THE GREAT VICTORY
In naval warfare there are many actions but few battles. An action is
any engagement between war vessels of any size, but a battle is a
contest between ships of the battle-line—sometimes called “capital
ships” upon the results of which depends the vital issues of a war.
During the whole of the long contest with Napoleon, there were only two
battles of this decisive kind—the Nile and Trafalgar.
And although the fighting by sea and land went on for ten years after
Trafalgar had given to us the supreme control of the world’s seas, there
were no more naval battles. Battles at sea are very rare because, when
fought out, they are so crushingly decisive. This characteristic feature
of the great naval battle has been greatly emphasised by modern
conditions. Upon land armies have outgrown the very earth itself;
fighting frontiers have become lines of trenches; battles have become
the mere swaying of these trench lines—a ripple here or there marks a
success or failure—but the lines re-formed remain. Even after weeks or
months of fighting, if the lines remain unbroken, neither side has
reached a decision. War upon land between great forces is a long
drawn-out agony of attrition.
But while battles upon land have become much less decisive than in the
simpler days of small armies and feeble weapons, fighting upon the sea
has become much quicker, much more crushingly final, in its effects and
results than in the days of our grandfathers. Speed and gun power are
now everything. The faster and more powerful fleet—more powerful in its
capacity for dealing accurate and destructive blows—can annihilate its
enemy completely within the brief hours of a single day. The more
powerful and faster his ships the less will the victor himself suffer.
Only under one condition can a defeated fleet escape annihilation, and
that is when the lack of light or of sea room snatches from the victor a
final decision. If an enemy can get away under shelter of his shore
fortifications, or within the protection of his minefields, he can defy
pursuit; but if there be ample room and daylight Speed and Power wielded
by men such as ours, will prevail with absolute mathematical
certainty—the losers will be sunk, the victors will, by comparison, be
little damaged. Every considerable engagement during the war has added
convincing proof to the conclusions which our Navy drew from the
decisive battle in the Sea of Tsushima between the Japanese and the
Russians, and the not less decisive action upon a smaller scale in which
the Americans destroyed the Spanish squadron off Santiago, Cuba. In both
cases the losers were destroyed while the victors suffered little hurt.
These outstanding lessons were not lost upon the Royal Navy, its
officers had themselves seen both fights, and so in its silent way the
Navy pressed upon its course always seeking after more speed, more gun
power, and above all more numbers. “Only numbers can annihilate,” said
Napoleon, and what the Emperor declared to be true of land fighting is
the more true of fighting by sea. Only numbers can annihilate.
Upon the evening of August 4th, 1914, I was sitting in a London office
beside a ticking tape machine awaiting the message that the Germans had
declined our ultimatum to withdraw from Belgium, and that war had been
declared. “There will be a big sea battle this evening,” observed my
companion. “There has been a big battle,” observed I, “but it is now
over.” Although he and I used similar language we attached to the words
very different meanings. He thought, as the bulk of the British people
thought at that time, that the British and German battle fleets would
meet and fight off the Frisian Islands. But I meant, and felt sure, that
the last thing our Grand Fleet desired was to fight in restricted and
dangerous waters, amid the perils of mines and submarines, when it had
already won the greatest fight of the war without firing a shot or
risking a single ship or man. There had been no “battle” in the popular
sense, but there had in fact been achieved a tremendous decisive victory
which through all the long months to follow would dominate the whole war
by sea and by land. Our great battleships were at that moment cruising
between Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and the Cromarty Firth on the
north-eastern shores of Scotland. Our fastest battle cruisers were in
the Firth of Forth together with many of the better pre-Dreadnought
battleships which, though too slow for a fleet action, had heavy
batteries available for a close fight in narrow waters. Many other older
and slower battleships and cruisers were in the Thames. The narrow
straits of Dover were thickly patrolled by destroyers and submarines,
and more submarines and destroyers were on watch off the mouths of the
Weser, the Jade, the Elbe and the Ems. Light cruisers hovered still
farther to the north where the Skagerrak opens between Denmark and the
Norwegian coast. The North Sea had become a _mare clausum_—no longer,
as the mapmakers term it, a German Ocean, but one which at a single
stroke had become overwhelmingly British.
