Читать книгу The British Navy in Battle - Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen - Страница 6

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The opening of the war at sea was in every respect auspicious for the Allies. By what looked like a happy accident, the British Navy had just been mobilized on an unprecedented scale. It was actually in process of returning to its normal establishment when the international crisis became acute, and, by a dramatic stroke, it was kept at war strength and the main fleet sent to its war stations before the British ultimatum was despatched to Berlin. The effect was instantaneous. Within a week transports were carrying British troops into France and trade was continuing its normal course, exactly as if there were no German Navy in existence. The German sea service actually went out of existence. Before a month was over a small squadron of battle-cruisers raided the Bight between Heligoland and the German harbours, sank there small cruisers and half-a-dozen destroyers, challenged the High Seas Fleet to battle, and came away without the enemy having attempted to use his capital ships to defend his small craft or to pick up the glove so audaciously thrown down. The mere mobilization of the British Fleet seemed to have paralyzed the enemy, and it looked as if our ability to control sea communications was not only surprisingly complete, but promised to be enduring. The nation’s confidence in the Navy had been absolute from the beginning, and it seemed as if that confidence could not be shaken.

Before another two months had passed we had run into one of those crises which were to recur not once, but again and again. During September an accumulation of errors came to light. The enormity of the political and naval blunder which had allowed Goeben and Breslau to slip through our fingers in the Mediterranean, and so bring Turkey into the war against us, at last become patent. There was no blockade. There were the raids which Emden and Karlsruhe were making on our trade in the Indian Ocean and between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The enemy’s submarines had sunk some of our cruisers—three in succession on a single day and in the same area. Then rumours gained ground that the Grand Fleet, driven from its anchorages by submarines, was fugitive, hiding now in one remote loch, now in another, and losing one of its greatest units in its flight. For a moment it looked as if the old warnings, that surface craft were impotent against under-water craft, had suddenly been proved true. Von Spee, with a powerful pair of armoured cruisers, was known to be at large. As a final insult, German battle-cruisers crossed the North Sea, and battered and ravaged the defenceless inhabitants of a small seaport town on the east coast. Something was evidently wrong. But nobody seemed to know quite what it was.

The crisis was met by a typical expedient. We are a nation of hero-worshippers and proverbially loyal to our favourites long after they have lost any title to our favour. In the concert-room, in the cricket-field, on the stage, in Parliament—in every phase of life—it is the old and tried friend in whom we confide, even if we have conveniently to overlook the fact that he has not only been tried, but convicted. This blind loyalty is, perhaps, amiable as a weakness, and almost peculiar to this nation. But we have another which is neither amiable nor peculiar. We hate having our complacency disturbed by being proved to be wrong and, rather than acknowledge our fault, are easily persuaded that the cause of our misfortune is some hidden and malign influence. And so in October, 1914, the explanation of things being wrong at sea was suddenly found to be quite simple. It was that the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty was of German birth. With the evil eye gone the spell would be removed. And so a most accomplished officer retired, and Lord Fisher, now almost a mythological hero, took his place.

Within very few weeks the scene suffered

… a sea change.

Into something rich and strange.

Von Spee was left but a month in which to enjoy his triumph over Cradock; Emden was defeated and captured by Sydney; Karlsruhe vanished as by enchantment from the sea; and Von Hipper’s battle-cruisers, going once too often near the British coast, had been driven in ignominious flight across the North Sea and paid for their temerity by the loss of Blücher. Three months of the Fisher-Churchill régime had seemingly put the Navy on a pinnacle that even the most sanguine—and the most ignorant—had hardly dared to hope for in the early days. The spectacle, in August, of the transports plying between France and England, as securely as the motor-buses between Fleet Street and the Fulham Road, had been a tremendous proof of confidence in sea-power. The unaccepted challenge at Heligoland had told a tale. The British fleet had indeed seemed unchallengeable. But the justification of our confidence was, after all, based only on the fact that the enemy had not disputed it. It was a negative triumph. But the capture of Emden, the obliteration of Von Spee, the uncamouflaged flight of Von Hipper, here were things positive, proofs of power in action, the meaning of which was patent to the simplest. No man in his senses could pretend that our troubles in October had not been attributed to their right origin, nor that the right remedy for them had been found and applied.

