Febraary 24, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER 
NEW SUBMARINE CAMPAIGN. 
By Arthur Pollen. 
A BOUT ten years ago, when the Navy was sup- 
/% posed to be divided between the historical 
/ % and the viateriel schools, a distinguished 
A. JL admiral — of the latter persuasion — is said to 
have given this extraordinary reason for declining certain 
measures for encouraging the study of naval history. 
" There was no advantage," he said, " to be got from it, 
because history was after all only the record of other 
people's mistakes." As if the principle of the drunken 
Helot had not always been the most fruitful stimulus 
to wisdom ! Certainly this war has been no less fecund 
than previous wars in teaching by the method of trial 
and error. The catalogue of unquestioned sea blunders 
is too long a one to exhaust. There have been gross 
errors on both sides in the preparation of naval force 
and in the theory of its use. What have we paid and 
what have we yet to pay for our failure so to organise 
the brain power of our navy, that Admiralty programmes. 
Admiralty plans and Admiralty administration were 
projected , laid and conducted according to doctrines 
which the clearest thinkers have always held, and eighteen 
months of war have once more proved to be right ? 
What is the price that the Allies must pay for the failure 
of Great Britain to reahse from the lirst that our sea 
power was the Allies' greatest asset,. and should therefore, 
from the first day of the war, have been used with the 
completest rigour that was possible ? Had our reply to 
the outrages on Belgium been the proclamation of a 
strict blockade, no neutrals would have dared to protest, 
for all neutrajs were then boiling hot with indignation 
at the hideous and recent iniquity which had been done. 
W'hat has the shortage of cruisers cost us ? What might 
it have cost us had the Germans expected a war with us ? 
The humorist who said that our 1910 fleet consisted 
of "Dreadnoughts that submarines would chase off the sea, 
and of submarines that would not even have a Dread- 
nought to chase," was not so grossly wrong after all. 
We had no defensive plans against submarines ready. 
Our neglect of mines was inexplicable. Our failure to 
provide for the orderly and scientific development of 
na\'al gvmnery was almost insane, when it is remembered 
that the Dreadnought policy could only be justified 
by the use of guns being brought to perfection. 
Non-Use of Naval Power. 
What saved us from the worst features of our de- 
fective preparations was that our enemies fell into almost 
precisely the same errors. Still we did much by our 
non-use or mis-use of naval power to make things easier 
for them. The folly of limiting the Fleet's action bj' the 
Declaration of London no longer needs emphasis now 
that a Minister of Blockade is to be added to the Cabinet — 
a tardy recognition tliat in this matter we still have our 
sea power to use. The blunder of trying to take the 
Dardanelles by ships alone, the far greater blunder of 
failing to recognise, when its impossibility had been 
proved, that military success had been made impossible 
by it ; the rejection of the advice to treat the bombard- 
ments as demonstrations only, and on their failing to send 
the army destined for Gallipoli into Serbia — all these things 
can be traced to the non-recognition of the truth that the 
application of the principles of right strategy and right 
technique, is not a matter of instinct or of impulse, 
but can be ensured only where a duly constituted staff 
brings the weight of universally accepted and imper- 
sonally expressed principles to bear on practice. What 
would we not have given in October, 1915, to have had 
in Serbia the 200,000 men put out of action in Gallipoli ? 
Yet in Mafch, 1915, they could have been sent through 
Salonika to our Allies' help without difhculty or opposi- 
tion. 
Germany's blunders at sea have been even more 
flagrant and far more disastrous than our own. We 
do, after all, possess in our capital ship fleet an asset too 
(A'erwhelmingly powerful for our command of the seas 
to be questioned. The enemy could not take that com- 
mand from us, though we were free to misuse it. All 
Germany's naval action has followed from three things : 
Her folly in not foreseeing that Great Britain must be 
arrayed against her ; her folly in going on light-heartedly 
with the war after our opposition became certain — in 
the apparent belief that the land fighting would be over 
before the sea pressure began ; her folly in expressing 
by mere savagery her resentment at her £300,000,000 
fleet being valueless. The submarine campaign was, 
though the most effective, not the only one of her cruel 
and senseless expressions of her anger. The mine cam- 
paign against trading ships, the bombardment of the 
undefended coast towns, the attacking of ships by air 
bombs — each of these was but an outlet of the same 
unmeasured fury. 
The little neutrals — Holland, Denmark, Sweden 
and Norway— have never had it in their power to deal 
with Germany over these atrocities to puissance en 
puissance. America, manifestly sincere in wishing to 
keep out of the war, and no less sincere in trying to 
bring back naval war to its old legal standards of 
humanity, could alone so deal with Germany. And 
she will do so before the eventful chapter is closed. If 
it is inevitable that Germany should proceed with a new 
and more devastating campaign with a larger and more 
powerful submarine, then it is also inevitable that the 
condemnation by neutral countries of her conduct — so 
long held in abeyance — must take active shape. The 
quarrel between Germany and America/'so long and so 
patiently kept within bounds, must then become an 
open one, and when America finally speaks out, the 
other neutrals can hardly remain silent. 
Germany's Counterstoke. 
Is the new German submarine campaign inevitable ? 
It seemingly is. The first campaign has failed to lift 
the blockade — its professed object. Our losses in mer- 
chant shipping have been heavy. Between 500 and 
600 out of 8,000 in ig months of war. But our shortage 
of tonnage to-day does not arise primarily from the toll 
which the enemy has taken. The requirements of the 
fleet, the still greater requirements of our military ex- 
peditions over sea, have taxed the merchant navy four or 
five times more greatly than the enemy. Nor is this all. 
The merchant tonnage of the world, British as well as 
neutral, is less, not only by British ships sunk and with- 
drawn for military purposes. It is less by the whole 
German merchant mariile that has escaped capture. 
And the demands of the belligerents both for war supplies 
and for food, clothes and other necessaries from overseas, 
has become enormously greater. Notwithstanding, then, 
war's inroads on trade, a greatly diminished merchant 
shipping has witnessed enormously greater demands on 
its carrying capacity. And in this fact will probably be 
found the governing consideration that makes the new 
German campaign inevitable. Its object is no longer 
to terrify Great Britain into letting food enter Germany. 
Its object is to prevent food entering France. 
To cut off the sea communications of an enemy, to 
keep them open for ourselves and our friends, these 
are the equal and immediate objects of commanding the 
sea. How valuable the achievement of this object in 
the case of France has been may be gathered from the 
single fact that £90,000,000 of goods left the port of New 
York for France in 1915, whereas in normal years 
£30,000,000 represents the total exports of America tc 
that country. French imports from other countries arf 
no doubt as strikingly increased. The imports of al 
belligerent countries, and especially those that Russis 
is getting from Japan, must be fabulous. While, then, 
Germany feels every day the growing strain of her isola- 
tion, the Allies are showing every day a growing strength 
from their sea supplies. It is to sap this form of strength 
that the new submarine campaign will be directed- 
U 
