Читать книгу The British Navy in Battle - Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen - Страница 7

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Within a month a naval adventure of a new kind was embarked upon, based on the theory that if only you had naval guns enough, any fort against which they were directed must be pulverized as were the forts of Liège, Namur, Maubeuge, and Antwerp. The simplest comprehension of the principles of naval gunnery would have shown the theory to be fallacious. It originated in the fertile brain of the lay Chief of the Admiralty, and though it would seem as if his naval advisers felt the theory to be wrong, none of them, in the absence of a competent and independent gunnery staff, could say why. And so the essentially military operation of forcing the passage of the Dardanelles was undertaken as if it were a purely naval operation, with the result that, just as naval success had never been conceivable, so now the failure of the ships made military success impossible also.

It was thus we came to our second naval crisis. The first we had solved by putting Lord Fisher into Prince Louis’s place. The lesson of the second seemed to be that there was only one mistake that could be made with the navy and that was for the Government to ask it to do anything. Mr. Churchill, as King Stork, had taken the initiative. Lord Fisher, the naval superman, had not been able to save us. It was clear that lay interference with the navy was wrong—equally clear that it would be wiser to leave the initiative to the enemy. And so a new régime began.

But, in reality, the lessons of the first crisis and the second crisis were the same. To suppose that a civilian First Lord is bound to be mischievous if he is energetic, and certain to be harmless if, in administering the navy as an instrument of war, he is a cipher, were errors just as great as to suppose that a seaman with a long, loyal, and brilliant record in the public service had put an evil enchantment over the whole British Navy because, fifty years before, he had been born a subject of a Power with which till now we had never been at war. Things went wrong in October, 1914, for precisely the same reasons that they went wrong in February, March, and April, 1915. The German battle-cruisers escaped at Heligoland for exactly the same reasons that the attempt to take the Dardanelles forts by naval artillery was futile. We had prepared for war and gone into war with no clear doctrine as to what war meant, because we lacked the organism that could have produced the doctrine in peace time, prepared and trained the Navy to a common understanding of it, and supplied it with plans and equipped it with means for their execution. What was needed in October, 1914, was not a new First Sea Lord, but a Higher Command charged only with the study of the principles and the direction of fighting.

But in May, 1915, this truth was not recognized. And in the next year which passed, all efforts to make this truth understood were without effect. And so the submarine campaign went on till it spent itself in October and revived again in the following March, when it was stopped by the threat of American intervention. The enemy, thwarted in the only form of sea activity that promised him great results, found himself suddenly threatened on land and humiliated at sea, and to restore his waning prestige, ventured out with his forces, was brought to battle—and escaped practically unhurt.

The controversies to which the battle of Jutland gave rise will be in everyone’s recollection. Another of the many indecisive battles with which history is full had been fought, and the critics established themselves in two camps. One side was for facing risks and sinking the enemy at any cost. The other would have it that so long as the British Fleet was unconquered it was invincible, and that the distinction between “invincible” and “victorious” could be neglected. After all, as Mr. Churchill told us, while our fleet was crushing the life breath out of Germany, the German Navy could carry on no corresponding attack on us; and when the other camp denounced this doctrine of tame defence, he retorted that victory was not unnecessary but that the torpedo had made it impossible.