Take a map of the North Sea and consider with me for a moment the
relative strengths and dispositions of the opposing battle fleets. There
was nothing complicated or super-subtle about the Royal Navy’s plans; on
the contrary they had that beautiful compelling simplicity which is the
characteristic feature of all really great designs whether in war or in
peace.
There are two outlets to the North Sea, one wide to the north and west
beyond the Shetlands, the other narrow and shallow to the south-west
through the Straits of Dover. The Straits are only twenty-one miles
wide; opposite the north of Scotland the Sea is 300 miles wide. But
before German battleships or cruisers could get away towards the wide
north-western outlet beyond the Shetlands they would have to steam some
400 miles north of Heligoland. Except for the Pacific Squadron based
upon Tsing-tau in the Far East and cruising upon the east and west
coasts of Mexico, all the fleets of our enemy were at his North Sea
ports or in the Baltic—a land-locked sheet of water which for the
moment is out of our picture. From Heligoland to Scapa Flow in the
Orkneys—where Admiral Jellicoe had his headquarters and where he had
under his hand twenty-two of our most powerful battleships—is less than
550 miles. Jellicoe had also with him large numbers of armoured and
light cruisers. In the Firth of Forth, less than 500 miles from
Heligoland, Admiral Beatty had five of the fastest and most powerful
battle cruisers afloat and great quantities of lighter cruisers and
destroyers. In the Thames, about 350 miles from Heligoland, lay most of
our slower and less powerful pre-Dreadnought battleships and cruisers,
vessels of a past generation in naval construction, but in their huge
numbers and collective armaments a very formidable force to encounter in
the narrow waters of the Straits of Dover.
Three possible courses of action lay before the German Naval Staff. They
had at their disposal seventeen battleships and battle cruisers built
since the first _Dreadnought_ revolutionised the battle line, but, as I
have already pointed out, these vessels, class for class and gun for
gun, were lighter, slower, and less well armed than were the
twenty-seven great war vessels at the disposal of Jellicoe and Beatty.
The Germans could have tried to break away to the north with their whole
battle fleet, escorting all their lighter cruisers, in the hope that
while the battle fleets were engaged the cruisers might escape round the
north of Scotland, and get upon our trade routes in the Atlantic. That
was their first possible line of action—a desperate one, since Jellicoe
and Beatty with much stronger forces lay upon the flank of their course
to the north, and the preponderating strength and swiftness of our light
and heavy cruisers would have meant, in all human probability, not only
the utter destruction of the enemy’s battle fleet but also the wiping
out of his would-be raiders. Our cruisers could have closed the passages
between the Orkneys and Iceland long before the Germans could have
reached them. This first heroic dash for the free spaces of the outer
seas would have been so eminently gratifying to us that it is scarcely
surprising that the Germans denied us its blissful realisation.
[Illustration: THE NORTH SEA.]
The second possible course, apparently less heroic but in its ultimate
results probably as completely destructive for the enemy as the first
course, would have been to bear south-west, hugging the shallows as
closely as might be possible, and to endeavour to break a way through
the Straits of Dover and the English Channel. From Heligoland to the
Straits is over 350 miles, and we should have known all about the German
dash long before they could have reached the Narrows. Those Narrow Seas
are like the neck of a bottle which would have been corked most
effectually by our serried masses of pre-Dreadnought battleships and
cruisers interspersed by swarming hundreds of submarines and destroyers
with their vicious torpedo stings. We can quite understand how the
Germans, who had read Sir Percy Scott’s observations of a month or two
before on the deadliness of submarines in narrow waters, liked a dash
for the Straits as little as they relished a battle with Jellicoe and
Beatty in the far north, more especially as their line of retreat would
have been cut off by the descent from their northern fastnesses of our
battle fleets. Not then, nor a week or two later when we were passing
our Expeditionary Force across the Channel, did the Germans attempt to
break through the Straits and cut us off from our Allies the French.
