Some Principles of Maritime Strategy
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PART TWO
THEORY
OF
NAVAL WAR
CHAPTER ONE
THEORY OF THE
OBJECT—COMMAND
OF THE SEA
The object of naval warfare must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it.
The second part of the proposition should be noted with special care in order to exclude a habit of thought, which is one of the commonest sources of error in naval speculation.That error is the very general assumption that if one belligerent loses the command of the sea it passes at once to the other belligerent.The most cursory study of naval history is enough to reveal the falseness of such an assumption.It tells us that the most common situation in naval war is that neither side has the command; that the normal position is not a commanded sea, but an uncommanded sea.The mere assertion, which no one denies, that the object of naval warfare is to get command of the sea actually connotes the proposition that the command is normally in dispute.It is this state of dispute with which naval strategy is most nearly concerned, for when the command is lost or won pure naval strategy comes to an end.
This truth is so obvious that it would scarcely be worth mentioning were it not for the constant recurrence of such phrases as: "If England were to lose command of the sea, it would be all over with her." The fallacy of the idea is that it ignores the power of the strategical defensive. It assumes that if in the face of some extraordinary hostile coalition or through some extraordinary mischance we found ourselves without sufficient strength to keep the command, we should therefore be too weak to prevent the enemy getting it—a negation of the whole theory of war, which at least requires further support than it ever receives.
And not only is this assumption a negation of theory; it is a negation both of practical experience and of the expressed opinion of our greatest masters.We ourselves have used the defensive at sea with success, as under William the Third and in the War of American Independence, while in our long wars with France she habitually used it in such a way that sometimes for years, though we had a substantial preponderance, we could not get command, and for years were unable to carry out our war plan without serious interruption from her fleet.
So far from the defensive being a negligible factor at sea, or even the mere pestilent heresy it is generally represented, it is of course inherent in all war, and, as we have seen, the paramount questions of strategy both at sea and on land turn on the relative possibilities of offensive and defensive, and upon the relative proportions in which each should enter into our plan of war. At sea the most powerful and aggressively-minded belligerent can no more avoid his alternating periods of defence, which result from inevitable arrests of offensive action, than they can be avoided on land. The defensive, then, has to be considered; but before we are in a position to do so with profit, we have to proceed with our analysis of the phrase, "Command of the Sea," and ascertain exactly what it is we mean by it in war.
In the first place, "Command of the Sea" is not identical in its strategical conditions with the conquest of territory.You cannot argue from the one to the other, as has been too commonly done.Such phrases as the "Conquest of water territory" and "Making the enemy's coast our frontier" had their use and meaning in the mouths of those who framed them, but they are really little but rhetorical expressions founded on false analogy, and false analogy is not a secure basis for a theory of war.
The analogy is false for two reasons, both of which enter materially into the conduct of naval war.You cannot conquer sea because it is not susceptible of ownership, at least outside territorial waters.You cannot, as lawyers say, "reduce it into possession," because you cannot exclude neutrals from it as you can from territory you conquer.In the second place, you cannot subsist your armed force upon it as you can upon enemy's territory.Clearly, then, to make deductions from an assumption that command of the sea is analogous to conquest of territory is unscientific, and certain to lead to error.
The only safe method is to inquire what it is we can secure for ourselves, and what it is we can deny the enemy by command of the sea.Now, if we exclude fishery rights, which are irrelevant to the present matter, the only right we or our enemy can have on the sea is the right of passage; in other words, the only positive value which the high seas have for national life is as a means of communication.For the active life of a nation such means may stand for much or it may stand for little, but to every maritime State it has some value.Consequently by denying an enemy this means of passage we check the movement of his national life at sea in the same kind of way that we check it on land by occupying his territory.So far the analogy holds good, but no further.
So much for the positive value which the sea has in national life.It has also a negative value.For not only is it a means of communication, but, unlike the means of communication ashore, it is also a barrier.By winning command of the sea we remove that barrier from our own path, thereby placing ourselves in position to exert direct military pressure upon the national life of our enemy ashore, while at the same time we solidify it against him and prevent his exerting direct military pressure upon ourselves.
Command of the sea, therefore, means nothing but the control of maritime communications, whether for commercial or military purposes.The object of naval warfare is the control of communications, and not, as in land warfare, the conquest of territory.The difference is fundamental.True, it is rightly said that strategy ashore is mainly a question of communications, but they are communications in another sense.The phrase refers to the communications of the army alone, and not to the wider communications which are part of the life of the nation.
But on land also there are communications of a kind which are essential to national life—the internal communications which connect the points of distribution. Here again we touch an analogy between the two kinds of war. Land warfare, as the most devoted adherents of the modern view admit, cannot attain its end by military victories alone. The destruction of your enemy's forces will not avail for certain unless you have in reserve sufficient force to complete the occupation of his inland communications and principal points of distribution. This power is the real fruit of victory, the power to strangle the whole national life. It is not until this is done that a high-spirited nation, whose whole heart is in the war, will consent to make peace and do your will. It is precisely in the same way that the command of the sea works towards peace, though of course in a far less coercive manner, against a continental State. By occupying her maritime communications and closing the points of distribution in which they terminate we destroy the national life afloat, and thereby check the vitality of that life ashore so far as the one is dependent on the other. Thus we see that so long as we retain the power and right to stop maritime communications, the analogy between command of the sea and the conquest of territory is in this aspect very close. And the analogy is of the utmost practical importance, for on it turns the most burning question of maritime war, which it will be well to deal with in this place.
It is obvious that if the object and end of naval warfare is the control of communications it must carry with it the right to forbid, if we can, the passage of both public and private property upon the sea.Now the only means we have of enforcing such control of commercial communications at sea is in the last resort the capture or destruction of sea-borne property.Such capture or destruction is the penalty which we impose upon our enemy for attempting to use the communications of which he does not hold the control.In the language of jurisprudence, it is the ultimate sanction of the interdict which we are seeking to enforce.The current term "Commerce destruction" is not in fact a logical expression of the strategical idea.To make the position clear we should say "Commerce prevention."
The methods of this "Commerce prevention" have no more connection with the old and barbarous idea of plunder and reprisal than orderly requisitions ashore have with the old idea of plunder and ravaging. No form of war indeed causes so little human suffering as the capture of property at sea. It is more akin to process of law, such as distress for rent, or execution of judgment, or arrest of a ship, than to a military operation. Once, it is true, it was not so. In the days of privateers it was accompanied too often, and particularly in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, with lamentable cruelty and lawlessness, and the existence of such abuses was the real reason for the general agreement to the Declaration of Paris by which privateering was abolished.
But it was not the only reason.The idea of privateering was a survival of a primitive and unscientific conception of war, which was governed mainly by a general notion of doing your enemy as much damage as possible and making reprisal for wrongs he had done you.To the same class of ideas belonged the practice of plunder and ravaging ashore.But neither of these methods of war was abolished for humanitarian reasons.They disappeared indeed as a general practice before the world had begun to talk of humanity.They were abolished because war became more scientific.The right to plunder and ravage was not denied.But plunder was found to demoralise your troops and unfit them for fighting, and ravaging proved to be a less powerful means of coercing your enemy than exploiting the occupied country by means of regular requisitions for the supply of your own army and the increase of its offensive range.In short, the reform arose from a desire to husband your enemy's resources for your own use instead of wantonly wasting them.
In a similar way privateering always had a debilitating effect upon our own regular force. It greatly increased the difficulty of manning the navy, and the occasional large profits had a demoralising influence on detached cruiser commanders. It tended to keep alive the mediaeval corsair spirit at the expense of the modern military spirit which made for direct operations against the enemy's armed forces. It was inevitable that as the new movement of opinion gathered force it should carry with it a conviction that for operating against sea-borne trade sporadic attack could never be so efficient as an organised system of operations to secure a real strategical control of the enemy's maritime communications. A riper and sounder view of war revealed that what may be called tactical commercial blockade—that is, the blockade of ports—could be extended to and supplemented by a strategical blockade of the great trade routes. In moral principle there is no difference between the two. Admit the principle of tactical or close blockade, and as between belligerents you cannot condemn the principle of strategical or distant blockade. Except in their effect upon neutrals, there is no juridical difference between the two.
Why indeed should this humane yet drastic process of war be rejected at sea if the same thing is permitted on land?If on land you allow contributions and requisitions, if you permit the occupation of towns, ports, and inland communications, without which no conquest is complete and no effective war possible, why should you refuse similar procedure at sea where it causes far less individual suffering?If you refuse the right of controlling communications at sea, you must also refuse the right on land.If you admit the right of contributions on land, you must admit the right of capture at sea.Otherwise you will permit to military Powers the extreme rights of war and leave to the maritime Powers no effective rights at all.Their ultimate argument would be gone.
In so far as the idea of abolishing private capture at sea is humanitarian, and in so far as it rests on a belief that it would strengthen our position as a commercial maritime State, let it be honourably dealt with. But so far as its advocates have as yet expressed themselves, the proposal appears to be based on two fallacies. One is, that you can avoid attack by depriving yourself of the power of offence and resting on defence alone, and the other, the idea that war consists entirely of battles between armies or fleets. It ignores the fundamental fact that battles are only the means of enabling you to do that which really brings wars to an end-that is, to exert pressure on the citizens and their collective life. "After shattering the hostile main army," says Von der Goltz, "we still have the forcing of a peace as a separate and, in certain circumstances, a more difficult task ... to make the enemy's country feel the burdens of war with such weight that the desire for peace will prevail. This is the point in which Napoleon failed.... It may be necessary to seize the harbours, commercial centres, important lines of traffic, fortifications and arsenals, in other words, all important property necessary to the existence of the people and army."
If, then, we are deprived of the right to use analogous means at sea, the object for which we fight battles almost ceases to exist.Defeat the enemy's fleets as we may, he will be but little the worse.We shall have opened the way for invasion, but any of the great continental Powers can laugh at our attempts to invade single-handed.If we cannot reap the harvest of our success by deadening his national activities at sea, the only legitimate means of pressure within our strength will be denied us.Our fleet, if it would proceed with such secondary operations as are essential for forcing a peace, will be driven to such barbarous expedients as the bombardment of seaport towns and destructive raids upon the hostile coasts.
If the means of pressure which follow successful fighting were abolished both on land and sea there would be this argument in favour of the change, that it would mean perhaps for civilised States the entire cessation of war; for war would become so impotent, that no one would care to engage in it. It would be an affair between regular armies and fleets, with which the people had little concern. International quarrels would tend to take the form of the mediaeval private disputes which were settled by champions in trial by battle, an absurdity which led rapidly to the domination of purely legal procedure. If international quarrels could go the same way, humanity would have advanced a long stride. But the world is scarcely ripe for such a revolution. Meanwhile to abolish the right of interference with the flow of private property at sea without abolishing the corresponding right ashore would only defeat the ends of humanitarians. The great deterrent, the most powerful check on war, would be gone. It is commerce and finance which now more than ever control or check the foreign policy of nations. If commerce and finance stand to lose by war, their influence for a peaceful solution will be great; and so long as the right of private capture at sea exists, they stand to lose in every maritime war immediately and inevitably whatever the ultimate result may be. Abolish the right, and this deterrent disappears; nay, they will even stand to win immediate gains owing to the sudden expansion of Government expenditure which the hostilities will entail, and the expansion of sea commerce which the needs of the armed forces will create. Any such losses as maritime warfare under existing conditions must immediately inflict will be remote if interference with property is confined to the land. They will never indeed be serious except in the case of complete defeat, and no one enters upon war expecting defeat. It is in the hope of victory and gain that aggressive wars are born. The fear of quick and certain loss is their surest preventive. Humanity, then, will surely beware how in a too hasty pursuit of peaceful ideals it lets drop the best weapon it has for scotching the evil it has as yet no power to kill.
