TO 
LAND & WATER 
May 31, 10T7 
even if wo wished. It was simply that we were entirely ig- 
norant of what the disposition and tactics of th,e Grand Fleet 
had been. \Vc only knt-w that in the bad lifht. the (k-nnans liad 
been able to break off the action and escajMf. For tliat 
matter we know very little more now. The admission 
HI the Connnander-iii-Chief's dispatch, that the enemy had 
■'.opened the range under cover of torpedo attacks," — that 
is, had either deterred ns from pursuit, or driven us off, our 
courses by the torpedo threat ; the discussions that arose in- 
'vitably out of Mr. Churchill's statements, first that victory 
\\as unnecessary " because we had all that the most victorious 
111 battles could give us; " and next, that seeking victory at 
dose range was impossible, bi>cause battleships were not 
armoured against torpedoes ; and tinally the utujualijied 
coiitinnation of the last of these statements by Sir John 
Jellicoe.have since, of course, put Jutland into a new perspective. 
\N e have simply lieen compelled to debate what we have l(>st 
by the German Fleet haying escaped destnictioii, and to raise 
tile issue, did it escajse for an adequate reason r" 
The question that one is driven to put to oneself in re- 
reading the story is this : Taking it for all in all, is not the 
version put forsvard by the British Admiralty, on the evening 
of Friday, June 2nd, that which will in its implication stand 
the test of time ? In other words, can -more be said of Jutland 
than that such British success as there was, was partial — the 
work of a portion of the fleet (mly — and that the achievement 
f>f the main puqwse for which the fleet exists was not attained 
because a certain tactical doctrine was held to govern the 
situation ? Put in this way. the enemy has somewhat the 
Ix'st of the argument - because he could liardly have expected 
more from the forces at his disposal. But it should not be 
j)Ut this way without adding that the losses inflicted by him 
on the British Fleet would have been trivial but for his luck 
in finding a weakness of construction in three of our capital 
ships, whereas the losses that he sutfered. both by guniire 
and torpedo, were the nonnal consequence of our superior 
wea{ions and our greater skill in using them. 
The New Tactical Doctrine 
It is irnpossible to review this great event without con- 
Fidering again the cogency of the new doctrine that battle- 
ships must not be risked against torpedoes. It was this 
doctrine which, as we all know, explains how it was that 
l>etween O.13 and S.30 the vastly superior batteries of the 
(irand F'leet were not brought to a short enough range for 
the German battleships to have been destroyed. Distant 
gunnery in the bad light was impossible, and action at six or 
seven thousand yards -would have meant bringing all our 
ships through a zone of torpedo barrage. In dealing with 
this question on rriany previous occasions in these columns, 
1 have always maintained that the doctrine acted upon was 
not that the ships could not ever be risked in such circum- 
stances, birt that, had they been so risked on this particular 
occasion, the weather conditions were such that there was no 
Certainty that the inevitable losses would have been redeemed 
by the destruction of the enemy. A good many corre- 
spondents have pointed out to me that the First Sea Lord's 
I'ishmongers' Hall speech is not compatible with my version. 
As 1 have said above, his statement of the Churchill theory is 
unqualified— ships cannot be brought within torpedo range. 
The question is a vital one, and no doubt can never be 
answered authoritatively until the prpfession as a whole is 
free to give its.verdict. .Ml the layman can do is to set out 
1 ertain considerations that seem applicable. And I am 
encouraged to revert to this matter to-day, because of 
certain statements in the interview to which 1 have referred 
above, which seem to throw some light on its origin, and, 
lH'rhai)S foreshatjow its abandonment. 
Here, it must be assumed. Sir John Jellicoe is expressing 
the official view of naval strategy. If so, he tell us for the 
first time of a radical change of view from pre-war days. 
We learn, for instance, that our historical naval policy was one 
of definite offence, and that we have had to change this as a 
consequence of our enemy's use of submarines to attack our 
trading ships, since our only active enemy is now the under- 
water boat, engaged in piracy and murder, and because all 
surface ships have been driven from the sea. But in another 
paragraph the First Sea Lords tells us that one of the disadvan- 
tages under which we suffered during the early part of the war 
was that " we had no harbour in the North Sea big enough 
to hold the growing (irand Fleet, where it could be within 
easy striking distance ofethe enemy." 
Note first with regard to this that it was a disadvantage 
which only existtd during the early part of the war. But, if 
it was necessary to our historical ix)licy of the definite 
offensive to place tlie main striking force where it could 
f.ill immediately on an enemy the moment he emerged, and if 
no harbour necessary for such a disposition was available in 
the early part of the war, would it not seem as if the directing 
minds of the navy who -as we are constantly told— ever 
since 1904 had been pre])aring specilically for war with Ger- 
many, had overlooked an essential element, if our fleet was 
intended to play, in these days, the r6le rt had assumed iu the 
olden wars from which our historical strategy derived ? 