The third course was the one which the Germans in fact took. It was the
famous course of Brer Rabbit, to lie low and say nuffin’, and to wait
for happier times when perchance the raids of their own submarines, and
our losses from mines, might so far diminish our fighting strength as to
permit them to risk a Battle of the Giants with some little prospect of
success. And in adopting this waiting policy they did what we least
desired and what, therefore, was the safest for them and most
embarrassing for us. Never at any time did we attempt to prevent the
German battle fleets from coming out. We no more blockaded them than
Nelson a hundred years earlier blockaded the French at Toulin and Brest.
We maintained, as Nelson did, a perpetual unsleeping watch on the
enemy’s movements, but our desire always was the same as Nelson’s—to
let the enemy come out far enough to give us space and time within which
to compass his complete and final destruction.
Although the Germans, by adopting a waiting policy, prevented the Royal
Navy from fulfilling its first duty—the seeking out and destruction of
an enemy’s fighting fleets—their inaction emphasised the completeness
of the Victory of Brains and Soul which the Navy had won during those
few days before the outbreak of war. It was because our mobilisation had
been so prompt and complete, it was because the disposition of our
fleets had been so perfectly conceived, that the Germans dared not risk
a battle with us in the open and were unable to send out their cruisers
to cut off our trading ships and to break our communications with
France. Although the enemy’s fleets had not been destroyed, they had
been rendered very largely impotent. We held, more completely than we
did even after the crowning mercy of Trafalgar, the command of the seas
of the world. The first great battle was bloodless but complete, it had
won for us and for the civilised world a very great victory, and the
Royal Navy had never in its long history more fully realised and
revealed its tremendous unconquerable Soul.
* * * * *
It may be of some little interest, now that the veil of secrecy can be
partly raised, to describe the opposing battle fleets upon which rested
the decision of victory or defeat. Before the war it had become the
habit of many critics, both naval and civilian, to exalt the striking
power of the torpedo craft—both destroyers and submarines—and to talk
of the great battleship as an obsolete monster, as some vast Mammoth at
the mercy of a wasp with a poison sting. But the war has shown that the
Navy was right to hold to the deep beliefs, the outcome of all past
experience, that supremacy in the battle line means supremacy in Sea
Control. The smaller vessels, cruisers, and mosquito craft, are vitally
necessary for their several rôles,—without them the great ships cannot
carry out a commercial blockade, cannot protect trade or transports,
cannot conduct those hundreds of operations both of offence and defence
which fall within the duties of a complete Navy. But the ultimate
decision rests with the Battle Fleets. They are the Fount of Power.
While they are supreme, the seas are free to the smaller active vessels;
without such supremacy, the seas are closed to all craft, except to
submarines and, as events have proved, to a large extent even to those
under-water wasps.
In August, 1914, our Battle Fleets available for the North Sea—and at
the moment of supreme test no vessels, however powerful, which were not
on the spot were of any account at all—were not at their full strength.
The battleships were all at home—the ten Dreadnoughts, each with ten
12-inch guns, the four Orions, the four K.G.V.s and the four Iron Dukes,
each with their ten 13.5-inch guns far more powerful than the earlier
Dreadnoughts,—and were all fully mobilised by August 3rd. But of our
nine fast and invaluable battle cruisers as many as four were far away.
