A RETROSPECT
_August, 1918._
In looking back over the last four years, the sharpest outlines in
the retrospect are the ups and downs of hopes and fears. Indeed,
so acutely must everyone bear these alternations in mind, that to
remark on them is almost to incur the guilt of commonplace. For they
illustrate the tritest of all the axioms of war. It is human to
err--and every error has to be paid for. If the greatest general is he
who makes the fewest mistakes, then the making of some mistakes must
be common to all generals. The rises and reversals of fortune on all
the fronts are of necessity the indices of right or wrong strategy.
These transformations have been far more numerous on land than at
sea, and locally have in many instances been seemingly final. Thus
to take a few of many examples, Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia are
almost completely eliminated as factors; our effort in the Dardanelles
had to be acknowledged as a complete failure. But at no stage was any
victory or defeat of so overwhelming and wholesale a nature as to
promise an immediate decision. The retreat from Mons, Gallipoli, Neuve
Chapelle, Hulloch, Kut--the British Army could stand all of these,
and much more. France never seemed to be beaten, whatever the strain.
Even after the defection of Russia, a German victory seemed impossible
on land. Never once did either side see defeat, immediate and final,
threatened. A right calculation of all the forces engaged may have
shown a discerning few where the final preponderance lay. The point is
that, despite extraordinary and numerous vicissitudes, there never was
a moment when the land war seemed settled once and for all.
This has not been the case at sea. The transformations here have
been fewer; but they have been extreme. For two and a half years the
sea-power of the Allies appeared both so overwhelmingly established
and so abjectly accepted by the enemy, that it seemed incredible that
this condition could ever alter materially. Yet between the months
of February and May, 1917, the change was so abrupt and so terrific
that for a period it seemed as if the enemy had established a form of
superiority which must, at a date that was not doubtful, be absolutely
fatal to the alliance. And again, in six months’ time, the situation
was transformed, so that sea-power, on which the only hope of Allied
victory has ever rested was once more assured.
Thus, after the most anxious year in our history, we came back to where
we started. This nation, France, Italy, and America no less, we have
all returned to that absolute and unwavering confidence in the navy
as the chief anchor of all Allied hopes. Not that the navy had ever
failed to justify that confidence in the past. There was no task to
which any ship was ever set that had not been tackled in that heroic
spirit of self-sacrifice which we have been taught to expect from our
officers and men; there had never been a recorded case of a single ship
declining action with the enemy. There were scores of cases in which
a smaller and weaker British force had attacked a larger and stronger
German. Ships had been mined, torpedoed, sunk in battle, and the men
on board had gone to their death smiling, calm, and unperturbed. If
heroism, goodwill, a blind passion for duty could have won the war,
if devotion and zeal in training, patient submission to discipline, a
fiery spirit of enterprise could have won--then we never should have
had a single disappointment at sea. The traditions of the past, the
noble character of the seamen of to-day--we hoped for a great deal, nor
ever was our hope disappointed. And when the time of danger came, when
our tonnage was slipping away at more than six million tons a year, so
that it was literally possible to calculate how long the country could
endure before surrender, it never occurred to the most panic-stricken
to blame the navy for our danger. The nation saw quite clearly where
the fault lay, and the Government, sensitive to the popular feeling, at
last took the right course.
But it was a course that should have been taken long before. For,
though the purposes for which sea-power exists seemed perfectly secure
and never in danger at all till little more than a year ago, yet there
had been a series of unaccountable miscarriages of sea-power. Battles
were fought in which the finest ships in the world, armed with the
best and heaviest guns, commanded by officers of unrivalled skill and
resolution, and manned by officers and crews perfectly trained, and
acting in battle with just the same swift, calm exactitude that they
had shown in drill--and yet the enemy was not sunk and victory was not
won. Though, seemingly, we possessed overwhelming numbers, the enemy
seemed to be able to flout us, first in one place and then in another,
and we seemed powerless to strike back. Almost since the war began we
kept running into disappointments which our belief in and knowledge of
the navy convinced us were gratuitous disappointments. A rapid survey
of the chief events since August, 1914, will illustrate what I mean.
