CHAPTER I

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE SEA SERVICE

Had I the fabled herb That brought to life the dead, Whom would I dare disturb In his eternal bed? Great Grenville would I wake, And with glad tidings make The soul of mighty Drake Lift an exulting head.

_William Watson._

When King George returned from the visit he paid to the Grand Fleet in June, 1917, he sent a message to Admiral Sir David Beatty, who had succeeded Sir John Jellicoe in the command, in which he said that “never had the British Navy stood higher in the estimation of friend or foe.” His Majesty spoke of people who reason and understand. But it is certainly true that the work of the Sea Service during this unparalleled war has never been properly appreciated by many of those who have benefited by it most. The silent Navy does its work unobserved. The record of its heroism and the services it renders pass unobserved by the multitude. Sometimes it emerges to strike a blow, engage in a “scrap,” or, it may be, to fight a battle, and then it retires into obscurity again. Its achievements are forgotten. Only the bombardment of a coast town or the torpedoing of a big ship, which the Navy did not frustrate, is remembered. Such has been the case in all the naval campaigns of the past. Englishmen, who depend upon the Navy for their security and the means of their life and livelihood, as well as for their power of action against their enemies, are but half conscious of what the Fleet is doing for them. On this matter, British statesmen, when they speak about the war, almost invariably fail to enlighten them.

Who can wonder that people in the Allied countries are still less able to realise that behind all the fighting of their own armies lies the influence of sea-power, exercised by the British Fleet and the fleets that came one after another into co-operation with it? Without this power of the sea there could have been no hope of success in the war. As the King said, the Navy defends British shores and commerce, and secures for England and her Allies the ocean highways of the world. The purpose of this book is to show how these things are done.

On the first day of hostilities the British Navy laid hold upon the road that would lead to victory. There is no hyperbole in saying that the Grand Fleet, in its northern anchorages, from the very beginning, influenced the military situation throughout the world, and made possible many of the operations of the armies, which could neither have been successfully initiated nor continued without it. But in the early days of August, 1914, when, from the war cloud which had overshadowed Europe, broke forth the lurid horrors of the conflict, the situation was extremely critical. What was required to be done had to be done quickly and unhesitatingly, lest the enemy should strike an unforeseen blow. Happily, with faultless knowledge, the strategy of the emergency was realised, and with unerring instinct and sagacity it was applied. The foresight of great naval administrators, and chiefly of Lord Fisher, who had brought about the regeneration of the British Navy, shaping it for modern conditions, was justified a thousandfold.

Never was the need of exerting sea command more urgent than at the outbreak of war. Everything that Englishmen had won in all the centuries of the storied past was involved in the quarrel. Only by mastery of the sea could the country be made secure. Its soil had never been trodden by an invader since Norman William came in 1066. The very food that was eaten and the things by which the industries and commerce of the country existed demanded control at sea. If the British Empire was to be safe from aggression it must be safeguarded on every sea. If England was to set armies in any foreign field of operations, and to retain and maintain them there, with the gigantic supplies they would require; if she was to render help to her Allies in men or munitions or anything else, whether they came from England, or the United States, or any other country, and were landed in France, Russia, Italy, or Greece, or in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or East or West Africa, for the defeat of the enemy, that must be done by virtue of power at sea. Therefore, in this war, as John Hollond, writing his _Discourse of the Navy_ in 1638, said of the wars of his time, “the naval part is the thread that runs through the whole wooft, the burden of the song, the scope of the text.”

The moment when the First Fleet, as it was then called, slipped away from its anchorage at Portland on the morning of Wednesday, July 29th, 1914, will yet be regarded as one of the decisive moments of history. The initiative had been seized, and all real initiative was thenceforward denied to the enemy. The gauge of victory had been won. “Time is everything; five minutes makes the difference between a victory and a defeat,” said Nelson. “The advantage and gain of time and place will be the only and chief means for our good,” Drake had said before him. By a fortunate circumstance, which should have arrested the imagination as with a presage of victory—a circumstance arranged five months before, as the result of a series of most intricate preparations—time and place were both on the British side.

