lO 
Land & Water 
August 8, igi8 
von Hipper's battle-cniisers, going once too often near the 
British coast, had been driven in ignominious flight across 
the North Sea, and paid for their temerity by the loss of 
Bliiclier. Three months of the Fislier -Churchill regime had 
seemingly put the Navy on a pinnacle that even the most 
sanguine — and the most ignorant — had hardly dared -'to 
hope for in the early days. The spectacle, in August, of the 
transports plying between France and England, as securely 
as the motor h^ses between Fleet Street and the Fulham 
Road, had been a tremendous proof of confidence in sea- 
power. The unaccepted challenge at Heligoland had told a 
tale. The British Fleet had indeed seemed unchallengeable. 
But the justification of our confidence was, after all, based 
onl}' on the fact that the enemy had not disputed it. It 
was a negative triumph. But the capture of Emden, the 
obliteration of von Spee, the uncamouflagcd flight of von 
Hipper, here were things positive, proofs of power in action, 
the meaning of which was patent to the simplest. No man 
in his senses could pretend that our troubffes in October 
had not been attributed to their right origin, nor that the 
right remed\' for them had been found and applied. 
There was but one cloud on the horizon. The submarine 
— despite the loss of Hague, Cressy, Aboukir, Haxtke, Hermes, 
and Niger, and the disturbing rumours that the Fleet's 
bases were insecure — had been a failure as an agent for the 
attrition of our main sea forces. The loss of Formidable, 
that clouded the opening of the year, had not restored its 
prestige. But von Tirpitz had made an ominous threat. 
The submarine might have failed against naval ships. It 
certainly would not fail, he said, against trading ships. He 
gave the world fair warning that at the right moment an 
under-water blockade of the British Isles would be pro- 
claimed ; then woe to all belligerents or neutrals that ven- 
tured into those death-doomed waters. The naval writers 
were not very greatly alarmed: For four months, after all, 
trading ships— turned into transports— had used the narrow 
waters of the Channel as if the submarines were no threat 
at all. Yet, on pre-war reasoning, it was precisely in narrow 
waters crowded with traffic that under-water war should 
have been of greatest effect. These transports and these 
narrow waters were the ideal victims and the ideal field, and 
coast and harbour defence and the prevention of invasion, 
by. common consent, the obvious and indeed the supreme 
functions the submarine would be called upon to discharge. 
From a military point of view the landing of British troops 
in France was but the first stage towards an invasion of 
Germany and, from a naval point of view, it looked as if to 
defend the French ports from being entered by British ships 
was just as clearly the first objective of the German submarine 
as the defence of any German port. Now six months of war 
had shown that, if they had tried to stop th,e transports, 
the submarines had been thwarted. Means and methods 
had evidently been found of preventing their attack or 
parrying it when made. Was it not obvious that it could 
be no more than a question of extending these methods to 
merchant shipping at large to turn the greater threat to 
futility ? It was this reasoning that, in January and Febru- 
ary, made it easy for the writers to stem any tendency of 
the pubhc to panic, and when, towards the end of February 
the First Lord addressed Pariiament on the subject, and dealt 
with the conscienceless threat of piracy with a placid and 
defined confidence, all were justified in thinking that the naval 
critics had been-right. 
