THE WAR ON AND BEYOND THE SEAS
The declaration of war by Great Britain on 4 August converted the
conflict into one unlike any other that had been waged since Napoleon
was sent to St. Helena in 1815; and sea-power was once more revealed
to a somewhat purblind world. There had, indeed, been wars in which
navies had been engaged, and Japan in 1904 had exhibited the latest
model of a naval battle. But Japan only commanded the sea in Far
Eastern waters; and the wars in which Great Britain herself was
engaged since 1815 had displayed her command in limited spheres and at
the expense of enemies who had no pretensions to be her naval rivals.
But in 1914 the second navy in the world seemed by the conduct of
Germany to challenge the first, and for nearly four and a half years
there were hopes and fears of a titanic contest for the command of the
sea. But in fact the challenge was not forthcoming, and from first to
last the command remained in our hands through Germany's default.
There was no Trafalgar because no one came forth to fight, and in the
end the German Navy surrendered without a struggle.
But while our command of the sea was not disputed in deed by the
Germans, it was disputed in word by domestic critics and denied by
loquacious generals; and the exploits of German submarines, airships,
and aeroplanes lent some colour to the denial and to the assertion
that England had ceased to be an island. Both contentions were the
outcome of inadequate knowledge and worse confusion of thought.
Islands are made by the sea and not by the air; even if the Germans
had secured command of the air, which they did not, that command would
not have given them the advantages which accrue from the command of
the sea. It might please pessimists to believe that England would be
cowed into submission by air-raids, but the most inveterate
scaremongers hesitated to assert that armies with their indispensable
artillery and equipment could be dropped on British soil from the
skies. Belgium and France were far more troubled than we by aircraft;
but it was not aircraft that carried German armies to Brussels and
near to the gates of Paris, and London was saved from the fate of
Louvain by British command of the sea. Nor was that command abolished
or even threatened by submarines, and the fear lest it was came of the
mentality which denies the existence of a power on the ground that it
is not perfect. Command of the sea never has been and never can be
absolute. French privateers had never been more active nor British
losses at sea more acute than after Trafalgar, when no French Navy
ventured out of port; and the destruction of every German Dreadnought
would not have affected by one iota the success of German submarines.
The command of the sea does not mean immunity from the risks of naval
warfare or from loss by the capture or sinking of merchant vessels. It
does not imply absolute security for British coasts, for British
coasts have been raided in every great war that Britain has waged. It
does not even involve the defeat or destruction of the enemy's naval
forces, or it would be a simple task for any naval Power to deprive us
of the command of the sea by locking its fleets in harbour, and on
that theory the forts of the Dardanelles would have enabled Turkey to
deny the command of the sea to the combined fleets of the world. The
meaning is familiar enough to intelligent students of history. Bacon
sketched it three hundred years ago when he wrote, "He that commands
the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the
war as he will ... and the wealth of both Indies seems in great part
but an accessory to the command of the seas." "Both Indies" have grown
to-day to include the resources of nearly the whole extra-European
world which the command of the sea placed at the disposal of the
Entente and denied to the Central Empires; and the last great war,
like those against Napoleon, Louis XIV, and Philip II, was decided by
the same indispensable factor in world-power. Others might control for
a time a continent; only those who command the sea can dispose of the
destinies of the world.
But while an essential factor in world-power, the command of the sea
is not its sum; and the war throughout its course illustrated the
weakness of attack by sea against a well-defended coast. No attempt
was made to land an army on German territory, and complete command of
the Ægean did not avail for the capture of Gallipoli. It could not
turn sea into land nor enable a navy to do an army's work, and command
of the sea while a more extensive is a less intensive kind of power
than command of the land. The nature of the command varies, indeed,
with the solidity of the element in which it is exercised: land is
more solid than water, and water than air; the command of the land is
therefore more complete than command of the sea, and command of the
sea than command of the air; and endless confusion arose from the use
of the same word to describe three different degrees of control.
Victory can be achieved on sea, conquest only on land; and nothing
like victory, let alone conquest, in war has yet been won in the air.
