IN THE SOUTH SEAS: CLEANING UP
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer . . .
And all the clouds that lour’d
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
The naval operations which culminated in the action off the Falkland
Islands are associated vividly in my mind with two little personal
incidents. On November 12th, 1914, a week after the distressful news had
reached this country of the destruction by the enemy of the cruisers
_Good Hope_ and _Monmouth_ off the Chilean coast, a small slip of paper
was brought to me in an envelope which had not passed through the post.
I will not say from whom or whence that paper came. Upon it were written
these words: “The battle cruisers _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ have
left for the South Atlantic.” That was all, twelve words, but rarely has
news which meant so much been packed into so small a space. The German
Sea Command would have given a very great deal for the sight of that
scrap of paper which, when read, I burned. For it meant that two fast
battle cruisers, each carrying eight 12-inch guns, were at that moment
speeding south to dispose for ever of von Spee’s Pacific Squadron. The
battle cruisers docked and coaled at Devonport on November 9th, 10th and
11th; hundreds of humble folk like myself must have known of their
mission and its grim purpose, yet not then nor afterwards until their
work was done did a whisper of their sailing reach the ears of Germany.
The _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ coaled off St. Vincent, Cape Verde
Islands, and again south of the Line. At the appointed rendezvous off
Brazil they were joined by the _Carnarvon_, _Kent_, _Cornwall_, and
_Bristol_, the armed liner _Orama_, and many colliers. Weeks had passed
and yet no word of the English plans, even of the concentration in
force, reached von Spee, who still thought that he had nothing more
formidable to deal with than a few light cruisers and the old battleship
_Canopus_.
Nothing is more difficult to kill than a legend, and perhaps the most
invulnerable of legends is that one which attributes to the German
Secret Service a superhuman efficiency. I offer to the still faithful
English believers two facts which in a rational world would blast that
legend for ever: the secret mission of the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_
to the Falkland Islands in November-December 1914, and the silent
transport of the original British Expeditionary Force across the Channel
during the first three weeks of war. And yet, I suppose, the legend will
survive. The strongest case, says Anatole France in _Penguin Island_, is
that which is wholly unsupported by evidence.
The second incident which sticks in my mind was a scene in a big public
hall on the evening of December 9th. Lord Rosebery was in the middle of
a recruiting speech—chiefly addressed, as he plaintively observed, to
an audience of baldheads—when there came a sudden interruption. Pink
newspapers fluttered across the platform, the coat tails of the speaker
were seized, and one of the papers thrust into his hands. We all waited
while Lord Rosebery adjusted his glasses and read a stop-press message.
What he found there pleased him, but he was in no hurry to impart his
news to us. He smiled benevolently at our impatience, and deliberately
worked us up to the desired pitch of his dramatic intensity. Then at
last he stepped forward and read:
“At 7.30 a.m. on December 8th the _Scharnhorst_, the _Gneisenau_, the
_Nürnberg_, the _Leipzig_, and the _Dresden_ were sighted near the
Falkland Islands by a British Squadron under Vice-Admiral Sir Frederick
Sturdee. An action followed in the course of which the _Scharnhorst_
(flying the flag of Admiral Graf von Spee), the _Gneisenau_, and the
_Leipzig _ were . . . _sunk_.”
At that word, pronounced with tremendous emphasis, 6,000 people jumped
to their feet; they shouted, they cheered, they stamped upon the floor,
they sang “Rule Britannia” till the walls swayed and the roof shuddered
upon its joists. It was a scene less of exultation than of relief,
relief that the faith of the British people in the long arm of the Royal
Navy had been so fully justified. Cradock and the gallant dead of
Coronel had been avenged. The mess had been cleaned up.
“I thought,” said Lord Rosebery, as soon as the tumult had died down, “I
thought that would wake you up.”
