Land & Water 
February 21, 191 8 
An American Naval Critic: By Arthur Pollen 
A SHORT study of the war at sea entitled " Naval 
Power in the War, 1914-17," has been sent to 
us by the publishers, the George Borland Company 
of New York. The writer is Lieutenant-Com- 
mander Charles Clifford Gill of the United States 
Navy, and the work has grown out of lectures delivered at 
Annapolis and aftervvards published in a New York magazine. 
After a short chapter on the significance of naval power in 
the war and another on some definitions and an estimate of 
the situation the writer considers the opening activities — the 
action in the Bight of Heligoland, the Coronel and Falkland 
engagements, the Dardanelles operations. Dogger Bank en- 
counter, and the battle of Jutland. He then has three 
chapters on the submarine war, on anti-submarine tactics, 
and a general study of the broad naval lessons. There is 
an appendi.x dealing with the relative strength of the Powers 
in 1914 ; another on the exploits of the Emden, and a third 
on .\merica's part in the development of naval weapons and 
tact cs by F. G. FrothingV.am, reprinted from the " Pro- 
ceedings of the United States Naval Institute." 
The book makes no pretence to being in any sense a history. 
It is avowedly a series of sketches treating of the general 
principles involved, and not the events. 'And as such it has 
a value. Many of the comments are excellent, and the 
summary of Jutland is impartial and generally correct. But 
the worth of the book suffers because the writer seems to 
have taken little trouble lo get accurate information about 
several details that are both material and quite well known. 
The plans of the actions, too, are merely diagrammatic and 
make no pretence of being consistent even with the informa- 
tion contained in the published dispatches. Yet of at least 
two extremely important engagements, namely, that between 
Sydney and Emden and the action off the Falkland Islands, 
quite accurate plans are available. There is no reason to 
suppose that the Times plan of the first action is not sub- 
stantially correct in almost every particular, and the plan 
of the latter engagement, published in the middle of August, 
1915, by Land and Water, was authentic. In some matters 
the rnisstatements are very far from being unimportant, and 
as this volume is to be used at Annapolis as a text book, it 
is wortli while to see that the most obvious of these are 
corrected. It is stated, for instance, that the action between 
Sydney and Emien opened at 4,000 yards; whereas it is 
quite well known that Emden got Sydney under a very hot 
fire at 10,500 yards, and actually fired many hundreds of 
rounds m the first minute without a single salvo being more 
than a couple of hundred yards wrong for range. It was in 
this period that Emden made her only hits, smashed the 
Sydney's rangefinder, and inflicted the only casualties that 
Sydney suffered. Also Emden was armed with 4.1-in guns 
nqt 4.1 pounders. 
Cradock's Decision 
Again, in discussing the battle of Coronel the writer 
supposes that Admiral Cradock might well have been in 
grave doubt whether after he had got his ships into forma- 
tion he should engage. " By bearing off sharply to the 
westward even at this late hour," he says, " the speeds of 
the two squadrons were so nearly equal that he could have 
avoided engaging that night, and by morning he might have 
IZ^L'^^u"''"^'^^ and fought the^attle L a mo^re equll 
« I f\u^^ T"'"^ ^^ interesting to add what thoughts 
flashed through the Admiral's mind and what prevailed uS,n 
h m to make the fatal but courageous decision embodied^in 
his signal to the Canopus at 8 p.m. : " I am goini- to attarT 
he enemy now." But here, to^, the know^ffcs^of the cast- 
leave little doub as to the Admiral's frame of m nd I? 
bSk" un^tL r'''".'" break away from Von Spee and fal 
back upon the Canopus, for the simple reason that he had 
^on^nH/'Tf'^f.^'^°'" deliberately left Cano/,«rbehind to 
go and look for the great Von Spee. Further, it was between 
two and three in the afternoon of November isT When hTs 
squadron was scattered over a very wide front and workk.? 
