Читать книгу The Silent Watchers - Bennet Copplestone - Страница 7

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THE GREAT VICTORY

In naval warfare there are many actions but few battles. An action is any engagement between war vessels of any size, but a battle is a contest between ships of the battle-line—sometimes called “capital ships” upon the results of which depends the vital issues of a war. During the whole of the long contest with Napoleon, there were only two battles of this decisive kind—the Nile and Trafalgar.

And although the fighting by sea and land went on for ten years after Trafalgar had given to us the supreme control of the world’s seas, there were no more naval battles. Battles at sea are very rare because, when fought out, they are so crushingly decisive. This characteristic feature of the great naval battle has been greatly emphasised by modern conditions. Upon land armies have outgrown the very earth itself; fighting frontiers have become lines of trenches; battles have become the mere swaying of these trench lines—a ripple here or there marks a success or failure—but the lines re-formed remain. Even after weeks or months of fighting, if the lines remain unbroken, neither side has reached a decision. War upon land between great forces is a long drawn-out agony of attrition.

But while battles upon land have become much less decisive than in the simpler days of small armies and feeble weapons, fighting upon the sea has become much quicker, much more crushingly final, in its effects and results than in the days of our grandfathers. Speed and gun power are now everything. The faster and more powerful fleet—more powerful in its capacity for dealing accurate and destructive blows—can annihilate its enemy completely within the brief hours of a single day. The more powerful and faster his ships the less will the victor himself suffer. Only under one condition can a defeated fleet escape annihilation, and that is when the lack of light or of sea room snatches from the victor a final decision. If an enemy can get away under shelter of his shore fortifications, or within the protection of his minefields, he can defy pursuit; but if there be ample room and daylight Speed and Power wielded by men such as ours, will prevail with absolute mathematical certainty—the losers will be sunk, the victors will, by comparison, be little damaged. Every considerable engagement during the war has added convincing proof to the conclusions which our Navy drew from the decisive battle in the Sea of Tsushima between the Japanese and the Russians, and the not less decisive action upon a smaller scale in which the Americans destroyed the Spanish squadron off Santiago, Cuba. In both cases the losers were destroyed while the victors suffered little hurt. These outstanding lessons were not lost upon the Royal Navy, its officers had themselves seen both fights, and so in its silent way the Navy pressed upon its course always seeking after more speed, more gun power, and above all more numbers. “Only numbers can annihilate,” said Napoleon, and what the Emperor declared to be true of land fighting is the more true of fighting by sea. Only numbers can annihilate.

Upon the evening of August 4th, 1914, I was sitting in a London office beside a ticking tape machine awaiting the message that the Germans had declined our ultimatum to withdraw from Belgium, and that war had been declared. “There will be a big sea battle this evening,” observed my companion. “There has been a big battle,” observed I, “but it is now over.” Although he and I used similar language we attached to the words very different meanings. He thought, as the bulk of the British people thought at that time, that the British and German battle fleets would meet and fight off the Frisian Islands. But I meant, and felt sure, that the last thing our Grand Fleet desired was to fight in restricted and dangerous waters, amid the perils of mines and submarines, when it had already won the greatest fight of the war without firing a shot or risking a single ship or man. There had been no “battle” in the popular sense, but there had in fact been achieved a tremendous decisive victory which through all the long months to follow would dominate the whole war by sea and by land. Our great battleships were at that moment cruising between Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and the Cromarty Firth on the north-eastern shores of Scotland. Our fastest battle cruisers were in the Firth of Forth together with many of the better pre-Dreadnought battleships which, though too slow for a fleet action, had heavy batteries available for a close fight in narrow waters. Many other older and slower battleships and cruisers were in the Thames. The narrow straits of Dover were thickly patrolled by destroyers and submarines, and more submarines and destroyers were on watch off the mouths of the Weser, the Jade, the Elbe and the Ems. Light cruisers hovered still farther to the north where the Skagerrak opens between Denmark and the Norwegian coast. The North Sea had become a mare clausum—no longer, as the mapmakers term it, a German Ocean, but one which at a single stroke had become overwhelmingly British.

Take a map of the North Sea and consider with me for a moment the relative strengths and dispositions of the opposing battle fleets. There was nothing complicated or super-subtle about the Royal Navy’s plans; on the contrary they had that beautiful compelling simplicity which is the characteristic feature of all really great designs whether in war or in peace.

