NAVAL WAR STAFF AND ADMIRALTY CLERKS
“A wise old owl lived in an oak;
The more he heard, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard;
Why can’t we be like that wise old bird?”
Lord Haldane with his “art of clear thinking” elaborated the
Imperial War Staff to its present magnificent dimensions. If any man
wants a thing advertised, let him take it over there to the Secret
Department. Only Sir Arthur Wilson and myself, when I was First Sea
Lord of the Admiralty, knew the Naval plan of war. He was the man,
so head-and-shoulders above all his fellows, who in his time was our
undoubted, indeed our incomparable, Sea Leader. No one touched him; and
I am not sure that even now, though getting on for Dandolo’s age, he
would not still achieve old Dandolo’s great deeds. What splendid lines
they are from Byron:
“Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo,
Th’ Octogenarian Chief, Byzantium’s Conquering Foe!”
I loved Sir Arthur Wilson’s reported reply to the maniacs who think
the Navy is the same as the Army. If it is not true it is _ben
trovato_. He said the Naval War Staff at the Admiralty consisted of
himself--assisted by every soul inside the Admiralty, and he added,
“including the charwomen”--they emptied the waste-paper baskets full of
the plans of the amateur strategists--Cabinet and otherwise.
No such rubbish has ever been talked as about the Navy War Staff and
also, in connexion therewith, the Admiralty clerks who are supposed to
have wrecked its first inception in the period long ago when my great
friend the late Admiral W. H. Hall was introduced into the Admiralty to
form a Department of Naval Intelligence. I give my experience. I have
been fifteen or more years in the Admiralty--Director of Ordnance and
Torpedoes, Controller of the Navy, Second Sea Lord and First Sea Lord.
Inside the Admiralty, for conducting administrative work, the Civil
Service clerk is incomparably superior to the Naval Officer. The Naval
Officer makes a very bad clerk. He hasn’t been brought up to it. He
can’t write a letter, and, as you can see from my dictation, he is both
verbose and diffuse. The Clerk is terse and incisive.
I’ll go to instances. My Secretary, W. F. Nicholson, C.B., was really
just as capable of being First Sea Lord as I was, when associated
with my Naval Assistant. I often used to say that the First Sea Lord
was in commission, and that I was the facile dupe of these two; and I
was blessed with a succession of Naval Assistants who knew so exactly
their limitations as regards Admiralty work as allowed the Admiralty
machine to be, as was officially stated, the best, most efficient, and
most effective of all the Government Departments of the State. I have
a note of this, made by the highest authority in the Civil Service.
I would like here to name my Naval Assistants, because they were out
and away without precedent the most able men in the Navy: Admirals Sir
Reginald Bacon, Sir Charles Madden, Sir Henry Oliver, Sir Horace Hood,
Sir Charles de Bartolomé, Captain Richmond and Captain Crease--I’ll
back that set of names against the world.
I was the originator of the Naval War College at Portsmouth--that’s
quite a different thing from an Imperial General Staff at the War
Office. The vulgar error of Lord Haldane and others, who are always
talking about “Clear thinking” and such-like twaddle, is that they
do not realise that the Army is so absolutely different from the
Navy. Every condition in them both is different. The Navy is always
at war, because it is always fighting winds and waves and fog. The
Navy is ready for an absolute instant blow; it has nothing to do with
strategic railways, lines of communication, or bridging rivers, or
crossing mountains, or the time of the year, when the Balkans may be
snowed under, and mountain passes may be impassable. No! the ocean is
limitless and unobstructed; and the fleet, each ship manned, gunned,
provisioned and fuelled, ready to fight within five minutes. The Army
not only has to mobilize, but--thank God! this being an island--it has
to be carried somewhere by the Navy, no matter where it acts. I observe
here that when Lord Kitchener went to Australia to inaugurate the
scheme of Defence, he forgot Australia was an island. What Australia
wants to make it impregnable is not Conscription--it’s Submarines.
However, I fancy Kitchener was sent there to get him out of the way.
They wanted me to go to Australia, but I didn’t.[11] Jellicoe has
gone there. But then, Jellicoe hasn’t always sufficient foresight;
_exempli gratia_, he was persuaded to take the deplorable step of
giving up command of the Grand Fleet and going as First Sea Lord of the
Admiralty. Never was anything so regrettable. I told the War Council
that I am very glad Nelson never went to the Admiralty, and that Nelson
would have made an awful hash of it. Nelson was a fighter, not an
administrator and a snake charmer--that’s what a First Sea Lord has to
be.
Gross von Schwartzhoff told me on the sands of Scheveningen:--
“Your Navy can strike in thirteen hours; Our Army can’t under
thirteen days.”