* * * * *
At Devonport the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ had been loaded “to the
utmost capacity,” not only with stores and ammunition for their own use,
but with supplies to replenish the depleted magazines of their future
consorts. They steamed easily well out of sight of land, except when
they put in to coal off St. Vincent, and made the trip of 4,000 miles to
the rendezvous near the line in a little over fourteen days. They
cleared the Sound in the evening of November 11th, and found the other
cruisers I have mentioned awaiting them at the appointed rendezvous off
the Brazilian coast in the early morning of November 26th. Two days
passed, days of sweltering tropic heat, during which the stores, brought
by the battle cruisers, were parcelled out among the other ships and
coal was taken in by all the ships from the attendant colliers. The
speed of a far-cruising squadron is determined absolutely by its coal
supplies. When voracious eaters of coal like battle cruisers undertake
long voyages, it behoves them to cut their fighting speed of some
twenty-eight knots down to a cruising speed of about one-half. By the
morning of Saturday, November 28th, the now concentrated and fully
equipped avenging Squadron was ready for its last lap of 2,500 miles to
the Falkland Islands. The English vessels, spread out in a huge fan,
swept down, continually searching for the enemy off the coasts of South
America, where rumour hinted that he had taken refuge. The several ships
steamed within the extreme range of visible signalling—so that no
tell-tale wireless waves might crackle forth warnings to von Spee. It
was high summer in the south and the weather glorious, though the
temperature steadily fell as the chilly solitudes of the Falklands were
approached. No Germans were sighted, and the Falkland Islands were
reached before noon on December 7th. The Squadron had already been met
at the rendezvous and joined by the light cruiser _Glasgow_. The old
_Canopus_, so slow and useless as a battleship that she had been put
aground on the mud of the inner harbour (Port Stanley) to protect the
little settlement there, was found at her useful but rather inglorious
post. Most of the vessels anchored in the large outer harbour (Port
William) and coaling was begun at once, but though it was continued at
dawn of the following day it was not then destined to be completed.
Up to this moment the plans of Whitehall had worked to perfection. The
two great battle cruisers had arrived at the rendezvous from England,
the Squadron had secretly concentrated and then searched the South
Atlantic, the Falkland Islands had been secured from a successful
surprise attack which would have given much joy to our enemies, yet not
a whisper of his fast-approaching doom had sped over the ether to von
Spee. Throughout the critical weeks of our activity he had dawdled
irresolutely off Valparaiso. All our ships were ready for battle, even
the light cruiser _Glasgow_, so heavily battered in the Coronel action
that her inside had been built up with wooden shores till it resembled
the “Epping Forest,” after which the lower deck had christened it, and
she had a hole as big as a church door in one side above the water-line.
She had steamed to Rio in this unhappy plight and had been there well
and faithfully repaired. Captain Luce and his men were full of fight;
they had their hurts and their humiliation to avenge and meant to get
their own back with interest. They did; their chance came upon the
following day, and they used it to the full.
Whitehall had done its best, and now came a benevolent Joss to put the
crowning seal upon its work. Coronel was bad black Joss, but the
Falkland Islands will go down to history as a shining example of the
whiteness of the Navy’s good Joss when in a mood of real benignity. We
desired two things to round off the scheme roughed out at the Admiralty
on November 6th: we wanted—though it was the last thing which we
expected—we wanted the German Pacific Squadron to walk into the trap
which had so daintily been prepared, and they came immediately, on the
very first morning after our arrival at the Falkland Islands, at the
actual moment when Vice-Admiral Sturdee and Rear-Admiral Stoddart (of
the _Carnarvon_), with heads bent over a big chart, were discussing
plans of search. They might have come and played havoc with the Islands
on any morning during the previous five weeks, yet they did not come
until December 8th, when we were just ready and most heartily anxious to
receive them hospitably. We wanted a fine clear day with what the Navy
calls “full visibility.” We got it on December 8th. And this was a very
wonderful thing, for the Falkland Islands are cursed with a vile cold
climate, almost as cold in the summer of December as in the winter of
June. It rains there about 230 days in the year, and even when the rain
does not fall fog is far more frequent than sunshine. The climate of the
Falklands is even some points more forbidding than the dreadful climate
of Lewis in the Hebrides, which it closely resembles. Yet now and then,
at rare intervals, come gracious days, and one of them, the best of the
year, dawned upon December 8th. The air was bright and clear, visibility
was at its maximum, the sea was calm, and a light breeze blew gently
from the north-west. Our gunners had a full view to the horizon and a
kindly swell to swing the gunsights upon their marks. For Sturdee and
his gunners it was a day of days. Had von Spee come upon a wet and dull
morning all would have been spoiled; he could have got away, his
squadron could have scattered, and we should have had many weary weeks
of search before compassing his destruction. But he came upon the one
morning of the year when we were ready for him and the perfect weather
conditions made escape impossible. Our gunnery officers from their
spotting tops could see as far as even the great 12-inch guns could
shoot. When the Fates mean real business there is no petty higgling
about their methods; they ladle out Luck not in spoonfuls but with
shovels.