There was but one cloud on the horizon. The submarine—despite the loss of Hogue, Cressy, Aboukir, Hawk, Hermes, and Niger, and the disturbing rumours that the fleet’s bases were insecure—had been a failure as an agent for the attrition of our main sea forces. The loss of Formidable, that clouded the opening of the year, had not restored its prestige. But Von Tirpitz had made an ominous threat. The submarine might have failed against naval ships. It certainly would not fail, he said, against trading ships. He gave the world fair warning that at the right moment an under-water blockade of the British Isles would be proclaimed; then woe to all belligerents or neutrals that ventured into those death-doomed waters. The naval writers were not very greatly alarmed. For four months, after all, trading ships—turned into transports—had used the narrow waters of the Channel as if the submarines were no threat at all. Yet, on pre-war reasoning, it was precisely in narrow waters crowded with traffic that under-water war should have been of greatest effect. These transports and these narrow waters were the ideal victims and the ideal field, and coast and harbour defence and the prevention of invasion, by common consent, the obvious and indeed the supreme functions the submarine would be called upon to discharge. From a military point of view the landing of British troops in France was but the first stage towards an invasion of Germany and, from a naval point of view, it looked as if to defend the French ports from being entered by British ships was just as clearly the first objective of the German submarine as the defence of any German port. Now six months of war had shown that, if they had tried to stop the transports, the submarines had been thwarted. Means and methods had evidently been found of preventing their attack or parrying it when made. Was it not obvious that it could be no more than a question of extending these methods to merchant shipping at large to turn the greater threat to futility? It was this reasoning that, in January and February, made it easy for the writers to stem any tendency of the public to panic, and when, towards the end of February, the First Lord addressed Parliament on the subject, and dealt with the conscienceless threat of piracy with a placid and defiant confidence, all were justified in thinking that the naval critics had been right.

And so the beginning of the submarine campaign, though somewhat disconcerting, caused no wide alarm. An initial success was expected. It would take time to build the destroyers and the convoying craft on the scale that was called for, and so to organize the trade that the attack must be narrowed to protected focal points. And as absolute secrecy was maintained, both as to our actual defensive methods and as to our preparations for the future, there was neither the occasion nor the material for questioning whether the serene contentment of Whitehall was rightly founded.

Meantime, as we have seen, success had justified the solution of the October crisis. The attempt to probe deeper and to get at the cause of things was a thankless task. Those who could see beneath the surface could not fail to note in December and January that, while an exuberant optimism had become the mark of the British attitude towards the war at sea, a movement curiously parallel to it was going forward in Germany. The shifts to which the Grand Fleet had been put by the defenceless state of its harbours, though rigidly excluded from the British Press, has been triumphantly exploited in the German. Hence, when the enemy’s only oversea squadron was annihilated by Sir Doveton Sturdee, his Press responded with an outcry on the cowardice of the British Fleet that, while glad to overwhelm an inferior force abroad, dared not show itself in the North Sea. And, as if to prove the charge, Whitby and the Hartlepools were forthwith bombarded by a force we were unable to bring to action while returning from this exploit. The enemy naval writers surpassed themselves after this. And it looked so certain that the German Higher Command might itself become hypnotized by such talk that, before the New Year, it seemed prudent to note these phenomena and warn the public that we might be challenged to action after all, of the kind of action the enemy would dare us to, and what the problems were that such an action would present. And in particular it seemed advisable to state explicitly that much less must be expected from naval guns in battle than those had hoped, whose notions were founded upon battle practice. A battle-cruiser manœuvring at twenty-eight knots—instead of a canvas screen towed at six—mines scattered by a squadron in retreat, a line of retreat that would draw the pursuers into minefields set to trap them; the attacks on the pursuing squadrons by flotillas of destroyers, firing long-range torpedoes—these new elements would upset, it was said, all experiences of peace gunnery, because in peace practices it is impossible to provide a target of the speed which enemy ships would have in action, and because there had been no practice while executing the manœuvres which torpedo attack would make compulsory in battle.

Within a fortnight the action of the Dogger Bank was fought and Von Hipper’s battle-cruisers were subjected to the fire of Sir David Beatty’s Fleet from nine o’clock until twelve, without one being sunk or so damaged as to lose speed. The enemy’s tactics included attacks by submarine and destroyer which had imposed the manœuvres as anticipated—and the best of gunnery had failed. But Blücher had been sunk; the enemy had run away; so the warning fell on deaf ears; the lesson of the battle was misread. Optimism reigned supreme.