The _Australia_ was at the other side of the globe, and three others had
a short time before been despatched to the Mediterranean. Beatty had the
_Lion_, _Queen Mary_, and _Princess Royal_, each with eight 13.5-inch
guns and twenty-nine knots of speed, in addition to the _New Zealand_,
and _Invincible_ each with eight 12-inch guns. The First Lord of the
Admiralty announced quite correctly that we had mobilised thirty-one
ships of the battle line, but actually in the North Sea at their war
stations upon that fateful evening of August 4th—which now seems so
long ago—Jellicoe and Beatty had twenty-seven only of first line
ships. They were enough as it proved, but one rather grudged at
that time, those three in the Mediterranean and the _Australia_ at
the Antipodes. Had there been a battle of the Giants we should have
needed them all, for only numbers can annihilate. Jellicoe had, in
addition to those which I have reckoned, the _Lord Nelson_ and
_Agamemnon_—pre-Dreadnoughts, each with four 12-inch guns and ten
9.2-inch guns—useful ships but not of the first battle line.
Opposed to our twenty-seven available monsters the Germans had under
their hands eighteen completed vessels of their first line. I do not
count in this select company the armoured cruiser _Blücher_, with her
twelve 8-inch guns, which was sunk later on in the Dogger Bank action by
the 13.5-inch weapons of Beatty’s great cruisers. Neither do I count the
fine cruiser _Goeben_, a fast vessel with ten 11-inch guns which, like
our three absent battle cruisers, was in the Mediterranean. The _Goeben_
escaped later to the Dardanelles and ceased to be on the North Sea roll
of the German High Seas Fleet.
Germany had, then, eighteen battleships and battle cruisers, and had it
been known to the public that our apparent superiority in available
numbers was only 50 per cent. in the North Sea, many good people might
have trembled for the safety of their homes and for the honour of their
wives and daughters. But luckily they did not know, for they could with
difficulty have been brought to understand that naval superiority rests
more in speed and in quality and in striking power than in the mere
numbers of ships. When I have said that numbers only can annihilate, I
mean, of course, numbers of equal or superior ships. In quality of ships
and especially of men, in speed and in striking power, our twenty-seven
ships had fully double the strength of the eighteen Germans who might
have been opposed to them in battle. None of our vessels carried
anything smaller—for battle—than 12-inch guns, and fifteen of them
bore within their turrets the new 13.5-inch guns of which the weight of
shell and destructive power were more than 50 per cent. greater than
that of the earlier 12-inch weapons. On the other hand, four of the
German battleships (the _Nassau_ class) carried 11-inch guns and were
fully two knots slower in speed than any of the British first line.
Three of their battle cruisers also had 11-inch guns. While therefore we
had guns of 12 and 13.5 inches the Germans had nothing more powerful to
oppose to us than guns of 11 and 12 inches. Ship for ship the Germans
were about two knots slower than ourselves, so that we always had the
advantage of manœuvre, the choosing of the most effective range, and the
power of preventing by our higher speed the escape of a defeated foe.
Had the Germans come north into the open sea, we could have chosen
absolutely, by virtue of our greater speed, gun power and numbers, the
conditions under which an action should have been fought and how it
should have been brought to a finish.
An inch or two in the bore of a naval gun, a few feet more or less of
length, may not seem much to some of my readers. But they should
remember that the weight of a shell, and the weight of its explosive
charge, vary as the _cube_ of its diameter. A 12-inch shell is a third
heavier than one of 11 inches, while a 13.5-inch shell is more than
one-half heavier than a 12-inch and twice as heavy as one of 11 inches
only. The power of the bursting charge varies not as the weight, but as
the _square_ of the weight of a shell. The Germans were very slow to
learn the naval lesson of the superiority of the bigger gun and the
heavier shell. It was not until after the Dogger Bank action when
Beatty’s monstrous 13.5-inch shells broke in a terrible storm upon their
lighter-armed battle cruisers that the truth fully came home to them.
Had Jellicoe and Beatty fought the German Fleet in the wide spaces of
the upper North Sea in August, 1914, we should have opposed a fighting
efficiency in power and weight of guns of more than two to one. Rarely
have the precious qualities of insight and foresight been more
strikingly shown forth than in the superiority in ships, in guns, and in
men that the Royal Navy was able to range against their German
antagonists in those early days of August, when the fortunes of the
Empire would have turned upon the chances of a naval battle. In the long
contest waged between 1900 and 1914, in the bloodless war of peace, the
spiritual force of the Navy had gained the victory; the enemy had been
beaten, and knew it, and thenceforward for many months, until the spring
of 1916, he abode in his tents. Whenever he did venture forth it was not
to give battle but to kill some women, some babes, and then to scuttle
home to proclaim the dazzling triumph which “Gott” had granted to his
arms.