In what follows, therefore, it is intended to regard the right of private capture at sea as still subsisting.Without it, indeed, naval warfare is almost inconceivable, and in any case no one has any experience of such a truncated method of war on which profitable study can be founded.
The primary method, then, in which we use victory or preponderance at sea and bring it to bear on the enemy's population to secure peace, is by the capture or destruction of the enemy's property, whether public or private. But in comparing the process with the analogous occupation of territory and the levying of contributions and requisitions we have to observe a marked difference. Both processes are what may be called economic pressure. But ashore the economic pressure can only be exerted as the consequence of victory or acquired domination by military success. At sea the process begins at once. Indeed, more often than not, the first act of hostility in maritime wars has been the capture of private property at sea. In a sense this is also true ashore. The first step of an invader after crossing the frontier will be to control to a less or greater extent such private property as he is able to use for his purposes. But such interference with private property is essentially a military act, and does not belong to the secondary phase of economic pressure. At sea it does, and the reason why this should be so lies in certain fundamental differences between land and sea warfare which are implicit in the communication theory of naval war.
To elucidate the point, it must be repeated that maritime communications, which are the root of the idea of command of the sea, are not analogous to military communications in the ordinary use of the term.Military communications refer solely to the army's lines of supply and retreat.Maritime communications have a wider meaning.Though in effect embracing the lines of fleet supply, they correspond in strategical values not to military lines of supply, but to those internal lines of communication by which the flow of national life is maintained ashore.Consequently maritime communications are on a wholly different footing from land communications.At sea the communications are, for the most part, common to both belligerents, whereas ashore each possesses his own in his own territory.The strategical effect is of far-reaching importance, for it means that at sea strategical offence and defence tend to merge in a way that is unknown ashore.Since maritime communications are common, we as a rule cannot attack those of the enemy without defending our own.In military operations the converse is the rule.Normally, an attack on our enemy's communications tends to expose their own.
The theory of common communications will become clear by taking an example.In our wars with France our communications with the Mediterranean, India, and America ran down from the Channel mouth past Finisterre and St.Vincent; and those of France, at least from her Atlantic ports, were identical for almost their entire distance.In our wars with the Dutch the identity was even closer.Even in the case of Spain, her great trade routes followed the same lines as our own for the greater part of their extent.Consequently the opening moves which we generally made to defend our trade by the occupation of those lines placed us in a position to attack our enemy's trade.The same situation arose even when our opening dispositions were designed as defence against home invasion or against attacks upon our colonies, for the positions our fleet had to take up to those ends always lay on or about the terminal and focal points of trade routes.Whether our immediate object were to bring the enemy's main fleets to action or to exercise economic pressure, it made but little difference.If the enemy were equally anxious to engage, it was at one of the terminal or focal areas we were almost certain to get contact.If he wished to avoid a decision, the best way to force him to action was to occupy his trade routes at the same vital points.
Thus it comes about that, whereas on land the process of economic pressure, at least in the modern conception of war, should only begin after decisive victory, at sea it starts automatically from the first.Indeed such pressure may be the only means of forcing the decision we seek, as will appear more clearly when we come to deal with the other fundamental difference between land and sea warfare.
Meanwhile we may note that at sea the use of economic pressure from the commencement is justified for two reasons. The first is, as we have seen, that it is an economy of means to use our defensive positions for attack when attack does not vitiate those positions, and it will not vitiate them if fleet cruisers operate with restraint. The second is, that interference with the enemy's trade has two aspects. It is not only a means of exerting the secondary economic pressure, it is also a primary means towards overthrowing the enemy's power of resistance. Wars are not decided exclusively by military and naval force. Finance is scarcely less important. When other things are equal, it is the longer purse that wins. It has even many times redressed an unfavourable balance of armed force and given victory to the physically weaker Power. Anything, therefore, which we are able to achieve towards crippling our enemy's finance is a direct step to his overthrow, and the most effective means we can employ to this end against a maritime State is to deny him the resources of seaborne trade.
It will be seen, therefore, that in naval warfare, however closely we may concentrate our efforts on the destruction of our enemy's armed forces as the direct means to his overthrow, it would be folly to stay our hands when opportunities occur, as they will automatically, for undermining his financial position on which the continued vigour of those armed forces so largely depends.Thus the occupation of our enemy's sea communications and the confiscatory operations it connotes are in a sense primary operations, and not, as on land, secondary.
Such, then, are the abstract conclusions at which we arrive in our attempt to analyse the idea of command of the sea and to give it precision as the control of common communications. Their concrete value will appear when we come to deal with the various forms which naval operations may take, such as, "seeking out the enemy's fleet," blockade, attack and defence of trade, and the safeguarding of combined expeditions. For the present it remains to deal with the various kinds of sea command which flow from the communication idea.
If the object of the command of the sea is to control communications, it is obvious it may exist in various degrees.We may be able to control the whole of the common communications as the result either of great initial preponderance or of decisive victory.If we are not sufficiently strong to do this, we may still be able to control some of the communications; that is, our control may be general or local.Obvious as the point is, it needs emphasising, because of a maxim that has become current that "the sea is all one."Like other maxims of the kind, it conveys a truth with a trail of error in its wake.The truth it contains seems to be simply this, that as a rule local control can only avail us temporarily, for so long as the enemy has a sufficient fleet anywhere, it is theoretically in his power to overthrow our control of any special sea area.
It amounts indeed to little more than a rhetorical expression, used to emphasise the high mobility of fleets as contrasted with that of armies and the absence of physical obstacles to restrict that mobility.That this vital feature of naval warfare should be consecrated in a maxim is well, but when it is caricatured into a doctrine, as it sometimes is, that you cannot move a battalion oversea till you have entirely overthrown your enemy's fleet, it deserves gibbeting.It would be as wise to hold that in war you must never risk anything.
It would seem to have been the evil influence of this travestied maxim which had much to do with the cramped and timorous strategy of the Americans in their late war with Spain. They had ample naval force to secure such a local and temporary command of the Gulf of Mexico as to have justified them at once in throwing all the troops they had ready into Cuba to support the insurgents, in accordance with their war plan. They had also sufficient strength to ensure that the communications with the expeditionary force could not be interrupted permanently. And yet, because the Spaniards had an undefeated fleet at sea somewhere, they hesitated, and were nearly lost. The Japanese had no such illusions. Without having struck a naval blow of any kind, and with a hostile fleet actually within the theatre of operations, they started their essential military movement oversea, content that though they might not be able to secure the control of the line of passage, they were in a position to deny effective control to the enemy. Our own history is full of such operations. There are cases in plenty where the results promised by a successful military blow oversea, before permanent command had been obtained, were great enough to justify a risk which, like the Japanese, we knew how to minimise by judicious use of our favourable geographical position, and of a certain system of protection, which must be dealt with later.
For the purpose, then, of framing a plan of war or campaign, it must be taken that command may exist in various states or degrees, each of which has its special possibilities and limitations.It may be general or local, and it may be permanent or temporary.General command may be permanent or temporary, but mere local command, except in very favourable geographical conditions, should scarcely ever be regarded as more than temporary, since normally it is always liable to interruption from other theatres so long as the enemy possesses an effective naval force.
Finally, it has to be noted that even permanent general command can never in practice be absolute. No degree of naval superiority can ensure our communications against sporadic attack from detached cruisers, or even raiding squadrons if they be boldly led and are prepared to risk destruction. Even after Hawke's decisive victory at Quiberon had completed the overthrow of the enemy's sea forces, a British transport was captured between Cork and Portsmouth, and an Indiaman in sight of the Lizard, while Wellington's complaints in the Peninsula of the insecurity of his communications are well known.9 By general and permanent control we do not mean that the enemy can do nothing, but that he cannot interfere with our maritime trade and oversea operations so seriously as to affect the issue of the war, and that he cannot carry on his own trade and operations except at such risk and hazard as to remove them from the field of practical strategy. In other words, it means that the enemy can no longer attack our lines of passage and communication effectively, and that he cannot use or defend his own.
To complete our equipment for appreciating any situation for which operations have to be designed, it is necessary to remember that when the command is in dispute the general conditions may give a stable or an unstable equilibrium. It may be that the power of neither side preponderates to any appreciable extent. It may also be that the preponderance is with ourselves, or it may be that it lies with the enemy. Such preponderance of course will not depend entirely on actual relative strength, either physical or moral, but will be influenced by the inter-relation of naval positions and the comparative convenience of their situation in regard to the object of the war or campaign. By naval positions we mean, firstly, naval bases and, secondly, the terminals of the greater lines of communication or trade-routes and the focal areas where they tend to converge, as at Finisterre, Gibraltar, Suez, the Cape, Singapore, and many others.
Upon the degree and distribution of this preponderance will depend in a general way the extent to which our plans will be governed by the idea of defence or offence.Generally speaking, it will be to the advantage of the preponderating side to seek a decision as quickly as possible in order to terminate the state of dispute.Conversely, the weaker side will as a rule seek to avoid or postpone a decision in hope of being able by minor operations, the chances of war, or the development of fresh strength, to turn the balance in its favour.Such was the line which France adopted frequently in her wars with us, sometimes legitimately, but sometimes to such an excess as seriously to demoralise her fleet.Her experience has led to a hasty deduction that the defensive at sea for even a weaker Power is an unmixed evil.Such a conclusion is foreign to the fundamental principles of war.It is idle to exclude the use of an expectant attitude because in itself it cannot lead to final success, and because if used to excess it ends in demoralisation and the loss of will to attack.The misconception appears to have arisen from insistence on the drawbacks of defence by writers seeking to persuade their country to prepare in time of peace sufficient naval strength to justify offence from the outset.
Having now determined the fundamental principles which underlie the idea of Command of the Sea, we are in a position to consider the manner in which fleets are constituted in order to fit them for their task.
CHAPTER TWO
THEORY OF THE
MEANS—THE
CONSTITUTION OF
FLEETS
In all eras of naval warfare fighting ships have exhibited a tendency to differentiate into groups in accordance with the primary function each class was designed to serve.These groupings or classifications are what is meant by the constitution of a fleet.A threefold differentiation into battleships, cruisers, and flotilla has so long dominated naval thought that we have come to regard it as normal, and even essential.It may be so, but such a classification has been by no means constant.Other ideas of fleet constitution have not only existed, but have stood the test of war for long periods, and it is unscientific and unsafe to ignore such facts if we wish to arrive at sound doctrine.
The truth is, that the classes of ships which constitute a fleet are, or ought to be, the expression in material of the strategical and tactical ideas that prevail at any given time, and consequently they have varied not only with the ideas, but also with the material in vogue.It may also be said more broadly that they have varied with the theory of war, by which more or less consciously naval thought was dominated.It is true that few ages have formulated a theory of war, or even been clearly aware of its influence; but nevertheless such theories have always existed, and even in their most nebulous and intangible shapes seem to have exerted an ascertainable influence on the constitution of fleets.
Going back to the dawn of modern times, we note that at the opening of the sixteenth century, when galley warfare reached its culmination, the constitution was threefold, bearing a superficial analogy to that which we have come to regard as normal.There were the galeasses and heavy galleys corresponding to our battleships, light galleys corresponding to our cruisers, while the flotilla was represented by the small "frigates," "brigantines," and similar craft, which had no slave gang for propulsion, but were rowed by the fighting crew.Such armed sailing ships as then existed were regarded as auxiliaries, and formed a category apart, as fireships and bomb-vessels did in the sailing period, and as mine-layers do now.But the parallel must not be overstrained.The distinction of function between the two classes of galleys was not so strongly marked as that between the lighter craft and the galleys; that is to say, the scientific differentiation between battleships and cruisers had not yet been so firmly developed as it was destined to become in later times, and the smaller galleys habitually took their place in the fighting line.
