July 24, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER, 
Bubraarine — which can attack, but cannot engage, 
which can sink an enemy, but cannot fight him — 
can make itself safe, by inclining its planes and 
burying itself beneath the waves. A means of 
attaining complete safety, at once so immediate 
and so complete, combined with the possession of 
a weapon so instantaneously destructive, gave the 
submarine a character that had become fabulous 
before its efficiency was tested in v.ar. It is 
barely a year since, on the invitation of Sir Percy 
Scott, we were all arguing whether any battleship 
could remain afloat, now that the submarine was 
in existence. Eleven months of war have taught 
us that command of the sea resides to-day, as it 
always has resided, with the possession of the 
greatest number of the most powerful fighting 
units, so long as they can be fought with an 
efficiency at least equal, if not superior, to that 
which the enemy units command. For all the sub- 
marine's command of safety, for all its power of 
invisible approach, for all its possession of the 
instantaneously annihilating weapon, it has, as 
a simple matter of fact, been entirely powerless* 
to diminish the number of the principal fighting 
units on either side, and the fighting units have 
not been compelled to abandon their main task 
by the measures they have taken to preserve 
themselves. The submarine has not alTected, even 
in the most remote manner, that command of the 
sea on which our continuance as a prosperous 
nation, and our ability to take part in a Con- 
tinental war, depend. 
In the first few months of hostilities it cer- 
tainly had a success, which was much greater in 
the estimation of those Avho watched it than in 
actual fact. Its powers and limitations had been 
set before the world by Captain Murray Sueter, 
R.N., so long ago as 1907. The problem of defeat- 
ing it had been shown by this very able and clear- 
sighted officer to be a far more complicated and 
far more urgent problem than that of using it to 
the best effect. But, for reasons which we need 
not stop to examine, this problem had never in 
times of peace been examined with the thorough- 
ness that was to be expected from a sea Power 
that had everything to lose and nothing to gain 
by bringing the submarine to perfection. What 
we had failed to anticipate, by intelligent analysis 
and well-considered experiment, in time of peace, 
Ave learned by the rude ordeal of loss of lives and 
ships in war. No sooner were the Hogtie, Crcssy, 
and Aboukir, Hawke, Hermes, and Niger sunk, 
than it was suddenly realised that to avoid being 
sunk was quite a simple affair for ships of war. 
Formidable fell in what were undoubtedly novel 
cxjnditions. But they were not conditions tliat 
would have been overlooked had the preliminary 
analysis been scientifically conducted. From the 
sinking of Formidable to the sinking of 2'riiimph 
and Majestic was a matter of some months, and 
the more one learns of the circumstances in which 
these ships were sunk, the more amazing does 
their undoing become, unless, for good reasons, 
the risk was deliberately taken. The Gambetta, 
A malfi, and Garibaldi seem to have succumbed in 
circumstances indistinguishable from those in 
which our ov.n ships were lost. Surely it stands 
to reai^'On, if ships by the limitation of tlieir fire 
control can only be employed whon they are 
stationary, that to employ them thus is to make 
certain of their being sure and '" sitting "' targets 
if submarines are about. 
Rightly considered, we can say that twelve 
months' experience have shown that warships 
need never be lost by submarine attack, except in 
those rare conjunctions in which a vessel going at 
high speed chances to pass one at a range at which 
missing is impossible — as may have been the case 
when Roxburgh was hit recently — or in conditions 
of seeing in which the periscope is invisible. 
PROBLEMS OF SUBMARINE 
ATTACK. 
The distinguished correspondent whose gun- 
nery problems I discussed last week propounded 
a second question, relating to the defence of war- 
ships against submarine torpedo attack. Part of 
his question is answered by the fact that we have 
not, so far, lost a single warship that could not by 
precautions which now seem elementary have been 
saved. The possibilities of surprise can be — and, 
in fact, have been — reduced by ships being escorted 
by fast craft. Their speed and armament, when 
employed to scour for the submarine with the de- 
sired vigilance, can make under-water operations 
so diflicult and so dangerous as to be well nigji 
impossible. But in the exceptional case they will 
fail, as they failed with Triumph and Majeatic. 
Is there any way of meeting these cases? Can 
the ship be made torpedo-proof 1 
So far as I know, this pi'oblem was never 
seriously faced until, after the teachings of the 
Japanese War, the question was gone into in 1907. 
If I remember rightly, experiments were then 
made with exploding gun-cotton charges under 
specially prepared portions of the old Duke of 
Edinbtirgh. But the character of the passive 
defence employed, and the result of the experi- 
ments, were quite properly kept secret. And no 
ship designed since 1907 — I mean, of course, no 
armoured ship — has so far been torpedoed. It 
still remains to be proved whether the problems 
considered in 1907 have been satisfactorily solved. 
But one would be inclined to hazard the guess 
that none of the experiments of eight years ago 
were carried out with charges of the dimensions 
used at the present time. It is possible, therefore, 
even if protective measures have been adopted 
in more modern designs of ships — whether by a 
greater subdivision into compartments, or by the 
actual employment of armour, or, at any rate, of 
a far stronger system of bulkheads — that these 
might prove quite ineffective against modern 
charges. 
But this is not to say that the problem of pas- 
sive defence is insoluble. It is in the nature of 
things that, when a disease is declared, the dis- 
covery of its remedy is, at the lowest, facilitated. 
The ingenuity of constructors may, for all I know 
to the contrary, already have found nicthods by 
which future ships can be made virtur.lly safe 
against under-water attack, at least to the point 
of maintaining fiotation, even if speed and 
mobility suffer. 
But if the problem has not been solved, and if 
it prove, as it may well j)rove, insoluble, an alter- 
Jiative way out of the difficulty will most 
certainly have to be considered. The object 
of all passive defence is to locdise the in- 
jury. And beyond question the most effective 
way of localising it will be to cut the ship in 
half, when for anv gi^en underwater attack only 
half would suffer. Is it practical to substitute 
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