The Squadron which had come so far to clean up the mess of Coronel was
commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir F. C. Doveton Sturdee, who had been
plucked out of his office chair at the Admiralty—he was Director of
Naval Intelligence—and thrown up upon the quarter-deck of the
_Invincible_. He was the right man for the job, a cool-headed scientific
sailor who would make full use of the power and speed of his big ships
and yet run no risk of suffering severe damage thousands of miles away
from a repairing base. Those who criticise his leisurely deliberation in
the action, and the long-range fighting tactics which dragged out the
death agony of the _Scharnhorst_ for three and a half hours and of the
_Gneisenau_ for five, forget that to Sturdee an hour or two of time, and
a hundred or two rounds of heavy shell, were as nothing when set against
the possibility of damage to his battle cruisers. His business was to
sink a very capable and well-armed enemy at the minimum of risk to his
own ships, and so he determined to fight at a range—on the average
about 16,000 yards (9½ land miles)—which made his gunnery rather
ineffective and wasteful, yet certain to achieve its purpose in course
of time.
Just as von Spee at Coronel, having the advantage of greater speed and
greater power, could do what he pleased with the _Good Hope_ and
_Monmouth_, so Sturdee with his battle cruisers could do what he pleased
with von Spee. The _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ could steam at
twenty-eight knots—they were clean ships—while the _Scharnhorst_ and
the _Gneisenau_, now five months out of dock, could raise little more
than twenty. The superiority of the English battle cruisers in guns was
no less than in speed. Each carried eight 12-inch guns, firing a shell
of 850 lb., while von Spee’s two armoured cruisers were armed with eight
8.2-inch guns, firing shell of 275 lb. Sturdee, with his great advantage
of speed, could set the range outside the effective capacity of von
Spee’s guns, secure against anything but an accidental plunging shot
upon his decks, while the light German 6-inch armour upon sides and
barbettes was little protection against his own 12-inch armour-piercing
shell. Sturdee could keep his distance and pound von Spee to bits at
leisure. The “visibility” was perfect, space was unlimited, the Germans
had no port of refuge, and from dawn to sunset Sturdee had sixteen hours
of working daylight. He was in no hurry, though one may doubt if he
expected to take so unconscionable a time as three and a half hours to
sink the _Scharnhorst_ and five hours to dispose of the _Gneisenau_. It
was not that Sturdee’s gunnery was bad—relatively, that is, to the
gunnery of other ships or of other navies. The word bad suggests blame.
But it was certainly ineffective. After the Falkland Islands action, and
after those running fights in the North Sea between battle cruisers, it
became dreadfully clear that naval gunnery is still in its infancy. All
the brains and patience and mechanical ingenuity which have been
lavished upon the problem of how to shoot accurately from a rapidly
moving platform at a rapidly moving object, all the appliances for
range-finding and range-keeping and spotting, leave a margin of
guesswork in the shooting, which is a good deal bigger than the width of
the target fired at. The ease and accuracy of land gunnery in contrast
with the supreme difficulty and relative inaccuracy of sea gunnery were
brought vividly before me once in conversation with a highly skilled
naval gunner. “Take a rook rifle,” said he, “put up a target upon a
tree, measure out a distance, sit down, and fire. You will get on to
your target after two or three shots and then hit it five times out of
six. You will be a land gunner with his fixed guns, his observation
posts, his aeroplanes or kite balloons, his maps upon which he can
measure up his ranges. Then get into a motor-car with your rook rifle,
get a friend to drive you rapidly along a country road, and standing up
try what sport you make of hitting the rabbits which are running and
jumping about in the fields. That, exaggerated a bit perhaps, is sea
gunnery. We know our own speed and our own course, but we don’t know
exactly either the enemy’s speed or the enemy’s course; we have to
estimate both. As he varies his course and his speed—he does both
constantly—he throws out our calculations. It all comes down to
range-finding and spotting, trial and error. Can you be surprised that
naval gunnery, measured by land standards, is wasteful and ineffective?”
“No,” said I, “I am surprised that you ever hit at all.”