With the rise of the sailing vessel as the typical ship-of-war an entirely new constitution made its appearance. The dominating classification became twofold. It was a classification into vessels of subservient movement using sails, and vessels of free movement using oars. It was on these lines that our true Royal Navy was first organised by Henry the Eighth, an expert who, in the science of war, was one of the most advanced masters in Europe. In this constitution there appears even less conception than in that of the galley period of a radical distinction between battleships and cruisers. As Henry's fleet was originally designed, practically the whole of the battleships were sailing vessels, though it is true that when the French brought up galleys from the Mediterranean, he gave some of the smartest of them oars. The constitution was in fact one of battleships and flotilla. Of cruisers there were none as we understand them. Fleet scouting was done by the "Row-barges" and newly introduced "Pinnaces" of the flotilla, while as for commerce protection, merchant vessels had usually to look after themselves, the larger ones being regularly armed for their own defence.
The influence of this twofold constitution continued long after the conditions of its origin had passed away.In ever-lessening degree indeed it may be said to have lasted for two hundred years.During the Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, which finally established the dominant status of the sailing warship, practically all true sailing vessels—that is, vessels that had no auxiliary oar propulsion—took station in the line.The "Frigates" of that time differed not at all from the "Great Ship" in their functions, but only in their design.By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, the old tendency to a threefold organisation began to reassert itself, but it was not till the middle of the century that the process of development can be regarded as complete.
Down to the end of the War of the Austrian Succession—a period which is usually deemed to be one of conspicuous depression in the naval art—the classification of our larger sailing vessels was purely arbitrary. The "Rates" (which had been introduced during the Dutch wars) bore no relation to any philosophical conception of the complex duties of a fleet. In the first rate were 100-gun ships; in the second, 90-gun ships—all three-deckers. So far the system of rating was sound enough, but when we come to the third rate we find it includes 80-gun ships, which were also of three decks, while the bulk of the rest were 70-gun two-deckers. The fourth rate was also composed of two-decked ships—weak battle-units of 60 and 50 guns—and this was far the largest class. All these four rates were classed as ships-of-the-line. Below them came the fifth rates, which, though they were used as cruisers, had no distinct class name. They differed indeed only in degree from the ship-of-the-line, being all cramped two-deckers of 44 and 40 guns, and they must be regarded, in so far as they expressed any logical idea of naval warfare, as the forerunners of the "Intermediate" class, represented in the succeeding epochs by 50-gun ships, and in our own time by armoured cruisers. The only true cruiser is found in the sixth rate, which comprised small and weakly armed 20-gun ships, and between them and the "Forties" there was nothing. Below them, but again without any clear differentiation, came the unrated sloops representing the flotilla.
In such a system of rating there is no logical distinction either between large and small battleships or between battleships and cruisers, or between cruisers and flotilla.The only marked break in the gradual descent is that between the 40-gun two-deckers and the 20-gun cruisers.As these latter vessels as well as the sloops used sweeps for auxiliary propulsion, we are forced to conclude that the only basis of the classification was that adopted by Henry the Eighth, which, sound as it was in his time, had long ceased to have any real relation to the actuality of naval war.
It was not till Anson's memorable administration that a scientific system of rating was re-established and the fleet at last assumed the logical constitution which it retained up to our own time. In the first two rates appear the fleet flagship class, three-deckers of 100 and 90 guns respectively. All smaller three-deckers are eliminated. In the next two rates we have the rank and file of the battle-line, two-deckers of increased size-namely, seventy-fours in the third rate, and sixty-fours in the fourth. Here, however, is a slight break in the perfection of the system, for the fourth rate also included 50-gun ships of two decks, which, during the progress of the Seven Years' War, ceased to be regarded as ships-of-the-line. War experience was eliminating small battleships, and therewith it called for a type intermediate between battleships and cruisers, with whose functions we shall have to deal directly. In practice these units soon formed a rate by themselves, into which, by the same tendency, 60-gun ships were destined to sink half a century later.
But most pregnant of all Anson's reforms was the introduction of the true cruiser, no longer a small battleship, but a vessel specialised for its logical functions, and distinct in design both from the battle rates and the flotilla.Both 40-gun and 20-gun types were abolished, and in their place appear two cruiser rates, and the fifth consisting of 32-gun true frigates, and the sixth of 28-gun frigates, both completely divorced from any battle function.Finally, after a very distinct gap, came the unrated sloops and smaller craft, which formed the flotilla for coastwise and inshore work, despatch service, and kindred duties.
The reforms of the great First Lord amounted in fact to a clearly apprehended threefold constitution, in which the various groups were frankly specialised in accordance with the functions each was expected to perform. Specialisation, it will be observed, is the note of the process of development. We have no longer an endeavour to adapt the fleet to its multifarious duties by multiplying a comparatively weak nature of fighting-ship, which could act in the line and yet be had in sufficient numbers to protect commerce, but which was not well fitted for either service. Instead we note a definite recognition of the principle that battleships should be as powerful as possible, and that in order to permit of their due development they must be relieved of their cruising functions by a class of vessel specially adapted for the purpose. The question we have to consider is, was this specialisation, which has asserted itself down to our own times, in the true line of development? Was it, in fact, a right expression of the needs which are indicated by the theory of naval war?
By the theory of naval war it must be reiterated we mean nothing but an enunciation of the fundamental principles which underlie all naval war.Those principles, if we have determined them correctly, should be found giving shape not only to strategy and tactics, but also to material, whatever method and means of naval warfare may be in use at any given time.Conversely, if we find strategy, tactics, or organisation exhibiting a tendency to reproduce the same forms under widely differing conditions of method and material, we should be able to show that those forms bear a constant and definite relation to the principles which our theory endeavours to express.
In the case of Anson's threefold organisation, the relation is not far to seek, though it has become obscured by two maxims. The one is, that "the command of the sea depends upon battleships," and the other, that "cruisers are the eyes of the fleet." It is the inherent evil of maxims that they tend to get stretched beyond their original meaning. Both of these express a truth, but neither expresses the whole truth. On no theory of naval warfare can we expect to command the sea with battleships, nor, on the communication theory, can we regard the primary function of cruisers as being to scout for a battle-fleet. It is perfectly true that the control depends ultimately on the battle-fleet if control is disputed by a hostile battle-fleet, as it usually is. It is also true that, so far as is necessary to enable the battle-fleet to secure the control, we have to furnish it with eyes from our cruiser force. But it does not follow that this is the primary function of cruisers. The truth is, we have to withdraw them from their primary function in order to do work for the battle-fleet which it cannot do for itself.
Well established as is the "Eyes of the fleet" maxim, it would be very difficult to show that scouting was ever regarded as the primary function of cruisers by the highest authorities. In Nelson's practice at least their paramount function was to exercise the control which he was securing with his battle-squadron. Nothing is more familiar in naval history than his incessant cry from the Mediterranean for more cruisers, but the significance of that cry has become obscured. It was not that his cruisers were not numerous in proportion to his battleships—they were usually nearly double in number—but it was rather that he was so deeply convinced of their true function, that he used them to exercise control to an extent which sometimes reduced his fleet cruisers below the limit of bare necessity. The result on a memorable occasion was the escape of the enemy's battle-fleet, but the further result is equally important. It was that the escape of that fleet did not deprive him of the control which he was charged to maintain. His judgment may have been at fault, but the strategical distribution of his force was consistent throughout the whole period of his Mediterranean command. Judged by his record, no man ever grasped more clearly than Nelson that the object of naval warfare was to control communications, and if he found that he had not a sufficient number of cruisers to exercise that control and to furnish eyes for his battle-fleet as well, it was the battle-fleet that was made to suffer, and surely this is at least the logical view. Had the French been ready to risk settling the question of the control in a fleet action, it would have been different. He would then have been right to sacrifice the exercise of control for the time in order to make sure that the action should take place and end decisively in his favour. But he knew they were not ready to take such a risk, and he refused to permit a purely defensive attitude on the part of the enemy to delude him from the special function with which he had been charged.
If the object of naval warfare is to control communications, then the fundamental requirement is the means of exercising that control.Logically, therefore, if the enemy holds back from battle decision, we must relegate the battle-fleet to a secondary position, for cruisers are the means of exercising control; the battle-fleet is but the means of preventing their being interfered with in their work.Put it to the test of actual practice.In no case can we exercise control by battleships alone.Their specialisation has rendered them unfit for the work, and has made them too costly ever to be numerous enough.Even, therefore, if our enemy had no battle-fleet we could not make control effective with battleships alone.We should still require cruisers specialised for the work and in sufficient numbers to cover the necessary ground.But the converse is not true.We could exercise control with cruisers alone if the enemy had no battle-fleet to interfere with them.
If, then, we seek a formula that will express the practical results of our theory, it would take some such shape as this. On cruisers depends our exercise of control; on the battle-fleet depends the security of control. That is the logical sequence of ideas, and it shows us that the current maxim is really the conclusion of a logical argument in which the initial steps must not be ignored. The maxim that the command of the sea depends on the battle-fleet is then perfectly sound so long as it is taken to include all the other facts on which it hangs. The true function of the battle-fleet is to protect cruisers and flotilla at their special work. The best means of doing this is of course to destroy the enemy's power of interference. The doctrine of destroying the enemy's armed forces as the paramount object here reasserts itself, and reasserts itself so strongly as to permit for most practical purposes the rough generalisation that the command depends upon the battle-fleet.
Of what practical use then, it may be asked, is all this hairsplitting?Why not leave untainted the conviction that our first and foremost business is to crush the enemy's battle-fleet, and that to this end our whole effort should be concentrated?The answer is to point to Nelson's dilemma.It was a dilemma which, in the golden age of naval warfare, every admiral at sea had had to solve for himself, and it was always one of the most difficult details of every naval war plan.If we seek to ensure the effective action of the battle-fleet by giving it a large proportion of cruisers, by so much do we weaken the actual and continuous exercise of control.If we seek to make that control effective by devoting to the service a large proportion of cruisers, by so much do we prejudice our chance of getting contact with and defeating the enemy's battle-fleet, which is the only means of perfecting control.
The correct solution of the dilemma will of course depend upon the conditions of each case—mainly upon the relative strength and activity of the hostile battle-fleet and our enemy's probable intentions. But no matter how completely we have tabulated all the relevant facts, we can never hope to come to a sound conclusion upon them without a just appreciation of all the elements which go to give command, and without the power of gauging their relative importance. This, and this alone, will ultimately settle the vital question of what proportion of our cruiser force it is right to devote to the battle-fleet.
If the doctrine of cruiser control be correct, then every cruiser attached to the battle-fleet is one withdrawn from its true function.Such withdrawals are inevitable.A squadron of battleships is an imperfect organism unable to do its work without cruiser assistance, and since the performance of its work is essential to cruiser freedom, some cruisers must be sacrificed.But in what proportion?If we confine ourselves to the view that command depends on the battle-fleet, then we shall attach to it such a number as its commander may deem necessary to make contact with the enemy absolutely certain and to surround himself with an impenetrable screen.If we knew the enemy was as anxious for a decision as ourselves, such a course might be justified.But the normal condition is that if we desire a decision it is because we have definite hopes of success, and consequently the enemy will probably seek to avoid one on our terms. In practice this means that if we have perfected our arrangements for the destruction of his main fleet he will refuse to expose it till he sees a more favourable opportunity.And what will be the result?He remains on the defensive, and theoretically all the ensuing period of inaction tends to fall into his scale.Without stirring from port his fleet is doing its work.The more closely he induces us to concentrate our cruiser force in face of his battle-fleet, the more he frees the sea for the circulation of his own trade, and the more he exposes ours to cruiser raids.