Conquest, however, while it cannot be effected, can be prevented on
sea, as it was at Salamis in 1588, at Trafalgar, and Navarino; for
sea-power, while conclusive for defence, is merely conducive to
offence, and that is why it has ever been a means of liberty rather
than of despotism. Armies are the weapons of autocracy, navies those
of freedom; for peoples do not live upon water, and only armies
command their homes. Command of the sea is a sufficient protection for
an island-empire; to conquer others it needs a superior army, and the
absence of such an army proved the defensive aims of the British
Empire before the war. World domination could only be secured by the
combination of a dominant army with a dominant navy, and hence the
significance of the German naval programme designed at least to
prevent the counteraction of one by the other.
But while a supreme navy suffices to protect an island empire, it does
not suffice to defend continental states; and the importance of
British sea-power was that it gave us and other oversea peoples the
liberty to take as much or as little part as we chose in a war to
defend states that were threatened on land. The existence of that
facility did not determine the extent to which it might be used by
ourselves or by allies. That would depend upon the size of the armies
we raised and the labour we spent upon their equipment; and we might
have restricted our expeditionary forces to the numbers we sent under
Marlborough against Louis XIV or under Wellington against Napoleon.
But we could not have sent any without the command of the sea; and the
essence of that command is that, firstly, it prevented the enemy from
using his armies to invade our shores, and, secondly, it enabled us to
send whatever forces we liked to whatever sphere of operations was not
commanded by the enemy's armies. Philip II had demonstrated once for
all the emptiness of the invasion scare when he sent a superb military
expedition, the Spanish Armada, across a sea which he did not command;
and the efforts of German submarines failed to affect the transport of
our own and our Allies' troops or seriously to impede their
communications.
The command of the sea was, in fact, abandoned by the Germans when on
26 July 1914 their fleet was recalled from the Norwegian fiords; and
the cruisers which the outbreak of war found beyond reach of German
territorial waters were in turn and in time destroyed. One
Dreadnought, the Goeben, and a light cruiser, the Breslau, escaped to
play a chequered part in the war. Caught by its outbreak in the
Mediterranean, they attempted to make the Straits, were headed off by
the British, and gained Messina on 5 August. Evading the British Fleet
under circumstances which were held to cast no reflection on the
British commander, and with assistance which it was deemed impolitic
to make public, they pursued their flight eastward, gallantly
assaulted by the smaller and slower Gloucester off Cape Matapan, until
they reached the Dardanelles and took the Turkish Government under
their charge. Out in the Atlantic the swift Karlsruhe caused some
anxiety till she was wrecked in the West Indies, and the Geier was
interned at Honolulu by the United States. A few converted merchantmen
also pursued a brief career as raiders: the Cap Trafalgar was disposed
of in a spirited action by the converted Cunarder Carmania on 14
September off Brazil; the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was sunk by the
Highflyer off Cape Verde Islands on 27 August; and the Spreewald was
captured in the North Atlantic by the Berwick on 12 September. For the
rest, the German mercantile marine was interned in neutral ports or
restricted to Baltic waters, and apart from Von Spee and the
submarines the German flag disappeared from the seas.
The Germans had realized from the start a vital difference between war
on sea and war on land. The land affords some protection to the weaker
combatant especially on the defensive; the sea gives none. There are
no trenches in the sea, but only graves. It is merciless to the
vanquished, and the casualties in a beaten fleet are total losses;
instead of prisoners, fugitives, and wounded, there is one vast list
of drowned. Ships that are sunk do not return to the battle-line, and
their loss takes long to repair. Years are required to build a
Dreadnought, and years to make a seaman. Armies are easier to create
and more difficult to destroy than fleets, and the sailor's fight is
ever one to a finish, with little chance of escape from the dread
alternative. It is a case of all or nothing; there are no water-tight
compartments in sea-power, no fluctuating spheres of power, no
divided areas in some of which one and in some the other combatant may
be supreme. Apart from land-locked waters the sea is one and
indivisible, and he who has the command, commands it everywhere. The
battle at sea is a battle without a morrow for those who lose; and
from the day when the Germans wisely withdrew into Kiel and
Wilhelmshaven there was little chance that they would come out to
fight to a finish except as a counsel of despair or until they could
by mine or submarine or skilful raid reduce the disparity of force.
