THE ACTION THAT NEVER WAS FOUGHT
_August, 1914._
Take it for all in all, the most remarkable thing about the naval war
is that it took the Germans by surprise. They had planned the most
perfect thing imaginable in the way of a scheme for the conquest of
all Europe. It had but one flaw. They left Great Britain out of their
calculations--left us out, that is to say, not as ulterior victims,
but as probable and immediate combatants. We were omitted because
Germany assumed that we should either be too rich, too frightened, or
too unready to fight. So that, of all the contingencies that could
be foreseen, simultaneous sea war with Great Britain and land war on
two frontiers, was the one for which almost no preparations had been
made. Hence to undo Germany utterly at sea proved to be a very simple
business indeed.
Much has been made of this statesman or that admiral having actually
issued the mandate that kept the Grand Fleet mobilized and got it to
its war stations two days before war was declared. But there is here no
field for flattery and no scope for praise, and the historical interest
in identifying the actual agent is slender. It has always been a part
of the British defensive theory that the main Fleet shall be ever ready
for instant war orders. Of the fact of its being the plan, we need
no further testimony than Mr. Churchill’s first Memorandum after his
elevation to the control of British naval policy and of the British
Fleet. The thing, therefore, that was done was the mere mechanical
discharge of a standing order.
Once the Fleet was mobilized and at its war stations, German sea power
perished off the outer seas as effectually as if every surface ship
had been incontinently sunk. There was not a day’s delay in our using
the Channel exactly as if no enemy were afloat. Within an hour of the
declaration of war being known, no German ship abroad cleared for a
German port, nor did any ship in a German port clear for the open sea.
The defeat was suffered without a blow being offered in defence, and,
for the purposes of trade and transport, it was as instantaneous as it
was final.
Nor was it our strength, nor sheer terror of our strength, that made
the enemy impotent. He was confounded as much by surprise as he was
by superior power. In point of fact, the disparity between the main
forces of the two Powers in the North Sea, though considerable, was
not such as to have made Germany despair of an initial victory--and
that possibly decisive--had she been free to choose her own method of
making war on us, and had she chosen her time wisely. In August 1914
three of our battle cruisers were in the Mediterranean, one was in the
Pacific, one was in dockyard hands. Only one German ship of the first
importance was absent from Kiel. In modern battleships commissioned and
at sea, the German High Seas Fleet consisted of at least two _Königs_,
five _Kaisers_, four _Helgolands_, and four _Westfalens_. All except
the _Westfalens_ were armed with 12.2 guns--weapons that fire a heavier
shell than the British 12-inch. The _Westfalens_ were armed with
11-inch guns. They could, then, have brought into action a broadside
fire of 110 12-inch guns and 40 11-inch. Germany had, besides, four
battle-cruisers, less heavily armed than our ships of the same class,
quite as fast as our older battle-cruisers and much more securely
armoured. So that if protection--as so many seem to think--is the one
essential quality in a fighting ship, they were more suited to take
their share in a fleet action than our battle-cruisers could have been
expected to be.
On our side we had twenty battleships and four armoured cruisers. In
modern capital ships, then, we possessed but twenty-four to nineteen--a
percentage of superiority of only just over 25 per cent., and less than
that for action purposes if the principle alluded to holds good. It was
a margin far lower than the public realized. At Jutland we lost two
battle cruisers in the first forty minutes of the action. Had such an
action been fought, with like results, in August, 1914, our surviving
margin would have been very slender indeed. But the enemy dared not
take the risk. He paid high for his caution. Yet his inferiority should
not have paralyzed him. At Jutland he faced infinitely greater odds.
His numbers were not such as to make inglorious inactivity compulsory
had he been resourceful, enterprising, and willing to risk all in the
attack. It certainly was a position that bristled with possibilities
for an enemy who, to resource, courage, and enterprise, could add the
overpowering advantage of choosing the day and the hour of attack, and
could strike without a moment’s warning.
If the German Government had realized from the start that in no war
that threatened the balance of power in Europe could we remain either
indifferent or, what is far more important, inactive spectators, then
they would have realized something else as well, something that was, in
point of fact, realized the moment Germany began her self-imposed--but
now impossible--task of conquering Europe by first crushing France and
Russia. She would have realized as then she did, that if Great Britain
were allowed to come into the war her intervention might be decisive.
It would seemingly have to be so for very obvious reasons. With France
and Russia assured of the economic and financial support of the
greatest economic and financial Power in Europe, Germany’s immediate
opponents would have staying power: time, that is to say, would be
against their would-be conquerors. The intervention of Great Britain,
then, would make an ultimate German victory impossible. In a long war
staying power would make the population of the British Empire a source
from which armies could be drawn. Beginning by being the greatest sea
Power in the world, we would necessarily end in becoming one of the
greatest military Powers as well. The two things by themselves must
have threatened military defeat for Germany. Nor, again, was this
all. For while sea power, and the financial strength which goes with
sustained trade and credit, could add indefinitely to the fighting
capacity and endurance of Russia and France, sea power and siege were
bound, if resolutely used, to sap the fighting power and endurance of
the Central Powers.
