SEA FALLACIES: A PLEA FOR FIRST PRINCIPLES
What do we mean by “sea-power” and “command of the sea”? What really
is a navy and how does it gain these things? How come navies into
existence? Of what constituents, human and material, are they composed?
How are the human elements taught, trained, commanded, and led? How are
the ships grouped and distributed, and the weapons fought in war?
To the countrymen of Nelson, and to those of his great interpreter,
Mahan, these might at first sight seem very superfluous questions, for
they, almost of natural instinct, should understand that strange but
overwhelming force that has made them. To the Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland, to the Empires that owe allegiance to the British Crown,
to the United States of America, sea-power is at once their origin
and the fundamental essential of their continued free and independent
existence. And it is their predominant races that have produced the
world’s greatest sea fighters and sea writers. It is to the British
Fleet that the world owes its promise of safety from German diabolism
bred of autocracy. It is to sea-power that America must look if she is
to finish the work the Allies have begun. With so great a stake in the
sea, Great Britain and America should have fathomed its mysteries.
But, despite the fighters and the writers, the sea in a great measure
has kept its secret hidden. In every age the truth has been the
possession of but a few. Countries for a time have followed the
light, and have then, as it were, been suddenly struck blind, and the
fall of empires has followed the loss of vision. The world explains
the British Empire of to-day, and the great American nation which has
sprung from it, by a happy congenital talent for colonizing waste
places, for self-government, for assimilating and making friends with
the unprogressive peoples, by giving them a better government than they
had before. And certainly without such gifts the British races could
not have overspread so large a portion of the earth. But the world is
apt to forget that there were other empires sprung from other European
peoples--Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Dutch--each at some time
larger in wealth, area, or population, than that which owed allegiance
to the British Crown. In each case it was the power of their navies
that gave each country these great possessions. Of some of these
empires only insignificant traces remain to-day. They have been merged
in the British Empire or have become independent. And the merging or
the freeing has always followed from war at sea. It is the British
sailors, and not the British colonists, that have made the British
Empire. It is not because the settlers in New England were better
fighters or had more talent for self-government, but because Holland
had the weaker navy, that the city which must shortly be the greatest
in the world is named after the ancient capital of Northern England,
and not after Amsterdam. It was not England’s half-hearted fight on
land, but her failure to preserve an unquestionable command of the sea
that secured the extraordinary success of Washington and Hamilton’s
military plans.
To all these truths we have long paid lip service. Years ago it passed
into a commonplace that should ever national existence be threatened
by an outside force, it would be on the sea that we should have to
rely for defence. With so tremendous an issue at stake, why was our
knowledge so vague, why has our curiosity to know the truth been so
feeble? Perhaps it is that communities that are very rich and very
comfortable are slow to believe that danger can hang over them. In
the catechism used to teach Catholic children the elements of their
religion, the death that awaits every mortal, the instant judgment
before the throne of God, the awful alternatives, Heaven or Hell, that
depend on the issue, are spoken of as the “Four Last Things.” Their
title has been flippantly explained by the admitted fact that they
are the very last things that most people ever think of. So has it
been with America and England in the matter of war. The threat seemed
too far off to be a common and universal concern. It could be left
to the governments. So long as we voted all the money that was asked
for officially, we had done our share. And, if statesmen told us that
our naval force was large enough, and that it was in a state of high
efficiency, and ready for war, we felt no obligation to ask what war
meant, in what efficiency consisted, or how its existence could be
either presumed or proved. We had no incentive to master the thing
for ourselves. We were not challenged to inquire whether in fact the
semblance of sea-power corresponded with its reality. The fact that it
was on sea-power that we relied for defence against invasion should,
of course, have quickened our vigilance. It, in fact, deadened it. For
we had never refused a pound the Admiralty had asked for. We took the
sufficiency of the Navy for granted and, with the buffer of the fleet
between ourselves and ruin, the threat of ruin seemed all the more
remote.