That was the purpose of their early naval strategy; it proved
ineffective owing to British skill and caution, and it became hopeless
when it appeared that we could build ships much faster than the
Germans could sink them or build ships themselves; and the Germans
then turned from the task of destroying the British Navy to that of
destroying the commerce on which we depended for subsistence, from the
hope of securing the command of the sea for themselves to that of
turning it into a "no man's land," a desert which no allied or neutral
ship could cross.
The mine-sowing began the moment war was declared, and on 5 August the
Konigin Luise was sunk in the nefarious act of sowing loose mines in
the North Sea. Fixed mines for coast and harbour defence or minefields
at sea are legitimate means of war, provided that warning is given of
the dangerous area; loose mines are prohibited by international law,
because they can make no distinction in their destruction between
neutrals and belligerents, merchantmen and men-of-war. But the German
flag having practically disappeared from the seas, the Germans paid
little heed to the risks of other people. On 6 August a light cruiser,
the Amphion, struck one of these mines and was sunk, and on 3
September a gunboat, the Speedy, met with a similar fate. A more
serious loss, though only one man was killed, was that of the
super-Dreadnought Audacious, which struck a mine to the north of
Ireland on 27 October and sank as she was being towed into harbour;
and a mine caused the loss of the Hampshire, with Lord Kitchener on
board, in June 1916.
The submarine proved, however, the greater danger, and there was
nothing illegal in the sinking of men-of-war or transports. On 5
September the Pathfinder, a light cruiser, was torpedoed and sunk, and
on the 13th the British retaliated by sinking the German light cruiser
Hela near Heligoland. The warning, however, had not been taken to
heart, and on 22 September the German submarine commander, Otto
Weddigen, successively sank the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy,
three old but substantial cruisers on patrol duty off the Dutch coast.
The Hogue and the Cressy were lost because they came up to the rescue
and were protected by no screen of destroyers, and 680 officers and
men were drowned. A fourth cruiser, the Hawke, was torpedoed off
Aberdeen on 15 October, and on 1 January 1915 the Formidable, of
15,000 tons, was sunk off Start Point on her way to the Dardanelles,
with a loss of 600 of her crew. The Germans were not, however, immune
in their submarine campaign. H.M.S. Birmingham rammed and sank a
German submarine on 6 August, the Badger did the like on 25 October,
and U18 was sunk on 23 November; Weddigen himself was rammed, with the
loss of his submarine and all on board, later on by the Dreadnought.
The British losses by mine and submarine created some discontent on
the ground that our naval strategy was defensive rather than
offensive; and military critics, whose notions of naval warfare were
derived from the study of German text-books on the principles of war
on land, continually pressed for a more active policy, and asked why
our superior navy did not treat the German Fleet as the German Army
treated its enemies in France and Belgium. It was forgotten that he
who possesses all must always be on the defensive; there must be
something tangible to attack before there can be an offensive, and
there could have been no Trafalgar had Napoleon kept his fleet in
harbour. The abandonment of the high seas by the German Navy precluded
a naval battle, and the defensive strength of harbour defences which
kept Nelson outside Toulon had so increased as to make it vastly
harder for Jellicoe to penetrate Wilhelmshaven or Kiel. Naval power,
which the war proved to be more than ever effective on sea, was shown
to be more than ever powerless on shore. The mine and the submarine
made the sustained bombardment of land fortifications a dangerous
practice, and moving batteries on shore were more than a match for
ships, because they could not be sunk and could be more easily
repaired or replaced. There were wild dreams of British forces landing
on German coasts, and still wilder alarms about German armies
descending on British shores; but the only landing effected on hostile
territory during the war was at Gallipoli, and it did not encourage a
similar attempt against the better defended lands held by the Germans.