To the least prophetic of statesmen--just as to the least instructed
students of military history--the situation would have been plain. And
there could be but one lesson to be drawn from it. To risk everything
on a quick victory over France or Russia was insanity. If the conquest
of Europe could not be undertaken with Great Britain an opponent, the
alternative was simple. Either the conquest of Great Britain must
precede it or the conquest of the world be postponed to the Greek
Kalends.
Was the conquest of Great Britain a thing so unattainable that it had
only to be considered to be discarded as visionary? No doubt, had
we been warned and upon our guard, ready to defend ourselves before
Germany was ready to strike, then certainly any such scheme must have
been doomed to failure. But I am not so sure that a successful attack
would have been beyond the resources of those who planned the great
European war, had they from the first, grasped the elementary truth
that it was necessary to their larger scheme. For to win the conquest
of Europe it would not be necessary to crush Great Britain finally and
altogether. All that was required was to prevent her interference for,
say, six months, and this, it really seems, was far from being a thing
beyond the enemy’s capacity to achieve.
The essentials of the attack are easy enough to tabulate. First,
Germany would have to concentrate in the North Sea the largest force
of capital ships that it was possible to equip. Her own force I have
already enumerated. Had Germany contemplated war on Great Britain she
would, of course, not have sent the _Goeben_ away to the Straits. The
nucleus of the German Fleet, then, would have been twenty and not
nineteen ships. To these might have been added the three completed
Dreadnoughts of the Austrian Fleet, the _Viribus Unitis_, _Tegetthof_,
and _Prinz Eugen_--all of which were in commission in the summer of
1914. They would have contributed a broadside fire of 36 12-inch
guns--a very formidable reinforcement--and brought the enemy fleet
to an almost numerical equality with ours. A review at Kiel would
have been a plausible excuse for bringing the Austrian Dreadnoughts
into German waters. Supposing the British force, then, to have been
undiminished, the war might have opened with a bare superiority of
five per cent. on the British side.
But there is no reason why British strength should not have been
reduced. Knowing as we now do, not the potentialities, but the
practical use that can be made of submarines and destroyers, it must
be plain to all that, had Germany intended to begin a world war with a
blow at Great Britain, she might well have hoped to have reduced our
strength to such a margin before the war began, as to make it almost
unnecessary to provide against a fleet action. Most certainly a single
surprise attack by submarines could have done all that was desired.
By a singular coincidence, an opportunity for such an attack--an
opportunity that could hardly have failed of a most sinister
success--offered itself at the strategic moment when the Central
Powers had already resolved to use the murder of the Archduke as a
pretext for an unprovoked attack on Christendom. All our battleships
of the first, second, and third lines, all our battle-cruisers
commissioned and in home waters, almost all our armoured cruisers and
fast light cruisers, and the bulk of our destroyers and auxiliaries
were, in the fateful third week in July, gathered and at anchor--and
completely unprotected--in the fairway of the Solent. There were to
be no manœuvres in 1914, but a test mobilization instead, and this
great congregation of the Fleet was to be a measure of the Admiralty’s
capacity to man all our naval forces of any fighting worth. The fact
that this gathering was to take place on a certain and appointed date
was public property in the month of March. A week or a fortnight before
the squadrons steamed one by one to their moorings, a plan of the
anchored lines was published in every London paper. The order of the
Fleet, the identity of every ship in its place in every line, might
have been, and probably were, in German hands a week before any single
ship was in her billet. From Emden to the Isle of Wight is a bare 350
miles--a day and a half’s journey for a submarine--and in July 1914,
Germany possessed between twenty and thirty submarines. It was a day
and a half’s journey if it had been all made at under-water speed. What
could not a dozen Weddigens and Hersings have done had they only been
sent upon this fell mission, and their arrival been timed for an hour
before daybreak on the morning of July 18? They surely could have gone
far beyond wiping out a margin of five big ships, which was all the
margin we had against the German Fleet alone. They could, in the half
light of the summer’s night, have slipped five score torpedoes into a
dozen or more battleships and battle-cruisers. They could have attacked
and returned undetected, leaving Great Britain largely helpless at sea
and quite unable to take part in the forthcoming European war.
Germany could, of course, have done much more to complete our
discomfiture. A hundred merchant ships, each carrying three brace of
4-inch guns, and sent as peaceful traders astride the distant trade
routes; the despatch of two score or more destroyers to the approaches
of the Channel and the Western ports, and all of them instructed--as in
fact, eight months afterwards, every submarine was instructed--to sink
every British liner and merchantman at sight, without waiting to search
or troubling to save passengers or crew--raids organized on this scale
and on these principles could have reduced our merchant shipping by a
crippling percentage in little more than forty-eight hours. The two
things taken together--the assassination of the Fleet, the wholesale
murder of the merchant marine--must certainly have thrown Great Britain
into a paroxysm of grief and panic.