Frau von Pohl tells us the Germans did expect us so to strike, but
Nelson was in heaven (Dear Reader, look again at what Frau von Pohl
said, you’ll find it in Chapter III.). On one occasion I got into a
most unpleasant atmosphere. I arrived at a country house late at night,
and at breakfast in the morning, I not knowing who the guests were,
a Cabinet Minister enunciated the proposition that sea and land war
were both in principle and practice alike. At once getting up from
the breakfast table, in the heat of the moment, and not knowing that
distinguished military officers were there, I said, “Any silly ass
could be a General.” I graphically illustrated my meaning. I gave the
contrast between a sea and a land battle. The General is somewhere
behind the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral has got to be
_in_ the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral is indeed like
the young Subaltern, he is often the first “Over the top.” The General,
at a telescopic distance from the battle scene and surrounded by his
Kitcheners, and his Ludendorffs, and his Gross von Schwartzhoffs, has
plenty of time for the “Clear thinking” _à la_ Lord Haldane; and then,
acting on the advice of those surrounding him, he takes his measures.
So far as I can make out from the Ludendorff extracts in _The Times_,
Hindenburg, the Generalissimo, was clearly not in it. He was “the silly
ass”! Ludendorff did it all as Chief of the Staff.
Now what’s the corresponding case at sea? The smoke of the enemy,
not even the tops of his funnels, can be seen on the horizon. (I
proved this myself with the great Mediterranean fleet divided into
two portions.) Within twenty minutes the action is decided! Realise
this--it takes some minutes for the Admiral to get his breeches on, to
get on deck and take in the situation; and it takes a good many more
minutes to deploy the Fleet from its Cruising Disposition into its
Fighting Disposition. In the Cruising Disposition his guns are masked,
one ship interfering with the fire of another. The Fleet for Battle
has to be so disposed that all the guns, or as many as possible, can
concentrate on one or a portion of the enemy’s fleet. Each fleet pushes
on at its utmost speed _to meet the other_, hoping to catch the other
undeployed. Every telescope in the fleet (and there are myriads) is
looking at the Admiral as he goes to the topmost and best vantage spot
on board his flag ship to see the enemy, and sees him alone outlined
against the sky--neither time nor room for a staff around him, and if
there were they’d say, “It’s not the Admiral who is doing it,” and be
demoralized accordingly--fatal to victory. In the fleet the Admiral’s
got to be like Nelson--“the personal touch” so that “_any silly ass
can’t be an Admiral_”; and the people of the Fleet watch him with
unutterable suspense to see what signal goes up to alter the formation
of the fleet--a formation on which depends Victory or Defeat. So it
was that Togo won that second Trafalgar; he did what is technically
known as “crossing the T,” which means he got the guns of his fleet
all to bear, all free to fire, while those of the enemy were masked by
his own ships. One by one Rozhdestvensky’s ships went to the bottom,
under the concerted action of concentrated fire. What does it? Speed.
And what actuates it? One mind, and one mind only. Goschen was right
(when First Lord of the Admiralty); he quoted that old Athenian Admiral
who, when asked what governed a sea battle, replied, “Providence,” and
then with emphasis he added: “and a _good Admiral_.” Which reminds
me too of Cromwell--a pious man, we all know; when asked a somewhat
similar question as to what ruled the world, he replied “The Fear of
the Lord,” and he added with an emphasis equal to that of the Athenian
Admiral--“And a broomstick.” No one votes more for the Sermon on the
Mount than I do; but I say to a blithering fool “_Begone!_”
A Naval War Staff at the Admiralty is a very excellent organisation
for cutting out and arranging foreign newspaper clippings in such an
intelligent disposition as will enable the First Sea Lord to take in
at a glance who is likely amongst the foreigners to be the biggest
fool or the greatest poltroon, who will be opposed to his own trusted
and personally selected Nelson who commands the British Fleet. The
First Sea Lord and the Chief Admiral afloat have got to be Siamese
twins. And when the war comes, the Naval War Staff at the Admiralty,
listening every moment to the enemy’s wireless messages (if he dare use
it), enables the First Sea Lord to let his twin at sea know exactly
what is going on. He takes in the wireless, and not necessarily the
Admiral afloat, on account of the far greater power of reception in a
land installation as compared with that on a ship. When you see that
spider’s web of lines of wire on the top of the Admiralty, then thank
God this is more or less a free country, as it got put up by a cloud of
bluejackets before a rat was smelt! An intercepted German Naval letter
at the time gave me personally great delight, for it truly divined that
wireless was the weapon of the strong Navy. For the development of the
wireless has been such that now you can get the direction of one who
speaks and go for him; so the German daren’t open his mouth. But if he
does, of course the message is in cypher; and it’s the elucidation
of that cypher which is one of the crowning glories of the Admiralty
work in the late war. In my time they never failed once in that
elucidation. Yes, wireless is the weapon of the strong. So also is the
Submarine--that is if they are sufficiently developed and diversified
and properly applied, but you must have quantities and multiplicity of
species.