We had to content ourselves with the practical realization in war of
our continual claim in peace that sea-power is an instrument for the
defence of island states rather than one for offence against
continental peoples. Only when and where those peoples wished to be
defended and opened their ports to their allies, was it found possible
to land a relieving force. The British armies which liberated Brussels
had to travel via Boulogne and not Ostend; and the German ships which
sheltered in port had to be routed out by the pressure of Allied arms
on land.
The naval actions of the war were therefore of the nature of outpost
raids and skirmishes rather than of battles. The first that developed
any serious fighting took place in the Bight of Heligoland on 28
August. Apparently with the design of inducing the Germans to come
out, a flotilla of submarines under Commodore Keyes was sent close in
to Heligoland, with some destroyers and two light cruisers, the
Arethusa and Fearless, behind them, and more substantial vessels out
of sight in the offing. Presently there appeared a German force of
destroyers and two cruisers, the Ariadne and the Strassburg; they were
driven off mainly by the gallant fighting of the Arethusa; but
thinking there was no further support the Germans then sent out three
heavier cruisers, the Mainz, the Koln, and apparently the Yorck. The
Arethusa and Fearless held their own for two or three hours until
Beatty's battle-cruisers, led by the Lion, came safely through the
German mine-fields and submarines to their assistance. The Lion's
13.5-inch guns soon settled the issue: the Mainz and the Köln were
sunk, while no British unit was lost, and the casualties were 32
killed and 52 wounded against 300 German prisoners and double that
number of other casualties. The overwhelming effect of heavier gunfire
had been clearly demonstrated, and it was further illustrated on 17
October by the destruction of four German destroyers off the Dutch
coast by the light cruiser Undaunted accompanied by four British
destroyers; but the next exhibition of naval gun-power was to be at
our expense.
Among the incidental advantages which the adhesion of Great Britain
brought to the Entente was the intervention of Japan, which, apart
from its alliance with us, had never forgiven Germany the part she
took in depriving Japan of the fruits of her victory over China in
1894, and regarded as a standing offence the naval base which Germany
had established at Tsingtau and the hold she had acquired on North
Pacific islands. On 15 August Japan demanded within eight days the
surrender of the lease of Tsingtau and the evacuation of Far Eastern
waters by German warships. No answer was, of course, returned, but the
German squadron under Von Spee wisely left Tsingtau in anticipation of
its investment by the Japanese. It began on the 27th, and troops were
landed on 2 September: on the 23rd a British contingent arrived from
Wei-hai-wei to co-operate, and gradually the lines of investment and
the heavy artillery were drawn closer. The final assault was fixed for
7 November, but the Germans forestalled it by surrender; there were
3000 prisoners out of an original garrison of 5000, and Germany's last
overseas base, on which she had spent £20,000,000, passed into the
enemy's hands. Australian troops had already occupied without serious
opposition German New Guinea, the Bismarck archipelago, and the
Gilbert and Caroline Islands, while Samoa surrendered to a New Zealand
force, and the Marshall Islands to the Japanese.
Von Spee's squadron was thus left without a German naval base; but one
of its vessels was to show that there was still a career for a raider,
and the others were to demonstrate the paradox that neutral ports
might be more useful than bases of their own, inasmuch as they could
not be treated like Tsingtau. On fleeing from the Japanese menace Von
Spee had steamed eastwards across the Pacific, but two of his
cruisers, the Königsberg and the Emden, were detached to help the
Germans in East Africa and to raid British commerce in the Indian
Ocean. On 20 September the Königsberg sank H.M.S. Pegasus at Zanzibar,
but failed to give much assistance in the projected attack on Mombasa,
and was presently bottled up in the Rufigi River. The Emden under
Captain Müller had better success. Throughout September and October
she haunted the coasts of India and harried British trade, setting
fire to an oil-tank at Madras, torpedoing a Russian cruiser and a
French destroyer in the roadstead of Penang, and capturing in all some
seventeen British merchantmen. She had, however, lost her own
attendant colliers about 25 October, and a raid on the Cocos or
Keeling islands on 9 November was interrupted by the arrival of H.M.S.
Sydney, which had been warned by wireless, on her way from Australia.
