THE BATTLE OF DOVER.
Until the war of 1904, it had been an undisputed axiom in naval
warfare that a territorial attack upon an enemy's coast by a fleet
was foredoomed to failure unless that enemy's fleet had been either
crippled beyond effective action, or securely blockaded in distant
ports. As an axiom secondary to this, it was also held that it would
be impossible for an invading force, although convoyed by a powerful
fleet, to make good its footing upon any portion of a hostile coast
defended by forts mounting heavy long-range guns.
These principles have held good throughout the history of naval
warfare from the time when Sir Walter Raleigh first laid them down in
the early portion of his _History of the World_, written after the
destruction of the Spanish Armada.
But now two elements had been introduced which altered the conditions
of naval warfare even more radically than one of them had changed
those of military warfare. Had it not been for this the attack upon
the shores of England made by the commanders of the League would
probably either have been a failure, or it would have stopped at a
demonstration of force, as did that of the great Napoleon in 1803.
The portion of the Kentish coast selected for the attack was that
stretching from Folkestone to Deal, and it would perhaps have been
difficult to find in the whole world any portion of sea-coast more
strongly defended than this was on the morning of October 28, 1904;
and yet, as the event proved, the fortresses which lined it were as
useless and impotent for defence as the old Martello towers of a
hundred and fifty years before would have been.
As the war-balloons rose into the air from the heights above
Boulogne, good telescopes at Dover enabled their possessors to count
no less than seventy-five of them. Fifty of these were quite newly
constructed, and were of a much improved type, as they had been built
in view of the practical experience gained by the first fleet.
This aërial fleet divided into three squadrons; one, numbering
twenty-five, steered south-westward in the direction of Folkestone,
twelve shaped their course towards Deal, and the remaining
thirty-eight steered directly across the Straits to Dover. As they
approached the English coast they continually rose, until by the time
they had reached the land, aided by the light south-easterly breeze
which was then blowing, they floated at a height of more than five
thousand feet.
All this while not a warship or a transport had put to sea. The whole
fleet of the League lay along the coast of France between Calais and
Dieppe, under the protection of shore batteries so powerful that it
would have been madness for the British fleet to have assumed the
offensive with regard to them. With the exception of two squadrons
reserved for a possible attack upon Portsmouth and Harwich, all that
remained from the disasters and costly victories of the war of the
once mighty British naval armament was massed together for the
defence of that portion of the coast which would evidently have to
bear the brunt of the attack of the League.
Ranged along the coast from Folkestone to Deal was an armament
consisting of forty-five battleships of the first, second, and third
classes, supported by fifteen coast-defence ironclads, seventy
armoured and thirty-two unarmoured cruisers, forty gunboats, and a
hundred and fifty torpedo-boats.
Such was the still magnificent fleet that patrolled the waters of the
narrow sea,--a fleet as impotent for the time being as a flotilla of
Thames steamboats would have been in face of the tactics employed
against it by the League. Had the enemy's fleet but come out into the
open, as it would have been compelled to do under the old conditions
of warfare, to fight its way across the narrow strip of water, there
is little doubt but that the issue of the day would have been very
different, and that what had been left of it would have been driven
back, shattered and defeated, to the shelter of the French shore
batteries.
But, in accordance with the invariable tactics of the League, the
first and most deadly assault was delivered from the air. The
war-balloons stationed themselves above the fortifications on land,
totally ignoring the presence of the fleet, and a few minutes after
ten o'clock began to rain their deadly hail of explosives down upon
them. Fifteen were placed over Dover Castle, and five over the fort
on the Admiralty Pier, while the rest were distributed over the town
and the forts on the hills above it. In an hour everything was in a
state of the most horrible confusion. The town was on fire in a
hundred places from the effects of the fire-shells. The Castle hill
seemed as if it had been suddenly turned into a volcano; jets of
bright flame kept leaping up from its summit and sides, followed by
thunderous explosions and masses of earth and masonry hurled into the
air, mingled with guns and fragments of human bodies.
The end of the Admiralty Pier, with its huge blocks of stone wrenched
asunder and pulverised by incessant explosions of dynamite and
emmensite, collapsed and subsided into the sea, carrying fort, guns,
and magazine with it; and all along the height of the Shakespeare
cliff the earthworks had been blown up and scattered into dust, and a
huge portion of the cliff itself had been blasted out and hurled down
on to the beach.
Meanwhile the victims of this terrible assault had, in the nature of
the case, been able to do nothing but keep up a vertical fire, in the
hope of piercing the gas envelopes of the balloons, and so bringing
them to the earth. For more than an hour this fusilade produced no
effect; but at length the concentrated fire of several Maxim and
Nordenfelt guns, projecting a hail of missiles into the sky, brought
about a result which was even more disastrous to the town than it was
to its assailants.
Four of the aerostats came within the zone swept by the bullets.
Riddled through and through, their gas-holders collapsed, and their
cars plunged downwards from a height of more than 5000 feet. A few
seconds later four frightful explosions burst forth in different
parts of the town, for the four cargoes exploded simultaneously as
they struck the earth.
The emmensite and dynamite tore whole streets of houses to fragments,
and hurled them far and wide into the air, to fall back again on
other parts of the town, and at the same time the fire-shells
ignited, and set the ruins blazing like so many furnaces. No more
shots were fired into the air after that.
There was nothing for it but for British valour to bow to the
inevitable, and evacuate the town and what remained of its
fortifications; and so with sad and heavy hearts the remnant of the
brave defenders turned their faces inland, leaving Dover to its fate.
Meanwhile exactly the same havoc had been wrought upon Folkestone and
Deal. Hour after hour the merciless work continued, until by three
o'clock in the afternoon there was not a gun left upon the whole
range of coast that was capable of firing a shot.
