10 
LAND & WATER 
September 28, 1916 
Enemy Activities at Sea 
By Arthur Pollen 
ALTHOUGH we are no longer allowed to know 
/\ the drtailed incidents of the submarine attacks 
/ \ on allied and neutral trading ships, it is clear 
_Z jk^enoui,'h from the published information that 
the inemy's under-water campaign is as hvely and 
as menacing as ever it was. And it is also 
clear that, in spite of its vigour, it still entirely 
fails to come up to the expectation of the German 
Jingoes. For it seems quite undoubted now that the 
Biuluw-Reventlow-Tirpitz party have captured the 
>'avv League and several of the most popular papers, 
and "are concentrating their forces for an attack upon the 
Chancellor— which they hope will be decisive. To anyone 
who follows the (ierman press, the ground of their attack 
is extremely clear. It is that he has neglected to bring 
Kngland to" her knees by submarine, as he could and 
should have done. Popular expression of this faiUi is 
extremely naive. A committee, for instance, has been 
organised in Munich for putting England out of action 
with great rapidit/. The committee has suddenly 
realised the importance of this, for it is awakened to the 
fact that our heavy defeats on the Somme will not suffice 
to lower the crests of so proud and obstinate a people as 
ourselves. Germanv is. in fact, at last alive to the 
truth that, if England is to be beaten— as of course she 
must be. because unless she is the others never can 
be beaten — then the trick must be done at sea. And 
sea victories of the ordinary- kind clearly do not suffice, 
any more than the (ierman victories of the Somme. 
The battle of Jutland is nearly four months old, and the 
Fatherland has reaped just "nothing as its harvest of 
that -.ictory. Somehow the blockade still goes on, some- 
how prices of food still go up, and the amount of food 
available goes down. For some reason not given, there is 
no talk of repeating Jutland. It may be even suspected 
that a fiw more similar victories would leave Germany 
with no fleet at all. But there is a wonderfnl unanimity 
that the submarine arm can do what Scheer and Von 
Hipper hardly succeeded in bringing off. 
It is very "improbable that there is any reality behind 
all this agitation. But discussion of this sort helps the 
Higher Command, if only because it keeps up the illusion 
that Germanv still has cards up her sleeve, and that 
she can play them, if things become really serious. In 
other words, this domestic quarrelling is a proof to all 
that thmgs are not serious now. The game is an inter- 
esting one to the onlookers, and I plead guilty to a con- 
siderable curiosity as to what the Chancellor ^vill say in 
self-defence. 
Meanwhile, for reasons I do not pretend to understand, 
it has become the allied policy to maintain silence about 
submarine successes, the greater part of which must be 
quite well known to the enemy. The advantages of this 
policy may be and probably arc an ample justification 
for its enforcement. But its disadvantages are naturally 
much more obvious, for since May, when the rule of 
silence began, a great many ships have been attacked 
and sunk' — and not in the Mediterranean only — in abso- 
lute defiance of the German undertaking to America of 
May 4th. One would have thought that if the utmost 
publicity were given to these events an educative value 
should be derived from them. The people of America 
are about to elect a new President. The two candidates 
and the parties that support them are of one mind in 
tlnnking it America's chief business to be neutral, and 
the undertaking of May 4th is quoted to show that 
neutrality is compatible with a firm assertion of national 
rights and dignity. It could do the German cause no 
good, and the allied cause might, it would seem, be 
benefited if the utmost publicity were given to every 
-^ase in which a shij) was attacked and the persons and 
lives of passengers and crew jeopardised by submarines 
tor^iedoing them without warning. In a few cases 
sufficient details have been published to prove that the 
undertaking to America has not been observed. We 
hear, as if accidentally, of their being made the subject 
.of investigation by Washington. But such dilatory 
and secret enquiries are of very little, if of any value, in 
bringing home the root truths of the situation to the 
popular mind. Nothing but newspaper pubhcity can 
effect this. 
Of late the enemy has added to his under-water 
activities three or four successful efforts with surface 
craft. Certain British and neutral steamers have been 
captured by forces sent out from Zecbrugge, and amongst 
the prisoners taken out of the Dutch mail steamer are 
certain naval ratings from the interned in Holland who 
were on their way to England on leave. It will be 
interesting to see if the Dutch succeed in obtaining the 
surrender of these prisoners'. To have taken them at all 
was, of course, a gross sliglit on the Dutch sovereignty. 
What we are more concerned with, however, is the added 
evidences of the disadvantages which our North Sea 
strategy imposes. 
Mr. Churchill as Strategist 
I dealt with this subject in a cursory manner last week, 
apropos of Captain Sims' critique of the Battle of Jut- 
land. Now I find he is by no means a solitary exponent of 
the defensive theory. No less an authority than the 
late First Lord of the Admiralty has dashed into print 
with an eloquent repetition of Captain Sims' heresies. 
" Although," says Mr. Churchill, " the battle squadrons 
of the Grand Fleet have been denied all opportunity of 
decisive battle, yet from the beginning they have enjoyed 
ALL the fruits of a complete victory. If Germany had 
never built a Dreadnought, or if all German Dread- 
noughts had been sunk, the control and authority of the 
British Navy could not have been more effective. There 
has been no Trafalgar, but the full consequences of Trafal- 
gar have been continuously operative. " There is, of 
course, a sense in which this is true, because for ten years 
after Trafalgar was fought we lost every year more ships 
than the German submarines have taken from Allies and 
neutrals altogether since this war began. But when 
Mr. Churchill goes on to say that " no obligation of war 
requires us to go further," and that at Jutland " there 
was no need for the British to seek battle at all," that 
our. motives for seeking battle were only " zeal and 
strength," and that " a keen desire to engage the enemy 
impelled, and a cool calculation of ample margins of 
superiority justified, a movement not necessarily required 
by any practical need," then it is necessary to remind 
him that if, in modern conditions, we could bring off a 
modern Trafalgar, a great deal more would follow from 
it than followed from Nelson's historic victory. 
If without any battle at all the whole of Germany's 
merchant shipping and cruiser activities could be extin- 
guished on the high seas, what would happen from the 
final destruction of the whole of her main organised 
naval force ? We have only to look at the general naval 
po.sition, as very lucidly set out by Mr. Churchill, to 
reaUse how greatly an unnecessary victory would help 
us. Our pre-war, and indeed, if Mr. Churchill now 
expounds the doctrines of Whitehall, our present strategy 
has always contemplated the North Sea being a kind of 
no man's sea between two entrenched fleets. To the 
Germans we say, " We blockade you at the Channel, we 
blockade you north of the Sound. The outer seas, except 
for your slinking submarines, we control utterly. We 
leave you the North Sea, which j-ou will enter at your 
peril, because if you do we may cut you off and bring 
you to action when you least expect it. But we do not 
bind ourselves to hunt you down or to hem you into your 
own harbours, because we are quite content, so long as 
the rest of the sea is ours, and so long as you can put 
the North Sea to no mihtary use directly hostile to this 
country, and practically to no commercial use, to leave 
things as they are. We do not consider depriving you 
of all naval activity as worth the cost. Having got' 90 