THE FIRST CRISIS
The opening of the war at sea was in every respect auspicious for the
Allies. By what looked like a happy accident, the British Navy had
just been mobilized on an unprecedented scale. It was actually in
process of returning to its normal establishment when the international
crisis became acute, and, by a dramatic stroke, it was kept at war
strength and the main fleet sent to its war stations before the British
ultimatum was despatched to Berlin. The effect was instantaneous.
Within a week transports were carrying British troops into France and
trade was continuing its normal course, exactly as if there were no
German Navy in existence. The German sea service actually went out of
existence. Before a month was over a small squadron of battle-cruisers
raided the Bight between Heligoland and the German harbours, sank there
small cruisers and half-a-dozen destroyers, challenged the High Seas
Fleet to battle, and came away without the enemy having attempted to
use his capital ships to defend his small craft or to pick up the glove
so audaciously thrown down. The mere mobilization of the British Fleet
seemed to have paralyzed the enemy, and it looked as if our ability
to control sea communications was not only surprisingly complete, but
promised to be enduring. The nation’s confidence in the Navy had been
absolute from the beginning, and it seemed as if that confidence could
not be shaken.
Before another two months had passed we had run into one of those
crises which were to recur not once, but again and again. During
September an accumulation of errors came to light. The enormity of the
political and naval blunder which had allowed _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ to
slip through our fingers in the Mediterranean, and so bring Turkey into
the war against us, at last become patent. There was no blockade. There
were the raids which _Emden_ and _Karlsruhe_ were making on our trade
in the Indian Ocean and between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The
enemy’s submarines had sunk some of our cruisers--three in succession
on a single day and in the same area. Then rumours gained ground
that the Grand Fleet, driven from its anchorages by submarines, was
fugitive, hiding now in one remote loch, now in another, and losing
one of its greatest units in its flight. For a moment it looked as if
the old warnings, that surface craft were impotent against under-water
craft, had suddenly been proved true. Von Spee, with a powerful pair
of armoured cruisers, was known to be at large. As a final insult,
German battle-cruisers crossed the North Sea, and battered and ravaged
the defenceless inhabitants of a small seaport town on the east coast.
Something was evidently wrong. But nobody seemed to know quite what it
was.
The crisis was met by a typical expedient. We are a nation of
hero-worshippers and proverbially loyal to our favourites long after
they have lost any title to our favour. In the concert-room, in the
cricket-field, on the stage, in Parliament--in every phase of life--it
is the old and tried friend in whom we confide, even if we have
conveniently to overlook the fact that he has not only been tried, but
convicted. This blind loyalty is, perhaps, amiable as a weakness, and
almost peculiar to this nation. But we have another which is neither
amiable nor peculiar. We hate having our complacency disturbed by being
proved to be wrong and, rather than acknowledge our fault, are easily
persuaded that the cause of our misfortune is some hidden and malign
influence. And so in October, 1914, the explanation of things being
wrong at sea was suddenly found to be quite simple. It was that the
First Sea Lord of the Admiralty was of German birth. With the evil eye
gone the spell would be removed. And so a most accomplished officer
retired, and Lord Fisher, now almost a mythological hero, took his
place.
Within very few weeks the scene suffered
... a sea change.
Into something rich and strange.