The First, Second, and Third Fleets, and the flotillas attached to them, had been mobilised as a test operation, and inspected at Spithead by King George, on July 20th. The First Fleet had returned to Portland and the other fleets to their home ports, where the surplus or “balance” crews of the Naval Reserves were to be sent on shore. Then had come the now famous order to “stand fast,” issued on the night of Sunday, July 26th, which had stopped the process of demobilisation. Dark clouds had shadowed the international horizon. Austria-Hungary had presented her ultimatum to Serbia. She declared war on the 28th. The Second Fleet remained, therefore, in proximity to its reserves of men, and the men were ready to be re-embarked in the Third Fleet.

Few people realised at the time the immense significance of the memorable eastward movement of the squadrons from Portland Roads, or of the assembly of those powerful forces at their northern strategic anchorages. Those forces became the Grand Fleet, that unexampled organisation of fighting force, under command of that fine sea officer, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. War was declared by Great Britain on August 4th. Successive steps of supreme importance were taken, which, in very truth, saved the cause of the Allies. Disaster and surprise attack were forestalled. The Fleet, fully mobilised, and growing daily in strength, was already exerting command of the sea, and the safe transport of the Expeditionary Force to France was assured. Co-operation with the French Fleet was immediately established—its cruiser squadron in the Channel and its battle squadrons in the Mediterranean.

Fighting episodes were not delayed, but for many months the operations of the Grand Fleet remained shrouded as by a veil, lifted only on rare occasions. Few people knew the tremendous anxieties and responsibility of the British Commander-in-Chief. His vast command of vessels of all classes and uses had to be organised into a mighty fleet, complete in every element—battle squadrons, battle-cruiser squadrons, light-cruiser squadrons, flotillas and auxiliaries, transports, hospital ships, and every ship and thing that a fleet can require. A whole series of intricate dispositions had to be made. Officers were to be inspired with the ideas of the Commander-in-Chief and the whole Fleet was to be so trained, under squadron and flotilla commanders, that each would know on the instant how he should act.

If Nelson, in 1789, spent many hours in explaining to his “band of brothers” his plans for his attack at the Nile, with fourteen sail-of-the-line, what must it have been for Sir John Jellicoe to communicate to his officers, and discuss with them, all his plans for every emergency or call for the service of every squadron and ship in his vast command? All this must be realised now. And during the anxious early months of the war, as the winter was drawing near, the great anchorages were as yet unprotected, and safety from hostile submarines could often only be found in rapid steaming at sea. The mining campaign of the enemy had also to be overcome. The anxieties were enormous, and it was only the power of command, the sea instinct, the deep understanding, the readiness to act in moments of extraordinary responsibility, and the resource and professional skill of the Commander-in-Chief and his staff and officers in command, that enabled the tremendous work to be accomplished.

While this was in progress other work of immense significance had been going on. The Admiralty had undertaken a gigantic task of supreme importance with complete success. Great defensive preparations were made in British waters, where all traffic was regulated and controlled. The vast maritime resources of the country were added to the naval service. Two battleships building for Turkey, another for Chile, and certain flotilla leaders and other craft building in the country, were taken over. Officers and men in abundance were ready. The magnificent seafaring populations of the merchant marine and the fisheries were drawn into the naval service, and subsequently the whole mercantile marine was brought under naval control, and for practical purposes was embodied with the Navy. Officers and men of these services showed splendid heroism in situations of terror and responsibility never anticipated.

A wide network of patrols was brought into being; the blockade was organised and strengthened; the examination services were set on foot and perfected; and the coast sectors of defence, with their flotillas, were raised to a standard of high efficiency. Mine-sweepers and net-drifters were at work. Every shipyard in the country and a multitude of engineering and ammunition works began to buzz with work for the Navy and the mercantile marine. Provision was made for dealing with the raiding cruisers and armed merchantmen of the enemy.