There are two outlets to the North Sea, one wide to the north and west beyond the Shetlands, the other narrow and shallow to the south-west through the Straits of Dover. The Straits are only twenty-one miles wide; opposite the north of Scotland the Sea is 300 miles wide. But before German battleships or cruisers could get away towards the wide north-western outlet beyond the Shetlands they would have to steam some 400 miles north of Heligoland. Except for the Pacific Squadron based upon Tsing-tau in the Far East and cruising upon the east and west coasts of Mexico, all the fleets of our enemy were at his North Sea ports or in the Baltic—a land-locked sheet of water which for the moment is out of our picture. From Heligoland to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys—where Admiral Jellicoe had his headquarters and where he had under his hand twenty-two of our most powerful battleships—is less than 550 miles. Jellicoe had also with him large numbers of armoured and light cruisers. In the Firth of Forth, less than 500 miles from Heligoland, Admiral Beatty had five of the fastest and most powerful battle cruisers afloat and great quantities of lighter cruisers and destroyers. In the Thames, about 350 miles from Heligoland, lay most of our slower and less powerful pre-Dreadnought battleships and cruisers, vessels of a past generation in naval construction, but in their huge numbers and collective armaments a very formidable force to encounter in the narrow waters of the Straits of Dover.

Three possible courses of action lay before the German Naval Staff. They had at their disposal seventeen battleships and battle cruisers built since the first Dreadnought revolutionised the battle line, but, as I have already pointed out, these vessels, class for class and gun for gun, were lighter, slower, and less well armed than were the twenty-seven great war vessels at the disposal of Jellicoe and Beatty. The Germans could have tried to break away to the north with their whole battle fleet, escorting all their lighter cruisers, in the hope that while the battle fleets were engaged the cruisers might escape round the north of Scotland, and get upon our trade routes in the Atlantic. That was their first possible line of action—a desperate one, since Jellicoe and Beatty with much stronger forces lay upon the flank of their course to the north, and the preponderating strength and swiftness of our light and heavy cruisers would have meant, in all human probability, not only the utter destruction of the enemy’s battle fleet but also the wiping out of his would-be raiders. Our cruisers could have closed the passages between the Orkneys and Iceland long before the Germans could have reached them. This first heroic dash for the free spaces of the outer seas would have been so eminently gratifying to us that it is scarcely surprising that the Germans denied us its blissful realisation.

THE NORTH SEA.

The second possible course, apparently less heroic but in its ultimate results probably as completely destructive for the enemy as the first course, would have been to bear south-west, hugging the shallows as closely as might be possible, and to endeavour to break a way through the Straits of Dover and the English Channel. From Heligoland to the Straits is over 350 miles, and we should have known all about the German dash long before they could have reached the Narrows. Those Narrow Seas are like the neck of a bottle which would have been corked most effectually by our serried masses of pre-Dreadnought battleships and cruisers interspersed by swarming hundreds of submarines and destroyers with their vicious torpedo stings. We can quite understand how the Germans, who had read Sir Percy Scott’s observations of a month or two before on the deadliness of submarines in narrow waters, liked a dash for the Straits as little as they relished a battle with Jellicoe and Beatty in the far north, more especially as their line of retreat would have been cut off by the descent from their northern fastnesses of our battle fleets. Not then, nor a week or two later when we were passing our Expeditionary Force across the Channel, did the Germans attempt to break through the Straits and cut us off from our Allies the French.

The third course was the one which the Germans in fact took. It was the famous course of Brer Rabbit, to lie low and say nuffin’, and to wait for happier times when perchance the raids of their own submarines, and our losses from mines, might so far diminish our fighting strength as to permit them to risk a Battle of the Giants with some little prospect of success. And in adopting this waiting policy they did what we least desired and what, therefore, was the safest for them and most embarrassing for us. Never at any time did we attempt to prevent the German battle fleets from coming out. We no more blockaded them than Nelson a hundred years earlier blockaded the French at Toulin and Brest. We maintained, as Nelson did, a perpetual unsleeping watch on the enemy’s movements, but our desire always was the same as Nelson’s—to let the enemy come out far enough to give us space and time within which to compass his complete and final destruction.

Although the Germans, by adopting a waiting policy, prevented the Royal Navy from fulfilling its first duty—the seeking out and destruction of an enemy’s fighting fleets—their inaction emphasised the completeness of the Victory of Brains and Soul which the Navy had won during those few days before the outbreak of war. It was because our mobilisation had been so prompt and complete, it was because the disposition of our fleets had been so perfectly conceived, that the Germans dared not risk a battle with us in the open and were unable to send out their cruisers to cut off our trading ships and to break our communications with France. Although the enemy’s fleets had not been destroyed, they had been rendered very largely impotent. We held, more completely than we did even after the crowning mercy of Trafalgar, the command of the seas of the world. The first great battle was bloodless but complete, it had won for us and for the civilised world a very great victory, and the Royal Navy had never in its long history more fully realised and revealed its tremendous unconquerable Soul.