Von Spee was left but a month in which to enjoy his triumph over
Cradock; _Emden_ was defeated and captured by _Sydney_; _Karlsruhe_
vanished as by enchantment from the sea; and Von Hipper’s
battle-cruisers, going once too often near the British coast, had been
driven in ignominious flight across the North Sea and paid for their
temerity by the loss of _Blücher_. Three months of the Fisher-Churchill
régime had seemingly put the Navy on a pinnacle that even the most
sanguine--and the most ignorant--had hardly dared to hope for in the
early days. The spectacle, in August, of the transports plying between
France and England, as securely as the motor-buses between Fleet Street
and the Fulham Road, had been a tremendous proof of confidence in
sea-power. The unaccepted challenge at Heligoland had told a tale. The
British fleet had indeed seemed unchallengeable. But the justification
of our confidence was, after all, based only on the fact that the
enemy had not disputed it. It was a negative triumph. But the capture
of _Emden_, the obliteration of Von Spee, the uncamouflaged flight of
Von Hipper, here were things positive, proofs of power in action, the
meaning of which was patent to the simplest. No man in his senses could
pretend that our troubles in October had not been attributed to their
right origin, nor that the right remedy for them had been found and
applied.
There was but one cloud on the horizon. The submarine--despite the loss
of _Hogue_, _Cressy_, _Aboukir_, _Hawk_, _Hermes_, and _Niger_, and
the disturbing rumours that the fleet’s bases were insecure--had been
a failure as an agent for the attrition of our main sea forces. The
loss of _Formidable_, that clouded the opening of the year, had not
restored its prestige. But Von Tirpitz had made an ominous threat. The
submarine might have failed against naval ships. It certainly would not
fail, he said, against trading ships. He gave the world fair warning
that at the right moment an under-water blockade of the British Isles
would be proclaimed; then woe to all belligerents or neutrals that
ventured into those death-doomed waters. The naval writers were not
very greatly alarmed. For four months, after all, trading ships--turned
into transports--had used the narrow waters of the Channel as if the
submarines were no threat at all. Yet, on pre-war reasoning, it was
precisely in narrow waters crowded with traffic that under-water war
should have been of greatest effect. These transports and these narrow
waters were the ideal victims and the ideal field, and coast and
harbour defence and the prevention of invasion, by common consent, the
obvious and indeed the supreme functions the submarine would be called
upon to discharge. From a military point of view the landing of British
troops in France was but the first stage towards an invasion of Germany
and, from a naval point of view, it looked as if to defend the French
ports from being entered by British ships was just as clearly the
first objective of the German submarine as the defence of any German
port. Now six months of war had shown that, if they had tried to stop
the transports, the submarines had been thwarted. Means and methods
had evidently been found of preventing their attack or parrying it
when made. Was it not obvious that it could be no more than a question
of extending these methods to merchant shipping at large to turn the
greater threat to futility? It was this reasoning that, in January and
February, made it easy for the writers to stem any tendency of the
public to panic, and when, towards the end of February, the First Lord
addressed Parliament on the subject, and dealt with the conscienceless
threat of piracy with a placid and defiant confidence, all were
justified in thinking that the naval critics had been right.
And so the beginning of the submarine campaign, though somewhat
disconcerting, caused no wide alarm. An initial success was expected.
It would take time to build the destroyers and the convoying craft on
the scale that was called for, and so to organize the trade that the
attack must be narrowed to protected focal points. And as absolute
secrecy was maintained, both as to our actual defensive methods and
as to our preparations for the future, there was neither the occasion
nor the material for questioning whether the serene contentment of
Whitehall was rightly founded.
Meantime, as we have seen, success had justified the solution of the
October crisis. The attempt to probe deeper and to get at the cause
of things was a thankless task. Those who could see beneath the
surface could not fail to note in December and January that, while
an exuberant optimism had become the mark of the British attitude
towards the war at sea, a movement curiously parallel to it was going
forward in Germany. The shifts to which the Grand Fleet had been put
by the defenceless state of its harbours, though rigidly excluded from
the British Press, has been triumphantly exploited in the German.