* * * * *
The English Squadron began to coal at half-past three upon that bright
summer morning of December 8th, and the grimy operation proceeded
vigorously until eight o’clock, when there came a sudden and most
welcome interruption. Columns of smoke were observed far away to the
south-east, and, presently, the funnels of two approaching vessels were
made out. There were three others whose upper works had not yet shown
above the horizon. Coaling was at once stopped and steam raised to full
pressure. Never have our engineer staffs more splendidly justified their
advance in official status than upon that day. Not only did they get
their boilers and engines ready in the shortest possible time, but, in
the subsequent action, they screwed out of their ships a knot or two
more of speed than they had any right to do. The action was gained by
speed and gun power; without the speed—the speed of clean-bottomed
ships against those which, after five months at sea, had become
foul—the power of the great guns could not have been fully developed.
So, when we remember Sturdee and his master gunners and gunnery officers
in the turrets and aloft in the spotting tops, let us also remember the
master engineers hidden out of sight far below who gave to the gunners
their opportunity.
The battle cruisers, whose presence it was desired to conceal until the
latest moment, poured oil upon their furnaces and, veiled in clouds of
the densest smoke, awaited the rising of the pressure gauges. In the
outer harbour the light cruisers collected, and from her immovable
position upon the mud-banks the old _Canopus_ loosed a couple of pot
shots from her big guns at the distant German at a range of six miles.
Admiral Graf von Spee and his merry men laughed—they knew all about the
_Canopus_. Then, when all was ready, the indomitable _Glasgow_, the
_Kent_ (own sister to the sunken _Monmouth_), and the armoured
_Carnarvon_ issued forth to battle. In the words of an eye-witness,
later a prisoner, “The Germans laughed till their sides ached.” A few
more minutes passed, and then, from under the cover of the smoke and the
low fringes of the harbour, steamed grandly out the _Invincible_ and
_Inflexible_, cleared for action, their huge turrets fore and aft and
upon either beam bristling with the long 12-inch guns, their turbines
working at the fullest pressure, the flag of Vice-Admiral Sturdee
fluttering aloft. There was no more German laughter. Von Spee and his
officers and men were gallant enemies, they saw instantly the moment the
battle cruisers issued forth, overwhelming in their speed and power,
that for themselves and for their squadron the sun had risen for the
last time. They had come for sport, the easy capture of the Falkland
Islands, but sport had turned upon the instant of staggering surprise to
tragedy; nothing remained but to fight and to die as became gallant
seamen. And so they fought, and so they died, all but a few whom we,
more merciful than the Germans themselves at Coronel, plucked from the
cold sea after the sinking of their ships.
The German Squadron—the two armoured cruisers _Scharnhorst_ and
_Gneisenau_, each with eight 8.2-inch guns, and the three light cruisers
_Nürnberg_, _Dresden_, and _Leipzig_, each armed with ten 4.1-inch
guns—made off at full speed, and for awhile the English Squadron
followed at the leisurely gait for the battle cruisers of about twenty
knots so as to keep together. It was at once apparent that our ships had
the legs of the enemy, and could catch them when they pleased and could
fight at any range and in any position which they chose to select. That
is the crushing advantage of speed; when to speed is added gun power a
fleeing enemy has no chance at all, if no port of refuge be available
for him. In weight and power of guns there was no possible comparison.
The _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_, which had descended from the far
north to swab up the mess of Coronel, were at least three times as
powerful as the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_, crack gunnery ships
though they might be. Their 12-inch guns could shoot with ease and with
sufficient accuracy for their purpose at a range beyond the full stretch
of the German 8.2-inch weapons however deftly they might be handled.
Their 10-inch armour upon the turrets and conning-tower was invulnerable
against chance hits when closing in, and the armoured decks covering
their inner vitals were practicably impenetrable. The chances of
disaster were reduced almost to nothingness by Sturdee’s tactics of the
waiting game. When at length he gave the order to open fire he kept out
at a distance which made the percentage of his hits small, yet still
made those hits which he brought off tremendously effective. A bursting
charge of lyddite in the open may do little damage, even that contained
in a 12-inch shell, but the same charge exploded within the decks of a
cruiser is multiplied tenfold in destructiveness.