* * * * *
It may seem to many a fact most extraordinary that in August, 1914, not
one of our great ships of the first class—the so-called
“super-Dreadnoughts”—upon which we depended for the domination of the
seas and the security of the Empire, not one was more than three years
old. The four Orions—_Orion_, _Conqueror_, _Thunderer_ and
_Monarch_—were completed in 1911 and 1912. The four K.G. Fives—_King
George V_, _Centurion_, _Ajax_, and _Audacious_ in 1912 and 1913; and
the four Iron Dukes—_Iron Duke_, _Marlborough_, _Emperor of India_ and
_Benbow_—in 1914. All these new battleships carried ten 13.5-inch guns
and had an effective speed of nearly 23 knots. The super-battle
cruisers—_Lion_, _Queen Mary_ and _Princess Royal_—were completed in
1912, carried eight 13.5-inch guns, and had a speed of over 29 knots.
Upon these fifteen ships, not one of which was more than three years
old, depended British Sea Power. The Germans had nothing, when the war
broke out, which was comparable with these fifteen splendid monsters.
Their first line battleships and battle cruisers completed in the
corresponding years, from 1911 to 1914—their “opposite numbers” as the
Navy calls them—were not superior in speed, design and power of guns to
our Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, which had already
passed into the second class, and which, long before the war ended, had
sunk to the third class. But the newness and overwhelming superiority of
our true first line do not surprise those who realise that these fifteen
great ships were the fine flower of our naval brains and soul. The new
Navy of the three years immediately preceding the war was simply the old
Navy writ large. As the need had arisen, so had the Navy expanded to
meet it. The designs for these fifteen ships did not fall down from
Heaven; they were worked out in naval brains years before they found
their material expression in steel. The vast ships issued forth upon the
seas, crushingly superior to anything which our enemy could put into
commission against us, because our naval brains were superior to his and
our naval Soul was to his as a white glowing flame to a tallow candle.
In a sentence, while Germany was laboriously copying our Dreadnoughts we
had cast their designs aside, and were producing at a speed, with which
he could not compete, Orions, K.G. Fives, Iron Dukes and Lions.
* * * * *
The North Sea, large as it may appear upon a map, is all too small for
the manœuvres of swift modern fleets. No part of that stretch of water
which lies south of the Dogger Bank—say, from the Yorkshire coast to
Jutland—is far enough removed from the German bases to allow of a sure
and decisive fleet action. There was no possibility here of a clean
fight to a finish. An enemy might be hammered severely, some of his
vessels might be sunk—Beatty showed the German battle cruisers what we
could do even in a stern chase at full speed—but he could not be
destroyed. On the afternoon and night of May 31st-June 1st, 1916, the
Grand Fleet had the enemy enveloped and ripe for destruction, but were
robbed of full victory by mist and darkness and the lack of sea room.
Nelson spoke with the Soul of the Navy when he declared that a battle
was not won when any enemy ship was enabled to escape destruction. So
while the divisions of the Grand Fleet, and especially the fastest
battle cruisers of some twenty-eight to twenty-nine knots speed (about
thirty-three miles per hour) neglected no opportunity to punish the
enemy ships that might venture forth, what every man from Jellicoe to
the smallest ship boy really longed and prayed for, was a brave ample
battle in the deep wide waters of the north. Here there was room for a
newer and greater Trafalgar, though even here the sea was none too
spacious. Great ships, which move with the speed of a fairly fast train
and shoot to the extreme limits of the visible horizon, really require a
boundless Ocean in which to do their work with naval thoroughness. But
the upper North Sea would have served, and there the Grand Fleet waited,
ever at work though silent, ever watchfully ready for the Great Day. And
while it waited it controlled by the mere fact of its tremendous power
of numbers, weight, and position the destinies of the civilised world.