And so the beginning of the submarine campaign, though 
somewhat disconcerting, caused no wide alarm. An initial 
success was expected. It would take time to build the 
destroyers and the convoying craft on the scale that was 
called for, and so to organise the trade that the attack must 
be narrowed to protected focal points. And as absolute 
secrecy was maintained, both as to our actual defensive 
methods and as to our preparations for the future, there was 
neither the occasion nor the material for questioning whether 
the serene contentment of Whitehall was rightly founded 
Meantime, as we have seen, success had justified the solu- 
tion of the October crisis. The attempt to probe deeper 
and to get at the cause of things was a thankless task. Those 
who could see beneath the surface could not fail to note in 
December and January that, while an exuberant optimism 
had become the mark of the British attitude towards the war 
•at sea a movement curiously parallel to it was going forward 
Dut bv Zh V'' f '"\'° ""^f^ '^' ^^^"d F'^<^t had been 
put by the defenceless state of its harbours, though ri^idlv 
e"pro?ted nThe*r ^"*'^'^P^^-. has been triu'mplS v 
nvKli i German. Hence, when the enemv^s onl'y 
oversea squadron was annihilated by Sir Doveton Sturdee 
Britrsh Flee?T.t^ n'f Tf''''''^ °" ^^^ ^^^^^^ice of tl.e 
Ik i ] i^^^' ^'^'''^ e'^^ to overwhelm an inferior force 
abroad, dared not show itself in the North Sea. And as 
if to prove the charge, Whitby and the .Hartlepools were 
forthwith bombarded by a force we were unable to bring to 
action while returning from this exploit. The enemy naval 
writers surpassed themselves after tiiis. And it looked so 
certain that the German Higher Command might itself 
become hypnotised by such talk that, before the New Year, 
it seemed prudent to note these phenomena and warn the 
public that we might be challenged to action after all, of 
the kind of action the enemy would dare us to, and what 
the problems were that such an action would present. • And 
in particular it seemed advisable to state explicitly that 
much less must be expected from naval guns in battle than 
those had hoped, whose notions were founded upon battle 
practice. A battle-cruiser manoeuvring at twenty-eight 
knots — instead of a canvas screen towed at six — mines scat- 
tered by a squadron in retreat, a line of retreat that would 
draw the pursuers into minefields set to trap them ; the attacks 
on the pursuing squadrons by flotillas of destroyers, firing 
long range torpedoes — these new elements would upset, it 
was said, all experiences of peace gunnery, because in peace 
practices it is impossible to provide a target of the speed 
which enemy ships would have in action, and because there 
had been no practice while executing the manoeuvres which 
torpedo attack would make compulsory in battle. 
Within a fortnight the action of the Dogger Bank was 
fought and von Hipper's battle cruisers were subjected to 
the fire of Sir David Beatty's Fleet from nine o'clock until 
twelve, without one being sunk or so damaged as to lose 
speed. The enemy's tactics included attacks by submarine 
and destroyer which had imposed the manoeuvres as antici- 
pated—and the best of gunnery had failed. But Bliicher 
had been sunk ; -the enemy had run away ; so the warning 
fell on deaf ears ; the lesson of the battle was misread. 
Optimism reigned supreme. 
\ 
The Second Crisis 
Within a month a naval adventure of a new kind was 
embarked upon, based on the theory that if only you had 
naval guns enough, any fort against which they were "directed 
must' be pulverised as were the forts of Li^ge, Namur, 
Maubeuge, and Antwerp. The simplest considerations of the 
principles of naval gunnery would have shown the theory 
to be fallacious. It originated in the fertile brain of the 
lay Chief of the Admiralty, and though it would seem as if 
his naval advisers felt the theory to be wrong, none of them, 
in the absence of a competent and independerit gunnery 
staff, could say why. And so the essentially military opera- 
tion of forcing the passage of the Dardanelles was undertaken 
as if it were a purely naval operation, with the result that, 
just as naval success had never been conceivable, so now the 
failure of the ships made military success impossible also. 
It was thus we came to our second naval crisis. ' The 
first we had solved by putting Lord Fisher into Prince Louis's 
place. The lesson of the second seemed to be that there 
was only one mistake that could be made with the navy 
and that was for the Government to ask it to do anything. 
Mr. Churchill, as King Stork, had taken the initiative. Lord" 
Fisher, the naval superman, had not been able to save us. 
It was clear that lay interference with the navy was wrong- 
equally clear that it would be wiser to leave the initiative 
to the enemy. And so a new regime began. 
But, in reality, the lessons of the first crisis and the second 
crisis were the same. To suppose that a civihan First Lord 
is bound to be mischievous if he is energetic, and certain to 
be harmful if, in administering the navy as an instrument of 
war, he is a cipher, were errors just as great as to suppose 
that a seaman with a long, loyal, and brilliant record in the 
public service had put an evil enchantment over the whole 
British Navy because, fifty years before, he had been born 
a subject of a Power with which till now we had never been 
at war. Things went wrong in October, 1914, for precisely 
the same reasons that they went wrong in Febniary, March 
and April, 1915. The German battle cruisers escaped at 
Heligoland for exactly the same reasons that the attempt to 
take the Dardanelles forts by naval artillery was futile 
We had prepared for war and gone info war 'with no clear 
doctrine as to what war meant, because we lacked the organ- 
ism that could have produced the doctrine in peace time 
prepared and trained the Navy to a common understanding 
of It and supplied it with plans and equipped it with means 
for their execution. WTiat was needed in October, 1014 was. 
not a new First Sea Lord, but a Higher Command charged 
only with the study of the principles and the direction of 
fighting. N 
But in May, 1915, this truth was not recognised. And 
in the next year which passed, all efforts to make this truth 
understood were without effect. And so the submarine 