Hence, when the enemy’s only oversea squadron was annihilated by Sir
Doveton Sturdee, his Press responded with an outcry on the cowardice
of the British Fleet that, while glad to overwhelm an inferior force
abroad, dared not show itself in the North Sea. And, as if to prove
the charge, Whitby and the Hartlepools were forthwith bombarded by
a force we were unable to bring to action while returning from this
exploit. The enemy naval writers surpassed themselves after this. And
it looked so certain that the German Higher Command might itself become
hypnotized by such talk that, before the New Year, it seemed prudent to
note these phenomena and warn the public that we might be challenged
to action after all, of the kind of action the enemy would dare us
to, and what the problems were that such an action would present. And
in particular it seemed advisable to state explicitly that much less
must be expected from naval guns in battle than those had hoped, whose
notions were founded upon battle practice. A battle-cruiser manœuvring
at twenty-eight knots--instead of a canvas screen towed at six--mines
scattered by a squadron in retreat, a line of retreat that would
draw the pursuers into minefields set to trap them; the attacks on
the pursuing squadrons by flotillas of destroyers, firing long-range
torpedoes--these new elements would upset, it was said, all experiences
of peace gunnery, because in peace practices it is impossible to
provide a target of the speed which enemy ships would have in action,
and because there had been no practice while executing the manœuvres
which torpedo attack would make compulsory in battle.
Within a fortnight the action of the Dogger Bank was fought and Von
Hipper’s battle-cruisers were subjected to the fire of Sir David
Beatty’s Fleet from nine o’clock until twelve, without one being
sunk or so damaged as to lose speed. The enemy’s tactics included
attacks by submarine and destroyer which had imposed the manœuvres as
anticipated--and the best of gunnery had failed. But _Blücher_ had been
sunk; the enemy had run away; so the warning fell on deaf ears; the
lesson of the battle was misread. Optimism reigned supreme.
THE SECOND CRISIS
Within a month a naval adventure of a new kind was embarked upon,
based on the theory that if only you had naval guns enough, any fort
against which they were directed must be pulverized as were the forts
of Liège, Namur, Maubeuge, and Antwerp. The simplest comprehension
of the principles of naval gunnery would have shown the theory to be
fallacious. It originated in the fertile brain of the lay Chief of
the Admiralty, and though it would seem as if his naval advisers felt
the theory to be wrong, none of them, in the absence of a competent
and independent gunnery staff, could say why. And so the essentially
military operation of forcing the passage of the Dardanelles was
undertaken as if it were a purely naval operation, with the result
that, just as naval success had never been conceivable, so now the
failure of the ships made military success impossible also.
It was thus we came to our second naval crisis. The first we had solved
by putting Lord Fisher into Prince Louis’s place. The lesson of the
second seemed to be that there was only one mistake that could be made
with the navy and that was for the Government to ask it to do anything.
Mr. Churchill, as King Stork, had taken the initiative. Lord Fisher,
the naval superman, had not been able to save us. It was clear that lay
interference with the navy was wrong--equally clear that it would be
wiser to leave the initiative to the enemy. And so a new régime began.
But, in reality, the lessons of the first crisis and the second crisis
were the same. To suppose that a civilian First Lord is bound to be
mischievous if he is energetic, and certain to be harmless if, in
administering the navy as an instrument of war, he is a cipher, were
errors just as great as to suppose that a seaman with a long, loyal,
and brilliant record in the public service had put an evil enchantment
over the whole British Navy because, fifty years before, he had been
born a subject of a Power with which till now we had never been at war.
Things went wrong in October, 1914, for precisely the same reasons
that they went wrong in February, March, and April, 1915. The German
battle-cruisers escaped at Heligoland for exactly the same reasons
that the attempt to take the Dardanelles forts by naval artillery
was futile. We had prepared for war and gone into war with no clear
doctrine as to what war meant, because we lacked the organism that
could have produced the doctrine in peace time, prepared and trained
the Navy to a common understanding of it, and supplied it with plans
and equipped it with means for their execution. What was needed in
October, 1914, was not a new First Sea Lord, but a Higher Command
charged only with the study of the principles and the direction of
fighting.
