Читать книгу A Merchant Fleet at War - Archibald Hurd - Страница 6

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There was never a time in our history when the value of the Mercantile Marine to our national life was as apparent as it is to-day. After passing through the crucible of war, we are what we are, mainly, because we are the possessors of ships.

When the Great War came, we possessed only a small, though highly trained, Army, and the guns of our Navy extended little further than high-water mark. How could we, a community of islanders, in partnership with other islanders living in Dominions thousands of miles away, hope to make our strength felt on the battlefields of the Continent of Europe, where the military Powers were mobilising conscript armies counted not by thousands, but by millions? The original Expeditionary Force, as finely tempered a fighting instrument as ever existed, was at once thrown across the Channel in merchant ships and it held in check the victorious army of Germany, saving by a miracle, the Channel ports; then, having mobilised on the eve of the declaration of war, the Royal Navy, the great protective force of the British peoples, we mobilised also the Merchant Navy, their essential sustaining force, bridged the oceans of the world, and concentrated on the conflict the enormous and varied powers of the 400,000,000 inhabitants of the Commonwealth. In Belgium and France as in the Pacific, in Gallipoli as in Eastern Africa, in Salonica as in Mesopotamia, and in Italy as in Palestine, British troops were soon confronting the forces of the Central Alliance; every ocean was dominated by British men-of-war. The enemies had the advantage of interior military lines, but by the aid of ships—carrying troops, munitions, and stores—we gradually forged a hoop of steel round them and slowly but irresistibly drew it tighter and tighter until, their economic power having been strangled by sea power, their naval and military power was weakened and they were compelled to sue for peace. If it had not been for our ships—ships of commerce drawing strength from the seas, and ships of war, efficiently policing those seas—the Allies could not by any possibility have won the Great War and Germans would to-day be the dominant race, not only in Europe, but in both hemispheres.

It is a common error to think of sea power in terms only of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. The secret of the spread of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, with its ideals of fair play, tolerance and personal liberty, its hatred of tyranny and love of justice, is not to be found as much in these emblems of organised violence as in merchant ships. Out of our island State the Merchant Fleet, a purely individualistic institution, developed by the compulsion of geographical necessities; the British people could not exist without ships even in days when their numbers were small and the standard of living was relatively low. The population has trebled in the last hundred years and the level of comfort of all classes has risen, and to-day the very existence of the 45,000,000 people of the British Isles, as well as their commercial and social relations with the other sections of the Empire, depends on the sufficiency and efficiency of the Mercantile Marine.

We possessed a trading Navy, with fine traditions of peace and war, long before we had a Fighting Navy. The owners of merchant ships for many centuries defended this country from raids and invasions, just as it was the early merchant-adventurers who laid the foundations of the Empire. Thus as far back as the reign of Athelstan, we find this Saxon king granting a Thaneship—or, as one might say, a knighthood—to every merchant who had been three voyages of length in his own trading vessel. It was largely with the ships of merchant owners that in 1212 the English, by raiding France, prevented a French invasion, and that in 1340 one of the greatest British naval victories was won over vastly superior forces at the battle of Sluys. And though, by the time of the Armada, merchant ships were but as it were the core of the fleets that fought and destroyed the threatened world domination of Spain, they played an exceedingly important part in that epoch-making struggle, which marked the emergence of this Island as a world power. Similarly the Indian Empire, the early American Colonies, and many other British Possessions all over the world, were founded by merchant shipping enterprise alone. From time immemorial, the British merchantman has carried the flag to the outermost parts of the world and thus helped to maintain its prestige.

The Mercantile Marine and Navy have always been so closely knit that it is often difficult to separate their histories. The Mercantile Marine was in reality, as has been said, the parent of the latter. As the State grew, and civilisation became more complex, a process of separation between the ships of commerce and the ships of war was inevitable, and the Navy became more and more a distinct Royal Service. The increasing difficulties of the problems of defence, armament, and so on, led to a process of specialisation, and could only be adequately studied and the Empire’s growing needs supplied by a State Department. On the other hand, the Mercantile Marine remained, and still remains, individualistic, each merchant ship-owner, or company of ship-owners, building the sort of vessel best adapted to the particular enterprise in hand. Thus we have sailing from our ports, ships of all descriptions, ocean-going liners carrying passengers, cargoes and mails, as well as tramps, colliers, cold-storage vessels, and an infinity of other types.

But while this process of separation, or specialisation, has been both inevitable and fruitful, the Mercantile Marine has, in every war, been called upon by the Navy to provide transports, auxiliary cruisers, hospital and munition ships, and, in the recent Great War, minesweepers, submarine chasers, ‘Q’ ships, and many other equally vital subsidiaries. Similarly, in the personnel of the Mercantile Marine, the Navy has always had a powerful reserve, not only of experienced sailors, but of actual navally-trained officers and men. Without these, it is safe to say that the Navy could never have undertaken, or accomplished, those vast and world-wide, and many of them unforeseeable, tasks, so magnificently and successfully carried out; and it is equally true that but for the Mercantile Marine, the armies of the whole Alliance would have been paralysed.

In no history, however long and laboriously compiled, would it be possible to do full justice to the war-work of the British Mercantile Marine, but the present volume supplies, at any rate, an index to the scope and value of what it performed. In the re-action of one unit, of one old, honourable, and successful merchant shipping Company to the demands of the world war, it is perhaps possible to realise more clearly than by making a wider sweep of research, the amazing accomplishments of the whole; and where all rose, with magnificent unity, to heights of service never surpassed in our annals, none excelled either in the prescience or organizing ability of its directors, in the courage and resource of its captains and crews, or in the loyalty and ingenuity of its skilled and unskilled employees, the record of the Cunard Steamship Company.