THE WAR AT SEA

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 113, 8 November 1918, Page 9

THE WAR AT SEA

GERMANY'S FIGHT AGAINST BRITISH SEA-POWER

THE UNBREAKABLE STRANGLEHOLD

Prince yon Buloio, formerly Imperial Chancellor, wrote: "A resolute English policy could easily have rendered us innocuous before our naval claws had. grown, hut by 1914 we liad grown so big that we could venture on a war with England with high spirits."

. At the outbreak of war, the German navy represented a cash-outlay of about 300 millions sterling. It was the second largest fleet in the world; far larger than that of France; but very much smaller than that of Britain. The United States and Japan were Comparable in numbers of armoured ships to Germany and France respectively, 'but as a balanced force the American fleet fell far below standard, and Germany's position as second naval power was unchallenged. Britain was in 1914 incontestably supreme. The British Navy, concentrated as it was in the North Sea and at the very doors of Germany, thus dominated the whole naval situation. Though it did not comply with the technical definition, the blockade"of Germany wm none.the less real from the outset, and as the war went on it became more and more definite and complete; Germany built some new ships; but not many more than had already been authorised before the War; and while this waa true also of the other European. Powers, Britain immediately began to expand her navy in all directions. This, of course, put the enemy still further in the minority. The entry of the United States into the war made a new and great addition of heavy ships to the force at the Allies' disposal; and the American 'fleet, hitherto weak in the lighter and swifter classes, was rapidly increased by the construction of a large number of destroyers of the most efficient type. ; The Mediterranean, where Germany had, after.the flight of the Goeben and Breslau to Turkey, no surface ships, wa« controlled at first by the French. Assisted by the British squadron in that area, they blockaded the mouth of the Adriatic and prevented any Austrian warship appearing in the open Mediterranean. When-Italy entered the war, the Allied position .navally was unchallengable, and.the Austrian, ignominious. There was only one serious naval problem in the Mediterranean —the submarine. In short, the naval war was, apart from the snbmarine, an Allied triumph, and the,absolute negation of everything that had been built for by the Central Powers in pursuance of a policy which had actually been wrecked by events pri6r to the war. '. THE GERMAN NAVAL POLICY. "Under the existing conditions, in order to protect Germany's. sea traffic and Colonies, there is only one means, viz.: Germany must have a fleet of such strength that, oven for the mightiest Naval Power, a war with her would involve such risks as to jeopardise its own supremacy. "For this.purpose it is not absolutely necessary that the German Fleet should ■ be as strong as that of the greatest seaPower, because, generally, a great seaPower will not be able to concentrate all its forces against us. But even if it should succeed in confronting us in superior force, the enemy would be so considerably weakened in overcoming the resistance of a strong German Fleet that, notwithstanding a victory gained, the enemy's supremacy would not at first be secured any longer by a sufficient fleet."—(Extract from the explanatory "preamble" to the German Navy Act, 1900). , : The passages quoted above have been used very often to enlighten British readers regarding Germany's naval policy both before and during the war; and they are so illuminating that nothing better can readily be found to emphasise the nature of the situation when the war began. They also point clearly to Germany's naval failure, which has played so great a part in her defeat. For the German Navy has failed; and it failed because the fundamental assumption set out in the "preamble" was wrong, and the policy itself therefore illogical and futile. ■ ■.'. •. ; It so happened that Britain, the naval enemy whom Germany in 1900 had in her eye, was able to concentrate all its forces against Germany, and the chance for inflicting the crippling, though merely partial, defeat that the preamble specified, never presented itself. Germany declared that it was "not absolutely necessary"* to have a navy as great as the British; but this was an argument of necessity because it was obvious that she would not have been permitted' to outbuild the British, so long as Britain was | not carried away by the impossible theories of the "Little Navy" school of agitators. But the German policy was nevertheless not one of defence; it was essentially offensive, and sought, by indirect strategy to undermine the supremacy which it could not hope to crush; to weaken it till it lost its dominating position either, by comparison with Germany, or in face of other potentially hostile Powers. The German naval was descended from the Germans' comprehensive misunderstanding of British affairs, which presupposed, among other things, the disruption-of the Empire in case of war, and had not yet become used to the idea that the "splendid isolation" of Victorian days, when England had no alliances, was one. And as she herself'expected, and as Germany certainly did not expect, the domestic troubles which arose within the British Empire after the war broke out wei* mere trifles, which were negligible as compared with the wonderful solidarity which the overseas Dominions displayed. ■ REAKDOWN OF THE THEORY. The key-move in the ■ wrecking of Germany's naval scheme was the entente with France, for it paved the way for a working agreement by which the British naval interests in the Mediterranean were handed over to the care of France (Britain retaining' there merely a. small squadron), with a corresponding delegation to British care of. French concerns in the North Sea and the North Atlantic. ' Germany had, indeed, detected this flaw in. her naval • scheme, and in the few years prior to the war (according to Mr. Archibald Hurd) her partners in the Triple Alliance had, though the cost was excessive for their finances, greatly increased their naval strength, for the purpose of jointly dominating the Meditei-r.wan. But thou?h. Italy had goiK- thus far,'.she. was not prepared, aa the te3t of war showed, to. join r iiv a partnership of international crime, and the ship* that were kid down in Italy for the »tr«ngtheau>c of tie Triple AIL-

