December 7, 1916 
rLAND & WATER 
«7 
doing so will serve a double purpose. If our embargo is 
complete, we ensure a constant sapping of the civil 
resolution of our enemy, and, consequentially, a constant 
diminution of his ultimate military strength. It is a 
form of pressure which may force him to fight at sea, 
the thing we most desire. For it is upon a decisive sea- 
fight that our second counter-stroke, the direct attacks 
on the submarines themselves and the aggressive defence 
of our trade, largely depends. One would have thought 
it hardly necessary that this point should once more be 
argued. But, within the last few days, two signed 
articles have appeared by naval and military writers 
in journals of great repute. In one, we were told that 
the Grand Fleet had nothing whatever to do with the 
submarine campaign ; in another, that it was a matter 
of absolute indifference whether the German fleet were 
defeated and sunk or not, except of course, for the prestige 
its sinking would give our navy. Surely the best answer 
to such statements as these is to ask this question. If 
the new First Sea Lord were given his choice between a 
sea action, in which half the British capital ships were 
sunk and all the Germans, or keeping both fleets 
intact — which would he choose ? No one could hesitate. 
Remove the High Seas Fleet and two forms of counter- 
stroke against the submarine become possible. And so 
far as we can see they are the only two forms that can 
ever be really effective. If, at the last resort, the enemy 
cannot defend his own minefields nor attack our defence 
of those we lay- — with the largest units of naval force, 
then, in the main, the war of mines passes from the enemy 
to us. In a great measure, if not entirely, hostile sub- 
marines could be kept within the limits of their bases. 
But, only when the main force of the enemy has gone 
can the mine war be carried to the approaches of his 
harbours. This is the first, and might easily be the most 
effective, of all measures for ridding the seas of these 
piratical pests. The second is to employ the most 
numerous possible force of mobile and well-armed ships, 
either for a modified form of convoy or for patrolling the 
routes that the trade must take, or for the direct search 
for and pursuit of the submarines themselves. We all 
know that to-day all our fastest cruisers, and all our 
most modern destroyers are, necessarily, devoted to their 
allotted duties with the main squadrons. The mine and 
the torpedo have in this respect revolutionised sea force 
altogether. The battleship is still the strongest and the 
supreme unit, but it can only be employed with faster 
and lighter craft, that can find the minefields and warn 
the main squardon, or can attack and deflect the torpedo- 
usii^g light craft of the enemy, and themselves hold the 
menace of under-water attack over the opposing squadrons 
and, by this attack, turn them off their course, shake and 
deflect their gun fire, and make the final task of the 
great gun-bearing vessels easier. If there were no enemy 
Beet afloat, all this light craft, the ideal vessels for the 
purpose, would be available for the anti-submarine cam- 
paign. Once more the point must be insisted on that 
success in the immediate task of the moment can only be 
made complete when sea victory is complete. 
Need of Attack 
How else, save by blockade, can naval force be used to 
compel the enemy fleet to fight ? Only by invasion. 
And doubtless one of the main questions that the new 
Admiralty must consider, concerns the possibilities of 
opening the Baltic, and all other forms of amphibious 
aggression that are possible. It would be a fatal error 
and one most unlikely to be committed, for the impression 
to gain ground that the new regime regarded its main 
task to be purely defensive. And in this connection it 
is well to draw attention to a not very cheering symptom. 
A good many journals have administered cautionary 
warnings to Sir Da\id Beatty not to gamble with the 
fleet. " Why," says one mentor, " should we be tempted 
into adventures which if they fafled might imperil the 
mighty victory which the navy is silently winning ? 
