September 28, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
il 
per cent, of what we need without risk, we are content 
to leave the odd 10 per cent, in dispute." 
This I take it is the strategy that Mr. Churchill adopted 
at Whitehall, and now sets out for the beneiit of the 
readers of the London Magazine. It is, like the rest of 
our naval policy, entirely defensive. And I do not use 
the word as a term of criticism or abuse, but simply to 
define its character. There is naturally much to be said 
for it. Presumably it has commended itself to a suc- 
cession of Boards of Admiralty, and must therefore have 
been consonant with the views of the party in the Fleet 
that, for the last twelve years, has exercised a pre- 
dominant influence. What is surprising I think is, 
that after the Battle of Jutland, which after all came 
very near to effecting the complete annihilation of 
the German fleet, Mr. Churchill should not have seen the 
really tremendous possibilities of a very different policy. 
A resolute offensive could not have been carried out in 
the beginning of the war, unless there had been very 
elaborate preparations for it. It would have meant 
holding the North Sea, not by concentrating the main 
force right away " in the northern mists." but by marshal- 
ling all the main elements of strength at some point far 
further south, so as to threaten the German fleet with 
immediate attack if it ventured out of its harbours. 
It would have involved very costly preparations in the 
conversion of disadvantageous bases and inlets into war 
harbours, and the thing manifestly could not be done at 
all without a provision of light cruisers and small craft 
far in excess of our pre-war establishment. Nor would 
the mere preparation of additional material have sufficed 
to rob this policy of inordinate risk. It would have been 
essential to have got to the bottom of all the means of 
using guns, mines, aircraft, and, above all, torpedoes, 
whether carried in destroyers or in submarines. And, as 
we know, no serious effort was ever made to get to the 
bottom of these things at all. 
Scientific Methods. 
In many ways the chief interest of Mr. Churchill's 
article is his incidental apology for this failure. It is, of 
course, the master fact of the situation, and it is one for 
which Mr. Churchill's administration is absolutely and 
solely responsible. For it was in the heyday of his 
power that he abolished the Inspectorship of Target 
Practice, the one independent establishment in the whole 
of our naval organisation, that had personnel, the 
experience and the expertise necessary for advising on 
.scientific methods of gunnery. It is needless to add that 
no corresponding organisation was set up for the study 
of destroyer, submarine or mine warfare. Yet there was no 
thinking person but must have realised, that if the Fleet 
was ever called upon to face the real thing, every weapon 
that it would use — or by which it would be threatened — 
would either by itself, or by its added range and accuracy, 
or by improvements in the vehicle that would carry it, 
present entirely new problems. Why were not these 
problems each and all of them thoroughly investigated 
and their solutions discovered before war began ? 
Mr. Churchill supplies us with the answer. He closes 
his article with a protest against naval operations being 
more critically and even captiously judged than military 
operations. They are so judged, he tells us, because of 
the apparent simplicity of a naval battle, and the obvious 
character of any disaster that happens to any unit of A. 
fleet. Regiments may be thrown away upon land, and 
no one be any the wiser, but to lose a ship is an event 
about which there can be no dispute. It is regarded 
as a disaster, and at once somebody, it is assumed, 
must be to blame. This is hard measure on the 
seamen. Surely an Admiral, he tells us, has a greater 
claim upon the generosity of his countrymen than a 
general. " His warfare is almost entirely novel. 
Scarcely one had ever had any experience of sea fighting. 
All had to learn the strange new, unmeasured, and in times 
of peace, largely immeasurable conditions." 
Now this is really a very striking admission. 
Wlience arose this theory that naval warfare consisted of 
imfathomable mysteries ? Perhaps the explanation is 
as follows : Popular interest in the navy was first 
thoroughlv aroused by Mr. Stead's Pall Mall articles in 
the middle eighties. It is from the controversies that 
he aroused that Brassey's and the other annual naval 
publications emerged. For twenty year^ newspaper 
interest in shipbuilding programmes, design and so 
forth, advanced in a crescendo of intensity. The many 
and startling departures in naval policy that character- 
ised Lord Fisher's tenure of the first professional place on 
the Board of Admiralty, brought this interest to a climax. 
There was a controversial demand for more costly pro- 
grammes, and the more costly programmes involvec"" 
political and journalistic opposition, which in turn pro- 
voked greater vigour in those that advocated them. 
Thus the whole of naval poHcy had to be commended to 
popular — and civilian — judgment. And it followed that 
the advocates of expansion had to employ arguments 
that civilians could understand. They very soon per- 
ceived that success lay along the line of sensationalism. 
Larger and faster ships, heavier and longer ranged guns, 
carrying bigger and more devastating shells, faster and 
more terrifying torpedoes, those new craft of weird 
mystery, the submarines — all these things in turn and 
for considerable periods were urged upon the public 
and the statesmen in terms of awe and wonder. But 
the . Augurs, instead of winking behind the %'eil, 
came finally to be hypnotised by their own wonder 
talk. Who cannot remember that ever recurring 
phrase, " the untold possibilities " of the new 
engines of war ? They got to be so convinced on 
this subject that they made no effort to find out precisely 
what the possibilities were, and Mr. Churchill's phrase 
that I have just quoted, " the strange new, unmeasured 
and largely ifnmeasurable conditions," exactly sum up 
the frame of mind of those who were responsible for 
naval policy up to and including Mr. Churchill's time. 
If all these problems were insoluble, if the con- 
ditions were immeasurable, if the possibilities of new 
weapons were really untold and untellable, what was the 
use of worrying about experiment and knowledge, judg- 
meit and expertise ? It was this frame of mind that 
led a humorist to suggest that the materialists ought 
really to be called the spiritualists. 
It was all very unfortunate, because any rightly or- 
ganised system of enquiry, investigation and experiment, 
would have dissipated this atmosphere of mystery once 
and for all. When new inventions are made that affect 
the processes of industry, it is not the men who go about 
talking of their untold " possibilities," their " incalcu- 
lable " effects, and their " immeasurable " results, that 
get the commercial advantage of their development. It 
is those who take immediate steps to investigate the 
limits of their action and the precise scope of their opera- 
tions who turn new discoveries to account. To talk as 
if the performance of guns, torpiedoes, submarine and 
aircraft, were beyond human calculation, was really a 
confession of incompetence. The application to these 
things of the principles of enquiry universally employed 
in other fields was always perfectly simple, and had it 
been employed wq should not have begun the war with 
wondering what we could do, but knowing precisely 
what we ought to do. 
It was want of preparation in these matters that was 
vmdoubtedly one of the deciding factors in tying us down 
both to defensive strategy 'and to defensive tactics. 
iMost people's eyes have been opened to these simple 
truths after two years of war, but Mr. Churchill seems 
to be preserving all his old ideas intact. He thinks it, 
for instance, a matter that is extremely satisfactory to 
us that the torpedo failed to influence the course of the 
sea buttle, because only one of our ships was hit, and 
that without being disabled. It is a remark that 
can only have arisen from failure to understand 
what torpedoes really effect. The purpose of 
defensive torpedo tactics in action is to drive pursuing 
squadrons off their course. Two advantages follow from 
success. If the enemy is made to change course, his 
fire control is thrown out and there is immediate relief 
from artillery attack. The successful employment of 
torpedoes is, then, a direct protection from gun-power, 
which may last anything from five minutes to a quarter 
of an hour, ^according to the efficiency of the gunnery 
organisation of the pursuing ships. The second advan- 
tage is certainly not less important. If the pursuers are 
turned off their course they lose way in the race. It gives 
the chase a new start. Are not these exactly the things 