A minority, no doubt, was uneasy and did inquire. But they found their
path crossed by difficulties almost insuperable. The literature of
sea-power was based entirely upon the history of the great sea wars of
a dim past. Mahan, it is true, had so elucidated the broad doctrines
of sea strategy that it seemed as if he who ran might read. But lucid
and convincing as is his analysis, urbane and judicial as is his
style, Mahan’s work could not make the bulk of his readers adepts in
naval doctrine. The fact seems to be that the fabled mysteries of the
sea make every truth concerning it elusive, difficult for any one but
a sailor to grasp. The difficulties were hardly lessened by Mahan’s
chief work having dealt completely with the past. The most important
of the world’s sea wars may be said to begin with the Armada and to
end in 1815. In these two and one quarter centuries the implements of
naval warfare changed hardly at all. Broadly speaking, from the days of
Howard of Effingham to those of Fulton and Watt, man used three-masted
ships and muzzle-loading cannon. Hence the history of the Great Age
deals very little with the technique of war.
To the lay reader, therefore, the study of sea-power, based upon these
ancient campaigns, seemed not only the pursuit of a subject vague
and elusive in itself, but one that becomes doubly unreal through
the successive revolutions of modern times. It was like studying the
politics of an extinct community told in records of a dead language.
The incendiary shell, armour to keep the shell out, steam that made
ships completely dirigible in the sense that they could with great
rapidity be turned to any chosen course, these alone had, by the middle
of the last century, completely revolutionized the tactical employment
of sea force. Steam, which made a ship easier to aim than a gun, gave
birth to ramming; and naval thought was hypnotized by this fallacy for
nearly two generations. By the end of the century the whole art had
again been changed, first by the development of the monster cannon, and
next, a far more important invention, the mountings that made first
light, and then heavy, guns so flexible in use that they could be aimed
in a moderate sea way. These and the invention of the fish torpedo and
the high speed boat for carrying it--that in the twilight of dawn and
eve would make it practically invisible--brought about fresh changes
that altered not only the tactics of battle, but those of blockade and
of many other naval operations.
But, great and surprising as were the changes and developments in
naval weapons and the material in the last half of the nineteenth
century, they were completely eclipsed by the number and nature of the
advances made in the first decade and a half of the twentieth. If, to
the ordinary reader, the lessons of the past seemed of doubtful value
in the light of what steam, the explosive shell, the torpedo, and
the heavy gun had effected, what was to be said in the light of the
kaleidoscope of novelties sprung upon the world _after_ the latest of
all the naval wars? For between 1906 and 1914 there came a succession
of naval sensations so startling as to make clear and connected
thinking appear a visionary hope.
First we heard that naval guns, that until 1904 had nowhere been
fired at a greater range than two miles, were actually being used in
practice--and used with success--at distances of ten, twelve, and
fourteen thousand yards. It was not only that guns were increasing
their range, they were growing monstrously in size and still more
monstrously in the numbers put into each individual ship, so that
the ships grew faster than the guns themselves, until the capital
ship of to-day is more than double the displacement of that of ten
years ago. And with size came speed, not only the speed that would
follow naturally from the increase in length, but the further speed
that was got by a more compact and lighter form of prime mover. Ten
years ago the highest action pace a fleet of capital ships would have
been, perhaps, seventeen knots. Now whole squadrons can do twenty-five
per cent. better. And with the battle-cruiser we have now a capital
ship carrying the biggest guns there are, that can take them into
action literally twice as fast as a twelve-inch gun could be carried
into battle twelve years ago. Thus with range increased out of all
imagination, and vastly greater speed, the tactics of battle were
obviously in the melting pot.
But these were far from being the only revolutionary elements. There
followed in quick succession a new torpedo that ran with almost perfect
accuracy for five or six miles and carried an explosive charge three
or four times larger than anything previously known. It had seemed but
yesterday that a mile was the torpedo’s almost outside range. Then, at
the beginning of the decade of which I speak, the submarine had a low
speed on the surface, and half of that below it, with a very limited
area of manœuvre in which it could work. It seemed little more, many
thought, than an ingenious toy capable, perhaps, of an occasional
deadly surprise if an enemy’s fleet should come too near a harbour, but
seemingly not destined to influence the grand tactics of war. But in an
incredibly short time the submarine became a submersible ocean cruiser,
with three times the radius of a pre-Dreadnought battleship, with a far
higher surface speed, and able to carry guns of such power that they
could sink a merchant ship with half-a-dozen rounds at four miles. In
this, even the dullest could see something more than a change in naval
tactics. Might not the whole nature of naval war be changed? For the
long range torpedo that could be used in action, at a range equal to
that at which the greatest guns could be expected to hit; the submarine
that, completely hidden, could bring the torpedo to such short range
that hits would be a certainty, the invisible boat that could evade
the closest surface cordon and, almost undisturbed, hunt and destroy
merchantmen on the trade routes--that, but for the submarine, would
have been completely protected by the command won by the predominant
fleet--wonderful as these new things were, they were far from
exhausting the new developments of under-water war. Great ingenuity had
been shown not only in developing very powerful mines, but in devising
means of laying them by the fastest ships, so that not only could
these deadly traps be set by merchantmen disguised as neutrals, but by
fast cruisers whose speed could at any time enable them to evade the
patrols. And, finally, it was equally obvious that the submarine could
become a mine layer also. There was, then, literally no spot in the
ocean that might not at any moment be mined.
