THE BRITISH NAVY
IN BATTLE
BY
ARTHUR H. POLLEN
[Illustration]
_ILLUSTRATED_
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Greeting. By Way of Dedication 3
II. A Retrospect 11
The First Crisis 14
The Second Crisis 20
The Third Crisis 22
The Fourth Crisis 25
The New Era 28
III. Sea Fallacies: A Plea for First Principles 33
IV. Some Root Doctrines 48
V. Elements of Sea Force 61
VI. The Actions 79
VII. Naval Gunnery, Weapons and Technique 93
Fire Control 96
The Torpedo in Battle 103
VIII. The Action that Never Was Fought 108
IX. The Destruction of _Koenigsberg_ 119
The First Attempt 126
Success 134
A Problem in Control 142
X. Capture of H. I. G. M. S. _Emden_ 152
XI. The Career of Von Spee. I 165
Coronel 172
XII. Battle of the Falkland Islands. I:
The Career of Von Spee II 180
A. Preliminary Movements 182
XIII. Battle of the Falkland Islands. II:
B. Action with the Armoured Cruisers 191
XIV. Battle of the Falkland Islands. III:
C. Action with the Light Cruisers 201
D. Action with the Enemy Transports 210
XV. Battle of the Falkland Islands. IV:
Strategy--Tactics--Gunnery 213
British Strategy 215
The Tactics of the Battle 219
A Point in Naval Ethics 230
XVI. The Heligoland Affair 232
The North Sea 240
XVII. The Action Off the Dogger Bank. I 245
XVIII. The Dogger Bank. II 251
XIX. The Battle of Jutland:
I. North Sea Strategies 267
XX. The Battle of Jutland (_continued_):
II. The Urgency of a Decision 283
XXI. The Battle of Jutland (_continued_):
III. The Distribution of Forces 294
XXII. The Battle of Jutland (_continued_):
IV. The Second Phase 307
XXIII. The Battle of Jutland (_continued_):
V. The Three Objectives 315
The Tactical Plans:
Admiral Scheer’s Tactics 317
Sir David Beatty’s Tactics 324
Sir John Jellicoe’s Tactics 326
XXIV. The Battle of Jutland (_continued_):
VI. The Course of the Action 330
The German Retreat 333
The Night Actions and the Events of June 1 335
XXV. Zeebrügge and Ostend 341
Strategical Object 342
Sir Roger Keyes’s Tactics 345
Attack on the Mole 352
Moral Effect 353
LIST OF LINE CUTS
PAGE
Big guns more accurate at long range, because more regular 94
Big guns need less accurate range-finding, because the danger
space is greater 95
Range-finding by bracket 97
The crux of sea fighting, changes of course and speed produce
an irregularly changing range 98
In this sketch the black silhouette shows the position at the
moment the torpedo is fired; the white silhouette the
position the ship has reached when the torpedo meets it 107
Plan of _Sydney_ and _Emden_ in action 158
Plan of the action between the British battle-cruisers and
the German armoured cruisers 199
Plan of action between _Kent_ and _Nürnberg_, and of that
between _Cornwall_ and _Glasgow_ and _Leipzig_ 207
The action off Heligoland up to the intervention of
Commodore Goodenough’s Light Cruiser Squadron 235
The action off Heligoland. The course of the battle-cruisers 239
The Dogger Bank Affair. Diagram to illustrate the character
of the engagement up to the disablement of _Lion_ 249
The official plan of the Battle of Jutland. Note that the
course of the Grand Fleet is not shown to be “astern”
of the battle-cruisers, but parallel to their track 295
Position of the opposing fleets at 3:30 P.M. 298
The first phase; from Von Hipper’s coming into view, until
his juncture with Admiral Scheer 301
The second phase; Beatty engages the combined German Fleet,
and draws it toward the Grand Fleet 309
Sketch plan of the action from 6 P.M. when the Grand Fleet
prepared to deploy, till 6:50 when Admiral Scheer
delivered his first massed torpedo attack 332
Jutland Diagrams. Third phase at end of book
THE BRITISH NAVY IN BATTLE
CHAPTER I
A GREETING BY WAY OF DEDICATION
_Xmas, 1915._
To the Admirals, Captains, Officers and Men of the Royal Navy and of
the Royal Naval Reserve:
To the men of the merchant service and the landsmen who have
volunteered for work afloat:
To all who are serving or fighting for their country at sea:
To all naval officers who are serving--much against their will--on land:
Greetings, good wishes and gratitude from all landsmen.
We do not wish you a Merry Christmas, for to none of us, neither to
you at sea nor to us on land, can Christmas be a merry season now.
