24 
LAND & WATER 
March 29. 1017 
contcmporarv torpedo boats. But by ifjio the displace- 
ment had risen to 600 tons and the horse-power to nearly 
2,000. So that to a fleet of submarines already more than 
60 btronf^, we were adding vessels of large radius and of good 
sea keeping qualities, craft that, in so greatly sur]>»s.-ing 
their prototypes in si/.e and speed, opened up new lirlds 
of action still more astonishing. (Jennany, that had but 
seven submarines at this time, and not one of them 
jnore than lialf the displacement of those that we pro- 
])osed to build, promptly availed herself of the lessons 
of our example. We had forged a new weapon and 
placed it ready made, so to speak, in our enemy's hands. 
Wc had done this forgetting that, if our other fleet — the 
surface battleships, cruisers and destroyers — were 
sufficient for their purpose, we could in war have few if 
any targets for our submarines to attack, forgetting that, 
in changing the submarine from a harboin- to an ocean 
craft, we were making it possible for the threatened 
fiuerrc dc course to become a jiractical reality : 
forgetting, in sliort, that the new craft was priceless to 
the weak and almost useless to the strong, precisely 
because it is only to the strong at sea that it is a threat, 
r'or submersion would give to the submarine the true 
invisibility of wliich surprise in attack and evasion in 
defencearethe tactical fruits, instead of that temporary 
and relative invisibility for which Anbv'f, tnrpilleurs \\nu\d 
have liad to rely upon their speed alone. Submarines, of 
the new tvpe then, in sufficient numbers, would fulfil 
his prophecy to the letter. Thus the policy that von 
Tirpitz propounded in December i<)i4 was borrowed from 
the ideas of the French writer, and was made practicable 
by the thoughtless pioneer work of the British Admiralty. 
Submarines and Coast Defence 
It must be supposed that the nature and scale of the 
threat was then, at least, understood. If it was, the 
safety of the transports serving our six theatres of war on 
land is the greater wonder. For with the incomparable 
resources of the British ship yards at our disposal, two 
years and eight months preparation have not sufficed to 
bring the attack on our trade to, I will not say negligible, 
but. even to reasonably safe proportions. The jieril of 
the trade and the safety of the transports afford, indeed, 
an extraordinary contrast. And all the more extra- 
ordinary if we look at the thing from another point of 
view. Whatever else the submarine could or could 
not do, there seemed no doubt that adequate num- 
bers would make the arrival of transports off an 
enemy's coasts or harbours virtually impossible. They 
seemed, it was agreed, to offer just that added element 
to naval power that would make invasion, not the first, 
but the last operation that any fleet could attempt. 
So effectixe indeed, did it seem to be that countries 
which had no other form of naval force at all, were urged, 
even in the early months of 1914, to supply themselves 
with submarines, when their harbours would be safe 
and their coasts intact. 
Now, rightly looked at, the despatch of an English 
army in August 1914, though immediately a measure for 
defending France, was, in essence, the first step towards 
the invasion of (iermany. The German IHeet, then, 
from the first had exactly the same motive for preventing 
our landing at Calais, Boulogne, or Havre, as it would 
have had for preventing it at any German harbour. To 
close the French ports was simply an urgent problem in 
German coast defence. It should have been a task for 
which the submarines alone should have sufficed. Hence, 
when we see our sea communications, not attacked 
then, and still intact, and intact because they are 
proof against attack, there are two questions that 
arise. First, how was it that the pre-war reasoning 
on this subject was so wildly wrong ? Next, how is it 
that the submarine attack, so deadly on our trade, is so 
powerless where the enemy most want to make it effec- 
tive— where, too, he has the greatest number of targets 
concentrated into the smallest space ? The answer to 
the second question affords an answer to the first. 