Presently the German Squadron divided, the enemy light cruisers and
attendant transports seeking safety in flight from our light cruisers
despatched in chase while the armoured cruisers held on pursued by the
two battle cruisers and the armoured _Carnarvon_, whose ten guns were of
7.5- and 6-inch calibre. The _Carnarvon_, light though she was by
comparison with the battle cruisers, did admirable and accurate work,
and proved in the action to be by no means a negligible consort. There
was no hurry. A wide ocean lay before the rushing vessels, the enemy had
no opportunity of escape so long as the day held clear and fine, and the
English ships could close in or open out exactly as they pleased. During
most of the fight which followed the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_
steered upon courses approximately parallel with those of the Germans,
following them as they dodged and winded like failing hares, always
maintaining that dominating position which in these days of steam
corresponds with Nelson’s weather gauge. It followed from their position
as the chasers that they could not each use more than six guns, but this
was more than compensated for by the enemy’s inability to use more than
four of his heavier guns in the _Scharnhorst_ or _Gneisenau_.
I have met and talked with many naval officers and men who have been in
action during the present war, and have long since ceased to put a
question which received an invariable answer. I used to inquire “Were
you excited or sensibly thrilled either when going into action or after
it had begun?” This was the substance though not the words of the
question. One does not talk in that land fashion with sailor-men. The
answer was always the same. “Excited, thrilled, of course not. There was
too much to do.” An action at sea is glorified drill. Every man knows
his job perfectly and does it as perfectly as he knows how. Whether he
be an Admiral or a ship’s boy he attends to his job and has no time to
bother about personal feelings. Naval work is team work, the individual
is nothing, the team is everything. This is why there is a certain
ritual and etiquette in naval honours; personal distinctions are very
rare and are never the result of self-seeking. There is no pot-hunting
in the Sea Service. Not only are actions at sea free from excitement or
thrills, but for most of those who take part in them they are blind. Not
one in twenty of those who fight in a big ship see anything at all—not
even the gun-layers, when the range is long and they are “following the
Control.” Calmly and blindly our men go into action, calmly and blindly
they fight obeying exactly their orders, calmly and blindly when Fate
wills they go down to their deaths. In their calmness and in their
blindness they are the perfected fruits of long centuries of naval
discipline. The Sea Service has become highly scientific, yet in taste
and in sentiment it has changed little since the days of Queen
Elizabeth. The English sailor, then as now, has a catlike hatred of
dirt, and never fights so happily as when his belly is well filled. The
officers and men of the battle cruisers had been coaling when the enemy
so obligingly turned up, and they had breakfasted so early that the meal
had passed from their memories. There was plenty of time before firing
could begin. So, while the engineers sweated below, those with more
leisure scrubbed the black grime from their skins, and changed into
their best and brightest uniforms to do honour to a great occasion. Then
at noon “all hands went to dinner.”
* * * * *
The big guns of the battle cruisers began to pick up the range of the
_Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_ at five minutes to one, three hours after
the chase had begun, when the distance from the enemy’s armoured
cruisers was some 18,000 yards, say ten land miles. And while the huge
shots fly forth seeking their prey, let us visit in spirit for a few
minutes the spotting top of the _Invincible_, and discover for ourselves
how it is possible to serve great guns with any approach to accuracy,
when both the pursuing and pursued ships are travelling at high speed
upon different courses during which the range and direction are
continually varying. The _Invincible_ worked up at one time to
twenty-nine knots (nearly thirty-four miles an hour), though not for
long, since a lower speed was better suited to her purpose, and the
firing ranges varied from 22,000 yards down to the comparatively close
quarters of six miles, at which the _Scharnhorst_ and, later, the
_Gneisenau_ were sent to the bottom.
