They saw no ships
Ludovic Kennedy
Naval Policy Between the Wars Stephen Roskill (Collins E12.00) Britain is fortunate in having had two distinguished naval historians, one English, the other American, to chronicle the rise and fall of twentieth-century sea-power. First Stephen Roskill, given a much freer hand than his predecessors, published his fine, official account of naval operations in the Second World War, The War at Sea. Then Professor Arthur Marder, of the University of California, produced his splendid five volume From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, beginning with the Fisher reforms of 1905 and ending with the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet in 1919. Now Captain Roskill has filled in the intervening gap with the completion of this second volume of his Naval Policy Between the Wars.
In considering the years immediately before the Second World War, one is struck forcibly, as in those before the First, by the Navy's deep conservatism, even sense of unreality, at almost every level. At several of the international naval conferences that took place between the wars, for instance, the British delegation solemnly proposed the abolition of the submarine. 1 n 1902, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson had called the submarine 'underhand, unfair and damned un-English'. The truth of the matter v, as that to an island nation like ourselves, dependent on foreign trade, the submarine posed a real threat to survival. It had nearly crushed us in 1917 and might do so again (indeed, it nearly did in 1942-3). But how did you, or could you, abolish it without first abolishing warfare ?
Having failed in our attempts to abolish the submarine, our naval priorities thereafter ought to have been involved in the protection of trade, which the submarine had made so vulnerable. But the Admiralty was still obsessed by heavy ships, and incredibly both the 1937 and 1938 naval manoeuvres were given over to the attack and defence of the battlefleet—though by this time it should have been clear that, with our chief enemy Germany having so few heavy ships, the battlefleet would rarely, if ever, operate as a force. As for enemy submarines the Admiralty pinned their faith on the ASDIC (Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee), though experiences during the Spanish Civil War showed claims for it to be exaggerated.
The same air of optimism prevailed about air-warfare: 'Even one gun in a merchant ship,' wrote Admiral Chatfield breezily, 'would keep the aircraft at a height such that the chance of destroying the ship is very small.' He was echoed by Sir John Salmond, a former Chief of Air Staff: 'The capital ship is the one remaining surface craft which if severely hit, will not sink.' Battleships had so long been a part of Britain's naval tradition that no one could imagine a situation without them. But in 1937 reality eventually triumphed when, before the eyes of a disbelieving Board of Admiralty, a Queen Bee target aircraft buzzed around the fleet for two and a half hours without being hit once. It was subsequently admitted that our system of anti-aircraft fire control was obsolete, and that we had no defence against the divebomber. As a result we suffered severe losses in the early part of the war which, says Roskill, 'would have been mitigated if greater foresight and less confidence had been shown.'
But perhaps the dottiest piece of misplaced confidence lay in the Admiralty's assessment of Japan, and the Navy's ability to protect our Far Eastern possessions. Every king needs his fool and Captain G. Vivian, the British naval attaché in Tokyo, was tailor-made. 'The Japanese,' he wrote to the Board, 'have very slow brains. Teachers have assured me that this is fundamentally due to the strain put on the child's brain in learning some 6,000 Chinese characters before any real education can start.' The other naval attaches, he went on, were convinced that the unwillingness of the Japanese to show more of their ships and weapons was due 'rather to the barrenness of the cupboard than to any secrets it may contain.' This report, says Roskill, was widely circulated. Perhaps it reached Churchill who wrote to Chamberlain six months before the war, 'Consider how vain is the menace that
Japan will send an army and fleet to conquer Singapore. One can take it as quite certain [my italics] that Japan would not run such a risk.'
There was conservatism, too, in the stout resistance put up by the Board to A. V. Alexander's modest proposals to widen the entry system for officers. 'It is not officers
• who exhibit any snobbish traits in regard to lower deck promotion,' wrote the First and Second Sea Lords to the Larken Committee, 'but the men of the lower deck who give greater respect to what is known as the officer class than to officers drawn from their own ranks.' (`God Bless the squire and his relations/And keep us in our proper stations'.) The captain of the Gunnery School complained of a batch of Direct .Entry cadets being 'unable to speak the King's English' ( he meant of course Opermiddle class English, the King at that time, Edward VIII, speaking a form of Cockney). In those days standard English was considered a great social and professional advantage. Today, especially in broadcasting, it is the other way round. Plus ca change!
Amid all these blunderings, there was one reform for which the Admiralty deserves the fullest credit—the winning of their long, bitter fight against both the Air Ministry and the government for control of their own air branch. The Fleet Air Arm was one of the war's most splendid successes. In Germany Raeder tried to do the same for his navy, but was frustrated by the ambitious Goering, much to the detriment of Germany's naval war effort.
The officer who led this battle was Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, Beatty's flag-captain at Jutland. It is good that Roskill pays him a long overdue tribute, for he was the outstanding senior officer of his generation. Roskill feels that he should have been recalled as First Sea Lord when war broke out ; and indeed he might have been, had not Churchill wanted a more malleable character. So instead we had Dudley Pound, weak, interfering, vindictive, incompetent, whose only virtues were in restraining Churchill from such madcap schemes as an expedition to the Baltic and the capture of Pantellaria. Had Pound and Alexander fought harder for more longrange aircraft for the Atlantic battle, says Roskill, victory there would have come earlier, millions of tons of shipping would have been saved, and the huge combined operations of 1943-5 could have been mounted much sooner. 'It may not go too far to suggest that the duration of tne war would have been shortened by some six months had the Admiralty been represented by a more effective team . . . than A. V. Alexander and Admiral Pound.'
Not all of this book is easy reading, since naval policies cannot be stated without naval technicalities. But as with all of Captain Roskill's work, the scholarship is meticulous, the writing clear, and the judgments sound. British naval policy between the wars is now on the record, and the record is unlikely to be surpassed.
Previous page