In less than two hours the Sydney's 6-in. guns had battered the Emden
to pieces, and with only 18 casualties had killed or wounded 230 of
the enemy. Müller became an honourable prisoner of war; he had proved
himself the most skilful of German captains and the best of German
gentlemen.
Meanwhile Von Spee had gained the South American coast and made
himself at home in its friendly ports and islands. He had with him two
sister cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, each of 11,400
tons and an armament of eight 8.2-inch guns, and three smaller
cruisers, the Dresden, Leipzig, and Nürnberg, each about the size of
the Emden, from 3200 to 3540 tons, and carrying ten 4.1-inch guns;
none of them had a speed of less than 22 knots. To protect the South
Pacific trade the British Government had in August sent Admiral
Cradock with a somewhat miscellaneous squadron, consisting of the
Canopus, a pre-Dreadnought battleship of nearly 13,000 tons, with
6-inch armour, four 12-inch guns, and a speed of 19 knots; the Good
Hope, a cruiser of 14,000 tons, with two 9.2-inch and sixteen 6-inch
guns, and a speed of 22 knots; the Monmouth of 9800 tons, fourteen
6-inch guns, and the same speed as the Good Hope; the Glasgow of 4800
tons, with two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns, and a speed of 25 knots;
and the Otranto, an armed liner. Reinforcements were expected from
home, and possibly from Japan; but the squadrons were not unequally
matched in weight of metal, though the British were handicapped by the
diversity and antiquity of their armament. The balance was, however,
destroyed before the battle, because, as Cradock in the third week of
October made his way north along the Pacific coast, the Canopus
developed defects which necessitated her being left behind for
repairs.
The squadrons fell in with one another north-west of Coronel late in
the afternoon of 1 November. Cradock had turned south, presumably to
join the Canopus, but Von Spee secured the inestimable advantage of
the in-shore course, and as the sun set it silhouetted the British
ships against the sky while the gathering gloom obscured the Germans.
The fight was really between the two leading cruisers on each side,
the Good Hope and the Monmouth against the Scharnhorst and the
Gneisenau. The Germans got the range first, and the Good Hope's two
9.2-inch guns were soon put out of action in spite of their superior
weight. At 7:50 she blew up, and the Monmouth was a wreck. The
lightly-armoured Glasgow had no option but to use her superior speed
and escape to warn the Canopus. This she did, and the two got safely
round Cape Horn to the Falkland Isles, leaving for the time the
Germans in command of the South Pacific coast. Sixteen hundred and
fifty officers, midshipmen, and men lost their lives with Cradock, and
none were rescued by the Germans. There was hardly a parallel in
British naval history for such a defeat.
Prompt measures were taken to retrieve it. Lord Fisher had succeeded
Prince Louis of Battenberg at the Admiralty on 30 October, and one of
his first acts was to dispatch on 5 November a squadron under Admiral
Sturdee, comprising the Invincible and Inflexible, and four lighter
cruisers, the Carnarvon, Kent, Cornwall, and Bristol; the Glasgow was
picked up in the South Atlantic, while the Canopus was at Port Stanley
in the Falklands. The Invincible and Inflexible were the two first
battle-cruisers built; each had a tonnage of 17,250, a speed of 27-28
knots, and eight 12-inch guns which could be fired as a broadside to
right or left; and there would be little chance for Von Spee if he
encountered such a weight of metal. Sturdee reached Port Stanley on 7
December. Von Spee, who had been refitting at Juan Fernandez, left it
on 15 November, possibly fearing the Japanese approach, and made for
Cape Horn and the Atlantic. His plan was to snap up the Canopus and
the Glasgow, get what he could out of the Falklands, and then proceed
to support the rebellion in South Africa. Early on 8 December he
unsuspectingly approached Port Stanley, not discovering the presence
of Sturdee's squadron until it was too late. He then made off
north-eastwards with the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, while his
lighter cruisers turned south-eastwards. The former were sunk in the
afternoon by the two British battle-cruisers and the Carnarvon, while
the latter succumbed in the evening to the Kent, Glasgow, and
Cornwall; only the Dresden escaped, to be sunk in five minutes on 14
March 1915 at Juan Fernandez by the Kent and the Glasgow. The
Invincible had no casualties, the Inflexible one man killed; the Kent
had four killed and twelve wounded, and the Glasgow nine and four.