At the time, the public knew little or nothing of what was in progress. Imagination fails even now to grasp the magnitude of what was achieved. The naval share in the campaign was of baffling obscurity, while the stage of the war on land became crowded with fighting men, locked in a terrible conflict, which at that time seemed to bode no good to the Allies. After the brush in the Heligoland Bight on August 28th, 1914, the Fleet was lost to view. Not at first, but slowly, did it become realised that the prognostications of peace-time alarmists had proved baseless. There had been no “bolt from the blue,” as had been foretold; neither invasion, nor raid, nor foray was attempted upon British shores, and there was no anxiety about food. There was always, with economy, enough to eat.

But popular confidence seemed for a time to be unreasonably disturbed by a record of successive alarming and generally unexplained incidents—the escape of the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ in the Mediterranean, the sinking of the _Aboukir_, _Cressy_, _Hogue_, _Formidable_, and other vessels, the depredations of German raiding cruisers on the distant lines of our trade, the bombardment of Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough, and other disquieting episodes. Strange as it may seem, there were people who went about asking, “What is the Fleet doing?” Was it not the ancient inspiration of the Navy to seek out the enemy and to capture or sink or burn his ships wherever they were to be found? Yet there was no battle. The German coast was not attacked. Allied shipping to the value of millions of pounds was being sunk. Why, then, was the Navy inactive? When, later on, the submarine menace assumed formidable proportions, alarm began again to seize upon the newspapers, when there was justification only for precaution.

The hidden truth was not comprehended. Victories were expected when, owing to the coyness of the enemy’s strategy, none were possible. The Seven Years’ War—the most successful in British annals, the turning-point in British history, the war in which Horace Walpole asked each morning what victory there was to record—began with the disaster of Minorca, followed by the tragedy of Byng. The central facts of naval history were but little known. Yet the Navy was, and is, in truth, all in all to the country, the Empire, and the Allies.

Before we enter into the main purpose of this book, in which we shall discover in several theatres of war the real nature of sea-power, as well as the character and momentous consequences of the antagonism which grew up between England and Germany, we may inquire what services could in reason have been expected from the Navy in the great cataclysm which was about to sweep with destruction over the nations. It would not have been expected to fight a battle every month or even every year, for battles are rare events in naval history. It would not have been expected to attack fortified coasts, though it might do so on occasions, because ships are designed and built to fight at sea. The Navy would not have been expected to forestall every untoward incident. Fish often slip through the net, as raiders have slipped through our guard in this and other wars. Nor, in these days of the stealthy submarine and the blind death-dealing mine, could the Fleet have been expected to remain immune from every misfortune. No one could have expected the Navy to devise a single conclusive defence against the attack of the submarine, any more than it was asked to find an infallible remedy for the effects of gunfire.

What we should have expected was that it would make the sea again the protecting wall, as Shakespeare says, of the British Isles,

Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands.

We should have expected it to safeguard the incoming of the supplies without which neither the people nor their industries could exist—to be the panoply of all trade and interests afloat, whether in the nature of imports or exports. We should have expected it to deny all external activity to the enemy at sea—we might not have anticipated the advent of the submarine as a pirate commerce-destroyer—to shut off his sea-borne supplies, and to exert that noiseless pressure on the vitals of the adversary of which Admiral Mahan speaks—“that compulsion, whose silence, when once noted, becomes to the observer the most striking and awful mark of the working of sea-power.” We should have expected the Navy to become the support, in thrust and holding, of the armies in the field—the shaft to their spearhead; their flank and rearguard also. Inasmuch as the war is world-wide, and we have powerful Allies, we should have expected naval influence and pressure to be manifested in the oceans, in the Mediterranean, and, indeed, wherever the enemy is and the seas are. Finally, we should have expected the Navy to be to the British Empire what it has always been to the Empire’s heart—its safeguard from injury and disruption, and the bond that holds it together.

Each one of these functions has been executed by in Navy with triumphant success in the war, and history would show that it is executing them now as the Sea Service has accomplished them in all the wars of the past.