Nor, amid so much misery and sorrow, does it seem, at first sight,
reasonable to carry the conventional phrase further and wish you a
Happy New Year. But happiness is a different thing from merriment. In
the strictest sense of the word you are happy in your great task, and
we doubly and trebly happy in the security that your great duties, so
finely discharged, confer. So, after all it is a Happy New Year that we
wish you.
If you could have your wish, you of the Grand Fleet--well, we can
guess what it would be. It is that the war would so shape itself as to
force the enemy fleet out, and make it put its past work and its once
high hopes to the test against the power which you command and use with
all the skill your long vigil and faithful service have made so singly
yours to-day. And in one sense--and for your sakes, because your glory
would be somehow lessened if it did not happen--we too could wish that
this could happen. But we wish it only because you do. Although you do
not grumble, though we hear no fretful word, we realize how wearing and
how wearying your ceaseless watch must be. It is a watchfulness that
could not be what it is, unless you hoped, and indeed more than hoped,
_expected_ that the enemy must early or late prove your readiness to
meet him, either seeking you, or letting you find him, in a High Seas
fight of ship to ship and man to man. We, like you, look forward to
such a time with no misgiving as to the result, though, unlike you,
we dread the price in noble lives and gallant ships that even an
overwhelming victory may cost.
Your hopes and expectation for this dreadful, but glorious, end to all
your work do not date from August, eighteen months ago. When as little
boys you went to the _Britannia_, you went drawn there by the magic of
the sea. It was not the sea that carries the argosies of fabled wealth;
it was not the sea of yachts and pleasure boats. It was the sea that
had been ruled so proudly by your fathers that drew you. And you, as
the youngest of the race, went to it as the heirs to a stern and noble
heritage. So, almost from the nursery have you been vowed to a life
of hardship and of self-denial, of peril and of poverty--a fitting
apprenticeship for those who were destined to bear themselves so nobly
in the day of strain and battle. To the mission confided to you in
boyhood you have been true in youth and true in manhood. So that when
war came it was not war that surprised you, but you that surprised war.
When the war came, you from the beginning did your work as simply, as
skilfully, and as easily as you had always done it. Not one of you
ever met the enemy, however inferior the force you might be in, but
you fought him resolutely and to the end. Twice and only twice was he
engaged to no purpose. _Pegasus_, disabled and outraged, fell nobly,
and the valiant Cradock faced overwhelming odds because duty pointed
to fighting. Should the certainty of death stand between him and that
which England expects of every seaman? There could only be one answer.
In no other case has an enemy ship sought action with a British ship.
In every other case the enemy has been forced to fight, and made to
fly. It was so from the first. When two small cruisers penetrated the
waters of Heligoland with a flotilla of destroyers, the enemy kept his
High Seas Fleet, his fast cruisers, and his well-gunned armoured ships
in the ignoble safety of his harbours and his canal. He left, to his
shame, his small cruisers to fight their battle alone. Tyrwhitt and
Blount might, and should, have been the objects of overwhelming attack.
But the Germans were not to be drawn into battle. The ascendancy
that you gained in the first three weeks of war you have maintained
ever since. Three times under the cover of darkness or of fog, the
greater, faster units of the German force have--in a frenzy of fearful
daring--ventured to cross or enter the sea that once was known as
the German Ocean. Three times they have known no alternative but
precipitate flight to the place from which they came.
Not once has a single merchant ship bound for England been stopped or
taken by an enemy ship in home waters. But fifty-six out of eight
thousand were overtaken in distant seas. It has been yours to shepherd
and protect the vast armies we have sent out from England, and so
completely have you done it that not a single transport or supply ship
has been impeded between this country and France. From the first there
has not been, nor can there now ever be, the slightest threat or the
remotest danger of these islands being invaded. Indeed, so utter and
complete has been your work that the phrase “Command of the Sea” has a
new meaning. The sea holds no danger for us. Allied to other great land
powers, we find ourselves able and compelled to become a great land
power also. The army of four millions is thus not the least of your
creations.
So thorough is your work that Britain stands to-day on a pinnacle of
power unsurpassed by any nation at any time.
Has the completeness of your work been impaired by the ravages of the
submarine? Its gift of invisibility has seemed to some so mystic a
thing that its powers become magnified. Because it clearly _sometimes
might_ strike a deadly blow, it was thought that it _always could_
so strike, till madness was piled upon madness, and it seemed as if
the very laws of force had been upset, and ships and guns things
obsolete and of no use. But you have always known--and we at last are
learning--that this is idle talk, and that as things were and as they
are, so must they always be; and that sea-power rests as it always has,
and as it always will, with the largest fleet of the strongest ships,
and with big guns well directed and truly aimed.