Experience, then, and theory alike dictate that as a general principle cruisers should be regarded as primarily concerned with the active occupation of communications, and that withdrawals for fleet purposes should be reduced to the furthest margin of reasonable risk. What that margin should be can only be decided on the circumstances of each case as it arises, and by the personal characteristics of the officers who are responsible. Nelson's practice was to reduce fleet cruisers lower than perhaps any other commander. So small indeed was the margin of efficiency he left, that in the campaign already cited, when his judgment was ripest, one stroke of ill-luck—a chance betrayal of his position by a neutral—availed to deprive him of the decision he sought, and to let the enemy's fleet escape.
We arrive, then, at this general conclusion.The object of naval warfare is to control maritime communications.In order to exercise that control effectively we must have a numerous class of vessels specially adapted for pursuit.But their power of exercising control is in proportion to our degree of command, that is, to our power of preventing their operations being interfered with by the enemy.Their own power of resistance is in inverse proportion to their power of exercising control; that is to say, the more numerous and better adapted they are for preying on commerce and transports, the weaker will be their individual fighting power.We cannot give them as a whole the power of resisting disturbance without at the same time reducing their power of exercising control.The accepted solution of the difficulty during the great period of Anson's school was to provide them with a covering force of battle units specially adapted for fighting.But here arises a correlative difficulty.In so far as we give our battle units fighting power we deny them scouting power, and scouting is essential to their effective operation.The battle-fleet must have eyes.Now, vessels adapted for control of communications are also well adapted for "eyes."It becomes the practice, therefore, to withdraw from control operations a sufficient number of units to enable the battle-fleet to cover effectively the operations of those that remain.
Such were the broad principles on which the inevitable dilemma always had to be solved, and on which Anson's organisation was based.They flow naturally from the communication theory of maritime war, and it was this theory which then dominated naval thought, as is apparent from the technical use of such phrases as "lines of passage and communication."The war plans of the great strategists from Anson and Barham can always be resolved into these simple elements, and where we find the Admiralty grip of them loosened, we have the confusion and quite unnecessary failures of the War of American Independence.In that mismanaged contest the cardinal mistake was that we suffered the enemy's battle-fleets to get upon and occupy the vital lines of "passage and communication" without first bringing them to action, an error partly due to the unreadiness of a weak administration, and partly to an insufficient allocation of cruisers to secure contact at the right places.
So far, then, the principles on which our naval supremacy was built up are clear. For the enemies with whom we had to deal Anson's system was admirably conceived. Both Spain and France held the communication theory so strongly, that they were content to count as success the power of continually disturbing our control without any real attempt to secure it for themselves. To defeat such a policy Anson's constitution and the strategy it connoted were thoroughly well adapted and easy to work. But it by no means follows that his doctrine is the last word. Even in his own time complications had begun to develop which tended to confuse the precision of his system. By the culminating year of Trafalgar there were indications that it was getting worn out, while the new methods and material used by the Americans in 1812 made a serious rent in it. The disturbances then inaugurated have continued to develop, and it is necessary to consider how seriously they have confused the problem of fleet constitution.
Firstly, there is the general recognition, always patent to ourselves, that by far the most drastic, economical, and effective way of securing control is to destroy the enemy's means of interfering with it.In our own service this "overthrow" idea always tended to assert itself so strongly, that occasionally the means became for a time more important than the end; that is to say, circumstances were such that on occasions it was considered advisable to sacrifice the exercise of control for a time in order quickly and permanently to deprive the enemy of all means of interference.When there was reasonable hope of the enemy risking a decision this consideration tended to override all others; but when, as in Nelson's case in the Mediterranean, the hope was small, the exercise of control tended to take the paramount place.
The second complexity arose from the fact that however strong might be our battleship cover, it is impossible for it absolutely to secure cruiser control from disturbance by sporadic attack.Isolated heavy ships, taking advantage of the chances of the sea, could elude even the strictest blockade, and one such ship, if she succeeded in getting upon a line of communication, might paralyse the operations of a number of weaker units.They must either run or concentrate, and in either case the control was broken.If it were a squadron of heavy ships that caused the disturbance, the practice was to detach against it a division of the covering battle-fleet.But it was obviously highly inconvenient and contrary to the whole idea on which the constitution of the fleet was based to allow every slight danger to cruiser control to loosen the cohesion of the main fleet.
It was necessary, then, to give cruiser lines some power of resistance. This necessity once admitted, there seemed no point at which you could stop increasing the fighting power of your cruisers, and sooner or later, unless some means of checking the process were found, the distinction between cruisers and battleships would practically disappear. Such a means was found in what may be called the "Intermediate" ship. Frigates did indeed continue to increase in size and fighting power throughout the remainder of the sailing era, but it was not only in this manner that the power of resistance was gained. The evil results of the movement were checked by the introduction of a supporting ship, midway between frigates and true ships-of-the-line. Sometimes classed as a battleship, and taking her place in the line, the 50-gun ship came to be essentially a type for stiffening cruiser squadrons. They most commonly appear as the flagships of cruiser commodores, or stationed in terminal waters or at focal points where sporadic raids were likely to fall and be most destructive. The strategical effect of the presence of such a vessel in a cruiser line was to give the whole line in some degree the strength of the intermediate ship; for any hostile cruiser endeavouring to disturb the line was liable to have to deal with the supporting ship, while if a frigate and a 50-gun ship got together they were a match even for a small ship-of-the-line.
In sailing days, of course, this power of the supporting ship was weak owing to the imperfection of the means of distant communication between ships at sea and the non-existence of such means beyond extreme range of vision.But as wireless telegraphy develops it is not unreasonable to expect that the strategic value of the supporting or intermediate ship will be found greater than it ever was in sailing days, and that for dealing with sporadic disturbance the tendency will be for a cruiser line to approximate more and more in power of resistance to that of its strongest unit.
For fleet service a cruiser's power of resistance was hardly less valuable; for though we speak of fleet cruisers as the eyes of the fleet, their purpose is almost equally to blindfold the enemy. Their duty is not only to disclose the movements of the enemy, but also to act as a screen to conceal our own. The point was specially well marked in the blockades, where the old 50-gun ships are almost always found with the inshore cruiser squadron, preventing that squadron being forced by inquisitive frigates. Important as this power of resistance in the screen was in the old days, it is tenfold more important now, and the consequent difficulty of keeping cruisers distinct from battleships is greater than ever. The reason for this is best considered under the third and most serious cause of complexity.
The third cause is the acquisition by the flotilla of battle power.It is a feature of naval warfare that is entirely new.10 For all practical purposes it was unknown until the full development of the mobile torpedo. It is true that the fireship as originally conceived was regarded as having something of the same power. During the Dutch wars—the heyday of its vogue—its assigned power was on some occasions actually realised, as in the burning of Lord Sandwich's flagship at the battle of Solebay, and the destruction of the Spanish-Dutch fleet at Palermo by Duquesne. But as the "nimbleness" of great-ships increased with the ripening of seamanship and naval architecture, the fireship as a battle weapon became almost negligible, while a fleet at anchor was found to be thoroughly defensible by its own picket-boats. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century indeed the occasions on which the fireship could be used for its special purpose was regarded as highly exceptional, and though the type was retained till the end of the century, its normal functions differed not at all from those of the rest of the flotilla of which it then formed part.
Those functions, as we have seen, expressed the cruising idea in its purest sense.It was numbers and mobility that determined flotilla types rather than armament or capacity for sea-endurance.Their primary purpose was to control communications in home and colonial waters against weakly armed privateers.The type which these duties determined fitted them adequately for the secondary purpose of inshore and despatch work with a fleet.It was, moreover, on the ubiquity which their numbers gave them, and on their power of dealing with unarmed or lightly armed vessels, that we relied for our first line of defence against invasion.These latter duties were of course exceptional, and the Navy List did not carry as a rule sufficient numbers for the purpose.But a special value of the class was that it was capable of rapid and almost indefinite expansion from the mercantile marine.Anything that could carry a gun had its use, and during the period of the Napoleonic threat the defence flotilla rose all told to considerably over a thousand units.
Formidable and effective as was a flotilla of this type for the ends it was designed to serve, it obviously in no way affected the security of a battle-fleet. But so soon as the flotilla acquired battle power the whole situation was changed, and the old principles of cruiser design and distribution were torn to shreds. The battle-fleet became a more imperfect organism than ever. Formerly it was only its offensive power that required supplementing. The new condition meant that unaided it could no longer ensure its own defence. It now required screening, not only from observation, but also from flotilla attack. The theoretical weakness of an arrested offensive received a practical and concrete illustration to a degree that war had scarcely ever known. Our most dearly cherished strategical traditions were shaken to the bottom. The "proper place" for our battle-fleet had always been "on the enemy's coasts," and now that was precisely where the enemy would be best pleased to see it. What was to be done? So splendid a tradition could not lightly be laid aside, but the attempt to preserve it involved us still deeper in heresy. The vital, most difficult, and most absorbing problem has become not how to increase the power of a battle-fleet for attack, which is a comparatively simple matter, but how to defend it. As the offensive power of the flotilla developed, the problem pressed with an almost bewildering intensity. With every increase in the speed and sea-keeping power of torpedo craft, the problem of the screen grew more exacting. To keep the hostile flotilla out of night range the screen must be flung out wider and wider, and this meant more and more cruisers withdrawn from their primary function. And not only this. The screen must not only be far flung, but it must be made as far as possible impenetrable. In other words, its own power of resistance must be increased all along the line. Whole squadrons of armoured cruisers had to be attached to battle-fleets to support the weaker members of the screen. The crying need for this type of ship set up a rapid movement for increasing their fighting power, and with it fell with equal rapidity the economic possibility of giving the cruiser class its essential attribute of numbers.
As an inevitable result we find ourselves involved in an effort to restore to the flotilla some of its old cruiser capacity, by endowing it with gun armament, higher sea-keeping power, and facilities for distant communication, all at the cost of specialisation and of greater economic strain. Still judged by past experience, some means of increasing numbers in the cruising types is essential, nor is it clear how it is possible to secure that essential in the ranks of the true cruiser. No point has been found at which it was possible to stop the tendency of this class of vessel to increase in size and cost, or to recall it to the strategical position it used to occupy. So insecure is the battle-squadron, so imperfect as a self-contained weapon has it become, that its need has overridden the old order of things, and the primary function of the cruising ship inclines to be no longer the exercise of control under cover of the battle-fleet. The battle-fleet now demands protection by the cruising ship, and what the battle-fleet needs is held to be the first necessity.
Judged by the old naval practice, it is an anomalous position to have reached.But the whole naval art has suffered a revolution beyond all previous experience, and it is possible the old practice is no longer a safe guide.Driven by the same necessities, every naval Power is following the same course.It may be right, it may be wrong; no one at least but the ignorant or hasty will venture to pass categorical judgment.The best we can do is to endeavour to realise the situation to which, in spite of all misgivings, we have been forced, and to determine its relations to the developments of the past.
It is undoubtedly a difficult task. As we have seen, there have prevailed in the constitution of fleets at various times several methods of expressing the necessities of naval war. The present system differs from them all. On the one hand, we have the fact that the latest developments of cruiser power have finally obliterated all logical distinction between cruisers and battleships, and we thus find ourselves hand in hand with the fleet constitution of the old Dutch wars. On the other, however, we have armoured cruisers organised in squadrons and attached to battle-fleets not only for strategical purposes, but also with as yet undeveloped tactical functions in battle. Here we come close to the latest development of the sailing era, when "Advanced" or "Light" squadrons began to appear in the organisation of battle-fleets.
The system arose towards the end of the eighteenth century in the Mediterranean, where the conditions of control called for so wide a dispersal of cruisers and so great a number of them, that it was almost imperative for a battle-squadron in that sea to do much of its own scouting.It was certainly for this purpose that the fastest and lightest ships-of-the-line were formed into a separate unit, and the first designation it received was that of "Observation Squadron."It remained for Nelson to endeavour to endow it with a tactical function, but his idea was never realised either by himself or any of his successors.