And, as the disadvantage only accrued in the early part of the 
war, it must be supposed that it was remedied in, let us say, 
six, nine or twelve months. How is it that none of the 
Boards over which Mr. Churchill presided drew attention to 
this singular departure from a well-established tradition 
— and one that could so swiftly be remedied ? . For an answer 
to this question we shall no doubt have to wait. In the 
meanwhile, Sir Reginald Custance, who has more than 
once of late — and, 1 believe on many occasions before the war 
—drawn attention to the strategical importance of placing the 
fleet as near the enemy's main base as ix)ssible, will doubtless 
feel a mild gratificttion on learning that a doctrine tiiat h>' 
has long ipaintained to be axiomatic —but without success 
in seeing it interpreted into action— is now admitted to be 
part, though a strangely neglected part, of our historical naval 
l»olicy. 
But if our strategy had foreseen the offensive in every possible 
form as the first necessity of war, we should have tlone 
something more than prepare a harbour from \v1iich to strike 
at an emerging enemy with the greatest advantage. We should 
have contemplated the attack in every one of its aspects and 
having prepared for the tactical aggressive, the historical 
authority for which is even stronger than that which urges 
ns to a forward strategy, we should have shaped our initial 
measures towards forcing the enemy to give us an opportunity 
fwr the attack we had prepared. VVe should hav(» begun the 
war by blockading him ruthlessly, and this would have implied 
not the mere stoppage of his ow'ntrading ships, but the closing 
of his ports to every neutral, and the closing of every 
neutral jxirt to any goods intended for the enemy. 
VVe should in other words, have been ready in August 4th, 1914, 
with the policy that we did not, as a simple matter of fact, 
adopt until the best part of eighteen months afterwards and we 
should have done this with the deliberate intention of bringing 
about battle. ^ How is it possible to escape the inference that 
we took neither of these two steps, the prepared base or the 
blockade, to force the enemy to fight, except on the suppo- 
sition that we had no wish to compel him to do so ? 
And if our tactics had been intended to be offensive, 
should we not have been prepared for these likewise ? 
Once the long range torpedo was an achieved reality, it was 
abundantly clear that the naval battle of the future would 
differ radically from that which w'oufd have been expected, 
say up to 1908-1909. Did we foresee and were we ready for 
the change ? It is no sufficient answer to say that we increased 
the calibres of our guns and pushed our battle practice cnit to 
longer ranges. True, these measures did look like being 
ready or keeping out of torpedo reach. But only superficially, 
because torpedo attack does not originate witli the battle fleet, 
which It is our business to destn)y, but witii destroyers that 
might be 5,000 or 6,000 yards nearer to us than the fleet thev 
.had to protect. If it was the distance from the destroyers tlrat 
was to be the test of the safety from torpedoes that "must be 
sought at all co.sts, one of two things would have been foreseen 
as following inevitably. Either the long range gunnery we 
were prepared with would have to be effective at 16,000 or 
18,000 yards, thus limiting battle to the very finest weather 
and to the hours of broad daylight, or else remembering that 
the speed of destroyers would enable toi-i)edo attack to be 
directed at us from any quarfer, and without warning, there 
could hardly be a moment in action when a battle fleet, if it 
were to avoid a menace, would not be driven to abrupt changes 
of course. But to put on the helni is to throw guiis out of 
action. Was it not clear tJieii that unless ships' artilleiy were 
rendered once and for all independent of helm, that an enemy 
could almost at will terminate a gunnery attack whenever 
he wished ? 
Not, of course, that the offensive in tactics can be secured by 
good gunnery alone, though without it no wide liberty of 
tactical movement is conceivable. To offensive tactics there 
IS required a sound theory of decentralised command and 
methods of disposition and deployment a little more aggressive 
than the single line-. It has been said that our strategy and 
statics were all consistently ' defensive because we held the 
doctrine which Mr. Churchill somewhat incautiously let out. 
It seems that we really did think that a fleet which the 
enemy could not defeat must give precisely the same results in a 
war as a fleet that had defeated the enemy. It is surely all to 
the good that the present first Lord and Chief of the Staff is 
wide awake now to the errors of the former Boards in wiio.se 
councils he assisted. May we not hope that from the new 
reorganizations that have taken place, the revi.sed theory of the 
offensive may lind a wider and wider application ? " 
Arthi^r Poi.i.f.n. 