northward, that one of his ships signalled to him That an 
*nemy wireless had been tapped". Admiral CradoTk at once 
^rdered MonmouU, Glasgow and Otranto to cloJe on ?he 
fligsh.p and then headed straight for the probable p^"nt at 
which the enemy would be found. And no soonerTd he 
.find h.m than he made the signal to which Captain Gill refers 
.J f r l'^ P?.':'?"'-'-^Ph of the chapter dealing with these 
events Captain Gill seems to have hit upon the only possible 
explanation of Admiral Cradock's actions '■ At theLSin- 
^ i^' '!,"J ^' '^f ' ^^^ B^'ti^'' armoured cruiseTs S 
Hope and Monmouth, together with the light cruiser G/as/.,; 
and the transport Olranto, were in Atlantic waters off the 
coast of the Americas. These ships rendezvoused off the 
coast of Brazil under the command of Sir Christopher Cradock 
and proceeded round Cape Horn, evidently with the mission to 
find and destroy the German vessels." If to find and destroy 
was actually the Admiral's mission, there is nothing surprising 
in his leaving the Canopus behind, for, however useful she 
might have been in helping to destroy Scharnhorst and 
Gtieisenau, she must surely have been perfectly useless in 
any effort to find them. Her presence would have made the 
whole of the Admiral's squadron equally ineffective for this 
purpose. Had the Admiral's mission been to cruise in certain 
localities and fight Von Spee if Von Spee attacked him, he 
would either not have left Canopus at all, or have fallen 
back upon her, as our author suggests. His secretar3''s letter, 
the last written before rounding the Horn, makes it quite 
clear that the general impression in the squadron was that 
everyone knew that they were on a task beyond their strength. 
It was, in short, a naval Balaclava, and the Laureate's tragic 
jingle makes it impossible to suppose that the heroic Cradock 
wasted any moments in reasoning or debate. 
The Jutland Controversy 
The author seems to have fallen into a very curious mis- 
understanding about the controversy to which the battle of 
Jutland has given rise. This arose, it will be remembered 
not out of Admiral Jellicoe's original dispatch, but out of 
the astounding explanation which Mr. Churchill offered for 
the failure to engage the German Fleet at decisive ranges and 
destroy it. His reasons were, it will be remembered, first 
that there was no need for victory, because we enjoved all 
Its fruits without it, and, next, that whether we needed victory 
or not It was impossible to place battleships within range of 
torpedoes, because their under bellies were not protected. 
These two doctrines gave a new significance to the Com- 
mander-in-Chief's statement in his dispatch that " the enemy 
constantly turned away and opened the range under cover of 
destroyer attacks." Mr. Churchill went on to make counsel 
worse confounded by laying it down that the torpedo had 
had no influence upon the action at all 1 The issue in the 
controversy that arose was quite simple. Should Lord 
Jelhcoe have disregarded the torpedoes, closed to a range at 
which in the light which prevailed his guns should have been 
effective, and so have done the only thing which would have 
given him a reasonable chance of destroying the German 
Fleet ? . 
The arguments on either side ne-J not be repeated 
here, but the issue is quite different frcm what Commander 
GUI seems to suppose. -The 'disposition of the British Fleet 
" for the night," he says, " has been a source of much con- 
troversy in England ... the question is whether or not the 
threat of torpedo and submarine attack was sufficient to 
justify losing all touch with the German Fleet, which was 
inferior in numbers, in gun power and in speed. Those who 
support Admiral JelHcoe in his decision not to close the enemy 
battle fleet dunng the dark hours maintain that inasmuch as 
naval superiority was essential to the Allied cause, it should 
jiot have been risked upon such a hazard as would have been 
involved by continuing the battle under the conditions which 
have been described. On the other hand, many hold the 
opinion that the destraction of the German Fleet was of such 
urgent importance as to justify this risk." I am not aware of 
anyone who has criticised the disposition of the British Fleet 
after darkness. There has been no criticism, partly because 
there is no information as to what the disposition was. Such 
dispute as there has been has been over the daylight tactics 
and not the night tactics. 
The most interesting portions of the book are perhaps the 
introduction and the chapters dealing with the broad lessons 
ot sea power, and portions of the Appendices. But I cannot 
agree that the use of the submarine against trading ships 
either should have been, or was, a complete surprise. There 
were ample warnings of such things being inevitable. In 
the nature of things, the more crushing the superiority of our 
surface navy, the more certain it must be that any enemy would 
seek to relieve the position by using whatever force that could 
evade it. The lessons of the war after Trafalgar and of the 
war of 1812— to look no further afield— were conclusive on 
the point that a guerre de course is not alone the necessary, 
but the only, alternative to a war of squadrons. Aube had 
pointed out thirty years ago first that the small size and high 
speed of the torpedo-boat would supply, in modem condi- 
tions, the power of evasion possessed by the privateer in old 
times, and secondly that the deadly character of her weapon 