Side by side with this new element in the organisation of a battle-fleet, which perhaps is best designated as a "Light Division," we have another significant fact. Not only was it not always composed entirely of ships-of-the-line, especially in the French service, but in 1805, the year of the full development, we have Sir Richard Strachan using the heavy frigates attached to his battle-squadron as a "Light Division," and giving them a definite tactical function. The collapse of the French Navy put a stop to further developments of either idea. Whither they would have led we cannot tell. But it is impossible to shut our eyes to the indication of a growing tendency towards the system that exists at present. It is difficult at least to ignore the fact that both Nelson and Strachan in that culminating year found the actuality of war calling for something for which there was then no provision in the constitution of the fleet, but which it does contain to-day. What Nelson felt for was a battleship of cruiser speed. What Strachan desired was a cruiser fit to take a tactical part in a fleet action. We have them both, but with what result? Anson's specialisation of types has almost disappeared, and our present fleet constitution is scarcely to be distinguished from that of the seventeenth century. We retain the three-fold nomenclature, but the system itself has really gone. Battleships grade into armoured cruisers, armoured cruisers into protected cruisers. We can scarcely detect any real distinction except a twofold one between vessels whose primary armament is the gun and vessels whose primary armament is the torpedo. But even here the existence of a type of cruiser designed to act with flotillas blurs the outline, while, as we have seen, the larger units of the flotilla are grading up to cruiser level.
We are thus face to face with a situation which has its closest counterpart in the structureless fleets of the seventeenth century.That naval thought should have so nearly retraced its steps in the course of two centuries is curious enough, but it is still more striking when we consider how widely the underlying causes differ in each case.The pressure which has forced the present situation is due most obviously to two causes.One is the excessive development of the "intermediate" ship originally devised for purposes of commerce protection, and dictated by a menace which the experience of the American War had taught us to respect.The other is the introduction of the torpedo, and the consequent vulnerability of battle-squadrons that are not securely screened.Nothing of the kind had any influence on the fleet constitution of the seventeenth century.But if we seek deeper, there is a less obvious consideration which for what it is worth is too striking to be ignored.
It has been suggested above that the constitution of fleets appears to have some more or less recognisable relation to the prevalent theory of war. Now, amongst all our uncertainty we can assert with confidence that the theory which holds the field at the present day bears the closest possible resemblance to that which dominated the soldier-admirals of the Dutch war. It was the "Overthrow" theory, the firm faith in the decisive action as the key of all strategical problems. They carried it to sea with them from the battlefields of the New Model Army, and the Dutch met them squarely. In the first war at least their commerce had to give place to the exigencies of throwing into the battle everything that could affect the issue. It is not of course pretended that this attitude was dictated by any clearly conceived theory of absolute war. It was due rather to the fact that, owing to the relative geographical conditions, all attempts to guard trade communications were useless without the command of the home waters in the North Sea, and the truth received a clinching moral emphasis from the British claim to the actual dominion of the Narrow Seas. It was, in fact, a war which resembled rather the continental conditions of territorial conquest than the naval procedure that characterised our rivalry with France.
Is it then possible, however much we may resist the conclusion in loyalty to the eighteenth-century tradition, that the rise of a new naval Power in the room of Holland must bring us back to the drastic, if crude, methods of the Dutch wars, and force us to tread under foot the nicer ingenuity of Anson's system?Is it this which has tempted us to mistrust any type of vessel which cannot be flung into the battle?The recurrence of a formidable rival in the North Sea was certainly not the first cause of the reaction.It began before that menace arose.Still it has undoubtedly forced the pace, and even if it be not a cause, it may well be a justification.
CHAPTER THREE
THEORY OF THE
METHOD—CONCENTRATION
AND DISPERSAL OF
FORCE
From the point of view of the method by which its ends are obtained, strategy is often described as the art of assembling the utmost force at the right time and place; and this method is called "Concentration."
At first sight the term seems simple and expressive enough, but on analysis it will be found to include several distinct ideas, to all of which the term is applied indifferently.The result is a source of some confusion, even to the most lucid writers."The word concentration," says one of the most recent of them, "evokes the idea of a grouping of forces.We believe, in fact, that we cannot make war without grouping ships into squadrons and squadrons into fleets."11 Here in one sentence the word hovers between the formation of fleets and their strategical distribution. Similar looseness will embarrass the student at every turn. At one time he will find the word used to express the antithesis of division or dispersal of force; at another, to express strategic deployment, which implies division to a greater or less extent. He will find it used of the process of assembling a force, as well as of the state of a force when the process is complete. The truth is that the term, which is one of the most common and most necessary in strategical discussion, has never acquired a very precise meaning, and this lack of precision is one of the commonest causes of conflicting opinion and questionable judgments. No strategical term indeed calls more urgently for a clear determination of the ideas for which it stands.
Military phraseology, from which the word is taken, employs "concentration" in three senses.It is used for assembling the units of an army after they have been mobilised.In this sense, concentration is mainly an administrative process; logically, it means the complement of the process of mobilisation, whereby the army realises its war organisation and becomes ready to take the field.In a second sense it is used for the process of moving the army when formed, or in process of formation, to the localities from which operations can best begin.This is a true strategical stage, and it culminates in what is known as strategic deployment.Finally, it is used for the ultimate stage when the army so deployed is closed up upon a definite line of operations in immediate readiness for tactical deployment—gathered up, that is, to deal a concentrated blow.
Well as this terminology appears to serve on land, where the processes tend to overlap, something more exact is required if we try to extend it to the sea. Such extension magnifies the error at every step, and clear thinking becomes difficult. Even if we set aside the first meaning, that is, the final stage of mobilisation, we have still to deal with the two others which, in a great measure, are mutually contradictory. The essential distinction of strategic deployment, which contemplates dispersal with a view to a choice of combinations, is flexibility and free movement. The characteristic of an army massed for a blow is rigidity and restricted mobility. In the one sense of concentration we contemplate a disposal of force which will conceal our intention from the enemy and will permit us to adapt our movements to the plan of operations he develops. In the other, strategic concealment is at an end. We have made our choice, and are committed to a definite operation. Clearly, then, if we would apply the principles of land concentration to naval warfare it is desirable to settle which of the two phases of an operation we mean by the term.
Which meaning, then, is most closely connected with the ordinary use of the word?The dictionaries define concentration as "the state of being brought to a common point or centre," and this coincides very exactly with the stage of a war plan which intervenes between the completion of mobilisation and the final massing or deployment for battle.It is an incomplete and continuing act.Its ultimate consequence is the mass.It is a method of securing mass at the right time and place.As we have seen, the essence of the state of strategic deployment to which it leads is flexibility.In war the choice of time and place will always be influenced by the enemy's dispositions and movements, or by our desire to deal him an unexpected blow.The merit of concentration, then, in this sense, is its power of permitting us to form our mass in time at one of the greatest number of different points where mass may be required.
It is for this stage that the more recent text-books incline to specialise concentration—qualifying it as "strategic concentration." But even that term scarcely meets the case, for the succeeding process of gathering up the army into a position for tactical deployment is also a strategical concentration. Some further specialisation is required. The analytical difference between the two processes is that the first is an operation of major strategy and the other of minor, and if they are to be fully expressed, we have to weight ourselves with the terms "major and minor strategic concentration."
Such cumbrous terminology is too forbidding to use.It serves only to mark that the middle stage differs logically from the third as much as it does from the first.In practice it comes to this.If we are going to use concentration in its natural sense, we must regard it as something that comes after complete mobilisation and stops short of the formation of mass.
In naval warfare at least this distinction between concentration and mass is essential to clear appreciation.It leads us to conclusions that are of the first importance.For instance, when once the mass is formed, concealment and flexibility are at an end.The further, therefore, from the formation of the ultimate mass we can stop the process of concentration the better designed it will be.The less we are committed to any particular mass, and the less we indicate what and where our mass is to be, the more formidable our concentration.To concentration, therefore, the idea of division is as essential as the idea of connection.It is this view of the process which, at least for naval warfare, a weighty critical authority has most strongly emphasised."Such," he says, "is concentration reasonably understood—not huddled together like a drove of sheep, but distributed with a regard to a common purpose, and linked together by the effectual energy of a single will."12 Vessels in a state of concentration he compares to a fan that opens and shuts. In this view concentration connotes not a homogeneous body, but a compound organism controlled from a common centre, and elastic enough to permit it to cover a wide field without sacrificing the mutual support of its parts.
If, then, we exclude the meaning of mere assembling and the meaning of the mass, we have left a signification which expresses coherent disposal about a strategical centre, and this it will be seen gives for naval warfare just the working definition that we want as the counterpart of strategic deployment on land.The object of a naval concentration like that of strategic deployment will be to cover the widest possible area, and to preserve at the same time elastic cohesion, so as to secure rapid condensations of any two or more of the parts of the organism, and in any part of the area to be covered, at the will of the controlling mind; and above all, a sure and rapid condensation of the whole at the strategical centre.
Concentration of this nature, moreover, will be the expression of a war plan which, while solidly based on an ultimate central mass, still preserves the faculty of delivering or meeting minor attacks in any direction.It will permit us to exercise control of the sea while we await and work for the opportunity of a decision which shall permanently secure control, and it will permit this without prejudicing our ability of bringing the utmost force to bear when the moment for the decision arrives.Concentration, in fact, implies a continual conflict between cohesion and reach, and for practical purposes it is the right adjustment of those two tensions—ever shifting in force—which constitutes the greater part of practical strategy.
In naval warfare this concentration stage has a peculiar significance in the development of a campaign, and at sea it is more clearly detached than ashore. Owing to the vast size of modern armies, and the restricted nature of their lines of movement, no less than their lower intrinsic mobility as compared with fleets, the processes of assembly, concentration, and forming the battle mass tend to grade into one another without any demarcation of practical value. An army frequently reaches the stage of strategic deployment direct from the mobilisation bases of its units, and on famous occasions its only real concentration has taken place on the battlefield. In Continental warfare, then, there is less difficulty in using the term to cover all three processes. Their tendency is always to overlap. But at sea, where communications are free and unrestricted by obstacles, and where mobility is high, they are susceptible of sharper differentiation. The normal course is for a fleet to assemble at a naval port; thence by a distinct movement it proceeds to the strategical centre and reaches out in divisions as required. The concentration about that centre may be very far from a mass, and the final formation of the mass will bear no resemblance to either of the previous movements, and will be quite distinct.
But free as a fleet is from the special fetters of an army, there always exist at sea peculiar conditions of friction which clog its freedom of disposition.One source of this friction is commerce protection.However much our war plan may press for close concentration, the need of commerce protection will always be calling for dispersal.The other source is the peculiar freedom and secrecy of movements at sea.As the sea knows no roads to limit or indicate our own lines of operation, so it tells little about those of the enemy.The most distant and widely dispersed points must be kept in view as possible objectives of the enemy.When we add to this that two or more fleets can act in conjunction from widely separated bases with far greater certainty than is possible for armies, it is obvious that the variety of combinations is much higher at sea than on land, and variety of combination is in constant opposition to the central mass.
It follows that so long as the enemy's fleet is divided, and thereby retains various possibilities of either concentrated or sporadic action, our distribution will be dictated by the need of being able to deal with a variety of combinations and to protect a variety of objectives. Our concentrations must therefore be kept as open and flexible as possible. History accordingly shows us that the riper and fresher our experience and the surer our grip of war, the looser were our concentrations. The idea of massing, as a virtue in itself, is bred in peace and not in war. It indicates the debilitating idea that in war we must seek rather to avoid than to inflict defeat. True, advocates of the mass entrench themselves in the plausible conception that their aim is to inflict crushing defeats. But this too is an idea of peace. War has proved to the hilt that victories have not only to be won, but worked for. They must be worked for by bold strategical combinations, which as a rule entail at least apparent dispersal. They can only be achieved by taking risks, and the greatest and most effective of these is division.