From the decks of the _Invincible_, when the main action opened, little
could be seen of the chase except columns of smoke, but from the fire
control platform one could make out through glasses the funnels and most
of the upper works of the German cruisers. At this elevation the sea
horizon was distant 26,000 yards (about 15½ land miles), and upon the
day of the Falkland Islands fight “visibility” was almost perfect. When
an enemy ship can be seen, its distance can be measured within a margin
of error of half of one per cent.—fifty yards in ten thousand; that is
not difficult, but since both the enemy vessel and one’s own ship are
moving very fast, and courses are being changed as the enemy seeks to
evade one’s fire or to direct more efficiently his own guns, the varying
ranges have to be kept, which is much more difficult. It follows that
three operations have to be in progress simultaneously, of which one is
a check upon and a correction of the other two. First, all the
range-finders have to be kept going and their readings compared;
secondly, the course and speed of one’s own ship have to be registered
with the closest accuracy and the corresponding speeds and courses of
the enemy observed and estimated; thirdly, the pitching of one’s shots
has to be watched and their errors noted as closely as may be. All this
delicate gunnery work is perfectly mechanical but chiefly human. The
Germans, essentially a mechanically inhuman people, try to carry the aid
of machinery farther than we do. They fit, for example, a gyroscopic
arrangement which automatically fires the guns at a chosen moment in the
roll of a ship. We fire as the roll brings the wires of the sighting
telescopes upon the object aimed at, and can shoot better when a ship is
rolling than when she is travelling upon an even keel. We believe in
relying mainly upon the deft eyes and hands of our gun-layers—when the
enemy is within their range of vision—and upon control officers up
aloft when he is not. German gunnery can be very good, but it tends to
fall to pieces under stress of battle. Ours tends to improve in action.
Machinery is a good servant but a bad master.
As the shots are fired they are observed by the spotting officers to
fall too short or too far over, to one side or to the other, and
corrections are made in direction and in range so as to convert a
“bracket” into a “straddle” and then to bring off accurate hits.
When, say, the shots of one salvo fall beyond the mark and the shots of
the next come down on the near side, the mark is said to be “bracketed.”
When the individual shots of a salvo fall some too far and others too
short, the mark has been “straddled.” A straddle is a closed-in bracket.
At long ranges far more shots miss than hit, and we are dealing now with
ranges up to ten or twelve miles. The bigger the gun the bigger the
splash made by its shell when striking the water, and as the spotting
officers cannot spot unless they can clearly make out the splashes,
there is an accuracy—an ultimate effective accuracy—in big guns with
which smaller ones cannot compete however well they may be served. For,
ultimately, in naval gunnery, when ships are moving fast and ranges are
changing continually, we come down to trial and error. We shoot and
correct, correct and shoot, now and then find the mark and speedily lose
it again, as the courses and speeds are changed. Unless we can see the
splashes of the shells and are equipped with guns powerful enough to
shoot fairly flat—without high elevation—we may make a great deal of
noise and expend quantities of shell, but we shall not do much hurt to
the enemy.
The Falkland Islands action was the Royal Navy’s first experience in
long-range war gunnery under favorable conditions of light—and it was
rather disappointing. It revealed the immense gap which separates
shooting in war and shooting at targets in time of peace. The battle
cruisers sank the enemy, and suffered little damage in doing their
appointed work, and thus achieved both the purposes which Admiral
Sturdee had set himself and his men. But it was a wasteful exhibition,
and showed how very difficult it is to sink even lightly armoured ships
by gun-fire alone. Our shells at the long ranges set were falling
steeply; their effective targets were not the sides but the decks of the
Germans, which were not more than seventy feet wide. If one reflects
what it means to pitch a shell at a range of ten miles upon a rapidly
moving target seventy feet wide, one can scarcely feel surprised that
very few shots got fairly home. We need not accept _au pied de la
lettre_ the declaration of Lieutenant Lietzmann—a damp and unhappy
prisoner—that the _Gneisenau_, shot at for five hours, was hit
effectively only twenty times, nor endorse his rather savage verdict
that the shooting of the battle cruisers was “simply disgraceful.” But
every competent gunnery officer, in his moments of expansive candour,
will agree that the results of the big-gun shooting were not a little
disappointing. The Germans added to our difficulty by veiling their
ships in smoke clouds and thus, to some extent cancelled the day’s
“visibility.”
No enemy could have fought against overwhelming odds more gallantly and
persistently than did von Spee, his officers, and his highly trained
long-service men. Many times, even at the long ranges at which the early
part of the action was fought, they brought off fair hits upon the
battle cruisers. One 8.2-inch shell from the _Scharnhorst_ wrecked the
_Invincible’s_ wardroom and smashed all the furniture into chips except
the piano, which still retained some wires and part of the keyboard.