It may be of some little interest, now that the veil of secrecy can be partly raised, to describe the opposing battle fleets upon which rested the decision of victory or defeat. Before the war it had become the habit of many critics, both naval and civilian, to exalt the striking power of the torpedo craft—both destroyers and submarines—and to talk of the great battleship as an obsolete monster, as some vast Mammoth at the mercy of a wasp with a poison sting. But the war has shown that the Navy was right to hold to the deep beliefs, the outcome of all past experience, that supremacy in the battle line means supremacy in Sea Control. The smaller vessels, cruisers, and mosquito craft, are vitally necessary for their several rôles,—without them the great ships cannot carry out a commercial blockade, cannot protect trade or transports, cannot conduct those hundreds of operations both of offence and defence which fall within the duties of a complete Navy. But the ultimate decision rests with the Battle Fleets. They are the Fount of Power. While they are supreme, the seas are free to the smaller active vessels; without such supremacy, the seas are closed to all craft, except to submarines and, as events have proved, to a large extent even to those under-water wasps.

In August, 1914, our Battle Fleets available for the North Sea—and at the moment of supreme test no vessels, however powerful, which were not on the spot were of any account at all—were not at their full strength. The battleships were all at home—the ten Dreadnoughts, each with ten 12-⁠inch guns, the four Orions, the four K.G.V.s and the four Iron Dukes, each with their ten 13.5-⁠inch guns far more powerful than the earlier Dreadnoughts,—and were all fully mobilised by August 3rd. But of our nine fast and invaluable battle cruisers as many as four were far away. The Australia was at the other side of the globe, and three others had a short time before been despatched to the Mediterranean. Beatty had the Lion, Queen Mary, and Princess Royal, each with eight 13.5-⁠inch guns and twenty-nine knots of speed, in addition to the New Zealand, and Invincible each with eight 12-⁠inch guns. The First Lord of the Admiralty announced quite correctly that we had mobilised thirty-one ships of the battle line, but actually in the North Sea at their war stations upon that fateful evening of August 4th—which now seems so long ago—Jellicoe and Beatty had twenty-seven only of first line ships. They were enough as it proved, but one rather grudged at that time, those three in the Mediterranean and the Australia at the Antipodes. Had there been a battle of the Giants we should have needed them all, for only numbers can annihilate. Jellicoe had, in addition to those which I have reckoned, the Lord Nelson and Agamemnon—pre-Dreadnoughts, each with four 12-⁠inch guns and ten 9.2-⁠inch guns—useful ships but not of the first battle line.

Opposed to our twenty-seven available monsters the Germans had under their hands eighteen completed vessels of their first line. I do not count in this select company the armoured cruiser Blücher, with her twelve 8-⁠inch guns, which was sunk later on in the Dogger Bank action by the 13.5-⁠inch weapons of Beatty’s great cruisers. Neither do I count the fine cruiser Goeben, a fast vessel with ten 11-⁠inch guns which, like our three absent battle cruisers, was in the Mediterranean. The Goeben escaped later to the Dardanelles and ceased to be on the North Sea roll of the German High Seas Fleet.

Germany had, then, eighteen battleships and battle cruisers, and had it been known to the public that our apparent superiority in available numbers was only 50 per cent. in the North Sea, many good people might have trembled for the safety of their homes and for the honour of their wives and daughters. But luckily they did not know, for they could with difficulty have been brought to understand that naval superiority rests more in speed and in quality and in striking power than in the mere numbers of ships. When I have said that numbers only can annihilate, I mean, of course, numbers of equal or superior ships. In quality of ships and especially of men, in speed and in striking power, our twenty-seven ships had fully double the strength of the eighteen Germans who might have been opposed to them in battle. None of our vessels carried anything smaller—for battle—than 12-⁠inch guns, and fifteen of them bore within their turrets the new 13.5-⁠inch guns of which the weight of shell and destructive power were more than 50 per cent. greater than that of the earlier 12-⁠inch weapons. On the other hand, four of the German battleships (the Nassau class) carried 11-⁠inch guns and were fully two knots slower in speed than any of the British first line. Three of their battle cruisers also had 11-⁠inch guns. While therefore we had guns of 12 and 13.5 inches the Germans had nothing more powerful to oppose to us than guns of 11 and 12 inches. Ship for ship the Germans were about two knots slower than ourselves, so that we always had the advantage of manœuvre, the choosing of the most effective range, and the power of preventing by our higher speed the escape of a defeated foe. Had the Germans come north into the open sea, we could have chosen absolutely, by virtue of our greater speed, gun power and numbers, the conditions under which an action should have been fought and how it should have been brought to a finish.