The idea that the power of tiie submarine was magical, 
mvsterious, inmieasurable, arose from its eerie gift of 
invisibility, i^ut it is not, in any .strict sense of the word, 
an invisible engine of war at all. Just as the invisibility 
of .\ube's toqx>do boats and fa.st cruisers was only 
relative, so the absolute in\ isibilitj- of the submarine 
is only limited. This indeed we saw from the fact that, 
in the first eighteen days of February, there were forty 
combats on the surface between (ierman submarines 
and British transports, armed merchantmen, patrols 
and aircraft. Practically all thv dt/ackinti work the sub- 
marine has to do, must be done either as a surface ship, 
or at least with the periscope showing, so that the de- 
tection of its presence is, almost always, a matter of 
light, \igilance and luck. Its periods of true ih\isib'i- 
bihty, then, give it but one function that is new to 
naval war. It is the capacity to pass through waters 
superficially commanded by tlie enemy. Just as British 
submarines penetrated the Sea of Marmora and the 
Baltic, so German submarines can get from their harbours 
to the open sea. Invisibility confers, then, the power of a 
surprise presence of an enemy shii^ in waters that no enemy 
surface ship can reach. What we have to deal with is 
the military \alue of this surprise presence. 
Submarine Limitations 
It is just here that we are brought up short by the 
submarine in action being for the most a surface ship 
itself. As a gun-carrying craft it must, of course, always 
be a surface ship. As a submerged torpedo-using ship, 
it carries but a short ranged and most uncertain weapon. 
But as a surface craft it is the weakest of all such craft. 
N'o other war vessel stands in such awful peril of the 
single hit. When, therefore, by its invisibility it finds 
itself in the area the true fighting ship cannot reach, 
it is itself powerless to fight, and can only get armed 
victims by stealth and largely by luck, becau.se it can 
normally only attack, itself unseen. For if the intended 
victims are armed, or attended or escorted by armed 
craft, the submarine must submerge altogether to seek 
safety or, if it is to attack, show no more than the object 
glass of its periscope. In this rondition its speed is 
less than half that of the slowest warship. And its 
weapon, when submerged, being only a torpedo, short 
ranged because its aim in these conditions is 
so uncertain, it cannot manoeu\re to a favourable posi- 
tion, and can attain success by chance only. Hence 
high speed and a high standard of vigilance in ships that 
are armed makes them altogether immune from sub- 
marines, save in the rare instances when their course 
takes them within their striking radius. It was thus, 
it is supposed, that Formidable was destroyed on New 
Year's Day, 1915 ; thus too, no doubt, that the Danton 
was sunk last week. It is these limitations of the sub- 
marine's power when invisible, and the ext'reme peril of 
its case when it comes to the surface, that forbids the 
submarine to show itself at all in closely patrolled waters. 
It is, indeed, the sole value of its invisibility that it can 
avoid them. Thus, after a very short exi)erience, the 
submarine attack on the armed fleet largely ceased, 
and all short routes that could be adequately patrolled 
became virtually safe from their attentions. 
Should it ha\'c needed the experience of war to show 
that the patrol could be made effective and, with Aubc's 
warnings on record, that the necessities of trade defence 
made it obligatory to provide material for such a patrol 
on a scale adequate at least to protect the nation's 
supplies from peril ? We asked just now why the pre-war 
view of the efficiency of the submarine in preventing 
invasion, was so wildly wrong ? The answer is that the 
limitation of its capacity in waters superficially controlled 
was not understood. But, unfortunately, if these 
limitations were overlooked, so too, and much more 
unfortunately, was its new capacity for predatory 
warfare. Had they not been, we should never have 
shown the way in building such submarines. Neither 
was understood because it was not the fashion to thinTc 
out how new instruments of war could be used. It 
seemed to suffice that they were new, and that something 
startling must follow from their use. And, because it 
was startling, whatever happened, it must be advan- 
tageous to those who produced the new devices and had 
them in the largest size, in the highest speed and in the 
greatest number ! The school that dominated naval 
thought for so many years was dubbed " Materialist," 
because its mental processes stopped when it had ap})re- 
ciated what the new instruments of war were. It had no 
curiosity to find out just wliat could be done with 
'them. ARTiifR Poi.i,en 
