Читать книгу The British Navy in Battle - Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen - Страница 10

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The period divides itself into two unequal portions. Between June and January, 1918, was seen the slowly growing mastery of the submarine. The rate of loss was halved and the methods by which this result was achieved were applied as widely as possible. But in the next six or eight months no improvement in the position corresponding to that which followed in the first period was obtained. The explanation is simple enough. The old autocratic régime had not understood the nature of the new war any better than the nature of the old. It had from the first, under successive chief naval advisers, repudiated convoy as though it were a pestilent heresy. In June, 1917, the very men who, as absolutist advisers, had taken this attitude, were compelled to sanction the hated thing itself. It yielded exactly the results claimed for it, but no more. It was in its nature so simple and so obvious that it did not take long to get it into working order. It was the best form of defence. But defence is the weakest form of war. The stronger form, the offensive, needed planning and long preparations. In the nature of things these could not take effect either in six months or in twelve. Nor is it likely that, while the old personnel was suffered to remain at Whitehall, those engaged on the plans and charged with the preparations for this were able to work with the expedition which the situation called for. For the first six months after the revolution, then, little occurred to prove its efficiency, except the fruits of the policy which instructed opinion had forced on Whitehall. But these, so far as the final issue of the war was concerned, were surely sufficient. For the losses by submarines were brought below the danger point.

It was not until the revolution made its next step forward by the changes in personnel announced in January that marked progress was shown in the other fields of naval war. The late autumn had been marked, as it was fully expected, once the submarine was thwarted, by various efforts on the part of the enemy to assert himself by other means at sea. A Lerwick convoy, very inadequately protected, was raided by fast and powerful enemy cruisers, and many ships sunk in circumstances of extraordinary barbarity. The destroyers protecting them sacrificed themselves with fruitless gallantry. There were ravages on the coast as well. Both things pointed to salient weaknesses in the naval position. At the time of the third naval crisis at the end of 1916, it had been pointed out that the repeated evidences of our inability to hold the enemy in the Narrow Seas ought not to be allowed to pass uncensured or unremedied. But the fatal habit of refusing to recognize that an old favourite had failed prevented any reform for a year. It was not until Sir Roger Keyes was appointed to the Dover Command and a new atmosphere was created that remarkable departures in new policy were inaugurated. This policy took two forms. First, there was the establishment of a mine barrage from coast to coast across the Channel, and simultaneously with this, North Sea minefields stretching, one from Norwegian territorial waters almost to the Scottish foreshore, and another in the Kattegat, to intercept such German U-boats as base their activities upon the enemy’s Baltic force. Two great minefields on such a scale as this are works of time. Nor can their effect upon the submarine campaign be expected to be seen until they are very near completion; but then the effect may possibly be immediate and overwhelming.

Principally to facilitate the creation and maintenance of the barrages, a second new departure in policy was the organization of attacks on the German bases in Flanders. Of these Zeebrügge was infinitely the more important, because it is from here that the deep water canal runs to the docks and wharves of Bruges some miles inland. The value of Zeebrügge, robbed of the facilities for equipment and reparation which the Bruges docks afford, is little indeed. It is little more than an anchorage and a refuge. To close Zeebrügge to the enemy called for an operation as daring and as intricate as was ever attempted. Success depended upon so many factors, of which the right weather was the least certain, that it was no wonder that the expedition started again and again without attempting the blow it set out to strike. Its final complete success at Zeebrügge was a veritable triumph of perfect planning and organization and command. It came at a critical moment in the campaign. A month before the enemy, by his great attack at St. Quentin, had achieved by far the greatest land victory of the war. He had followed this up by further attacks, and seemed to add to endless resources in men a ruthless determination to employ them for victory. The British and French were driven to the defensive. Not to be beaten, not to yield too much ground, to exact the highest price for what was yielded, this was not a very glorious rôle when the triumphs on the Somme and in Flanders of 1916 and 1917 were remembered. It cannot be questioned that the originality, the audacity, and the success of Vice-Admiral Keyes’ attacks on Zeebrügge and Ostend, gave to all the Allies just that encouragement which a dashing initiative alone can give. It broke the monotony of being always passive.

But the new minefields, the barrages, the sealing of Zeebrügge, these were far from being the only fruits of the changes at Whitehall. A sortie by Breslau and Goeben from the Dardanelles, which ended in the sinking of a couple of German monitors and the loss of a light German cruiser on a minefield, directed attention sharply to the situation in the Middle Sea. There was a manifest peril that the Russian Fleet might fall into German hands and make a junction with the Austrian Fleet at Pola. Further, the losses of the Allies by submarines in this sea had for long been unduly heavy. A visit of the First Lord to the Mediterranean did much to put these things right. First steps were taken in reorganizing the command and, before the changes had advanced very far, an astounding exploit by two officers of the Italian Navy resulted in the destruction of two Austrian Dreadnoughts, and relieved the Allies of any grave danger in this quarter.

Meantime, it had become known that a powerful American squadron had joined the Grand Fleet, that our gallant and accomplished Allies had adopted British signals and British ways, and had become in every respect perfectly amalgamated with the force they had so greatly strengthened. And though little was said about it in the Press, it was evident enough that the moral of the Lerwick convoy had been learned, nor was there the least doubt that the Grand Fleet, under the command of Sir David Beatty, had become an instrument of war infinitely more flexible and efficient than it had ever been. His plans and battle orders took every contingency into council so far as human foresight made possible. At Jutland, at the Dogger Bank, and in the Heligoland Bight, Admiral Beatty had shown his power to animate a fleet by his own fighting spirit and to combine a unity of action with the independent initiative of his admirals, simply because he had inspired all of them with a common doctrine of fighting. Under such auspices there could be little doubt that our main forces in northern waters were ready for battle with a completeness and an elasticity that left nothing to chance.

But if we are to look for the chief fruit of last year’s revolution, we shall not find it in the reorganized Grand Fleet, nor in the new initiative and aggression in the Narrow Seas, for the ultimate results of which we still have to wait. If the enemy despairs both of victory on land or of such success as will give him a compromise peace, if he is faced by disintegration at home and, driven to a desperate stroke, sends out his Fleet to fight, we shall then see, but perhaps not till then, what the changes of last year have brought about in our fighting forces. Meantime, the success of the great reforms can be measured quite definitely. In the months of May and June over half a million American soldiers were landed in France, sixty per cent. of whom were carried in British ships. No one in his senses in May or June last year would have thought this possible.

Looked at largely, then, last year’s revolution at Whitehall is in all ways the most astonishing and the most satisfactory naval event of the last four years. It is the most satisfactory event, because its results have been so nearly what was foretold and because it only needs for the work to be completed for all the lessons of the war to be rightly applied.