What you want to do is to fight the enemy’s fleet, make him come out
from under the shelter of his forts, where his ships are hiding like
rabbits in a hole--put in the ferrets and out come the rabbits, or they
kill ’em where they are. Nelson blockading Toulon, as he told the Lord
Mayor of London in one of his most characteristic letters, didn’t want
to keep the French fleet in; he wanted them to come out and fight. But
he kept close in for fear they should evade him in darkness or in fog.
But the mischief of a Naval War Staff is peculiar to the Navy. I
understand it is quite different in the Army--I don’t know. The
mischief to the Navy is that the very ablest of our Officers, both
young and old, get attracted by the brainy work and by the shore-going
appointment. I asked a splendid specimen once whatever made him go in
for being a Marine Officer. He said he wanted to be with his wife!
Well, it’s natural. I know a case of a Sea Officer whose long absence
caused his children not to recognise him when he came home from China
and, indeed, they were frightened of him. The land is a shocking
bad training ground for the sea. I once heard one bluejacket say to
another the reason _he_ believed in the Bible was that in heaven there
is “no more sea.” I didn’t realise it at the time, but I looked
up “Revelations” and found it was so. A shallower spirit observed:
“Britannia rules the waves, but the mistake was she didn’t rule them
straight.” A very distinguished soldier who came to see me when I was
Port Admiral at Portsmouth said that the Army, as compared with the
Navy, was at a great disadvantage. In the Army, or even in the country,
he said, anyone who had handled a rifle laid down the law as if he were
a General; but the Navy, he said, was “A huge mystery hedged in by
sea-sickness.”
So far as the Navy is concerned, the tendency of these “Thinking
Establishments” on shore is to convert splendid Sea Officers into very
indifferent Clerks. The Admiralty is filled with Sea Officers now who
ought to be afloat; and the splendid civilian element--incomparable in
its talent and in its efficiency--is swamped. Before the war, when I
was First Sea Lord, when I left the Admiralty at 8 p.m., prior to some
approaching Grand Manœuvres, I left it to my friend Flint, one of the
Higher Division Clerks, to mobilize the fleet by a wireless message
from the roof of the Admiralty; and the deciding circumstances having
arisen, he did it off his own bat at 2 a.m. A weaker vessel, knowing of
the telephone at my bedside, might have rung me up; but Flint didn’t.
Good old Flint! Always one of the Clerks was on watch, all the year
round, night and day; and that obtained in the Admiralty long before
any other Department adopted it.
Now for such work as I have described you don’t want sea art; you
want the Craven scholar, and I had him. A Sea Officer can never be
an efficient clerk--his life unfits him. He can’t be an orator; he’s
always had to hold his tongue. He can’t argue; he’s never been allowed.
Only a few great spirits like Nelson are gifted with the splendid
idiosyncrasy of insubordination; but it’s given to a few great souls. I
assure you that long study has convinced me that Nelson was nothing if
not insubordinate. This is hardly the place to describe his magnificent
lapses from discipline, which ever led to Victory. It’s only due
on my part, who have had more experience than anyone living of the
civilian clerks at the Admiralty, to vouch for the fact that Sir Evan
Macgregor, the ablest Secretary of the Admiralty since Samuel Pepys,
Sir Graham Greene, Sir Oswyn Murray, Sir Charles Walker and my friends
V. W. Baddeley, C.B., and J. W. S. Anderson, C.B., W. G. Perrin, J. F.
Phillips, and many others have done work which has never been exceeded
as regards its incomparable efficiency. I can’t recall a single lapse.
The outcome of this expanded Naval War Staff beyond its real
requirements, such as I have indicated, and which were provided for
while I was First Sea Lord, was that a Chief of the Staff, in imitation
of him at the War Office, was planked into the Admiralty and indirectly
supplanted the First Sea Lord. I won’t enlarge on this further. It’s
many years before another war can possibly take place, and it’s now
a waste of educated labour to discuss it further. All I would ask is
for anyone to take up the last issue of the Navy List and see the
endless pages of Naval Officers at the Admiralty or holding shore
appointments. There has never been anything approaching these numbers
in all our Sea History! It is deplorable!
The Naval War College, which I established at Portsmouth, is absolutely
a different affair. There it can be arranged that all the Officers
go to sea daily and work as if with the fleet, with flotillas of
Destroyers that are there available in quantities. These Destroyers
would represent all the items of the fleet; and the formations of war
and the meetings of hostile fleets could be practised and so constitute
the Naval War College a real gem in war efficiency.
[Illustration: AGED 14. MIDSHIPMAN.
H.M.S. “Highflyer,” China.]