Читать книгу The Naval War of 1812 - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 5

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IN 1812 the British Navy could look back with complacence over a record of victories frequently gained and easily won. Time and time again it had faced numerical odds and had emerged triumphant. At St Vincent it had faced odds of two to one and had snatched a colourful and important victory. At the Nile it had gone boldly into action against odds of five to four and had won the most crushing naval victory of recent centuries. Nelson at Trafalgar, Strachan at Cape Ortegal, Duckworth at San Domingo had all fought fleets considerably or slightly superior, and had destroyed them. In no case had the enemy misconducted himself. Frenchmen and Spaniards, Dutchmen and Danes, had fought to the death, unavailingly. Brilliant tactics and bold leadership accounted only partially for the long succession of victories. There had been single-ship actions too numerous to count, and in the great majority of these actions British ships had been victorious, and often over ships of greater tonnage, with more guns and larger crews.

The British public, and even the Navy, could be excused for forming the belief that there was something intrinsically superior in British seamanship and perhaps in British material. Ships commanded by British officers could expect victory over ships of comparable force of any other nation. A British captain who avoided action against anything less than a force obviously and overwhelmingly superior did so at his peril; nor did it often happen, for British officers were sublimely confident of victory and went into action with the assurance to be expected of men who seriously believed they represented a chosen race destined to pre-eminence.

There could, in fact, be no denying the present intrinsic superiority of British naval forces over those of Europe. The facts spoke for themselves, even when, as has already been said, allowance was made for the vast professional excellence of the British admirals of that generation. To enquire into the causes of this superiority might be deemed unpatriotic in a people who were prepared to accept the more ready—if actually less tenable—explanation of national destiny, and at the time the enquiry was hardly made. Time had to elapse, and serious histories had to be written, before the causes became apparent to the general public, and even then the public was loth to form the necessary conclusions.

The Revolution in France had gone far to reduce the efficiency of the French Navy; too many French naval officers had emigrated, there were too many schisms in French opinion, the French Government was distracted by too many anxieties, for the French Navy to retain the excellence it had displayed during the War of American Independence. Once the British Navy had asserted its superiority by a great deal of hard fighting the superiority became more and more easy to maintain. A fleet blockaded in harbour loses its efficiency rapidly. An equally potent factor was the constant drain of trained seamen, who were steadily combed out to man the ships that sortied. The fierce frigate warfare consumed them by the thousand. Every British capture of a French privateer—and privateers were captured by the hundreds—meant a loss of trained seamen into the British prison camps and hulks. Ten thousand men were consumed in a single night in the holocaust of the Nile. With these constant losses, and with small opportunity of training fresh men, the French Navy was bound to sink further and further into inferiority.

Spain had languished for years under the imbecile rule of the Bourbons and the incredible mismanagement of Godoy; her navy was in an unsatisfactory condition from the start, and as soon as she entered the war on the French side it was certain to deteriorate from the same causes as affected the French Navy. The Netherlands experienced revolution and emigration and attrition until Camperdown saw the destruction of her navy, a thousand killed and wounded and four thousand prisoners. The balance was bound to swing farther and farther in favour of Great Britain.

After the period of great victories other factors began to assert themselves. The British Navy continued to expand as fast as ships could be built and men found, somehow, to run them. In seven years its force was almost trebled, at a time when it was generally agreed that nothing less than three years’ service was sufficient to train a seaman, and at a time when wastage, from disease, from the accidents of the sea, and from battle casualties was very severe; when the mere lapse of time saw the superannuation of seamen who were understandably too old for their profession at forty. Even the large mercantile marine and the relentless use of the press could not supply sufficient seamen; the shortage could be deduced from the constantly renewed royal proclamations offering a bounty of no less than five pounds to any able seaman under the age of fifty volunteering for service—and blood money of three pounds to any informer who would deliver up any able seaman to the press; a guinea to anyone whatever who would persuade a landsman to volunteer. In this matter Wellington’s victories in the Peninsula had an unfortunate effect, for young men of spirit began to enlist voluntarily in the Army, at the same time as the Army competed for recruits with the Navy in the gaols and among the young men in trouble. The standard of manning in the British Navy suffered, during these years, a small but important decline.