The effect of prolonged peace has been to make "concentration" a kind of shibboleth, so that the division of a fleet tends almost to be regarded as a sure mark of bad leadership.Critics have come to lose sight of the old war experience, that without division no strategical combinations are possible.In truth they must be founded on division.Division is bad only when it is pushed beyond the limits of well-knit deployment.It is theoretically wrong to place a section of the fleet in such a position that it may be prevented from falling back on its strategical centre when it is encountered by a superior force.Such retreats of course can never be made certain; they will always depend in some measure on the skill and resource of the opposing commanders, and on the chances of weather: but risks must be taken.If we risk nothing, we shall seldom perform anything.The great leader is the man who can measure rightly to what breadth of deployment he can stretch his concentration.This power of bold and sure adjustment between cohesion and reach is indeed a supreme test of that judgment which in the conduct of war takes the place of strategical theory.
In British naval history examples of faulty division are hard to find. The case most commonly cited is an early one. It occurred in 1666 during the second Dutch war. Monk and Rupert were in command of the main fleet, which from its mobilisation bases in the Thames and at Spithead had concentrated in the Downs. There they were awaiting De Ruyter's putting to sea in a position from which they could deal with him whether his object was an attack on the Thames or to join hands with the French. In this position a rumour reached them that the Toulon squadron was on its way to the Channel to co-operate with the Dutch. Upon this false intelligence the fleet was divided, and Rupert went back to Portsmouth to cover that position in case it might be the French objective. De Ruyter at once put to sea with a fleet greatly superior to Monk's division. Monk, however, taking advantage of thick weather that had supervened, surprised him at anchor, and believing he had a sufficient tactical advantage attacked him impetuously. Meanwhile the real situation became known. There was no French fleet, and Rupert was recalled. He succeeded in rejoining Monk after his action with De Ruyter had lasted three days. In the course of it Monk had been very severely handled and forced to retreat to the Thames, and it was generally believed that it was only the belated arrival of Rupert that saved us from a real disaster.
The strategy in this case is usually condemned out of hand and made to bear the entire blame of the reverse. Monk, who as a soldier had proved himself one of the finest strategists of the time, is held to have blundered from sheer ignorance of elementary principles. It is assumed that he should have kept his fleet massed; but his critics fail to observe that at least in the opinion of the time this would not have met the case. Had he kept the whole to deal with De Ruyter, it is probable that De Ruyter would not have put to sea, and it is certain Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight would have lain open to the French had they come. If he had moved his mass to deal with the French, he would have exposed the Thames to De Ruyter. It was a situation that could not be solved by a simple application of what the French call the masse centrale. The only way to secure both places from attack was to divide the fleet, just as in 1801 Nelson in the same theatre was compelled to divide his defence force. In neither case was division a fault, because it was a necessity. The fault in Monk's and Rupert's case was that they extended their reach with no proper provision to preserve cohesion. Close cruiser connection should have been maintained between the two divisions, and Monk should not have engaged deeply till he felt Rupert at his elbow. This we are told was the opinion of most of his flag-officers. They held that he should not have fought when he did. His correct course, on Kempenfelt's principle, would have been to hang on De Ruyter so as to prevent his doing anything, and to have slowly fallen back, drawing the Dutch after him till his loosened concentration was closed up again. If De Ruyter had refused to follow him through the Straits, there would have been plenty of time to mass the fleet. If De Ruyter had followed, he could have been fought in a position from which there would have been no escape. The fault, in fact, was not strategical, but rather one of tactical judgment. Monk over-estimated the advantage of his surprise and the relative fighting values of the two fleets, and believed he saw his way to victory single-handed. The danger of division is being surprised and forced to fight in inferiority. This was not Monk's case. He was not surprised, and he could easily have avoided action had he so desired. To judge such a case simply by using concentration as a touchstone can only tend to set up such questionable habits of thought as have condemned the more famous division which occurred in the crisis of the campaign of 1805, and with which we must deal later.
Apart from the general danger of using either words or maxims in this way, it is obviously specially unwise in the case of concentration and division. The current rule is that it is bad to divide unless you have a great superiority; yet there have been numerous occasions when, being at war with an inferior enemy, we have found our chief embarrassment in the fact that he kept his fleet divided, and was able thereby to set up something like a deadlock. The main object of our naval operations would then be to break it down. To force an inferior enemy to concentrate is indeed the almost necessary preliminary to securing one of those crushing victories at which we must always aim, but which so seldom are obtained. It is by forcing the enemy to attempt to concentrate that we get our opportunity by sagacious dispersal of crushing his divisions in detail. It is by inducing him to mass that we simplify our problem and compel him to choose between leaving to us the exercise of command and putting it to the decision of a great action.
Advocates of close concentration will reply that that is true enough.We do often seek to force our enemy to concentrate, but that does not show that concentration is sometimes a disadvantage, for we ourselves must concentrate closely to force a similar concentration on the enemy.The maxim, indeed, has become current that concentration begets concentration, but it is not too much to say that it is a maxim which history flatly contradicts.If the enemy is willing to hazard all on a battle, it is true.But if we are too superior, or our concentration too well arranged for him to hope for victory, then our concentration has almost always had the effect of forcing him to disperse for sporadic action.So certain was this result, that in our old wars, in which we were usually superior, we always adopted the loosest possible concentrations in order to prevent sporadic action.True, the tendency of the French to adopt this mode of warfare is usually set down to some constitutional ineptitude that is outside strategical theory, but this view is due rather to the irritation which the method caused us, than to sober reasoning.For a comparatively weak belligerent sporadic action was better than nothing, and the only other alternative was for him to play into our hands by hazarding the decision which it was our paramount interest to obtain.Sporadic action alone could never give our enemy command of the sea, but it could do us injury and embarrass our plans, and there was always hope it might so much loosen our concentration as to give him a fair chance of obtaining a series of successful minor decisions.
Take, now, the leading case of 1805. In that campaign our distribution was very wide, and was based on several concentrations. The first had its centre in the Downs, and extended not only athwart the invading army's line of passage, but also over the whole North Sea, so as to prevent interference with our trade or our system of coast defence either from the Dutch in the Texel or from French squadrons arriving north-about. The second, which was known as the Western Squadron, had its centre off Ushant, and was spread over the whole Bay of Biscay by means of advanced squadrons before Ferrol and Rochefort. With a further squadron off the coast of Ireland, it was able also to reach far out into the Atlantic in order to receive our trade. It kept guard, in fact, not only over the French naval ports, but over the approaches to the Channel, where were the home terminals of the great southern and western trade-routes. A third concentration was in the Mediterranean, whose centre under Nelson was at Sardinia. It had outlying sub-centres at Malta and Gibraltar, and covered the whole ground from Cape St. Vincent outside the Straits to Toulon, Trieste, and the Dardanelles. When war broke out with Spain in 1804, it was considered advisable to divide this command, and Spanish waters outside the Straits were held by a fourth concentration, whose centre was off Cadiz, and whose northern limit was Cape Finisterre, where it joined the Ushant concentration. For reasons which were personal rather than strategical this arrangement was not continued long, nor indeed after a few months was there the same need for it, for the Toulon squadron had changed its base to Cadiz. By this comprehensive system the whole of the European seas were controlled both for military and trade purposes. In the distant terminal areas, like the East and West Indies, there were nucleus concentrations with the necessary connective machinery permanently established, and to render them effective, provision was made by which the various European squadrons could throw off detachments to bring up their force to any strength which the movements of the enemy might render necessary.
Wide as was this distribution, and great as its reach, a high degree of cohesion was maintained not only between the parts of each concentration, but between the several concentrations themselves.By means of a minor cruiser centre at the Channel Islands, the Downs and Ushant concentrations could rapidly cohere.Similarly the Cadiz concentration was linked up with that of Ushant at Finisterre, and but for personal friction and repulsion, the cohesion between the Mediterranean and Cadiz concentrations would have been equally strong.Finally, there was a masterly provision made for all the concentrations to condense into one great mass at the crucial point off Ushant before by any calculable chance a hostile mass could gather there.
For Napoleon's best admirals, "who knew the craft of the sea," the British fleet thus disposed was in a state of concentration that nothing but a stroke of luck beyond the limit of sober calculation could break. Decrès and Bruix had no doubt of it, and the knowledge overpowered Villeneuve when the crisis came. After he had carried the concentration which Napoleon had planned so far as to have united three divisions in Ferrol, he knew that the outlying sections of our Western Squadron had disappeared from before Ferrol and Rochefort. In his eyes, as well as those of the British Admiralty, this squadron, in spite of its dispersal in the Bay of Biscay, had always been in a state of concentration. It was not this which caused his heart to fail. It was the news that Nelson had reappeared at Gibraltar, and had been seen steering northward. It meant for him that the whole of his enemy's European fleet was in a state of concentration. "Their concentration of force," he afterwards wrote, "was at the moment more serious than in any previous disposition, and such that they were in a position to meet in superiority the combined forces of Brest and Ferrol," and for that reason, he explained, he had given up the game as lost. But to Napoleon's unpractised eye it was impossible to see what it was he had to deal with. Measuring the elasticity of the British naval distribution by the comparatively cumbrous and restricted mobility of armies, he saw it as a rash and unwarlike dispersal. Its looseness seemed to indicate so great a tenderness for the distant objectives that lay open to his scattered squadrons, that he believed by a show of sporadic action he could further disperse our fleet, and then by a close concentration crush the essential part in detail. It was a clear case of the enemy's dispersal forcing us to adopt the loosest concentration, and of our comparative dispersal tempting the enemy to concentrate and hazard a decision. It cannot be said we forced the fatal move upon him intentionally. It was rather the operation of strategical law set in motion by our bold distribution. We were determined that his threat of invasion, formidable as it was, should not force upon us so close a concentration as to leave our widespread interests open to his attack. Neither can it be said that our first aim was to prevent his attempting to concentrate. Every one of his naval ports was watched by a squadron, but it was recognised that this would not prevent concentration. The escape of one division might well break the chain. But that consideration made no difference. The distribution of our squadrons before his naval ports was essential for preventing sporadic action. Their distribution was dictated sufficiently by the defence of commerce and of colonial and allied territory, by our need, that is, to exercise a general command even if we could not destroy the enemy's force.
The whole of Nelson's correspondence for this period shows that his main object was the protection of our Mediterranean trade and of Neapolitan and Turkish territory.When Villeneuve escaped him, his irritation was caused not by the prospect of a French concentration, which had no anxieties for him, for he knew counter-concentrations were provided for.It was caused rather by his having lost the opportunity which the attempt to concentrate had placed within his reach.He followed Villeneuve to the West Indies, not to prevent concentration, but, firstly, to protect the local trade and Jamaica, and secondly, in hope of another chance of dealing the blow he had missed.Lord Barham took precisely the same view.When on news of Villeneuve's return from the West Indies he moved out the three divisions of the Western Squadron, that is, the Ushant concentration, to meet him, he expressly stated, not that his object was to prevent concentration, but that it was to deter the French from attempting sporadic action."The interception of the fleet in question," he wrote, "on its return to Europe would be a greater object than any I know.It would damp all future expeditions, and would show to Europe that it might be advisable to relax in the blockading system occasionally for the express purpose of putting them in our hands at a convenient opportunity."