* * * * *
The task of the Royal Navy in the war would have been much simpler had
the geography of the North Sea been designed by Providence to assist us
in our struggle with Germany. We made the best of it, but were always
sorely handicapped by it. The North Sea was too shallow, too well
adapted for the promiscuous laying of mines, and too wide at its
northern outlet for a really close blockade. Had the British Isles been
slewed round twenty degrees further towards Norway, so that the outlet
to the north was as narrow as that to the English Channel—and had there
been a harbour big enough for the Grand Fleet between the Thames and the
Firth of Forth—then our main bases could have been placed nearer to
Germany and our striking power enormously increased. We could then have
placed an absolute veto upon the raiding dashes which the Germans now
and then made upon the eastern English seaboard. As the position in fact
existed we could not place any of our first line ships further south
than the Firth of Forth—and could place even there only our fastest
vessels—without removing them too far from the Grand Fleet’s main
concentration at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Invergordon in the Cromarty
Firth was used as a rest and replenishing station. The German
raids—what Admiral Jellicoe called their tactics of “tip and run”—were
exasperating, but they could not be allowed to interfere with the naval
dispositions upon which the whole safety of the Empire depended. We had
to depend on the speed of our battle cruisers in the Firth of Forth to
give us opportunity to intercept and punish the enemy. The German battle
cruisers which fired upon Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools were
nearly caught—a few minutes more of valuable time and a little less of
sea haze would have meant their destruction. A second raid was
anticipated and the resulting Dogger Bank action taught the enemy that
the Navy had a long arm and long sight. For a year he digested the
lesson, and did not try his luck again until April, 1916, when he dashed
forth and raided Lowestoft on the Norfolk coast. The story of this raid
is interesting. The Grand Fleet had been out a day or two before upon
what it called a “stunt,” a parade in force of the Jutland coast and the
entrance to the Skaggerak. It had hunted for the Germans and found them
not, and returning to the far north re-coaled the ships. The Germans,
with a cleverness which does them credit, launched their Lowestoft raid
immediately after the “stunt” and before the battle cruisers,
re-coaling, could be ready to dash forth. Even as it was they did not
cut much time to waste. It was a dash across, a few shots, and a dash
back.
Then was made a re-disposition of the British Squadrons, not in the
least designed to protect the east coast of England—though the enemy
was led to believe so—but so to strengthen Beatty’s Battle Cruiser
Squadrons that the enemy’s High Seas Fleet, when met, could be fought
and held until Jellicoe with his battle squadrons could arrive and
destroy it. The re-disposition consisted of two distinct movements.
First: the pre-Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers which had
been stationed in the Forth were sent to the Thames. Second: Admiral
Evan-Thomas’s fifth battle squadron of five Queen Elizabeth battleships
(built since the war began)—of twenty-five knots speed and each
carrying eight 15-inch guns—_Queen Elizabeth_, _Barham_, _Valiant_,
_Warspite_, and _Malaya_—were sent from Scapa to the Firth of Forth to
reinforce Beatty and to give him a support which would enable him and
Evan-Thomas to fight a delaying action against any force which the
Germans could put to sea. Three of the Invincible type of battle
cruisers were moved from the Forth to Scapa to act as Jellicoe’s advance
guard, and to enable contact to be quickly made between Beatty and
Jellicoe. But for this change in the Grand Fleet’s dispositions, which
enabled the four splendid battleships—_Barham_, _Valiant_, _Warspite_
and _Malaya_ (the _Queen Elizabeth_ was in dock)—to engage the whole
High Seas Fleet on the afternoon of May 31st, 1916, while Beatty headed
off the German battle cruisers and opened the way for Jellicoe’s
enveloping movement, the Battle of Jutland could never have been fought.