But in May, 1915, this truth was not recognized. And in the next year
which passed, all efforts to make this truth understood were without
effect. And so the submarine campaign went on till it spent itself in
October and revived again in the following March, when it was stopped
by the threat of American intervention. The enemy, thwarted in the only
form of sea activity that promised him great results, found himself
suddenly threatened on land and humiliated at sea, and to restore
his waning prestige, ventured out with his forces, was brought to
battle--and escaped practically unhurt.
The controversies to which the battle of Jutland gave rise will be in
everyone’s recollection. Another of the many indecisive battles with
which history is full had been fought, and the critics established
themselves in two camps. One side was for facing risks and sinking the
enemy at any cost. The other would have it that so long as the British
Fleet was unconquered it was invincible, and that the distinction
between “invincible” and “victorious” could be neglected. After all, as
Mr. Churchill told us, while our fleet was crushing the life breath out
of Germany, the German Navy could carry on no corresponding attack on
us; and when the other camp denounced this doctrine of tame defence, he
retorted that victory was not unnecessary but that the torpedo had made
it impossible.
THE THIRD CRISIS
Yet, within two months of the battle of Jutland, the submarine campaign
had begun again, and, at the time of Mr. Churchill’s rejoinder, the
world was losing shipping at the rate of three million tons a year!
As there never had been the least dispute that to mine the submarine
into German harbours was the best, if not the only, antidote, never
the least doubt that it was only the German Fleet that prevented this
operation from being carried out it seemed strange that an ex-First
Lord of the Admiralty should be telling the world first, that the
German Fleet in its home bases delivered no attack on us and therefore
need not be defeated! And, secondly, as if to clinch the matter and
silence any doubts as to the cogency of his argument, we were to make
the best of it because victory was impossible.
This utter confusion of mind was typical of the public attitude. If a
man who had been First Lord at the most critical period of our history
had understood events so little, could the man in the street know any
better?
Once more the root principles of war were urged on public notice. But
it was already too late. Jutland, whether a victory, or something
far less than a victory, had at any rate left the public in the
comfortable assurance that the ability of the British Fleet was
virtually unimpaired to preserve the flow of provisions, raw material,
and manufactures into Allied harbours and to maintain our military
communications. But soon after the third year of the war began, a
change came over the scene. The highest level that the submarine
campaign had reached in the past was regained, and then surpassed
month by month. Gradually it came to be seen that the thing might
become critical--and this though the campaign was not ruthless. Yet it
was carried out on a larger scale and with bolder methods which the
possession of a larger fleet of submarines made possible. The element
of surprise in the thing was not that the Germans had renewed the
attempt--for it was clear from the terms of surrender to America that
they would renew it at their own time. The surprise was in its success.
The public, still trusting to the attitude of mind induced by the
critics and by the authorities in 1915, had taken it for granted that
the two previous campaigns had stopped in December, 1915, and in March,
1916, because of the efficiency of our counter-measures. The revelation
of the autumn of 1916 was that these counter-measures had failed.
It was this that brought about the third naval crisis of the war. Once
more the old wrong remedy was tried. The Government and the public
had learned nothing from the revelation that we had gone to war on
the doctrine that the Fleet _need_ not, and _ought_ not, to fight the
enemy, and were apparently unconcerned at discovering that it _could_
not fight with success. And so, still not realizing the root cause of
all our trouble, once more a remedy was sought by changing the chief
naval adviser to the Government.
But on this occasion it was not only the chief that was replaced, as
had happened when Lord Fisher succeeded Prince Louis of Battenberg,
and when Sir Henry Jackson succeeded Lord Fisher. When Admiral
Jellicoe came to Whitehall several colleagues accompanied him from the
Grand Fleet. There was nothing approaching to a complete change of
personnel, but the infusion of new blood was considerable. But this
notwithstanding, the menace from the submarine grew, when ruthlessness
was adopted as a method, until the rate of loss by April had doubled,
trebled, and quadrupled that of the previous year. All the world then
saw that, with shipping vanishing at the rate of more than a million
tons a month, the period during which the Allies could maintain the
fight against the Central Powers must be strictly limited.