All this time the ammunition tenders of the aërial fleet had been
winging their way to and fro across the Strait constantly renewing
the shells of the war-balloons.
As soon as it began to grow dusk the naval battle commenced.
Numerically speaking the attacking force was somewhat inferior to
that of the defenders, but now the second element, which so
completely altered the tactics of sea fighting, was for the first
time in the war brought into play.
As the battleships of the League steamed out to engage the opponents,
who were thirsting to avenge the destruction that had been wrought
upon the land, a small flotilla of twenty-five insignificant-looking
little craft, with neither masts nor funnels, and looking more like
half-submerged elongated turtles than anything else, followed in tow
close under their quarters. Hardly had the furious cannonade broken
out into thunder and flame along the two opposing lines, than these
strange craft sank gently and silently beneath the waves. They were
submarine vessels belonging to the French navy, an improved type of
the _Zédé_ class, which had been in existence for more than ten
years.[1]
These vessels were capable of sinking to a depth of twenty feet, and
remaining for four hours without returning to the surface. They were
propelled by twin screws worked by electricity at a speed of twenty
knots, and were provided with an electric searchlight, which enabled
them to find the hulls of hostile ships in the dark.
Each carried three torpedoes, which could be launched from a tube
forward so as to strike the hull of the doomed ship from beneath. As
soon as the torpedo was discharged the submarine boat spun round on
her heel and headed away at full speed in an opposite direction out
of the area of the explosion.
The effects of such terrible and, indeed, irresistible engines of
naval warfare were soon made manifest upon the ships of the British
fleet. In the heat of the battle, with every gun in action, and
raining a hail of shot and shell upon her adversary, a great
battleship would receive an unseen blow, struck in the dark upon her
most vulnerable part, a huge column of water would rise up from under
her side, and a few minutes later the splendid fabric would heel over
and go down like a floating volcano, to be quenched by the waves that
closed over her.
But as if it were not enough that the defending fleet should be
attacked from the surface of the water and the depths of the sea, the
war-balloons, winging their way out from the scene of ruin that they
had wrought on shore, soon began to take their part in the work of
death and destruction.
Each of them was provided with a mirror set a little in front of the
bow of the car, at an angle which could be varied according to the
elevation. A little forward of the centre of the car was a tube fixed
on a level with the centre of the mirror. The ship selected for
destruction was brought under the car, and the speed of the balloon
was regulated so that the ship was relatively stationary to it.
As soon as the glare from one of the funnels could be seen through
the tube reflected in the centre of the mirror, a trap was sprung in
the floor of the car, and a shell charged with dynamite, which, it
will be remembered, explodes vertically downwards, was released, and,
where the calculations were accurately made, passed down the funnel
and exploded in the interior of the vessel, bursting her boilers and
reducing her to a helpless wreck at a single stroke.
Every time this horribly ingenious contrivance was successfully
brought into play a battleship or a cruiser was either sunk or
reduced to impotence. In order to make their aim the surer, the
aerostats descended to within three hundred yards of their prey, and
where the missile failed to pass through the funnel it invariably
struck the deck close to it, tearing up the armour sheathing, and
wrecking the funnel itself so completely that the steaming-power of
the vessel was very seriously reduced.
All night long the battle raged incessantly along a semicircle some
twelve miles long, the centre of which was Dover. Crowds of anxious
watchers on the shore watched the continuous flashes of the guns
through the darkness, varied ever and anon by some tremendous
explosion which told the fate of a warship that had fired her last
shot.
All night long the incessant thunder of the battle rolled to and fro
along the echoing coast, and when morning broke the light dawned upon
a scene of desolation and destruction on sea and shore such as had
never been witnessed before in the history of warfare. On land were
the smoking ruins of houses, still smouldering in the remains of the
fires which had consumed them; forts which twenty-four hours before
had grinned defiance at the enemy were shapeless heaps of earth and
stone, and armour-plating torn into great jagged fragments; and on
sea were a few half-crippled wrecks, the remains of the British
fleet, with their flags still flying, and such guns as were not
disabled firing their last rounds at the victorious foe.
To the eastward of these about half the fleet of the League, in but
little better condition, was advancing in now overwhelming force upon
them, and behind these again a swarm of troopships and transports
were heading out from the French shore. About an hour after dawn the
_Centurion_, the last of the British battleships, was struck by one
of the submarine torpedoes, broke in two, and went down with her flag
flying and her guns blazing away to the last moment. So ended the
battle of Dover, the most disastrous sea-fight in the history of the
world, and the death-struggle of the Mistress of the Seas.
The last news of the tremendous tragedy reached the now
panic-stricken capital half an hour before the receipt of similar
tidings from Harwich, announcing the destruction of the defending
fleet and forts, and the capture of the town by exactly the same
means as those employed against Dover. Nothing now lay between London
and the invading forces but the utterly inadequate army and the lines
of fortifications, which could not be expected to offer any more
effective resistance to the assault of the war-balloons than had
those of the three towns on the Kentish coast.
[Footnote 1: _The Naval Annual_ for 1893 mentions two types of
submarine boats, the _Zédé_ and the _Goubet_, both belonging to the
French navy, which had then been tried with success. The same work
mentions no such vessels belonging to Britain, nor yet any prospect
of her possessing one. The effects described here as produced by
these terrible machines are little, if at all, exaggerated. Granted
ten years of progress, and they will be reproduced to a
certainty.--AUTHOR.]
[Illustration: "The _Centurion_, the last of the British battleships,
was struck by one of the submarine torpedoes."
_See page 300._]