About two hundred Germans were saved from drowning, but they did not
include Von Spee.
Such were the effects upon human life of a disparity of weight of
metal in naval action. No skill could avoid the brutal precision of
mechanical and material superiority. Von Spee had it at Coronel,
Sturdee at the Falklands, and there is no reason to suppose that if
the persons had been exchanged, the result would have been any
different. It is the romance of the past which attributes naval
success mainly to superior seamanship or courage; the "little" Revenge
was the super-Dreadnought of her time, and the victories of the
Elizabethan sea-dogs were as surely won by superior weight of metal as
those of Nelson or to-day. Von Spee and his men fought as bravely and
as skilfully as Cradock and his; and the war for command of the sea
went against the Germans because while the Germans were building
pre-Dreadnoughts and casting 8-inch guns, we were building
Dreadnoughts and casting 10 or 12-inch guns; and while they were
constructing their Dreadnoughts, we were building super-Dreadnoughts
with 13.5 and 15-inch guns. Success in naval warfare goes not so much
to the brave as to those who think ahead in terms of mechanical force.
The last German cruisers outside harbour were now destroyed, and
barely a raider remained at large, while the British went on gathering
the fruits of their command of the sea by mustering in Europe the
forces of the Empire and acquiring abroad the disjointed German
colonies. Naval strategy was reduced to the dull but arduous task of
blocking the exits from the North Sea and guarding against the furtive
German raids. The battle-fleet was stationed in Scapa Flow, the
cruisers off Rosyth, while little more than a patrol--backed by a
squadron of pre-Dreadnoughts in the Channel--was left to watch the
Straits of Dover and supplement the mine-fields. Both combatants drew
advantage from the narrow front of Germany's outlook towards the sea;
the exits were easier for us to close than Nelson had found the
lengthy coast of France, and no German Fleet slipped across the
Atlantic as Villeneuve did in 1805. On the other hand, the narrow
front was easier to fortify, protect with mine-fields, and defend
against attack. If there was to be a conclusive naval battle, the
field would be in the North Sea, and the only hope of success for the
Germans lay in the dispersion of our battle-fleet.
This was the object of the German raids on Yarmouth on 3 November, and
on Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools on 16 December. The former
effected nothing except sowing of some floating mines which
subsequently sank British submarine and two fishing-smacks, while one
of the participating cruisers, the Yorck, struck a German mine and
sank on entering Wilhelmshaven. The December raid was more successful
in its murderous intention of extending the schrecklichkeit practised
in Belgium to civilians on British shores. British delegates had
insisted at The Hague in 1907 on large rights of naval bombardment,
and the Germans expanded the plea that the presence of civilians does
not exempt a fortified town from bombardment into the argument that
the presence of a soldier or even of war-material justifies the
shelling of a crowd of civilians or a watering-place. There was a
cavalry station at Scarborough, a coastguard at Whitby, and some
infantry and a battery at Hartlepool; Scarborough also had a wireless
installation, and Hartlepool its docks, and both were undoubtedly used
for purposes of war. The truth is that war tends to pervade and absorb
the whole energies of the community, and the only legitimate criticism
of German methods is that they pushed to extremes of barbarity
premisses which were commonly admitted and could logically lead in no
other direction. The old restriction of war to a few actual combatants
disappeared as manhood took to universal service, womanhood to
munition-making, and whole nations to war-work, and as the reach of
artillery and aircraft extended the sphere of operations hundreds of
miles behind the battle-lines. Eighteen were killed at Scarborough,
mostly women and children, and 70 were wounded; Whitby had 3 killed
and 2 wounded, but the damage at Hartlepool was serious. Six hundred
houses were damaged or destroyed, 119 persons were killed, over 300
were wounded, and the mines the Germans scattered sank three steamers
with considerable loss of life. The raiders escaped by the skin of
their teeth in a fog which closed down just as two British
battle-cruisers appeared on the scene of their retreat. That the raid
had been effected at all evoked some protest from a public unaware
that such incidents have always been an inevitable accompaniment of
all our naval wars; and critics declared that we had lost the command
of the sea in the first great war in our history in which not an enemy
landed on English soil except as a prisoner. It was the German plan to
provoke such comment, a feeling of insecurity, and a demand for the
scattering of our Grand Fleet along the coasts for defence in order
that it might be dealt with in detail; but the design was happily
defeated by the restraint of the people and the sense of better
judges.