Add to all this, that while wireless introduced an almost instant means
of sending orders to or getting news from such distant spots that space
was annihilated, airships and aeroplanes--with some, as many thought,
with a decisive capacity for attacking fleets in harbour--seemed to
make scouting possible over unthought of areas. Can we blame the
landsman who set himself patiently to learn the rudiments of the naval
art if, after a painful study of the past, he found himself so bemused
by the changes of the present as to wonder if a single accepted dogma
could survive the high-explosive bombardment of to-day’s inventions? It
almost looked as if nothing could be learned from the past and less,
if possible, be foretold about the future. If the understanding of
sea-power in the days of old had been the possession of but a few, it
seemed that to-day it must be denied to all.
It is, therefore, not surprising that extraordinary misunderstandings
were--and are--prevalent. Only one truth seemed to survive--the
supremacy of the capital ship. But this, too, became an error,
because it excluded other truths. To the vast bulk of laymen the word
“navy” suggested no more than a panorama of great super-Dreadnought
battleships. From time to time naval reviews had been held, and
the illustrated papers had shown these great vessels, long vistas
of them, anchored in perfectly kept lines, with light cruisers and
destroyers fading away into the distance. Both in the pictures and in
the descriptions all emphasis was laid upon the ships. And in this
the current official naval thought of the day was reflected. If any
one wished to compare the British Fleet with the German or the German
with the American, he confined himself to enumerating their respective
totals in Dreadnoughts, and let it go at that. His mental picture of
a fleet was thus a perspective of vast mastodons armed with guns of
fabulous reach and still more fabulous power, gifted, some of them,
with speed that could outstrip the fastest liner, and encased, at least
in part, in almost impenetrable armour.
He would know generally, of course, that such things as cruisers,
destroyers, and submarines not only existed, but were indeed necessary.
He would know vaguely that cruisers were useful for cruising, and
destroyers for their eponymous duties--though he would have been sorely
puzzled if he had been asked to say exactly what the cruising was for,
or what the destroyers were intended to destroy. He would have heard
of the mystic properties of torpedoes, and of mines, and of certain
weird possibilities that lay before the combination of the torpedo with
the submarine. Similarly, if one challenged him, he would admit, of
course, that guns could only be formidable if they hit, and that fleets
could only succeed in battle if their officers and crews were properly
trained and skilfully led. But these were things that could not be
tabulated or scheduled. They did not figure in Naval Annuals, nor in
Admiralty statements. They were stumbling blocks to the layman’s desire
to be satisfied--and he took it for granted that they were all right,
and was content to measure naval strength by the number of the biggest
ships, and so rate the navies of the world by what they possessed in
these colossal units only. Thus, he would always put Great Britain
first, and recently Germany second, with the United States, Japan, and
France taking the third place in succession, as their annual programmes
of construction were announced. And just as he thought of navies in
terms of battleships, so he thought of naval war in terms of great sea
battles. A reaction was inevitable.
Four years have now passed since Germany struck her felon blow at the
Christian tradition the nations have been struggling to maintain--and
so far there has been no Trafalgar. The German Fleet, hidden behind its
defences, is still integral and afloat, and though the British Fleet
has again and again come out, its battleships have got into action
but once, and then for a few minutes only. For four years, therefore,
the two greatest battle fleets in the world seem to have been doing
nothing; and to be doing nothing now! And so, if you ask the average
layman for a broad opinion on sea-power to-day, he will tell you that
battle fleets are useless. For a year or more he has heard little of
any work at sea except of the work of the submarine. To him, therefore,
it seemed manifest that the torpedo has superseded the gun and the
submarine the battleship. His opinions, in other words, have swung full
cycle. Was he right before and is he wrong now, or was his first view
an error and has he at last, under the stern teachings of war, attained
the truth?
