IC 
LAND & WATER 
November 23, 1916 
The Gentle Inquisitors 
By Arthur Pollen 
LORDS S\-dcnhani and Bcresford did a public 
SLTvico \d)on, in the course of the debute on 
Thui-sday last in the House of Lords, they elicited 
from the only representative of the Admiralty 
Uric present a complete and altogether unqualified 
repudiation of the "containment is equivalent to victory " 
heresy. This is a matter with which I have been weai:y- 
infj the readers of Land & Water since the third 
week of S<'ptember. Originally my text was the now 
famous opinion j^iven by Ca{)taiu Sims of the I'nitcd 
States Navy. The German Fleet was contained, he 
said, and there was, therefore, no need for the British 
IHect to seek a decisive battle. This was the original 
form in which was .set out this very mischievous doctrine. 
It was curious that h) gallant a captain should be heterodox, 
for the American Navy Board, over which that admirable 
veteran Admiral George Dewey jiresides, had quite 
early in the war laid down the true doctrine in terms that 
can hardly be improved. All through the autumn of 
1015, opinion had been growing in America that the 
I'nited States navy was jierilously weak and must Ix" 
reinforced promptly and adequately. In October rumours 
of Mr. Daniels' new progi^amme began to get about, and 
it was in the course of this autunm that the Navy 
Board issued their report. 1 hope on a future occasion 
to go into this question of American naval activity at 
greater length. For the moment I am concerned only 
with the statement of naval doctrine. The Navy Board 
l)uts it thus : 
" For the United States, bordering on two great oceans, 
a navy strong enough only to defend the coast from in- 
vasion is insufficient. It must protect our sea trade and 
commerce and drive the commerce of the enemy from the 
sea. T/ie beiH way io accomplish all these objects is to 
find and defeat tJte hostile fleet or any of its detachments." 
This being the opinion of the best A.merican naval 
authority, it seems strange enough that Captain Sims 
should not have realised, first, that if the British 
Navy had the choice between the best and the worst 
way of achieving its main object, it certainly ought not 
to be content with the worst, and next that containment 
did not in fact achieve the navy's true object at all. 
But there w ere special reasons, as my readers know , why 
Captain Sims was led into a statement of principle that 
ma)-, after all, only have been incautious. It was a> 
quite different thing when the ex-F'irst Lord of the 
Admiralty, in treating of the battle of Jutland itself, 
should have laid down not the same doctrini- as Captain 
Sims, but one that went a good deal further in the 
wrong direction. Mr. Churchill's version of the heresy, it 
may be remembered, was, that " without a battle we 
had all that the most victorious of battles could give us," 
and " that no obligation of war obliged us to go further." 
And he added that it was " no strategic cause " that im- 
}x>lled the British Admirals to the great and gallant 
lightingof May 31st. It was almost as if he had said that 
Indefatigable , Queen Mary, Invincible, Defence, Black Prince. 
and Warrior, the six destroyers and many thousands of 
officers, petty officers and men, had been lost in tlie effort 
to achieve a victory that must have been entirely w ithout 
influence on the war ! It was not then, merely a state- 
ment of more than questionable doctrine, it was a direct 
and most grave imputation on the Admirals who planned 
and carried out the fighting on that memorable day. 
I-'or it is surely axiomatic that, next to refusing to fight 
resolutely and to a finish when victory is possible, there 
can be no worse offence than to risk ships and men 
foolishly and recklessly without any adequate military 
object. 
What was even more amazing than Mr. Churchill's ' 
light hearted emission of such devastating errors, was 
that the Board of Admiralty was content to lie passive 
under this imputa'rion on their professional competence, 
and did not firmJy and at once resent the slur Mr. 
Churchill had jnit upon Admirals JelHcoe and Beatty. 
The Lord Mayor's, banquet gave Mr. Balfour an oppor- 
tunity of putting this matter right, but on that occasion 
he seemed more concerned to defend his colleagues and 
himself from the charge of naval " passivity." He did 
not seem to realise that the accusation that the Higher 
Command was actuated from first to last by wholly false 
jiotions of strategy was a far more serious charge 
than that it might, from time to time, lapse into in- 
sufficient watchfulness or into odd phases of inactivity. 
Lord Sydenham's Purpose 
It was Lord Sydenham's purpose, he told the House of 
Lords, to ask thi/ .Vdmiralty for a definite statement one 
way or another. Did they or did they not endorse the 
Churchill theorv of naval strategy ? It fell to Lord 
Lytton, who has just succeeded the Duke of Devonshire 
as a Civil Memlx-r of the Board, to reply, and we must 
assume the actual terms that he .employed are not mere- 
ly his own but express the considered opinions of his 
colleagues. If they are indeed the rejily of the Board to 
Mr. Churchill's challenge, let us say at once that they are 
almost as satisfactory as they could possibly be. " If the 
noble Lord asks," he said. " whether it is a fact, that the 
policy of the Admiralty with regard to naval strategy 
at the present time is governed by the view, that it is 
not necessary to .seek out and destroy the enemy, and 
by a feeling that we have at the present time gained all 
we want, bj' confining the enemy to their ports, I most 
emphatically repudiate on behalf of the Admiralty any 
such suggestion. Neither is it the opinion of the Com- 
manders of the Fleet, nor of the War Staff of the Ad- 
miralty, that it. is not our main and first business to seek 
out and destroy the enemy fleet." This surely is explicit 
enough for anyone and should entirely allay that wide- 
spread alarm and uneasiness to which both Lord Syden- 
ham and Lord Beresford drew attention. And it is 
particularly gratifying that Lord Lytton's repudiation 
was not confined to the Board of Admiralty, but in- 
cluded the Commanders-in-Chief at sea, and the War Staff. 
It seems reasonable then to hope that we have heard 
the last of open — and I had almost added shameless — 
advocacy of a defensive national strategy at sea. And 
this in its way is a victory of great importance. But we 
must not fall into the opposite error of thinking it is all 
the victory we want. It must be admitted — and sorrow- 
fully — that it is a negative victory only. The abjuration 
of a heresy does not imply a thorough, whok-hearted 
grasp of the true faith. Indeed, the (hand* Inquisitors 
who were called upon in the Lords to condemn the ver- 
satile Mr. Churchill to the stake, were exceedingly tender 
in their methods, so tender indeed that one of them 
came perilously near falling into the same heresy himself ! 
Lord Lytton begged to be allowed to say at once that 
while he held no brief for the opinions expressed in those 
articles — imagine anyone defending them ! — he was 
inclined to d.oubt whether they did " in fact, bear all 
the meaning that had been read into them in various 
cjuarters." And, of course, it is quite possible that a great, 
variety of meanings, not all of them plausible, may have 
been read in. But surely their simplest meaning was 
tpiite suflicient. They propounded the theory that all 
the fruits of victory could be obtained without the toils 
and, above all, the risks and cost, that victory involves. 
\Vhat does Mr. Churchill gain from being defended from 
other heresies, if he stand convicted of this ? The signifi- 
cant thing is that Lord Lytton should even make a show 
of defending him. 
Then what arc we to say to one of Lord Crewe's observa- 
tions, in reply to the one of the mover's points as to certain 
statements of naval doctrine in essays, honoured by the 
naval authorities by gold medals and commendations ? 
These, said Lord Sydenham, pretended to set out an 
exhaustive statement of the functions of a fleet and 
entirely omitted placing decisive action in the forefront. 
Lord Crewe suggested that the omission might be c.x- 
plamed by the fact that "we used to have debates in this 