The Germans, however, were encouraged by their success to repeat the
attempt once too often, and on 24 January 1915 a more ambitious effort
was made by Admiral Hipper to emulate these raids, or perhaps rather
to lure the British on to mine-fields north of Heligoland which he
extended before he set out. He had with him three of the best German
battle-cruisers, the Derfflinger, Seydlitz, and Moltke, with speeds
ranging from 27 to 25 knots, tonnage from 26,000 to 22,000, and 12 or
11-inch guns; the Blücher of 15,550 tons, 24 knots, and 8.2-inch guns;
six light cruisers and a torpedo flotilla. The Germans rarely if ever
came out without information of their intended movement preceding
them, and Beatty put to sea within an hour of their start. His
flagship was the Lion, 26,350 tons, 29 knots, and eight 13.5-inch
guns, and he had five other battle-cruisers, the Tiger, 28,000 tons,
28 knots, and the same armament as the Lion; the Princess Royal, a
sister ship of the Lion; the New Zealand, 18,800 tons, 25 knots, and
eight 12-inch guns; and the Indomitable, sister to Sturdee's
Invincible and Inflexible. There were also four cruisers of the "town"
class, three light cruisers, and torpedo flotillas. The fight was,
however, mainly between the battle-crusiers. As soon as Hipper heard
of Beatty's approach he turned south-east. Gradually he was
overhauled, each of the leading British cruisers, Lion, Tiger, and
Princess Royal firing salvos into the slower Blücher as they passed on
to tackle the Moltke, Seydlitz, and Derfflinger. The Blücher was
finally reduced to a wreck by the New Zealand and Indomitable, and
then torpedoed by the Meteor; bombs from German aircraft prevented our
boats from rescuing more than 120 survivors from the sinking ship.
Meanwhile the Lion was damaged by a shell and had to fall behind, and
an hour and twenty minutes passed before Beatty could return to the
scene of action; he found that his second in command had broken off
the fight out of respect for the German mine-field, which seems,
however, to have been still thirty or forty miles away. The German
battle-cruisers, which might apparently have been destroyed, thus got
home with a severe battering which incapacitated them for action for
some months. No British ship was lost, and our casualties were about a
score of men.
The result was disappointing in the escape of the German cruisers, but
it left no doubt about the command of the sea. It was, indeed, being
daily demonstrated by the security of the Channel passage, the muster
of forces from oversea, and the conquest of German colonies. These
were mainly in Africa, and consisted of Togoland, the German
Cameroons, German South-West Africa, and East Africa. The tide of
conquest flowed in this order round Africa from north-west to
south-east, and Togoland, which was also the smallest, was the first
to be subdued. It was about the size of Ireland, and was hemmed in on
all sides, by British sea-power on the south, Nigeria on the west, and
French colonies on the north and east; and converging attacks forced
the handful of German troops to unconditional surrender on 27 August,
The Cameroons were larger than the German Empire in Europe, and the
first attacks, being made with inadequate preparation, were repulsed
in the latter days of August. On 27 September, however, by co-
operation between French troops and two British warships, Duala the
capital was captured and the whole coast-line was seized.