Another shell scattered the Fleet Paymaster’s money-box and strewed the
decks with golden bullets. But it was all useless. Though the
_Invincible_ was the leading ship, and at one time received the
concentrated fire of both the _Scharnhorst_ and the _Gneisenau_, she did
not suffer a single casualty. And, while she was being peppered almost
harmlessly, her huge shells, which now and then burst inboard the doomed
German vessels, were setting everything on fire between decks, until the
dull red glow could be seen from miles away through the gaping holes in
the sides. It was a long-drawn-out agony of Hell.
Firing began seriously at 12.55 and continued, with intervals of rest
for guns and men, till 4.16, when the _Scharnhorst_ sank. Three hours
and twenty-one minutes of Hell! Through it all the Germans stuck to
their work, there was no thought of surrender; they fought so long as a
gun could be brought to bear or a round of shell remained in their
depleted magazines. Every man in the _Scharnhorst_ was killed or
drowned; the action was not ended when she went down and her consort
_Gneisenau_, steaming through the floating bodies of the poor relics of
her company, was compelled to leave them to their fate. For nearly two
hours longer the _Gneisenau_ kept up the fight. The battle cruisers and
the smaller _Carnarvon_ closed in upon her, and at a range of some six
to seven land miles smashed her to pieces. By half-past five she was
blazing furiously fore and aft, and at two minutes past six she rolled
over and sank. Her guns spoke up to the last. As she lay upon her side
her end was hastened by the Germans themselves, who, feeling that she
was about to go, opened to the sea one of the broadside torpedo flats.
She sank with her ensign still flying. If the whole German Navy could
live, fight, and die like the Far Eastern Pacific Squadron, that Service
might in time develop a true Naval Soul.
Those of the crew who remained afloat in the water after the _Gneisenau_
sank were picked up by boats from the battle cruisers and the
_Carnarvon_—we rescued 108 officers and men. Admiral Sturdee sent them
a message of congratulation upon their rescue and of commendation upon
their gallantry in battle, and every English sailor did his utmost to
treat them as brothers of the sea. Officers and men lived with their
captors as guests, not as prisoners, in wardroom and gun-room, and on
the lower deck the English and Germans fought their battle over again in
the best of honest fellowship. “There is nothing at all to show that we
are prisoners of war,” wrote a young German lieutenant to his friends in
the Fatherland, expressing in one simple sentence—though perhaps
unconsciously—the immortal spirit of the English Sea Service. A
defeated enemy is not a prisoner; he is an unhappy brother of the sea,
to be dried and clothed and made much of, and to be taught with the
kindly aid of strong drink to forget his troubles.
There is little of exhilaration about a sea fight, such as that which I
have briefly sketched. It seems, even to those who take part in it, to
be wholly impersonal and wholly devilish. Though its result depends
entirely upon the human element, upon the machines which men’s brains
have secreted and which their cunning hands and eyes direct, it seems to
most of them while in action to have become nothing loftier than a fight
between soulless machines. One cannot wonder. The enemy ship—to those
few of the fighting men who can see it—is a spot upon the distant
horizon from which spit out at intervals little columns of fire and
smoke. There is no sign of a living foe. And upon one’s own ship the
attention of everyone is absorbed by mechanical operations—the steam
steering gear, the fire control, the hydraulic or electric gun
mechanism, the glowing fires down below fed by their buzzing air fans,
the softly purring turbines. And yet, what now appears to be utterly
inhuman and impersonal is in reality as personal and human as was
fighting in the days of yard-arm distances and hand-to-hand boarding.
The Admiral who, from his armoured conning-tower, orders the courses and
maintains the distances best suited to his terrible work; the Fire
Director watching, aiming, adjusting sights with the minute care of a
marksman with his rifle; the officers at their telescopes spotting the
gouts of foam thrown up by the bursting shells; the engineers intent to
squeeze the utmost tally in revolutions out of their beloved engines;
the stokers each man rightly feeling that upon him and his efforts
depends the sustained speed which alone can give mastery of manœuvre;
the seamen at their stations extinguishing fire caused by hostile
shells; the gunners following with huge blind weapons the keen eyes
directing them from far aloft; all these are personal and very human
tasks. A sea fight, though it may appear to be one between machinery, is
now as always a fight between men. Battles are fought and won by men and
by the souls of men, by what they have thought and done in peace time as
a preparation for war, by what they do in war as the result of their
peace training.