We win by waiting, the enemy loses by waiting. A false 
step at sea would be fatal to us, it would not be fatal to 
the enemy." Another reminds the new Commander-in- 
Chief tiiat " (lashing courage and determination must be 
associated witli strategic insight and a measure of what 
may be called calculating caution." Do these writers 
i eaily suppose that Sir David Beatty's mind is likely to be 
improved by precepts of this sort ? Do they really think 
that any person of sense accepts the Churehillian doctrine 
that Germany has everything to gain by defeating the 
Grand Fleet, and we nothing to gain by sinking the 
German fleet ? Or that it is " the primary and dominant 
fact of the situation that from its bases in Scottish waters 
the British fleet delivers a continuous attack upon the 
vital necessities of the enemy ; whereas the enemy, from 
his home bases, produces no corresponding effect upon 
us." If Lord Beresford's statement is true, that nearly 
1,500 of the ships, available for the service of the Allies, 
have already been sunk by submarines, if the German 
statement is true that our shipping is vanishing from the 
sea at the rate of about 10,000 tons a day, surely a more 
flagrant conflict with the truth could hardly be set out. 
Now to force the enemy to an issue, whether by a sea 
fight or by an amphibious fight, must obviously involve 
risks, and the pubhc must take it for certain that, it 
our naval policy is to get a new orientation, and a fresh 
vigour, and is to be marked by a new boldness and 
decision, no success can be won without certainly risking 
and probably incurring great losses. Cool-headed on- 
lookers see this clearly enough. It is gratifying to see 
in Tuesday's Morning Post a quotation from a New York 
paper in praise of Admiral Beatty's appointment. Its 
eulogy was based upon the fact that he had been rightly 
willing to sacrifice his ships at the critical moment in the 
Jutland battle, when, by doing so, it seemed that the 
sacrifice might secure the crushing defeat of the enemy. 
Let the public be assured that in this matter Whitehall 
and the men at sea must be, and will be, at one. If 
Sir David Beatty does not know his own business — when 
to take a risk, because only so can the desired result be 
gained, and when to avoid it because the risk is greater 
than the object justifies — then no one does. If Sir John 
Jellicoe cannot choose between policies in which success 
is possible, at a cost that is tolerable, and those.in which 
failure is too likely, then we are in a bad way indeed. 
But neither one man nor the other needs instruction in 
these elements of war. 
Sir John JelHcoe 
So far I have dealt with these two momentous changes 
simply as they affect the command of the Grand 
Fleet and the policy under which it is directed. But the 
First Sea Lord will have many duties besides these, 
and indeed in some respects the Grand Fleet, its mission, 
its care and its supply v.'ill, if not the least of his burdens, 
still be far less burden to him than it was to any of his 
predecessors. For he knows its needs at first hand. 
He knows its conduct is in the best hands. And his 
own work, while in command, was so thoroughly done 
as to leave, as we have seen, his successor a lighter burden 
than he bore himself. 
His own burden is one that none will envy. 
He has with him in what he undertakes, not only the 
best wishes, but the confidence of his fellow countrymen 
to a quite extraordinary degree. That his task is the 
most difficult of the day is hardly disputable. Three 
distinguished seamen have preceded him in it — -and no 
one of the three has succeeded. And its difficulties — 
except in the one respect — have not diminished. They 
have, on the contrary, increased enormously. Apart 
from questions affecting the main fleet, the naval pro- 
blems of the day are vastly more complicated than they 
were. A good many writers in the Press, I observe, 
have invited us to put confidence in the new First Lord, 
because of his long experience of Admiralty administration. 
They remind us that he has been assistant to Sir John 
Fisher when he was Director of Naval Ordnance, assistant 
to him again when he was Controller and third Sea Lord ; 
then that he was himself Director of Naval Ordnance 
and then ControUer, and finaUy served as Second Sea 
Lord, and that he had two brief spells of sea command, 
one between his tenure of the post of D.N.O. and Con- 
troller, and the other between his two tenures of office 
on the Board. And, undoubtedly, a man who is master 
of official procedure and forms is less likely to waste 
time reading unnecessary papers, or to get tangled up 
in the intricacies of red tape, than one whose whole time 
has been spent at sea. But these, after all, arc very 
negative advantages. A strong man, in time of war 
especially, would not long or often be hampered by 