He was wrong then and he is wrong now. It was an error to think of
sea-power _only_ in terms of battleships. It is a still greater error
to suppose that sea-power can exist in any useful form _unless_ based
on battleships in overwhelming strength. It is true that the German
submarines did for a period so threaten the world’s shipping as to
make it possible that the overwhelming military resources of the
Allies might never be brought to bear against the full strength of the
German line in France. It is also true that they have added years to
the duration of the war, millions and millions to its cost, and have
brought us to straits that are hard to bear. They were truly Germany’s
most powerful defence, the only useful form of sea force for her. But
it is, nevertheless, quite impossible that the submarine can give to
Germany any of the direct advantages which the command of the sea
confers.
These simple truths will come home convincingly to us if we suppose
for a minute that, at the only encounter in which the battle fleets
met, it had been the German Fleet that was victorious. Had Scheer and
Von Hipper met Beatty and Jellicoe in a fair, well-fought-out action,
and sunk or captured the greater part of the British Fleet so that but
a crippled remnant could struggle back to harbour--as little left of
the mighty British armada as survived of Villeneuve’s and Gravina’s
forces after Trafalgar--would it ever have been necessary for Germany
to have challenged the forbearance of the world by reckless and
piratical attacks on peaceful shipping? Quite obviously not. For with
her battle-cruisers patrolling unchallenged in the Channel, the North
Sea, and the Atlantic, with all her destroyers and light cruisers
working under their protection, no British merchantman could have
cleared or entered any British port, no neutral could have passed
the blockading lines. British submarines might, indeed, have held up
German shipping--but we should have lost the use of merchant shipping
ourselves. Our armies would have been cut off from their overseas
base, our fighting Allies would have been robbed of the food and
material now reaching them from North and South America and the British
Dominions, and the civil population of England, Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales, would have been threatened by immediate invasion or by not
very far distant famine. And this is so because command of the sea
is conditioned by a superior battleship strength, and can only be
exercised by surface craft which cannot be driven off the sea.
Let us look at this question again from another angle. It is probable
that Germany possessed, during the summer of 1917, some two hundred
submarines at least. She may have possessed more. These submarines
were, for many months, sinking on an average of from twenty to
twenty-four British ships a week, and perhaps rather more than half
as many Allied and neutral ships as well. It was, of course, a
very formidable loss. But of every seventeen ships that went into
the danger zone, sixteen did actually escape. How many would have
escaped if Germany could have maintained a fleet of fifty surface
ships--light cruisers, armed merchantmen, swift destroyers--in these
waters? Supposing trade ships were to put to sea and try to get past
such a _cordon_ just as they risk passing the submarines, how many
could possibly escape? What would be the toll each surface ship would
take--one a fortnight? One a week? One a day?
These are all ridiculous questions, because, could such a _cordon_ be
maintained, no ship bound for Great Britain would put to sea at all.
It would not be sixteen escaping to one captured; the whole seventeen
would so certainly be doomed that they all would stay in port. So much
the war has certainly taught us. When, on August 4, 1914, the British
Government declared war on Germany, the sailing of every German ship
the world over was then and there stopped. A hundred that were at sea
could not be warned and were captured. Those that escaped capture made
German or neutral ports. But the order not to sail did not wait upon
results. The stoppage of the German merchant service was automatic
and instantaneous. It would have been raving insanity to have risked
encounter with a navy that held the surface command.
Three months later the situation was locally reversed in South American
waters. Von Spee, with two very powerful armoured cruisers and three
light fast vessels, encountered a very inferior British force under
Admiral Cradock off Coronel, and defeated it decisively. Von Spee’s
victory meant that in the Southern Atlantic there was no force capable
of opposing him. Instantly every South American port was closed.
No one knew where Von Spee might turn up next. Not a captain dared
clear for England. Even in South Africa General Botha’s hands were
tied. A section of the Transvaal and Orange Colony Dutch had risen in
rebellion, and had made common cause with the Germans in South West
Africa. With Von Spee at large there was no saying what help he would
bring to the enemy, and the risk that communications with the mother
country might be cut, was a real one. For four weeks the South African
Government was paralyzed.