The ranks of the officers had undergone a similar expansion, and had suffered very similar wastage. It was more important that a high proportion of the officers were afflicted with the sense of superiority already mentioned, understandably, even excusably, but unfortunately. The victories had been won; it was even more gratifying to believe that they were the consequence of innate qualities than of hard work and brilliant leadership, and it would be certainly less gratifying to believe they were the result of French misfortunes. When service at sea was constant and battle more and more rare there was a natural inclination to devote more attention to seamanship than to warlike exercises. In the prevailing state of mind the lessons of the war were misread. Nelson had written, before Trafalgar, that no captain could be far wrong who laid his ship alongside an enemy. It was an excellent and well-timed order at a moment when Nelson was envisaging a pell-mell battle against an untrained and disorderly enemy, but it did not embody the secret of universal success, and there could easily be occasions when that action would be disastrous. The untrained French gunners were bad marksmen; if the British gunners were drilled to fire three times as fast they would score three times as many hits even though they were equally bad marksmen. If there was time left over from seamanship drills (and attention to the outward display which is always likely, in a disciplined service during a period of stagnation, to be accepted as a mark of efficiency) it could be employed in gunnery drills devoted to maintaining a high rate of fire; they were impressive to behold, and did not have the disadvantages of actual target practice, in which the gunpowder consumed was likely to make paintwork dirty and had to be accounted for to a niggardly and hard-pressed Government. If the French—or Spanish or Dutch or Italian—captain they might meet did not have the professional ability or the trained crew to enable him to keep his ship out of harm’s way they could count on closing rapidly, when superior rate of fire would decide the battle quickly enough, and in any case they could always board, when superior discipline would assert itself at once. There was not much need to think, and there was no urgent need for battle practice.

On the other hand the American officers had always realized that war with a European power would find them facing numerical odds; it was inevitable that they should devote thought to discovering means of counter-balancing this deficiency. They had had enough experience of actual war in the Mediterranean to discover the promising junior officers, and to acquire a fighting outlook rather than a routine outlook. It was plain to them that they must make the best of what they had. Gunnery must be practised so that no shot would be wasted; discipline and esprit de corps must be developed to make that gunnery even more effective; small-arms exercises were necessary to fit the men for hand-to-hand encounters. The manning problem was by no means as difficult as in England; liberal pay—fifteen dollars a month—and a moderate disciplinary system made the Service attractive, especially when embargo and non-intercourse caused periods of unemployment in the extensive mercantile marine. Enlistment for a definite short period—two years—made it easier to obtain recruits although the system had its own obvious disadvantages which had made themselves apparent more than once in the Mediterranean and were to do so again. The proportion of able seamen in the American Navy was always remarkably high, which made it easier to devote time to battle exercises.

It gave the American officer time to think about the theory of his profession, too, under the stimulus of the likelihood of encountering superior force. There had been exercises with a plotting-board in the Tripoli prison; there were constant discussions of theoretical problems during the long years of tension with England. In these discussions the carronade was pitted against the long gun, the small ship against the big ship, the weather gauge against the lee gauge, two ships against one and one ship against two, American methods against British. When the high average of ability among that generation of American captains is taken into account along with their large professional experience, it might be expected that the British would encounter tougher opponents than they had known in a long while. Pride might meet a fall; complacence might change to dismay.

There have been analogous situations in plenty, wherein a stronger military power has encountered humiliation at the hands of a hard-fighting and thoughtful weaker power who compensated by efficiency for numerical inferiority. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 is an early example, when men of genius like Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher led a small and handy force to victory against a fleet of arithmetically overpowering numbers.

There was complacence regarding the naval situation among the British public in 1914; there was both confidence in numbers and a sublime faith in the superiority of British material and British seamen. The German Navy had been built up by men who were well aware that they must encounter sooner or later a navy greatly stronger, and who had endeavoured to prepare for the struggle by the superior efficiency of their ships and their methods. The British defeat at Coronel is strongly reminiscent of the defeat of the Guerrière by the Constitution; a weaker force, not too well manned (Cradock’s crews were mainly reservists) was annihilated by a highly efficient stronger force handled by a man who knew exactly what he was doing and who was ably supported by subordinates trained to a high degree of co-operation. In the state of the public mind—and of a large part of the professional mind—in England in 1914 Cradock could no more have refused battle than Dacres could have done in 1812. And there were subsequent shocks to British complacency, too. The destruction of the British battle-cruisers at Jutland, the disproportion of the losses in that battle, and the successful withdrawal of the German fleet from an apparently hopeless situation, were harsh reminders to the British public that national security could not be entrusted merely to a large output of the shipyards and a semi-religious confidence in the national destiny; that (it was a difficult pill to swallow) other nations might produce navies in no way inferior man for man and ton for ton, and that intelligent preparation was a better weapon than blind faith.

These are lessons that have to be relearned every few generations, and which can be profitably remembered at any period in a nation’s history. They were remembered in England in 1940, when the highly efficient Royal Air Force handled by men of great ability beat back the attack of Goering’s squadrons which for years had by their mere existence paralysed the political thought of Europe. Once again, determination and fixity of purpose triumphed over irresolution and change of plan, intelligence and courage over obtuseness and over-confidence, material and personal excellence over numbers.