Indeed we had no reason for preventing the enemy's concentration. It was our best chance of solving effectually the situation we have to confront. Our true policy was to secure permanent command by a great naval decision. So long as the enemy remained divided, no such decision could be expected. It was not, in fact, till he attempted his concentration, and its last stage had been reached, that the situation was in our hands. The intricate problem with which we had been struggling was simplified down to closing up our own concentration to the strategical centre off Ushant. But at the last stage the enemy could not face the formidable position we held. His concentration was stopped. Villeneuve fell back on Cadiz, and the problem began to assume for us something of its former intricacy. So long as we held the mass off Ushant which our great concentration had produced, we were safe from invasion. But that was not enough. It left the seas open to sporadic action from Spanish ports. There were convoys from the East and West Indies at hand, and there was our expedition in the Mediterranean in jeopardy, and another on the point of sailing from Cork. Neither Barham at the Admiralty nor Cornwallis in command off Ushant hesitated an hour. By a simultaneous induction they both decided the mass must be divided. The concentration must be opened out again, and it was done. Napoleon called the move an insigne betise, but it was the move that beat him, and must have beaten him, whatever the skill of his admirals, for the two squadrons never lost touch.He found himself caught in a situation from which there was nothing to hope.His fleet was neither concentrated for a decisive blow nor spread for sporadic action.He had merely simplified his enemy's problem.Our hold was surer than ever, and in a desperate attempt to extricate himself he was forced to expose his fleet to the final decision we required.
The whole campaign serves well to show what was understood by concentration at the end of the great naval wars.To Lord Barham and the able admirals who interpreted his plans it meant the possibility of massing at the right time and place.It meant, in close analogy to strategic deployment on land, the disposal of squadrons about a strategical centre from which fleets could condense for massed action in any required direction, and upon which they could fall back when unduly pressed.In this case the ultimate centre was the narrows of the Channel, where Napoleon's army lay ready to cross, but there was no massing there.So crude a distribution would have meant a purely defensive attitude.It would have meant waiting to be struck instead of seeking to strike, and such an attitude was arch-heresy to our old masters of war.
So far we have only considered concentration as applied to wars in which we have a preponderance of naval force, but the principles are at least equally valid when a coalition places us in inferiority.The leading case is the home campaign of 1782.It was strictly on defensive lines.Our information was that France and Spain intended to end the war with a great combined effort against our West Indian islands, and particularly Jamaica.It was recognised that the way to meet the threat was to concentrate for offensive action in the Caribbean Sea everything that was not absolutely needed for home defence.Instead, therefore, of trying to be strong enough to attempt the offensive in both areas, it was decided to make sure of the area that was most critical.To do this the home fleet had to be reduced so low relatively to what the enemy had in European waters that offence was out of the question.
While Rodney took the offensive area, Lord Howe was given the other. His task was to prevent the coalition obtaining such a command of home waters as would place our trade and coasts at their mercy, and it was not likely to prove a light one. We knew that the enemy's plan was to combine their attack on the West Indies with an attempt to control the North Sea, and possibly the Straits of Dover, with a Dutch squadron of twelve to fifteen of the line, while a combined Franco-Spanish fleet of at least forty sail would occupy the mouth of the Channel. It was also possible that these two forces would endeavour to form a junction. In any case the object of the joint operations would be to paralyse our trade and annoy our coasts, and thereby force us to neglect the West Indian area and the two Spanish objectives, Minorca and Gibraltar. All told we had only about thirty of the line on the home station, and though a large proportion of these were three-deckers, a good many could not be ready for sea till the summer.
Inferior as was the available force, there was no thought of a purely passive defence. It would not meet the case. Something must be done to interfere with the offensive operations of the allies in the West Indies and against Gibraltar, or they would attain the object of their home campaign. It was resolved to effect this by minor counterstrokes on their line of communications to the utmost limit of our defensive reach. It would mean a considerable stretch of our concentration, but we were determined to do what we could to prevent reinforcements from reaching the West Indies from Brest, to intercept French trade as occasion offered, and, finally, at almost any risk to relieve Gibraltar.
In these conditions the defensive concentration was based on a central mass or reserve at Spithead, a squadron in the Downs to watch the Texel for the safety of the North Sea trade, and another to the westward to watch Brest and interrupt its transatlantic communications.Kempenfelt in command of the latter squadron had just shown what could be done by his great exploit of capturing Guichen's convoy of military and naval stores for the West Indies.Early in the spring he was relieved by Barrington, who sailed on April 5th to resume the Ushant position.His instructions were not to fight a superior enemy unless in favourable circumstances, but to retire on Spithead.He was away three weeks, and returned with a French East India convoy with troops and stores, and two of the ships of-the-line which formed its escort.
Up to this time there had been no immediate sign of the great movement from the south. The Franco-Spanish fleet which had assembled at Cadiz was occupied ineffectually in trying to stop small reliefs reaching Gibraltar and in covering their own homeward-bound trade. The Dutch, however, were becoming active, and the season was approaching for our Baltic trade to come home. Ross in the North Sea had but four of the line to watch the Texel, and was in no position to deal with the danger. Accordingly early in May the weight of the home concentration was thrown into the North Sea. On the 10th Howe sailed with Barrington and the bulk of the fleet to join Ross in the Downs, while Kempenfelt again took the Ushant position. Only about half the Brest Squadron had gone down to join the Spaniards at Cadiz, and he was told his first duty was to intercept the rest if it put to sea, but, as in Barrington's instructions, if he met a superior squadron he was to retire up Channel under the English coast and join hands with Howe. In spite of the fact that influenza was now raging in the fleet, he succeeded in holding the French inactive. Howe with the same difficulty to face was equally successful. The Dutch had put to sea, but returned immediately they knew of his movement, and cruising off the Texel, he held them there, and kept complete command of the North Sea till our Baltic trade was safe home.
By the end of May it was done, and as our intelligence indicated that the great movement from Cadiz was at last about to begin, Howe, to whom a certain discretion had been left, decided it was time to shift the weight to his other wing and close on Kempenfelt. The Government, however, seemed to think that he ought to be able to use his position for offensive operations against Dutch trade, but in the admiral's opinion this was to lose hold of the design and sacrifice cohesion too much to reach. He informed them that he had not deemed it advisable to make detachments from his squadron against the trade, "not knowing how suddenly there might be a call, for the greater part of it at least, to the westward." In accordance, therefore, with his general instructions he left with Ross a strong squadron of nine of the line, sufficient to hold in check, and even "to take and destroy," the comparatively weak ships of the Dutch, and with the rest returned to the westward.13 His intention was to proceed with all possible expedition to join Kempenfelt on the coast of France, but this, owing to the ravages of the influenza, he was unable to do. Kempenfelt was forced to come in, and on June 5th the junction was made at Spithead.
For three weeks, so severe was the epidemic, they could not move. Then came news that the Cadiz fleet under Langara had sailed the day Howe had reached Spithead, and he resolved to make a dash with every ship fit to put to sea to cut it off from Brest. He was too late. Before he could get into position the junction between Langara and the Brest squadron was made, and in their full force the allies had occupied the mouth of the Channel. With the addition of the Brest ships the combined fleet numbered forty of the line, while all Howe could muster was twenty-two, but amongst them were seven three-deckers and three eighties, and he would soon be reinforced. Three of Ross's smallest ships were recalled, and five others were nearly ready, but for these Howe could not wait. The homeward-bound Jamaica convoy was at hand, and at all hazards it must be saved.
What was to be done?So soon as he sighted the enemy he realised that a successful action was out of the question.Early in the morning of July 12th, "being fifteen leagues S.S.E.from Scilly," Langara with thirty-six of the line was seen to the westward."As soon," wrote Howe, "as their force had been ascertained, I thought proper to avoid coming to battle with them as then circumstanced, and therefore steered to the north to pass between Scilly and the Land's End.My purpose therein was to get to the westward of the enemy, both for protecting the Jamaica convoy and to gain the advantage of situation for bringing them to action which the difference in our numbers renders desirable."
By a most brilliant effort of seamanship the dangerous movement was effected safely that night, and it proved an entire success. Till Howe was met with and defeated, the allies would not venture into the Channel, and his unprecedented feat had effectually thrown them off. Assuming apparently that he must have passed round their rear to seaward, they sought him to the southward, and there for a month beat up and down in ineffective search. Meanwhile Howe, sending his cruisers ahead to the convoy's rendezvous off the south-west coast of Iceland, had taken his whole fleet about two hundred miles west of the Skelligs to meet it. Northerly winds prevented his reaching the right latitude in time, but it mattered little. The convoy passed in between him and the south of Ireland, and as the enemy had taken a cast down to Ushant, it was able to enter the Channel in safety without sighting an enemy's sail. Ignorant of what had happened, Howe cruised for a week practising the ships "in connected movements so particularly necessary on the present occasion." Then with his fleet in fine condition to carry out preventive tactics in accordance with Kempenfelt's well-known exposition,14 he returned to seek the enemy to the eastward, in order to try to draw them from their station at Scilly and open the Channel. On his way he learnt the convoy had passed in, and with this anxiety off his mind he bore up for the Lizard, where his reinforcements were awaiting him. There he found the Channel was free. From lack of supplies the enemy had been forced to retire to port, and he returned to Spithead to make preparations for the relief of Gibraltar. While this work was going on, the North Sea squadron was again strengthened that it might resume the blockade of the Texel and cover the arrival of the autumn convoys from the Baltic. It was done with complete success. Not a single ship fell into the enemy's hands, and the campaign, and indeed the war, ended by Howe taking the mass of his force down to Gibraltar and performing his remarkable feat of relieving it in the face of the Spanish squadron. For the power and reach of a well-designed concentration there can be no finer example.
If, now, we seek from the above and similar examples for principles to serve as a guide between concentration and division we shall find, firstly, this one.The degree of division we shall require is in proportion to the number of naval ports from which the enemy can act against our maritime interests and to the extent of coastline along which they are spread.It is a principle which springs from the soul of our old tradition that we must always seek, not merely to prevent the enemy striking at our heart, but also to strike him the moment he attempts to do anything.We must make of his every attempt an opportunity for a counterstroke.The distribution this aim entailed varied greatly with different enemies.In our wars with France, and particularly when Spain and Holland were in alliance with her, the number of the ports to be dealt with was very considerable and their distribution very wide.In our wars with the Dutch alone, on the other hand, the number and distribution were comparatively small, and in this case our concentration was always close.
This measure of distribution, however, will never stand alone. Concentration will not depend solely upon the number and position of the enemy's naval ports. It will be modified by the extent to which the lines of operation starting from those ports traverse our own home waters. The reason is plain. Whatever the enemy opposed to us, and whatever the nature of the war, we must always keep a fleet at home. In any circumstances it is essential for the defence of our home trade terminals, and it is essential as a central reserve from which divisions can be thrown off to reinforce distant terminals and to seize opportunities for counterstrokes. It is "the mainspring," as Lord Barham put it, "from which all offensive operations must proceed." This squadron, then, being permanent and fixed as the foundation of our whole system, it is clear that if, as in the case of the French wars, the enemy's lines of operation do not traverse our home waters, close concentration upon it will not serve our turn. If, on the other hand, as in the case of the Dutch wars, the lines do traverse home waters, a home concentration is all that is required. Our division will then be measured by the amount of our surplus strength, and by the extent to which we feel able to detach squadrons for offensive action against the enemy's distant maritime interests without prejudicing our hold on the home terminals of his lines of operation and our power of striking directly he moves. These remarks apply, of course, to the main fleet operations. If such an enemy has distant colonial bases from which he can annoy our trade, minor concentrations must naturally be arranged in those areas.
Next we have to note that where the enemy's squadrons are widely distributed in numerous bases, we cannot always simplify the problem by leaving some of them open so as to entice him to concentrate and reduce the number of ports to be watched.For if we do this, we leave the unwatched squadrons free for sporadic action.Unless we are sure he intends to concentrate with a view to a decisive action, our only means of simplifying the situation is to watch every port closely enough to interfere effectually with sporadic action.Then, sporadic action being denied him, the enemy must either do nothing or concentrate.
The next principle is flexibility.Concentration should be so arranged that any two parts may freely cohere, and that all parts may quickly condense into a mass at any point in the area of concentration.The object of holding back from forming the mass is to deny the enemy knowledge of our actual distribution or its intention at any given moment, and at the same time to ensure that it will be adjusted to meet any dangerous movement that is open to him.Further than this our aim should be not merely to prevent any part being overpowered by a superior force, but to regard every detached squadron as a trap to lure the enemy to destruction.The ideal concentration, in short, is an appearance of weakness that covers a reality of strength.