It did not take you long to learn the trick of the submarine in war,
and had things been ordered differently, you might have learned much of
what you know in the years of peace. But you learned its tricks so well
that it has failed completely to hurt the Navy or the Army which the
Navy carries over the sea, and has found its only success in attacking
unarmed merchant ships. These are only unarmed because the people of
Christendom had never realized that any of its component nations could
turn to barbarism, piracy, and even murder in war. It would have been
so easy, had this utter lapse into devilry been expected, to have
armed every merchant ship--and then where would the submarine have
been? But even with the merchantmen unarmed, the submarine success has
been greatly thwarted by your splendid ingenuity and resource, your
sleepless guard, your ceaseless activity, and the buccaneers of a new
brutality have been made to pay a bloody toll.
Take it for all in all, never in the history of war has organized force
accomplished its purpose at so small a cost in unpreventable loss,
or with such utter thoroughness, or in face of such unanticipated
difficulties.
It was inevitable that there should be some failures. Not every
opportunity has been seized, nor every chance of victory pushed to
the utmost. Who can doubt that there are a hundred points of detail
in which your material, the methods open to you, the plans which tied
you, might have been more ample, better adapted to their purpose,
more closely and wisely considered? For when so much had changed, the
details of naval war had to differ greatly from the anticipation. In
the long years of peace--that seem so infinitely far behind us now--you
had for a generation and a half been administered by a department
almost entirely civilian in its spirit and authority. It was a control
that had to make some errors in policy, in provision, in selection. But
your skill counter-balanced bad policy when it could; your resources
supplied the defects of material; too few of you were of anything but
the highest merit for many errors of selection to be possible.
And the nation understood you very little. Your countrymen, it is true,
paid you the lip service of admitting that you alone stood between the
nation and defeat if war should come. But war seemed so unreal and
remote to them, that it was only a few that took the trouble to ask
what more you needed for war than you already had.
And you were so absorbed in the grinding toil of your daily work to be
articulate in criticism; too occupied in trying to get the right result
with indifferent means--because the right means cost too much and could
not be given to you--to strive for better treatment; too wholly wedded
to your task to be angry that your task was not made more easy for you.
Hence you took civilian domination, civilian ignorance, and civilian
indifference to the things that matter, all for granted, and submitted
to them dumbly and humbly, as you submitted silent and unprotesting
to your other hardships; you were resigned to this being so; and
were resigned without resentment. If, then, the plans were sometimes
wrong, if you and your force were at other times cruelly misused, if
the methods available to you were often inadequate, it was not your
fault--unless, indeed, it be a fault to be too loyal and too proud to
make complaint.
If we took little trouble to understand you, we took still less to
pay and praise you. There is surely no other profession in the world
which combines so hard a life, such great responsibilities, such
pitiful remuneration. But small as the pay is, we seize eagerly every
chance to lessen it. If we waste our money, we do not waste it on
you. But we fully expect you to spend your money in our service. The
naval officer’s pay is calculated to meet his expenses in time of
peace. Now a very large proportion of the pay of cadets, midshipmen,
sub-lieutenants, and lieutenants necessarily goes in uniform and
clothes. The life of a uniform can be measured by the sea work done by
the wearer. Sea work in war is--what shall we say?--three to six times
what it is in peace. But we do nothing to help young officers to meet
these very ugly attacks on their very exiguous pay. We do not even
distribute the prize money that the Fleet has earned.
Some day, when this war is won, it may be realized that it has been won
because there is a great deal more water than land upon the world, and
because the British Fleet commands the use of all the water, and the
enemy the use of only a tiny fraction of all the land. If France can
endure, and if Russia can “come again”; if Great Britain has the time
to raise the armies that will turn the scale; if the Allies can draw
upon the world for the metal and food that make victory--and waiting
for victory--possible; if the effort to shatter European civilization
and to rob the Western world of its Christian tradition fails, it is
because our enemies counted upon a war in which England would not
fight. Some day, then, we shall see what we and all the world owe to
you.
We may then be tempted to be generous and pay you perhaps a living wage
for your work, and not cut it down to a half or a third if there is no
ship in which to employ you. And if you lose your health and strength
in the nation’s service, we may pay you a pension proportionate to
the value of your work, and the dangers and responsibilities that you
have shouldered, and to the strenuous, self-sacrificing lives that you
have led, for our sakes. We may do more. We may see to it that honours
are given to you in something like the same proportion that they are
given, say, to civilians and to the Army. We may do more still. We may
realize that to get the best work out of you, you must be ordered and
governed and organized by yourselves.
But then again we may do nothing of the kind. We may continue to treat
you as we have always treated you; and if we do, there is at any rate
this bright side to it. You will continue to serve us as you have
always served us, working for nothing, content so you are allowed to
remain the pattern and mirror of chivalry and knightly service, and to
wear “the iron fetters” of duty as your noblest decoration.