What a moment this would have been for throwing a raiding force, could
one have been secretly organized, upon the utterly undefended, and
now indefensible, eastern coast! Secretly, skilfully, and ruthlessly
executed these three measures could have done far more than make it
impossible for Great Britain to take a hand in the defence of France.
They might, by the sheer rapidity and terrific character of the blows,
have thrown us so completely off our balance as to make us unwilling,
if we were not already powerless, to make further efforts even to
defend ourselves. At least, so it must have appeared to Germany.
For it was the essence of the German case that the nation was too
distracted by political differences, too fond of money-making, too
debilitated by luxury and comfort, too conscious of its weak hold
on the self-governing colonies, too uncertain of its tenure on its
oversea Imperial possessions, to stand by its plighted word. The nation
has since proved that all these things were delusions. But it was no
delusion that Great Britain would be very reluctant to participate in
any war. And we need not have fallen so low as Germany supposed and yet
be utterly discomposed and incapable of further effort, had we indeed,
in quick succession or simultaneously, received the triple onslaught
that it was well within the enemy’s power to inflict.
Even had these blows so failed in the completeness of their several
and combined effects as to crush us altogether, had we recovered and
been able to strike back, what would have been the situation? It would
have taken us some months to hunt down and destroy a hundred armed
German merchantmen. If 100,000 or 150,000 men had been landed, the
campaign that would have ended in their defeat and surrender could not
have been a very rapid one. Our re-assertion of the command of the
seas might have had to wait until the dockyards, working day and night
shifts, could restore the balance of naval power. Suppose, then, we
escaped defeat; suppose these assassin blows had ended in the capture
or sinking of a hundred merchantmen in the final overthrow of Germany’s
sea power--could these things have been any loss to Germany, if it
had been the price of swift and complete victory in Europe? In the
unsuccessful attack on Verdun alone she threw away not 150,000 men but
three times that number. There is not a German merchantman afloat that
has been worth sixpence to her country since war was declared, nor
in the first two years of war did the German Fleet achieve anything
to counter-balance what the German Army lost by having to face the
British as well as the French Army in the west. The sacrifices, then,
would have been trivial compared with the stake for which Germany was
playing. If it had resulted in keeping us out of the Continent for six
months only, our paralysis, even if only temporary, should have decided
the issue in Germany’s favour.
Greatly as Germany dared in forcing war upon a Europe altogether
surprised and almost altogether unready, yet in point of fact she
dared just too little. Abominably wicked as her conduct was, it was
not wicked enough to win the justification of success. If war was
intended to be inevitable from the moment the Serbian ultimatum was
sent, the capacity of Great Britain to intervene should have been dealt
with resolutely and ruthlessly and removed as a risk before any other
risk was taken. It sobers one to reflect how changed the situation
might have been had German foresight been equal to the German want of
scruple. Looking back, it seems as if it was but a very little thing
the enemy had to do to ensure the success of all his plans.
Had any one before the war sketched out this programme as one which
Germany might adopt, he would perhaps have been regarded by the great
majority of his countrymen as a lunatic. But to-day we can look at
Germany in the light of four years of her conduct. And we can see that
it was not scruple or tenderness of conscience or any decent regard for
the judgment of mankind that made her overlook the first essential of
success. We must attribute it to quite a different cause. I am quoting
from memory, but it seems to me that Sir Frederick Pollock has put the
truth in this matter into exact terms. “The Germans will go down to
history as people who foresaw everything except what actually happened,
and calculated everything except its cost to themselves.” It is the
supreme example of the childish folly that, for the next two years, we
were to see always hand in hand with diabolical wickedness and cunning.
And always the folly has robbed the cunning of its prey.
In the edifying tales that we have inherited from the Middle Ages, when
simple-minded Christian folk personified the principle of evil and
attributed all wickedness to the instigation of the Devil, we are told
again and again of men who bargained with the Evil One, offering their
eternal souls in payment for some present good--a grim enough exchange
for a man to make who believed he had a soul to give. But it is seldom
in these tales that the bargain goes through so simply. Sometimes it is
the sinner who scores by repentance and the intervention of Heaven and
a helpful saint. But often it is the Devil that cheats the sinner. The
forfeit of the soul is not explicit in the bargain. There is some other
promise, seemingly of plain intent, but in truth ambiguous, which seems
to make it possible for sin to go unpunished. Too late, the deluded
gambler finds the treaty a “scrap of paper.” The story of Macbeth is a
case in point.
Does it not look as if Germany had made some unhallowed bargain of
this kind?--as if this hideous adventure was started on the faith of
a promise of success given by her evil genius and always destined to
be unredeemed? Is it altogether chance that there should have been
this startling blindness to the most palpable of the forces in the
game?--such inexplicable inaction where the right action was so obvious
and so easy?