Thus, without having lost a battle at sea--but because we had failed to
win one--a complete reverse in the naval situation was brought about.
Instead of enjoying the complete command Mr. Churchill had spoken
of, we were counting the months before surrender might be inevitable.
During the ten weeks leading up to the culminating losses of April, a
final effort was made to make the public and the Government realize
that failure of the Admiralty to protect the sea-borne commerce of a
seagirt people was due less to the Government’s reliance on advisers
ill-equipped for their task, than that the task itself was beyond human
performance, so long as the Higher Command of the Navy was wrongly
constituted for its task. It was, of course, an old warning vainly
urged on successive Governments year after year in peace time, and
month after month during the war. Evidences of inadequate preparation
of imperfect plans, of a wrong theory of command, of action founded on
wrong doctrine but endorsed by authority, had all been numerous during
the previous two and a half years.
THE FOURTH CRISIS
But where reason and argument had been powerless to prevail, the logic
of facts gained the victory. At last, in the fourth naval crisis of the
war, it was realized that changes in personnel at Whitehall were not
sufficient, that changes of system were necessary. Before the end of
May the machinery of administration was reorganized and a new Higher
Command developed, largely on the long resisted staff principle.
Thus, after repeated failures--not of the Fleet but of its directing
minds in London--a complete revolution was effected in the command
of the most important of all the fighting forces in the war, viz.,
the British Navy. It was actually brought about because criticism had
shown that the old régime had first failed to anticipate and then to
thwart a new kind of attack on sea communications--just as it had
failed to anticipate the conditions of surface war. It was at last
realized that two kinds of naval war could go on together, one almost
independent of the other. A Power might command the surface of the
sea against the surface force of an enemy, and do so more absolutely
than had ever happened before, and yet see that command brought, for
its main purposes, almost to nothing by a new naval force, from which,
though naval ships could defend themselves, they seemingly could not
defend the carrying and travelling ships, upon which the life of the
nation and the continuance of its military effort on land depended. The
revolution of May saved the situation. At last the principle of convoy,
vainly urged on the old régime, was adopted, and within six months the
rate at which ships were being lost was practically halved. In twelve
months it had been reduced by sixty per cent.
But the departure made in the summer of 1917, though radical as to
principle, was less than half-hearted as to persons. Many of the
men identified with all our previous failures and responsible for
the methods and plans that have led to them, were retained in full
authority. The mere adoption of the staff principle did indeed bring
about an effect so singular and striking as completely to transform
all Allied prospects. In April, defeat seemed to be a matter of a
few months only. By October it had become clear that the submarine
could not by itself assure a German victory. If such extraordinary
consequences could follow--exactly as it was predicted they must--from
a change in system which all experience of war had proved to be
essential, why, it may be asked, was the adoption of the staff
principle so bitterly opposed? Partly, no doubt, because of the natural
conservatism of men who have grown old and attained to high rank in
a service to which they have given their lives in all devotion and
sincerity. The singularity of the sailor’s training and experience
tends to make the naval profession both isolated and exclusive. And
that its daily life is based upon the strictest discipline, that gives
absolute power to the captain of a ship because it is necessary to hold
him absolutely responsible, inevitably grafts upon this exclusiveness
a respect for seniority which gives to its action in every field the
indisputable finality bred of the quarter-deck habit. Thus, there was
no place in Admiralty organization for the independent and expert work
of junior men, because no authority could attach to their counsel. It
is of the essence of the staff principle that special knowledge, sound,
impartial, trained judgment, grasp of principle and proved powers of
constructive imagination, are higher titles to dictatorship in policy
than the character and experience called for in the discharge of
executive command. But to a service not bred to seeing all questions of
policy first investigated, analyzed, and, finally, defined by a staff
which necessarily will consist more of younger than of older men, the
suggestion that the higher ranks should accept the guiding coöperation
of their juniors seemed altogether anarchical. The long resistance to
the establishment of a Higher Command based on rational principles may
be set down to these two elements of human psychology.