An inch or two in the bore of a naval gun, a few feet more or less of length, may not seem much to some of my readers. But they should remember that the weight of a shell, and the weight of its explosive charge, vary as the cube of its diameter. A 12-⁠inch shell is a third heavier than one of 11 inches, while a 13.5-⁠inch shell is more than one-half heavier than a 12-⁠inch and twice as heavy as one of 11 inches only. The power of the bursting charge varies not as the weight, but as the square of the weight of a shell. The Germans were very slow to learn the naval lesson of the superiority of the bigger gun and the heavier shell. It was not until after the Dogger Bank action when Beatty’s monstrous 13.5-⁠inch shells broke in a terrible storm upon their lighter-armed battle cruisers that the truth fully came home to them. Had Jellicoe and Beatty fought the German Fleet in the wide spaces of the upper North Sea in August, 1914, we should have opposed a fighting efficiency in power and weight of guns of more than two to one. Rarely have the precious qualities of insight and foresight been more strikingly shown forth than in the superiority in ships, in guns, and in men that the Royal Navy was able to range against their German antagonists in those early days of August, when the fortunes of the Empire would have turned upon the chances of a naval battle. In the long contest waged between 1900 and 1914, in the bloodless war of peace, the spiritual force of the Navy had gained the victory; the enemy had been beaten, and knew it, and thenceforward for many months, until the spring of 1916, he abode in his tents. Whenever he did venture forth it was not to give battle but to kill some women, some babes, and then to scuttle home to proclaim the dazzling triumph which “Gott” had granted to his arms.

It may seem to many a fact most extraordinary that in August, 1914, not one of our great ships of the first class—the so-called “super-Dreadnoughts”—upon which we depended for the domination of the seas and the security of the Empire, not one was more than three years old. The four Orions—Orion, Conqueror, Thunderer and Monarch—were completed in 1911 and 1912. The four K.G. Fives—King George V, Centurion, Ajax, and Audacious in 1912 and 1913; and the four Iron Dukes—Iron Duke, Marlborough, Emperor of India and Benbow—in 1914. All these new battleships carried ten 13.5-⁠inch guns and had an effective speed of nearly 23 knots. The super-battle cruisers—Lion, Queen Mary and Princess Royal—were completed in 1912, carried eight 13.5-⁠inch guns, and had a speed of over 29 knots. Upon these fifteen ships, not one of which was more than three years old, depended British Sea Power. The Germans had nothing, when the war broke out, which was comparable with these fifteen splendid monsters. Their first line battleships and battle cruisers completed in the corresponding years, from 1911 to 1914—their “opposite numbers” as the Navy calls them—were not superior in speed, design and power of guns to our Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, which had already passed into the second class, and which, long before the war ended, had sunk to the third class. But the newness and overwhelming superiority of our true first line do not surprise those who realise that these fifteen great ships were the fine flower of our naval brains and soul. The new Navy of the three years immediately preceding the war was simply the old Navy writ large. As the need had arisen, so had the Navy expanded to meet it. The designs for these fifteen ships did not fall down from Heaven; they were worked out in naval brains years before they found their material expression in steel. The vast ships issued forth upon the seas, crushingly superior to anything which our enemy could put into commission against us, because our naval brains were superior to his and our naval Soul was to his as a white glowing flame to a tallow candle. In a sentence, while Germany was laboriously copying our Dreadnoughts we had cast their designs aside, and were producing at a speed, with which he could not compete, Orions, K.G. Fives, Iron Dukes and Lions.