Then followed the most brilliant piece of sea strategy in the war. Two
battle-cruisers were sent secretly and at top speed to the Falkland
Islands. They reached Port Stanley on December 7, and on the next
morning at eight o’clock, Von Spee, in obedience to some inexplicable
instinct, brought the whole of his forces to attack the islands. It
was the most extraordinary coincidence in the history of war. It was
as if a man had been told that a sixty-pound salmon had been seen in
a certain river, had thrown a fly at random, and had got a bite and
landed him with his first cast. The verdict of Coronel was reversed.
Four out of five German ships were sunk. The _Dresden_ escaped, but
only to hide herself in the fjords of Patagonia. Germany’s brief spell
of sea command in the South Atlantic had ended as dramatically as it
began. And within twenty-four hours the laden ships of Chile and the
Argentine had put to sea, the underwriters had dropped their premiums
to the pre-war rate, and the arrangements for the invasion of South
West Africa had begun.
Once more it had been proved that the course of sea traffic is governed
by sea command, and sea command means the general power to use the
ocean for what it truly is, the highway that connects all the ports of
the world together. To use, that is to say, exclusively; to limit its
use to the power possessing that command, and to those other powers
that might be friendly to them, or to neutrals unconcerned with the
war altogether. Never in history has this command been complete. From
Trafalgar to 1815, the British, if ever, commanded the sea adversely
against their enemies. But they lost anything from six hundred to one
thousand ships a year, and it was never possible to stop the whole of
the enemy’s trade. Before submarines were ever heard of, then, command
could not be made absolute. Strangely enough, steam changed all this.
To-day the surface command against surface force is virtually absolute.
In August, 1914, Germany had in all a dozen armed vessels on the high
seas prepared to attack British shipping. They took and destroyed
fifty-six vessels only. All but three were destroyed or driven to
intern in very few months. Save for a raider or two--exceptions that
prove the rule--no surface attack has been made on the Allies’ ocean
trade since then. And there has been no ocean trade in German bottoms
at all. In a sense, then, the submarine has only restored to the
weaker belligerent a part--and only a small part--of the powers he
possessed in the days of sailing fleets. It gives him a limited power
of attack on his enemy’s supply. But, two cruises of the _Deutschland_
notwithstanding, it has returned him none of his old trading power.
And, as the course of the submarine war has shown, so long as he limits
the attack on trade to proportions which the neutral world can put up
with, the power of attack is so restricted as to be without military
value. The attempt, then, to get a kind of command of the sea by
submarine alone could only be made at the cost of turning the whole
neutral world into an enemy world. And from the German point of view,
the tragedy of the thing is this. The attempt was made, the whole world
has become hostile, and the thing has failed.
In these two popular fallacies--the pre-war error that battleships
were everything, and the present error that they are absolutely
useless, and that it is the submarine that reigns at sea--we see, as
it appears to me, convincing proofs that an exposition of the A B C
of sea fighting would not be a work of supererogation. I have spoken
of these fallacies as popular fallacies, but they are not limited to
the unlettered, nor are they foreign to men of affairs. They have, on
the contrary, flourished most in ministries, and been strongly held
by those whose business it should have been not only to follow or
express, but to mould, public opinion. A British statesman, afterwards
Prime Minister, said once in Parliament: “I believe that since the
Declaration of Paris, the fleet, valuable as it is for preventing an
invasion of these shores, is almost valueless for any other purpose.”
Most strange of all, the strongest exponents of these heresies have
been certain naval officers themselves. It would be interesting to
essay to account for this, as it seems to me the strangest curiosity
of our times. Let it suffice for the moment to state that what up to a
year ago was a dominating faith, is recognized universally to-day as a
devastating tissue of errors.
Had the root principles of sea-power been properly understood, these
errors never could have prevailed. For it is popular opinion that is
ultimately responsible for the kind of government each nation has. On
it depends the kind of navy that each government creates, and hence the
measure of safety at sea that each nation enjoys. The tragic history
of the last four years shows how this opinion can be misguided into an
almost fatal tolerance of what is false.
When will a new Mahan arise to set things right? The world needs a
naval teacher.