The whole art of successful war is the concentration upon an enemy at a
given moment of an overwhelming force and the concentration of that
force outside the range of his observation. Both these things were done
by the Royal Navy between November 6th and December 8th, 1914, and their
fruits were the shattered remains of von Spee’s squadron lying thousands
of fathoms deep in the South Atlantic. But nothing which the Admiralty
planned upon November 6th would have availed had not the Royal Navy
designed and built so great a force of powerful ships that, when the
far-off call arose, two battle cruisers could be spared to travel 7,000
miles from the North Sea to the Falkland Islands without sensibly
endangering the margin of safety of the Grand Fleet at home.
While the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ were occupying the front of the
battle stage and disposing of the hostile stars, the English light
cruisers were enjoying themselves in the wings in a more humble but not
less useful play. The cruiser _Kent_ astonished everybody. She was the
lame duck of the Squadron, a slow old creature who could with extreme
difficulty screw out seventeen knots, so that, in the company of much
faster boats, her armament of fourteen 6-inch guns appeared to be
practically wasted. Yet this elderly County cruiser, so short of coal
that her fires were fed with boats, ladders, doors, and officers’
furniture, got herself moving at over twenty-one knots, chased and
caught the _Nürnberg_—which ought to have been able to romp round her
if one of her boilers had not been out of action—and sank the German
vessel out of hand. Afterwards her officers claimed with solemn oaths
that she had done twenty-four knots, but there are heights to which my
credulity will not soar. One is compelled on the evidence to believe
that she did catch the _Nürnberg_, but how she did it no one can
explain, least of all, I fancy, her Engineer Commander himself. The
_Leipzig_ was rapidly overhauled by the speedy _Glasgow_, who sank her
with the aid of the _Cornwall_ and so repaid in full the debt of
Coronel. The cruiser _Bristol_, a sister of the _Glasgow_, was sent
after the German Squadron’s transports and colliers, and, in company
with the armed liner _Macedonia_, “proceeded,” in naval language, “to
destroy them.” Out of the whole German Squadron the light cruiser
_Dresden_ (own sister to the _Emden_) alone managed to get away. She had
turbine engines and fled without firing a shot. She passed a precarious
hunted existence for three months, and was at last disposed of off
Robinson Crusoe’s Island on March 14th, 1915. The _Glasgow_, still
intent upon collecting payment for her injuries, and our aged but active
friend the _Kent_, were in at her death, which was not very glorious. I
will tell her story in its proper place. So ended that most dainty
operation, the wiping out of the German Pacific Squadron and the
cleaning up of the Mess of Coronel. Throughout, our sailors had to do
only with clean above-water fighting. There were no nasty sneaking mines
or submarines to hamper free movement; the fast ship and the big gun had
full play and did their work in the business-like convincing fashion
which the Royal Navy has taught us to expect from it.
* * * * *
[For what follows I have none but German evidence, yet am loth to
disbelieve it. I cannot bring myself to conceive it possible that the
dull Teutonic imagination could, unaided by fact, round off in so pretty
a fashion the story of the Falkland Islands. My naval friends laugh at
me. They say the yarn is wholly impossible.]
More than a year afterwards some fishermen upon the barren Schleswig
coast observed a little water-worn dinghy lying upon the sand. She was
an open boat about twelve feet long, too frail a bark in which to essay
the crossing of the North Sea. Yet upon this little dinghy was engraved
the name of the _Nürnberg_! Like a homing pigeon this frail scrap of
wood and iron had wandered by itself across the world from that
far-distant spot where its parent vessel had been sunk by the _Kent_. It
had drifted home, empty and alone, through 7,000 miles of stormy seas. I
like to picture to myself that Odyssey of the _Nürnberg’s_ dinghy during
those fourteen months of lonely ocean travel. Those who know and love
ships are very sure that they are alive. They are no soulless hulks of
wood or steel or iron, but retain always some spiritual essence
distilled from the personality of those who designed, built, and sailed
them. It may be that in her dim blind way this fragment of a once fine
cruiser, all that was left of a splendid squadron, was inspired to bring
to her far-away northern home the news of a year-old tragedy. So she
drifted ever northwards, scorched by months of sun and buffeted by
months of tempest, until she came at last to rest upon her own arid
shores. And the spirits of German sailors, which had accompanied her and
watched over her during those long wanderings, must, when they saw her
ground upon the Schleswig sands, have passed to their sleep content.