The North Sea, large as it may appear upon a map, is all too small for the manœuvres of swift modern fleets. No part of that stretch of water which lies south of the Dogger Bank—say, from the Yorkshire coast to Jutland—is far enough removed from the German bases to allow of a sure and decisive fleet action. There was no possibility here of a clean fight to a finish. An enemy might be hammered severely, some of his vessels might be sunk—Beatty showed the German battle cruisers what we could do even in a stern chase at full speed—but he could not be destroyed. On the afternoon and night of May 31st-June 1st, 1916, the Grand Fleet had the enemy enveloped and ripe for destruction, but were robbed of full victory by mist and darkness and the lack of sea room. Nelson spoke with the Soul of the Navy when he declared that a battle was not won when any enemy ship was enabled to escape destruction. So while the divisions of the Grand Fleet, and especially the fastest battle cruisers of some twenty-eight to twenty-nine knots speed (about thirty-three miles per hour) neglected no opportunity to punish the enemy ships that might venture forth, what every man from Jellicoe to the smallest ship boy really longed and prayed for, was a brave ample battle in the deep wide waters of the north. Here there was room for a newer and greater Trafalgar, though even here the sea was none too spacious. Great ships, which move with the speed of a fairly fast train and shoot to the extreme limits of the visible horizon, really require a boundless Ocean in which to do their work with naval thoroughness. But the upper North Sea would have served, and there the Grand Fleet waited, ever at work though silent, ever watchfully ready for the Great Day. And while it waited it controlled by the mere fact of its tremendous power of numbers, weight, and position the destinies of the civilised world.

The task of the Royal Navy in the war would have been much simpler had the geography of the North Sea been designed by Providence to assist us in our struggle with Germany. We made the best of it, but were always sorely handicapped by it. The North Sea was too shallow, too well adapted for the promiscuous laying of mines, and too wide at its northern outlet for a really close blockade. Had the British Isles been slewed round twenty degrees further towards Norway, so that the outlet to the north was as narrow as that to the English Channel—and had there been a harbour big enough for the Grand Fleet between the Thames and the Firth of Forth—then our main bases could have been placed nearer to Germany and our striking power enormously increased. We could then have placed an absolute veto upon the raiding dashes which the Germans now and then made upon the eastern English seaboard. As the position in fact existed we could not place any of our first line ships further south than the Firth of Forth—and could place even there only our fastest vessels—without removing them too far from the Grand Fleet’s main concentration at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Invergordon in the Cromarty Firth was used as a rest and replenishing station. The German raids—what Admiral Jellicoe called their tactics of “tip and run”—were exasperating, but they could not be allowed to interfere with the naval dispositions upon which the whole safety of the Empire depended. We had to depend on the speed of our battle cruisers in the Firth of Forth to give us opportunity to intercept and punish the enemy. The German battle cruisers which fired upon Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools were nearly caught—a few minutes more of valuable time and a little less of sea haze would have meant their destruction. A second raid was anticipated and the resulting Dogger Bank action taught the enemy that the Navy had a long arm and long sight. For a year he digested the lesson, and did not try his luck again until April, 1916, when he dashed forth and raided Lowestoft on the Norfolk coast. The story of this raid is interesting. The Grand Fleet had been out a day or two before upon what it called a “stunt,” a parade in force of the Jutland coast and the entrance to the Skaggerak. It had hunted for the Germans and found them not, and returning to the far north re-coaled the ships. The Germans, with a cleverness which does them credit, launched their Lowestoft raid immediately after the “stunt” and before the battle cruisers, re-coaling, could be ready to dash forth. Even as it was they did not cut much time to waste. It was a dash across, a few shots, and a dash back.

Then was made a re-disposition of the British Squadrons, not in the least designed to protect the east coast of England—though the enemy was led to believe so—but so to strengthen Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Squadrons that the enemy’s High Seas Fleet, when met, could be fought and held until Jellicoe with his battle squadrons could arrive and destroy it. The re-disposition consisted of two distinct movements. First: the pre-Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers which had been stationed in the Forth were sent to the Thames. Second: Admiral Evan-⁠Thomas’s fifth battle squadron of five Queen Elizabeth battleships (built since the war began)—of twenty-five knots speed and each carrying eight 15-⁠inch guns—Queen Elizabeth, Barham, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya—were sent from Scapa to the Firth of Forth to reinforce Beatty and to give him a support which would enable him and Evan-⁠Thomas to fight a delaying action against any force which the Germans could put to sea. Three of the Invincible type of battle cruisers were moved from the Forth to Scapa to act as Jellicoe’s advance guard, and to enable contact to be quickly made between Beatty and Jellicoe. But for this change in the Grand Fleet’s dispositions, which enabled the four splendid battleships—Barham, Valiant, Warspite and Malaya (the Queen Elizabeth was in dock)—to engage the whole High Seas Fleet on the afternoon of May 31st, 1916, while Beatty headed off the German battle cruisers and opened the way for Jellicoe’s enveloping movement, the Battle of Jutland could never have been fought.