ON ALL FOUR FEET

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 116, 13 November 1919, Page 7

ON ALL FOUR FEET

LORD FISHER ON THE NAVY

INEPTITUDE CONDEMNED

HOW THE SEA WAR WAS "WON.

Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kelverstone says that life would lose its charm for him the day ho found he couldn't waltz "to the best waltz tune in the world — one of Moody and Sankey's hymns." And Lord Fisher will be 79 years old next January. •

In this fashion Lord Fisher introduces a series of articles in the London Times on the changes made in the British Navy between the years 1902 andl9lo and their effect upon the decision of the war.. He is totally inadequate, he says, for an autobiography; but he does well all the same, and repeats, seriously enough, the story told of him that he refused to be weaned. Nowadays such a mutiny would pass unnoticed — babies seem to have acquired the habit of making a fight for it, at weaning time, lout 79 years ago? Probably it was unheard of till Baby Fisher set the'fashion. .Possibly the story is repeated to impress you with Lord Fisher's willpower; for he quickly sketches through his life till on Trafalgar Bay, 1904, he was appointed First, Sea Lord of the Admiralty. Though he had entered the navy penniless, friendless and forlorn, he was equipped with knowledge and power to say to anyone who obstructed him—"You be damned," and he'was damned. Which would not be much encouragement to obstructionists. With the power gainedi from knowledge, Lord Fisher sailed in. He introduced the wondrous turbine engine, knocked out the old type of boiler, and put the fire where the water used to be, made an ISin. gun, doubled the speed of fighting ships, and cleared out 19,500,000 sterling of parasites, animate and inanimate. Clearly a busy time in the Admiralty. The fleet as he found it was, according to Lord Fisher, not wortli its reputation. His clean-sweep policy was virulently attacked—but his critic's were mere ostriches. "The bluejacket himself," he says, "had not had set before him the ideals of a modern battle. For the sailors in 1900 were still polishing the brasswork. They did not hit the target. There were 2000 more misses than hits. The fighting ships were the emanations of the past—museums of guns and samples of hulls. Money was being squandered on keeping ships in commission in peacetime, which in war-time could neither fight nor run away And so the- Dreadnought was born, and she paralysed shipbuilding amongst all the nations of the world i'or eighteen, months. "The damned thing was so different. "One result was that we had 2000 more hits than misses. "Our policy was : Have a big preponderance of speed over your enemy, so that you can choose your own distance for fighting; the next, the very biggest possible gun (a 20in. gun would have been in iho Incomparable, 'md I remained at the Admiralty), and so you hit the enemy when he can't reach you, and therefore, all his guns might as well be only pea-shooters. Consequently, the Invincible, with her - greatly superior speed, and her greatly bigger guns, eeiit Admiral yon Spec to the bottom iv his | Scharnhorst without having one .single man killed or wounded on board the British ship. That's war. | ."It's not my task (nor to my taste) to I criticise the tactics of the' Jutland battle. The fact remains, that in spite of miserable ineptitude the navy won _*he war. The blockade won the war; timorously | won it but yet it won it, though masses of war material were permitted to pass through because of fear of neutrals." Lord Fishe. then explained the thoughts that brought about "these Lutheran changes" and the opposition he I met with, and "damns" flow as freely as commas. Then the reactionaries ; but he would not name one of them—"never' fight a chimney-sweep, some of the soot comes off on you," as the great Arch' bishop Whateley wrote. Like the wolf oh the fold Lord Fisher comes down on the gasbags, the fossils, the parasites, the mandarins—everybody ; and then says it is with a. reluctance inexpressible that ho has re-entered the arena. But the spending of two millions a day more than the British income nine months after the utter disappearance of the German fleet and a vanished German army was too much for him. . "It is criminal folly People are so inconsequent. 'Economy,' they cry, but they won't go without their cream. 'Reduce the Navy expenses,' say they, but 'no discharges.' .. So it is with that silly crowd who want the British Navy dispersed all over the world and call it efficiency Nothing on earth is so deadly to sea fighting as the dispersal in peace time of small ships and small squadron's over the face of the globe. A big fleet and a drastic admiral,, and always on their battle ground, that's fighting perfection !" He believed in the submarine—seven months before the war he said that those boats were' the coming type of war vessel for sea-^ghting ; but one of the "most important members of the Cabinet said the -statement was 'marred by the remark that the Germans would sink unoffending merchant ships with their crews.'" He was literally persecuted for building submarines, but thanks—at last tiomeone who supported him—to Admiral Bacon and Admiral S. S. Hall, "we are what we are." When ho left the Admiralty on 25th January, 1910, there were 61 efficient submarines, and 13 were building; when he returned in October, 1914, there were only 51 So ho sent for Mr. Schwab, of the Bethlehem Steel Works (America), and he delivered a batch of submarines in five months—Mr. Schwab should have been made a duke. The German Fleet didn't attack the British because "the British FJeefc was ineffably superior to the German Fleet, and the Germans knew it." "Some of our very perturbed High Seas Officers have written a la Jeremiah as to the varied drawbacks suffered by the British Fleet, and the seriousness of the British sea position and the menace there was to British sea traffic when war broke out; but, here is the fact which you can't get over, that the German Fleet was boxed up, and the door 'slammed, bolted, and barred' in its face! And when two d——d fools of German spies went and told Ingenohl, the German Admiral, that ho might attack the British Fleet at Scapa Flow, he promptly shot them both, persuaded they were traitors luring the German Fleet to its doom'" Now Lord Fisher is-asked to give hi^ plan for reducing the Navy Estimates from 140 millions to 34 millions—"the figure that wo had in 1914, when I was first Sea Lord, and the Scapa .Flow Fleet began to build—l answer in the immortal words of Mr Burke :'I will not give my plan unless I have the execution of it.' .. . Our stupid people <lo not believe in the internal combustion engine, or in oil. I have faith in bbth. Those two aro not only going to revolutionise sea war, they are going; to revolutionise sea commerce, for ample and convincing reasons which I shall set forth in my book. " I should at first build—not necessarily fighting res-

sslg, I should build tramps to carry oil, with ever improving internal combustion engines fitted in them." ' Naturally, the British public, especially the Navy section of it, is not taking these articles lying down, and day by day various statements • are warmly" challenged. One retired Admiral goes as far as to describe- the.series aa "a vague and disjointed tirade, reminiscent more of the passionate screams of an angry child deprived of its favourite toy rather than of the mature and considered judgment of a recognised expert, writing on a subject which must have been the study of his long life."