THE NEW DANGER TO NAVAL POWERS.
LORD CHARLES BEEESFOBD'S interesting speech of Monday on the use of 'Torpedoes, coming as it does so soon after those remarkable achievements of•the-French torpedo the Thomeycroft,' of- which we gave some account last week, raises anxious thoughts as to the future of great Naval Powers. When you can manufacture a little grey boat, hardly showing at all on -the surface of the sea in the twilight, yet containing, below the -water, room for an officer and two men, who work the engines so as .to direct her at apace of nearly twenty miles an hour against great ships which could not possibly steam such a pace, even if their look-out had•seen her and knew what she meant, and who then blow up their mighty antagonists,- without suffering anything beyond a giddy spin -in the water for them- selves, you will certainly - have the risks and chances of naval warfare so 'terribly exaggerated, that two very bad results may accrue ;—in the first place, you may find that 'success is by no means proportioned to either the energy or the capital sunk in the -Navy ; — in the next -place, you may find a perfectly new sense of excite- ment, and even of panic, entering into naval war. For the new uncertainty and the new risk are not even fairly repre- sented by the achievements of a little •craft like the Thorney- -croft,' which does at least show something on the surface of the water,—a something which might therefore be discerned by sufficient care, even on dark nights with the help of the electric light, and accounted for by a well-directed shot or two, before it got into any dangerous proximity with the vessel. Lord Charles Beresford has shown us that you may launch, out of a sort of frame, from the- deck of a vessel, a torpedo which will' sink to - any depth in the water that it may be thought best 'to decide von, from one foot to thirty feet, and then move on at a rate of twenty knots an hour for full • a thousand yards,—more than half a mile,—to- wards ;the ship 'for which she is designed, and on contact knock a Bole in her bottom of an area'of seventy square feet,-- say, for instance, to give distinctness to the conception, a hole of eight feet one way; and nine feet the other-way. &ache hole, according to Lord Charles Beresford, would send any known ship, however constructed, to the bottom,—an assertion which Mr. Ward Hunt disputes,- maintaining that, in the ships of cellular construction, as such a. hole would not necessarily let water into -mere than one or two compattments, the ship might continue to float. After our experience-with the 'Vanguard,' however, this hope must -be far from sanguine. And it is quite certain that with the appliances' for driving 'this frightful submarine missile into the water from the deck of a ship, after -which it re- mains -invisible till it'strikes its victim, this Whitehead torpedo will more than the-alarm caused by' the 'Thomeycroft ' torpedo. Of course, the latter is the best adapted for pursuing a ship in motion, for any change .of direction on the part of the ship aimed at would, be fatal te-the,aubmatine torpedo, which cannot change the course on Which'it is set going ; whereas the 'Thorneycroft,' being manned, can alter its course like any other vessel. But for ships at anchor, or even though in motion, so near that the .danger of their changing their course before they are overtaken is very small, the Whitehead torpedo is indefinitely more dangerous than the other, since it can be launched half a mile- off, and is then en- tirely invisible till it does- its destructive work. Now, what we very reasonably fear from these terrible inven. -Lions is, as we have said, two great dangers. First, they may make Naval operations so incalculable,—so extremely fluctuating and capricious,—in their results, that except for the purposes of the-defence of the coasts, the power of navies may almost disappear. Next, if even that does not happen, these terrible inventions may create naval panics. Let us say a word on each danger separately.
It is obvious enough that one of the most essential elements of power is the ability to secure absolutely a given effect, by the habitual expenditure of the requisite energy and wealth. Anything that turns war of any kind into gambling, and especially into very risky gambling, has a clear tendency to prevent the investment of energy and wealth in operations which may prove quite fruitless. The Thorneycroft,' we are told, cost• just one-twentieth part of the value of a first-rate ship-of-war. We do not know how much the cigar-like Whitehead torpedo described by Lord Charles Beresford may have cost, but in all probability much less than the Thorneycroft.' Here, then, are- inventions of very little cost, and quite within the means of the poorest countries, which may have the effect of rendering useless ships and engines of the most costly kind, which only a great naval nation could produce. Supposing no effective mode of guarding against the new dangers can be devised, —and certainly Lord Charles Beresford did not suggest any which looks very hopeful,—will not the effect be just what the effect of constant earthquakes in earth- quake-haunted countries is, to prevent any costly con- struction the result of which is so likely to vanish in a night without leaving any considerable fraction of its
utility behind Of course, only a considerable naval war can show us how the new instruments will really work, but am far as we can see, they threaten us with a danger which may render the construction of a mighty iron- plated ship, worth hundreds- of thousands of pounds, a mere folly, since it may make such ships things as ephemeral as butterflies, and as little fitted to defend themselves. Neverthe- less, even if the end of it were to banish these- great miracles of art and enterprise from the Navies of the world, it might still be said that money and pluck would tell as much as before, since for every Naval leviathan we had dispensed with, a rich and enterprising- Power like Eng- land might produce fifty of these naval hornets, whose buzz and whose sting.might be heard and felt on every ocean and every shore. And that might be true, but then comes our second point, that the effect of these inventions may be a great liability to naval panics.
It is obviously a very different thing indeed to be prepared for danger, when everybody knows what it is and whence it comes, and the esprit de corps of those who have to meet it strengthens them in the duty of confronting it, and to be pre- pared for a blow which may send all whom it strikes at any moment into the other world, without a warning or the shadow of a warning,. at a moment, it may be, when all seems bright and hopeful. The difference is shown by the demoralisation to which the best soldiers are subject who fancy that they are treading on mined ground, and by the de- moralisation which comes upon populations subject to shocks of earthquake, where the terror is always said to be enhanced rather than diminished by repetitions. We should greatly fear that if in any naval war a considerable suc- cession of disappearances due to blows from a submarine torpedo were to occur, we might find the crews of our ships- of-var becoming quite unmanageable, and declining_to serve under conditions which condemned them to so sudden and mysterious a death from an• unseen foe. Mystery and suspense add enormously to all sorts - of terrors, and a considerable number of successes in destroying welbmanned English ships-of-war• would, in our• opinion, be extremely likely to render it all but impossible to • find adequate crews• for a great navy. Of course, this - would not act thus upon Englishmen, without acting in as great, or it may be, a greater degree, on the sailors :and-engineera of other nations. But then any sudden blow -to all naval power would be a very heavy blow to -the -relative power of
England, who is great for offence only through her Navy. Experience may show that both these dangers are compara- tively chimerical, but at present, we should be disposed to esti- mate them as very serious, and as needing the whole resources of our Naval Authorities to measure and to meet.
Previous page