The conquest of German South-West Africa was a more serious matter,
not only because the Germans were there more numerous and better
organized, but because the task was complicated by the politics of the
Union. It was not a Crown colony subject to the orders of the Imperial
Government; troops could only move at the instance of a responsible
local administration, and the back-veld Boers, led by Hertzog and De
Wet, were strenuously opposed to participation in the war on the
British side. Fortunately, perhaps, the Germans began hostilities by
raiding the frontiers of Cape Colony, and on 18 September the British
retaliated by seizing Luderitz Bay, which, like their other port,
Swakopmund, the Germans had abandoned to concentrate at their inland
capital, Windhoek. On the 26th there was a small British reverse at
Sandfontein, which was followed by the more serious news of Maritz'
rebellion in the Cape. Maritz had fought against the British in the
Boer War and for the Germans against the revolted Hereros; he now held
the ambiguous position of rank in the German Army and command of
British forces, but came down on the German side of the fence. Botha
ordered his arrest, and Maritz, with German assistance in arms and
ammunition, attempted to overrun the north-west of Cape Colony. A
fortnight's campaign in October ended with the dispersal of his
commandos by Colonel Van Deventer.
Maritz was the stormy petrel of a far more serious disturbance. While
the grant of self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange River
Colony in 1908 had placated the great majority and the better-educated
Boers, tradition and prejudice kept their hold upon the more
conservative minority; and some like Beyers, who had once been
received by the Kaiser, looked to a war with Germany to restore their
ancient independence. On 24 October De Wet seized Heilbronn in the
Orange State, and Beyers Rustenburg in the Transvaal. Botha's appeal
to the loyal Boers met, however, with an effective response, and soon
he had 30,000 men at his disposal. He acted with remarkable swiftness:
on the 27th he dispersed the commandos of Beyers and Kemp, and on 7
November General Smuts announced that there were but a few scattered
bands of rebels in the Transvaal. De Wet made a longer run by his
elusive heels, but found the motor-transport of his enemies an
insuperable bar to the repetition of his exploits of 1900-2. He had a
slight success at Doornberg on 7 November, when his force amounted to
2000 men; but Botha now came south into the Orange State and
completely defeated De Wet on the 11th to the east of Winburg. De Wet
himself escaped and attempted a junction with Beyers who had fled
south from the Transvaal. But he was gradually driven westward into
the Kalahari desert and overtaken by Colonel Jordaan's motors a
hundred miles west of Mafeking on 1 December, while Beyers was drowned
in trying to cross the Vaal on the 8th. De Wet was once more given his
life, and the other rebels were treated with a lenience which nothing
but its wisdom could excuse.
The rising put off to another year the conquest of German South-West
Africa. The conquest of East Africa (see Map, p. 249) was postponed
for a longer period by the inherent difficulties of the task and the
imported defects in its management. German East Africa was actually
and potentially by far the most valuable of German oversea
possessions. Twice the size of Germany, it had a population of eight
million natives and five thousand Europeans. Although tropical in its
climate, high ground, and especially the slopes of Kilimanjaro,
provided inhabitable land for white men, and its wealth in forests,
gold and other minerals, pastoral and agricultural facilities was
considerable. There were four excellent ports, and from two of them,
Tanga and the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, railways ran far into the
interior. On the north it was bounded by British East Africa and
Uganda, on the west by the Belgian Congo State, and on the south-west
by British Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, while on the south
Portuguese Mozambique provided some means of supply and an ultimate
refuge in defeat. The German forces were greatly superior to those of
the British in East Africa, and the Uganda railway from Mombasa to
Lake Victoria Nyanza running parallel with the frontier was a tempting
object of attack. The Germans took the offensive against the British
north and south-west, without achieving any great success. But only
the arrival of reinforcements from India on 3 September and the
failure of the Konigsberg to co-operate prevented the fall of Mombasa,
and only the inadequacy of the British maps, on which the Germans had
for once to rely, frustrated their attack on the Uganda railway.
Karungu was also besieged on Lake Victoria Nyanza, but relieved by a
couple of British vessels; the invaders of Northern Rhodesia were
beaten back; and a naval force bombarded Dar-es-Salaam and destroyed
the wireless installation. The arrival of a second expeditionary force
from India on 1 November was the prelude to a greater reverse. Landing
at Tanga on the 4th, it was met by a German force, superior in the art
of bush fighting if not in numbers which hurried down from Moschi, and
was compelled to re-embark with a loss of 800 casualties. During the
brief span of their colonial experience the Germans had learnt as much
about colonial warfare as we could teach them after centuries; for
traditions are not an unmixed blessing in the art of war.