lance were vied in. helping to wr«ck it. Britain's' distant naval stations were not heavily established; arid,, having one enemy alone to deal with, »he concen-' trated her force in the North Sea, and protected her possessions all over the globe by a closely centralised strategy. It was no longer probable that Germany could reduce Britain's control of the North Sea to a doubtful, not to say a certainly negative, quantity. "This change of policy, due to a large extent to Germany's ■ naval aggressiveness (which the Kaiser had not ineptly expressed in. his title of "Admiral of the Atlantic"), brought about sucli a condition that the German Fleet was "masked" immediately the war began. A "strangle-hold" closed upon Germany, and she never escaped from it. . • CHIEF POINTS OF THE NAVAL WAR. The naval history of the war actually begins a little before the war itself. When the Austrian heir was assassinated, a British squadron was enjoying the hospitality of the German Government at the reopening of the Kiel Canal, to which they had been bidden to observe .the improvement that had been made in that strategic waterway. It had just been widened and deepened, to enable the new battleships to pass between the Baltic and. the North Sea— without going round Jutland.. The news of the assassination broke up the festivities, and the squadron returned to home waters—past the island of Heligoland that Britain, had sold to Germany, and that had been made into a defending fortress—and to the ' great annual naval review. This function closed towards the end of July, and European affairs were already so strained that the usual review leave was cancelled, and the Fleet was kept, as it had been doring the review, on a war footing, and ready for instant action. \ ' Hysterical literature and ignorance of the nature of modern naval warfare combined to create quite mistaken ideas in the popular mind as to what would happen at sea; also, as the war went on, as to what was happening. The common notion that at some, early date, ever to be remembered like .that of Trafalgar, the fleets would rush at each other and fight a gnat battle, whose final effect on the war no one could rightly estimate, had its adherents, on both sides of the North: Sea. But the initiative at sea is generally possessed by the weaker party, and the German Navy had no such foolish notion. It'"intended to wait until the British Fleet had been whittled down by attrition, and then "The Day" might come; Before long, therefore, the first fantastic illusion faded out.. But it had substitutes, little better, and not all confined to the thoughtless. The British public waa encouraged to think of the German Fleet "skulking" in harbour, from which, as Mr. Churchill was foolish enough to prophesy, it would be dug like rats out of their holes. And, conversely, the German public fooled itself with the idea that the British, warships, were hiding in some mysterious northern fastness of the Ultima Thule. Each nation, in its worst moments, pictured the North Sea churned to foam by the wash of its battleships, raging outside the dens of the inaccessible and cowardly enemy. In sober fact, the naval situation was governed by much greater thine* than fruitless coal-burning or cowardice. When the Germans did not fight; caution rather than cowardice was their motive; and when they did they usually fought braveGERMANY TURNS TO THE U-BOAT. Britain assumed • complete control of the North Sea, without a shot being fired; and only once was a serione attempt made to challenge that control, or rather to attack it. Immediately there began a great sweeping up of merchant shipping. Germany, well prepared for coming events, had endeavoured to anticipate this by instructing her •hipping how to act if war broke out; but by 28th September 387 enemy vessels,' totalling 1,140,000 groat tons, had been captured by British cruisers, as against 86 vessels, of 229.000 tons, captured by Germany. The vast bulk of German shipping abroad, however, was interned. Soon the German flag was extinct upon the- open seas, except for an odd raider, which was either rounded up and destroyed, or after an adventurous career, reached port and stayed there. Germany's original naval policy, _ as we- havo >ee'i, was one of attrition, directed against the British naval supremacy; and attrition continued to be her policy at sea throughout, duplicating precisely that policy as pursued by the Allied armies on land. The simple major strategy of the High Sea Fleet having failed, / Germany turned her wearing-down tactics against the merchant marine. Soon the war at sea became admost purely one of attack upon civU shipping, and of defence agamet thai attack. Fierce and vivid glimpses of combat between the navies themservea were scattered sparsely over the expanse of this monotonous but intensely tragic struggle. With no hope of using cruisers m the open sea, Germany assumed the responsibility of using the, submarine to .attack shipping. The power of this then scarcely tested type of warship hjtd already been discussed, as against battleships particularly, but its natural limitations closely restricted its effectiveness in that respect during the war. Against unarmed ships it was, however, an instrument of the greatest power. Germany rightly realised that the strength of the Allies at sea was not really in their fighting fleets, but in the merchant marine which those fleets protected; that without the foodstuffs and military transports they could not fight; and that if they existed, she must inevitably suffer defeat. She was inexorably driven to the submarine; but her decision to use it, cloaked though it was under exenses both subtle and barefacedly false, merely made her defeat the more certain. -Half-measures with the U-boat had no appeal for Germany; the innocent perished with the guilty, and t)t» submarine finally brought "the world in arm* against Germany."