That successive Governments failed to break down this conservatism
must, I think, be explained by their fear of the hold which men of
great professional reputation had upon the public mind and public
affections. It was notable, for example, that when our original
troubles came to us at the first crisis, the Government, instead
of seeking the help of the youngest and most accomplished of our
admirals and captains, chose as chief advisers the oldest and least
in touch with our modern conditions. It was, perhaps, the same fear of
public opinion that delayed the completion of the 1917 reforms until
the beginning of the next year. But, with all its defects and its
limitations, the solution sought of the fourth sea crisis had made the
history of the past twelve months the most hopeful of any since the war
began.
THE NEW ERA
The period divides itself into two unequal portions. Between June and
January, 1918, was seen the slowly growing mastery of the submarine.
The rate of loss was halved and the methods by which this result was
achieved were applied as widely as possible. But in the next six or
eight months no improvement in the position corresponding to that which
followed in the first period was obtained. The explanation is simple
enough. The old autocratic régime had not understood the nature of the
new war any better than the nature of the old. It had from the first,
under successive chief naval advisers, repudiated convoy as though it
were a pestilent heresy. In June, 1917, the very men who, as absolutist
advisers, had taken this attitude, were compelled to sanction the
hated thing itself. It yielded exactly the results claimed for it, but
no more. It was in its nature so simple and so obvious that it did
not take long to get it into working order. It was the best form of
defence. But defence is the weakest form of war. The stronger form,
the offensive, needed planning and long preparations. In the nature
of things these could not take effect either in six months or in
twelve. Nor is it likely that, while the old personnel was suffered to
remain at Whitehall, those engaged on the plans and charged with the
preparations for this were able to work with the expedition which the
situation called for. For the first six months after the revolution,
then, little occurred to prove its efficiency, except the fruits of
the policy which instructed opinion had forced on Whitehall. But
these, so far as the final issue of the war was concerned, were surely
sufficient. For the losses by submarines were brought below the danger
point.
It was not until the revolution made its next step forward by the
changes in personnel announced in January that marked progress was
shown in the other fields of naval war. The late autumn had been
marked, as it was fully expected, once the submarine was thwarted, by
various efforts on the part of the enemy to assert himself by other
means at sea. A Lerwick convoy, very inadequately protected, was
raided by fast and powerful enemy cruisers, and many ships sunk in
circumstances of extraordinary barbarity. The destroyers protecting
them sacrificed themselves with fruitless gallantry. There were ravages
on the coast as well. Both things pointed to salient weaknesses in
the naval position. At the time of the third naval crisis at the end
of 1916, it had been pointed out that the repeated evidences of our
inability to hold the enemy in the Narrow Seas ought not to be allowed
to pass uncensured or unremedied. But the fatal habit of refusing to
recognize that an old favourite had failed prevented any reform for
a year. It was not until Sir Roger Keyes was appointed to the Dover
Command and a new atmosphere was created that remarkable departures
in new policy were inaugurated. This policy took two forms. First,
there was the establishment of a mine barrage from coast to coast
across the Channel, and simultaneously with this, North Sea minefields
stretching, one from Norwegian territorial waters almost to the
Scottish foreshore, and another in the Kattegat, to intercept such
German U-boats as base their activities upon the enemy’s Baltic force.
Two great minefields on such a scale as this are works of time. Nor can
their effect upon the submarine campaign be expected to be seen until
they are very near completion; but then the effect may possibly be
immediate and overwhelming.
Principally to facilitate the creation and maintenance of the barrages,
a second new departure in policy was the organization of attacks on
the German bases in Flanders. Of these Zeebrügge was infinitely the
more important, because it is from here that the deep water canal
runs to the docks and wharves of Bruges some miles inland. The value
of Zeebrügge, robbed of the facilities for equipment and reparation
which the Bruges docks afford, is little indeed. It is little more
than an anchorage and a refuge. To close Zeebrügge to the enemy called
for an operation as daring and as intricate as was ever attempted.