PART THREE
CONDUCT
OF
NAVAL WAR
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTORY
I.INHERENT DIFFERENCES IN THE
CONDITIONS OF WAR ON LAND AND ON SEA
Before attempting to apply the foregoing general principles in a definite manner to the conduct of naval war, it is necessary to clear the ground of certain obstacles to right judgment.The gradual elucidation of the theory of war, it must be remembered, has been almost entirely the work of soldiers, but so admirable is the work they have done, and so philosophical the method they have adopted, that a very natural tendency has arisen to assume that their broad-based conclusions are of universal application.That the leading lines which they have charted are in a certain sense those which must govern all strategy no one will deny.They are the real pioneers, and their methods must be in the main our methods, but what we have to remember is that the country we have to travel is radically different from that in which they acquired their skill.
A moment's consideration will reveal how far-reaching the differences are. Let us ask ourselves what are the main ideas around which all the military lore turns. It may be taken broadly that the general principles are three in number. Firstly, there is the idea of concentration of force, that is, the idea of overthrowing the enemy's main strength by bringing to bear upon it the utmost accumulation of weight and energy within your means; secondly, there is the idea that strategy is mainly a question of definite lines of communication; and thirdly, there is the idea of concentration of effort, which means keeping a single eye on the force you wish to overthrow without regard to ulterior objects. Now if we examine the conditions which give these principles so firm a footing on land, we shall find that in all three cases they differ at sea, and differ materially.
Take the first, which, in spite of all the deductions we have to make from it in the case of limited wars, is the dominating one.The pithy maxim which expresses its essence is that our primary objective is the enemy's main force.In current naval literature the maxim is applied to the sea in some such form as this: "The primary object of our battle-fleet is to seek out and destroy that of the enemy."On the surface nothing could look sounder, but what are the conditions which underlie the one and the other?
The practical value of the military maxim is based upon the fact that in land warfare it is always theoretically possible to strike at your enemy's army, that is, if you have the strength and spirit to overcome the obstacles and face the risks. But at sea this is not so. In naval warfare we have a far-reaching fact which is entirely unknown on land. It is simply this—that it is possible for your enemy to remove his fleet from the board altogether. He may withdraw it into a defended port, where it is absolutely out of your reach without the assistance of an army. No amount of naval force, and no amount of offensive spirit, can avail you. The result is that in naval warfare an embarrassing dilemma tends to assert itself. If you are in a superiority that justifies a vigorous offensive and prompts you to seek out your enemy with a view to a decision, the chances are you will find him in a position where you cannot touch him. Your offence is arrested, and you find yourself in what, at least theoretically, is the weakest general position known to war.
This was one of our earliest discoveries in strategy.It followed indeed immediately and inevitably upon our discovery that the most drastic way of making war was to concentrate every effort on the enemy's armed forces.In dealing with the theory of war in general a caveat has already been entered against the too common assumption that this method was an invention of Napoleon's or Frederick's, or that it was a foreign importation at all.In the view at least of our own military historians the idea was born in our Civil Wars with Cromwell and the New Model Army.It was the conspicuous feature that distinguished our Civil War from all previous wars of modern times.So astonishing was its success—as foreign observers remarked—that it was naturally applied by our soldier-admirals at sea so soon as war broke out with the Dutch.Whatever may be the claims of the Cromwellian soldiers to have invented for land warfare what is regarded abroad as the chief characteristic of the Napoleonic method, it is beyond doubt that they deserve the credit of it at sea.All three Dutch wars had a commercial object, and yet after the first campaign the general idea never was to make the enemy's commerce a primary objective.That place was occupied throughout by their battle-fleets, and under Monk and Rupert at least those objectives were pursued with a singleness of purpose and a persistent vehemence that was entirely Napoleonic.
But in the later stages of the struggle, when we began to gain a preponderance, it was found that the method ceased to work. The attempt to seek the enemy with a view to a decisive action was again and again frustrated by his retiring to his own coasts, where either we could not reach him or his facilities for retreat made a decisive result impossible. He assumed, in fact, a defensive attitude with which we were powerless to deal, and in the true spirit of defence he sprang out from time to time to deal us a counterstroke as he saw his opportunity.
It was soon perceived that the only way of dealing with this attitude was to adopt some means of forcing the enemy to sea and compelling him to expose himself to the decision we sought.The most cogent means at hand was to threaten his commerce.Instead, therefore, of attempting to seek out his fleet directly, our own would sit upon the fairway of his homeward-bound trade, either on the Dogger Bank or elsewhere, thereby setting up a situation which it was hoped would cost him either his trade or his battle-fleet, or possibly both.Thus in spite of the fact that with our increasing preponderance our preoccupation with the idea of battle decision had become stronger than ever, we found ourselves forced to fall back upon subsidiary operations of an ulterior strategical character.It is a curious paradox, but it is one that seems inherent in the special feature of naval war, which permits the armed force to be removed from the board altogether.
The second distinguishing characteristic of naval warfare which relates to the communication idea is not so well marked, but it is scarcely less important. It will be recalled that this characteristic is concerned with lines of communication in so far as they tend to determine lines of operation. It is a simple question of roads and obstacles. In land warfare we can determine with some precision the limits and direction of our enemy's possible movements. We know that they must be determined mainly by roads and obstacles. But afloat neither roads nor obstacles exist. There is nothing of the kind on the face of the sea to assist us in locating him and determining his movements. True it is that in sailing days his movements were to some extent limited by prevailing winds and by the elimination of impossible courses, but with steam even these determinants have gone, and there is practically nothing to limit the freedom of his movement except the exigencies of fuel. Consequently in seeking to strike our enemy the liability to miss him is much greater at sea than on land, and the chances of being eluded by the enemy whom we are seeking to bring to battle become so serious a check upon our offensive action as to compel us to handle the maxim of "Seeking out the enemy's fleet" with caution.
The difficulty obtruded itself from the moment the idea was born. It may be traced back—so far at least as modern warfare is concerned—to Sir Francis Drake's famous appreciation in the year of the Armada. This memorable despatch was written when an acute difference of opinion had arisen as to whether it were better to hold our fleet back in home waters or to send it forward to the coast of Spain. The enemy's objective was very uncertain. We could not tell whether the blow was to fall in the Channel or Ireland or Scotland, and the situation was complicated by a Spanish army of invasion ready to cross from the Flemish coast, and the possibility of combined action by the Guises from France. Drake was for solving the problem by taking station off the Armada's port of departure, and fully aware of the risk such a move entailed, he fortified his purely strategical reasons with moral considerations of the highest moment. But the Government was unconvinced, not as is usually assumed out of sheer pusillanimity and lack of strategical insight, but because the chances of Drake's missing contact were too great if the Armada should sail before our own fleet could get into position.
Our third elementary principle is the idea of concentration of effort, and the third characteristic of naval warfare which clashes with it is that over and above the duty of winning battles, fleets are charged with the duty of protecting commerce.In land warfare, at least since laying waste an undefended part of your enemy's country ceased to be a recognised strategical operation, there is no corresponding deflection of purely military operations.It is idle for purists to tell us that the deflection of commerce protection should not be permitted to turn us from our main purpose.We have to do with the hard facts of war, and experience tells us that for economic reasons alone, apart from the pressure of public opinion, no one has ever found it possible to ignore the deflection entirely.So vital indeed is financial vigour in war, that more often than not the maintenance of the flow of trade has been felt as a paramount consideration.Even in the best days of our Dutch wars, when the whole plan was based on ignoring the enemy's commerce as an objective, we found ourselves at times forced to protect our own trade with seriously disturbing results.
Nor is it more profitable to declare that the only sound way to protect your commerce is to destroy the enemy's fleet. As an enunciation of a principle it is a truism—no one would dispute it. As a canon of practical strategy, it is untrue; for here our first deflection again asserts itself. What are you to do if the enemy refuses to permit you to destroy his fleets? You cannot leave your trade exposed to squadronal or cruiser raids while you await your opportunity, and the more you concentrate your force and efforts to secure the desired decision, the more you will expose your trade to sporadic attack. The result is that you are not always free to adopt the plan which is best calculated to bring your enemy to a decision. You may find yourself compelled to occupy, not the best positions, but those which will give a fair chance of getting contact in favourable conditions, and at the same time afford reasonable cover for your trade. Hence the maxim that the enemy's coast should be our frontier. It is not a purely military maxim like that for seeking out the enemy's fleet, though the two are often used as though they were interchangeable. Our usual positions on the enemy's coast were dictated quite as much by the exigencies of commerce protection as by primary strategical reasons. To maintain a rigorous watch close off the enemy's ports was never the likeliest way to bring him to decisive action—we have Nelson's well-known declaration on the point—but it was the best way, and often the only way, to keep the sea clear for the passage of our own trade and for the operations of our cruisers against that of the enemy.
For the present these all-important points need not be elaborated further.As we proceed to deal with the methods of naval warfare they will gather force and lucidity.Enough has been said to mark the shoals and warn us that, admirably constructed as is the craft which the military strategists have provided for our use, we must be careful with our navigation.
But before proceeding further it is necessary to simplify what lies before us by endeavouring to group the complex variety of naval operations into manageable shape.
II.TYPICAL FORMS OF NAVAL OPERATIONS
In the conduct of naval war all operations will be found to relate to two broad classes of object.The one is to obtain or dispute the command of the sea, and the other to exercise such control of communications as we have, whether the complete command has been secured or not.
It was on the logical and practical distinction between these two kinds of naval object, as we have seen, that the constitution of fleets was based in the fulness of the sailing period, when maritime wars were nearly incessant and were shaping the existing distribution of power in the world. During that period at any rate the dual conception lay at the root of naval methods and naval policy, and as it is also the logical outcome of the theory of war, we may safely take it as the basis of our analysis of the conduct of naval operations.
Practically, of course, we can seldom assert categorically that any operation of war has but one clearly defined object. A battle-squadron whose primary function was to secure command was often so placed as to enable it to exercise control; and, vice versa, cruiser lines intended primarily to exercise control upon the trade routes were regarded as outposts of the battle-fleet to give it warning of the movements of hostile squadrons.Thus Cornwallis during his blockade of Brest had sometimes to loosen his hold in order to cover the arrival of convoys against raiding squadrons; and thus also when Nelson was asked by Lord Barham for his views on cruiser patrol lines, he expressed himself as follows: "Ships on this service would not only prevent the depredations of privateers, but be in the way to watch any squadron of the enemy should they pass on their track....Therefore intelligence will be quickly conveyed, and the enemy never, I think, lost sight of."15 Instructions in this sense were issued by Lord Barham to the commodores concerned. In both cases, it will be seen, the two classes of operation overlapped. Still for purposes of analysis the distinction holds good, and is valuable for obtaining a clear view of the field.
Take, first, the methods of securing command, by which we mean putting it out of the enemy's power to use effectually the common communications or materially to interfere with our use of them.We find the means employed were two: decision by battle, and blockade.Of the two, the first was the less frequently attainable, but it was the one the British service always preferred.It was only natural that it should be so, seeing that our normal position was one of preponderance over our enemy, and so long as the policy of preponderance is maintained, the chances are the preference will also be maintained.
But further than this, the idea seems to be rooted in the oldest traditions of the Royal Navy.As we have seen, the conviction of the sea service that war is primarily a question of battles, and that battles once joined on anything like equal terms must be pressed to the last gasp, is one that has had nothing to learn from more recent continental discoveries.The Cromwellian admirals handed down to us the memory of battles lasting three, and even four, days.Their creed is enshrined in the robust article of war under which Byng and Calder were condemned; and in the apotheosis of Nelson the service has deified the battle idea.