10 
LAND & WATER 
November 2, 1916 
The Channel Raid 
By Arthur Pollen 
IT is hard to conceive of a more utterly thankless 
job than the headship of the British Navy in this 
war. W'c have an enemy who is keenly military 
in all his aims ; completely unscrupulous in his 
nu'tliods : extraordinarily skilful in seeking his objects 
without having to fight for them. The submarine — and 
his own ingenuity— have enabled him to carry the art of 
evasion in naval war to a point hitherto undreamt of. 
It follows that the chances of the superior force gaining 
popular or picturesque successes must be singularly few. 
Conversely, there is thrown on the British Navy a task 
that has never in any war been perfectly performed, and 
in modern war, never can be. The trade we have to 
protect is not merely our own trade, nor our own and 
our Allies'. It is the trade of the whole world, on which 
all the belligerent countries arc entirely dependent. 
Under-water attack, whether active from the submarine, 
or passive from the mine — and the mine may be laid by 
submarine— is absolutely sure of taking a certain toll from 
it. The toll may sometimes be large, sometimes moderate, 
but any toll can, and certainly will be, looked upon as 
proving the failure of the Admiralty's defence. The 
unfortunate thing is that the public has no means, when 
this toll is large, of judging whether it arises from an 
increase in the enemy's resources and an improvement 
in his military skill, or, on the other hand, from some 
decline in the energy, resolution or power of direction of 
our counter-campaign. 
Further, if the whole of the naval forces of a country 
that is anything but poor in these, are concentrated on a 
comparatively narrow front that can be made not only 
impenetrable but almost unapproachable by mines, it 
is as if these forces had been spirited off the field alto- 
gether, in the sense that there exists apparently no means 
either of hunting them down in their lairs or even of 
blockading them there. As a consequence, we have in 
naval war the curious phenomenon that the initiative 
is with the weaker and fugitive force. In other words, 
the navy that has vanished from our ken may strike like 
a bolt from the blue at any moment and in any direction, 
and however strong the stronger power may be, it cannot 
be equally strong at ev^ery point that is open to attack. 
This again has always been so in naval war, and the 
modern inventions of scouting aircraft and slinking under- 
sea craft have added greatly to the possibilities of the 
sortie fleet. Thus, a naval war in which one side is so 
predominant that the other avoids action, is bound — in 
the absence of a decisive battle — to resolve itself, so far 
as naval incidents go, into a succession of successes by 
the weaker power, and a story of failure by the stronger. . 
.Vnd as the world generally is tempted to judge of the 
progress of the war, not by the permanent and abiding 
conditions set up, but by the occurrences, it may well 
happen from time to time that public confidence will 
rise and fall, and that there will be no, or little, relation 
between these and the true progress of the war. 
Sometimes the public will form an opinion broadly 
right in its general complexion, but account for holding it 
by an entirely wrong explanation. For example, at the 
end of the month of October, 1914, the Admiralty was 
in imcommonly bad odour. Everybody felt that things 
were as wrong as they possibly could be, but most of us 
were completely misled as to the cause of this state of 
things, and therefore as to the cure. The former was 
alleged to be that the First Sea Lord had been born a 
German subject. The latter, we were assured, would 
be found in substituting Lord Fisher for Prince Louis. 
But the cause was something entirely different. It lay 
broadly in the fact that for a great many years the Navy 
had been administered on entirely wrong .strategical 
principles ; that it was neither technically nor, what 
was much more serious, mentally prepared for war, so 
that the problem of adapting it for war was of an acutely 
baffling kind. By the old constitution of the Board of 
Admiralty the whole of the conduct of war fell into the 
bands of a courageous, energetic, but entirely ignorant 
young layman, who happened to be First Lord when 
hostilities broke out. There was no machinery for 
guiding or directing his energies in any authoritative 
way, no inmiediate means by which the direction of naval 
activities bv naval knowledge and naval skill could be 
assured. We were pajang the penalty, in other words, 
of ten years' naval misdirection. Now clearly it was no 
remedy for this state of things to call into a partnership 
with Mr. Churchill, the naval oflicer who, during the 
previous ten years had been chiefly responsible for making 
naval administration what it was. When, .therefore. 
Prince Louis left and Lord Fisher came in, there was 
and could be no real change for the better in the things 
that mattered, and as a fact there was just no change at 
all. 
A Change of System 
The change from the ChurchiU-Fisher to the Balfour- 
Jackson regime was something more than a change of per- 
sonnel. It was to a great extent a change of system, and 
it has stood the strain of the last eighteen months with a 
success that it would not be polite to call extraordinary. 
Now it is faced by a new condition. The year has been 
marked by continuous manifestations of tierman naval 
activity. On the morning of April 26th a squadron of 
(ierman battle cruisers, light cruiser^ and destroj'ers 
appeared off Lowestoft and bombarded the town. It 
\\as engaged by the local naval forces, and after a 20 
minutes stay retreated, pursued by the light cruisers and 
destroyers. Two of our cruisers and one destroyer were 
hit but none was sunk. On May 8th and May I7tti 
there were encounters between destroyers of both sides , 
and on the latter occasion monitors were also engaged. 
On May 31st, as we all remember, the whole (German 
fleet came out, and after being engaged from half-past 
three till 6.20, by our battle cruisers, light cruisers and 
destroyers, executed a masterly retreat under cover of 
smoke screens and torpedo attacks, from the British 
(".rand Fleet. Early in June there was another long- 
range affair off Zeebrugge, in which both sides vehe- 
mently denied that any damage had been done. On 
the 23rd of that month, the Harwich-Rotterdam steam- 
ship Brussels was captured by enemy destroyers and 
taken into Zeebrugge. And outrage was added to 
insult by the judicial murder of her heroic captain. 
On the 22nd July there were two affairs between torpedo 
boats, one off the North Hinder light vessel and another 
off the Schouwen Bank. According to the British story, 
the (jerman forces, consisting of three destroyers, retired 
in the first of these engagements before they could be 
damaged. In the second six enemy destroyers were 
found, and were engaged in a running fight during which 
they were repeatedly hit, nevertheless they succeeded in 
reaching the Belgian coast. Our vessels acknowledged 
the receipt of one hit, which slightly woimded an ofiicer 
and a man, otherwise our forces were untouched. The 
German story put a very different complexion on the 
affair. Alluding apparently to the second of these 
engagements, it declared that reconnaissance had been 
made as far as the mouth of the Thames without meeting 
any enemy forces at all. That on the return journey on 
the morning of the 23rd, some cruisers of the Aurora 
class and some destroyers were encountered, and that 
some lucky hits were secured against them. But there 
was no acknowledgment of any casualties suffered. I 
dealt with the sortie of August, and the adventures of 
the Muenclien with a British submarine last week. And 
now we have the news of the raid on our transport routes 
on Friday last. 
The facts of this case are at the time of writing some- 
what difficult to disentangle. There is no doubt that the 
Queen, fortunately empty, was found by the enemy and 
destroyed. From the fact that the officers and crew 
were saved, it must I think be inferred that the enemy 
did not sink at sight, but gave those on board the 