The material excellence of the American ships in 1812 had its origins in the germination of the Navy as far back as 1797. America was well served by her chief constructor, Joshua Humphreys, who combined originality of thought with professional ability, and whose shrewdness and tact enabled him to obtain a fair field for the employment of his other qualities. An Act of Congress had authorized the manning and employment of frigates; Humphreys saw to it that the frigates were outstanding in their class, taking advantage of an unwonted vagueness in the financial provisions of the Act and of its successors. He built with the avowed purpose of producing a frigate more powerful than any frigate yet thought of, of the dimensions of a not-too-small ship-of-the-line. He mounted in the hull the heaviest armament he could venture to mount, having consideration for the fact that Congress had authorized frigates and not ships-of-the-line. The ample funds of which he disposed enabled him to employ the best possible materials and workmanship. The fact that his vessels did not mount as great an armament as their displacement might justify made it possible to provide living quarters for the crew on a scale more liberal than was the case in other ships-of-war, and still left a margin available for larger space than was usual for the storage of food and water and munitions of war. And his native genius combined with his deep learning to give point to his ideas; he designed hulls and sail plans that excited the admiration of those qualified to judge and instilled a living force into his fighting machines.

There is some similarity between the situation of Humphreys working within the Congressional limitation of American ships-of-war to frigates and that of the German naval constructors after 1918 who were limited by treaty to the construction of ships under ten thousand tons. Each made liberal use of the funds at their disposal. The Germans produced the ‘pocket-battleship’; without regard to expense they made use of every means to cut down weight and to crowd as much fighting potential as possible within the arbitrary limit. They made use of every possible innovation. They substituted welding for riveting, diesel engines for steam. The ships they constructed were viewed with dismay by the other naval powers; they seemed to be the equal in fighting power of vessels of twice their displacement. Naval opinion was inclined to lose sight of another aspect of the case; Germany might have produced a still more powerful naval force for the same expenditure of funds if she had not been held within the arbitrary limits of ten thousand tons. In the same way Humphreys might have produced a more powerful force if he had not been restricted by the word ‘frigate’. Had he gone any farther, dissentient voices in Congress could have complained that what he was building were not frigates at all. He went as far as he could.

Yet America was well served by the persistence of the term. The Constitution and United States were frigates from the moment of their conception; they were not ‘large frigates’ or ‘extra-powerful frigates’. The warring countries used the same language; they were both addicted to the usage of rating a vessel by an arbitrary number of guns when actually she carried more—wartime exigencies, demanding that every vessel should be crammed with armament to the limits of safety and convenience, had brought that about—and, in the language they used, the term ‘frigate’ had an exact connotation. Ships were not expected to engage out of their class. A frigate could run from a ship-of-the-line without dishonour (although in special circumstances Pellew in the Indefatigable had destroyed the Droits de l’Homme) and a sloop could run from a frigate. But throughout the long French wars British frigates had engaged French frigates of superior force without hesitation and usually with success, and the British public had come to expect similar victories as a matter of course; so, for that matter, had the Royal Navy, and the defeat of a British frigate by a frigate of any other nation was a disturbing blow to the national pride.

The German Navy in this matter of nomenclature was less fortunate. The German ships were labelled ‘pocket-battleships’ and battleships they remained, even though treaty limitations, after they had been designed, brought about the construction of ships of the same tonnage which, with growing experience and a similar lavish expenditure of money, were more effective vessels-of-war and yet were called ‘cruisers’. The defeat of the Graf Spee at the River Plate was the defeat of a battleship in the eyes of the anxious British public and of the watchful American public and even of the propaganda-fed German public—although this does not decry the brilliant handling by Commodore Harwood, in that battle, of the much lighter British cruisers which won the victory.

It is hardly necessary to recall the military situation of the United States at the time when the news arrived of her first naval victories. General Hull had surrendered at Detroit on August 16, Dearborn and Van Rensselaer had had time enough to demonstrate their incompetence or their impotence or worse. The hope of a prompt and bloodless conquest of Canada had been succeeded by a fear of invasion no more reasonable, and despair was reinforced by suspicion. Rodgers had vanished into the Atlantic, and no one knew what had happened to him; if the American Army could fail so disastrously at Detroit, what could be expected of the American Navy? The Constitution had come into Boston with a tale of a hot pursuit, while off New York, by a British squadron—a tale which would lose nothing in the telling of the narrowness of the escape nor of the overwhelming strength of the enemy who had been evaded but who had already captured an American ship-of-war, the Nautilus. True, the Constitution had put to sea again, but could there be any reasonable hope of her achieving anything, seeing what her recent experience had been? And her captain bore the ominous name of Hull; he was indeed the nephew of the coward—or traitor—who had surrendered at Detroit.