Success depended upon so many factors, of which the right weather was
the least certain, that it was no wonder that the expedition started
again and again without attempting the blow it set out to strike. Its
final complete success at Zeebrügge was a veritable triumph of perfect
planning and organization and command. It came at a critical moment
in the campaign. A month before the enemy, by his great attack at St.
Quentin, had achieved by far the greatest land victory of the war. He
had followed this up by further attacks, and seemed to add to endless
resources in men a ruthless determination to employ them for victory.
The British and French were driven to the defensive. Not to be beaten,
not to yield too much ground, to exact the highest price for what was
yielded, this was not a very glorious rôle when the triumphs on the
Somme and in Flanders of 1916 and 1917 were remembered. It cannot
be questioned that the originality, the audacity, and the success of
Vice-Admiral Keyes’ attacks on Zeebrügge and Ostend, gave to all the
Allies just that encouragement which a dashing initiative alone can
give. It broke the monotony of being always passive.
But the new minefields, the barrages, the sealing of Zeebrügge, these
were far from being the only fruits of the changes at Whitehall. A
sortie by _Breslau_ and _Goeben_ from the Dardanelles, which ended
in the sinking of a couple of German monitors and the loss of a
light German cruiser on a minefield, directed attention sharply to
the situation in the Middle Sea. There was a manifest peril that the
Russian Fleet might fall into German hands and make a junction with the
Austrian Fleet at Pola. Further, the losses of the Allies by submarines
in this sea had for long been unduly heavy. A visit of the First Lord
to the Mediterranean did much to put these things right. First steps
were taken in reorganizing the command and, before the changes had
advanced very far, an astounding exploit by two officers of the Italian
Navy resulted in the destruction of two Austrian Dreadnoughts, and
relieved the Allies of any grave danger in this quarter.
Meantime, it had become known that a powerful American squadron had
joined the Grand Fleet, that our gallant and accomplished Allies had
adopted British signals and British ways, and had become in every
respect perfectly amalgamated with the force they had so greatly
strengthened. And though little was said about it in the Press, it was
evident enough that the moral of the Lerwick convoy had been learned,
nor was there the least doubt that the Grand Fleet, under the command
of Sir David Beatty, had become an instrument of war infinitely more
flexible and efficient than it had ever been. His plans and battle
orders took every contingency into council so far as human foresight
made possible. At Jutland, at the Dogger Bank, and in the Heligoland
Bight, Admiral Beatty had shown his power to animate a fleet by his own
fighting spirit and to combine a unity of action with the independent
initiative of his admirals, simply because he had inspired all of them
with a common doctrine of fighting. Under such auspices there could
be little doubt that our main forces in northern waters were ready
for battle with a completeness and an elasticity that left nothing to
chance.
But if we are to look for the chief fruit of last year’s revolution,
we shall not find it in the reorganized Grand Fleet, nor in the new
initiative and aggression in the Narrow Seas, for the ultimate results
of which we still have to wait. If the enemy despairs both of victory
on land or of such success as will give him a compromise peace, if he
is faced by disintegration at home and, driven to a desperate stroke,
sends out his Fleet to fight, we shall then see, but perhaps not till
then, what the changes of last year have brought about in our fighting
forces. Meantime, the success of the great reforms can be measured
quite definitely. In the months of May and June over half a million
American soldiers were landed in France, sixty per cent. of whom were
carried in British ships. No one in his senses in May or June last year
would have thought this possible.
Looked at largely, then, last year’s revolution at Whitehall is in all
ways the most astonishing and the most satisfactory naval event of the
last four years. It is the most satisfactory event, because its results
have been so nearly what was foretold and because it only needs for
the work to be completed for all the lessons of the war to be rightly
applied.