THE TRUE DOCTRINE OF NAVAL WARFARE.
rrIlE war has left us with rival doctrines both military and naval, and the critics of the future, if their writings are to be of any value, will have to decide these issues. Land fighting has presented us with the notorious conflict between " Westernism " and " Easternism." We must say frankly, for our part, that we see little to be said for Easternism- the strategy of scattering one's forces to various parts of the world in order to take advantage of apparently easy opportunities. When all has been said, in land fighting—and the same thing applies to sea fighting—the enemy if he is to be defeated has ultimately to be overcome where he is strongest.
The Easterners, so far as we have been able to discover, almost invariably emphasize the attractiveness of the openings in some more or less remote theatre, without making their arguments depend in the least upon the number of men available. When Easterners tell us that at the Dardanelles, in Palestine, in Mesopotamia, or wherever it may be, there were magnificent opportunities for hitting the enemy, we heartily agree. But the real -point to which we must always return was how many men could be spared from the real centre of the fighting. We believe that in 1915 ghastly risks were taken in Flanders and France.
We have mentioned land fighting first, although in this article we want to write mainly about sea fighting, because the principles that underlie the true doctrine in both cases seem to us to be identical. A few years before the war a school of thought had arisen and become very powerful in the Navy which taught that -true naval policy need concern itself only with passage and communication. In other words, if the Navy were able to keep the seas free for merchandise by containing the enemy's ships, it would be a matter of com- parative indifference whether the enemy's Fleet was destroyed or not. -Mr. Churehill was, we suppose, saturated with this doctrine when he made .his notorious speech in which he said that it did not injure us if the German ships occasionally took a promenade in the North Sea. Later he evidently changed his opinions, and he then strongly advocated an out- and-out offensive against the German sea forces, Nothing would then satisfy-him but that the enemy should be bearded in his den wherever that was humanly possible. In our opinion, Mr. Churchill's second thoughts were absolutely right, and his first thoughts absolutely wrong. The doctrine which was fashionable among many of our leading naval thinkers before the war was a negation of the Nelson spirit. We know all that can be said about the madness of piling up ships as a present to the enemy upon hostile beaches or committing suicide =among enemy minefields. But here, as in every other human matter, reason and sanity must of-course temper the absolute affirmation. 'Nelson's affirmations were absolute because he knew that heavily guarded and qualified statements produced in the mind of the seaman a mood of disinclination. When a seaman is told that he need not destroy his enemy, and that in fact it would be rather unwise if he tried to do so, the bias of all his naval thinking becomes a wrong bias. No boy brought up to believe that he can win naval wars by finesse and clever sparring rather than by flooring his enemy is likely to develop such a spirit—or to maintain it if he ever had it—as inspired the victories of Nelson and the cutting-out expeditions of our ancestors.
The issue which we have thus paraphrased is the subject of a remarkable book, The Navy in Battle, by Mr. A. H. Pollen, which has just been published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus (12s. 6d. net). Mr. Pollen's statement of the rival naval doctrines is by far the ablest we have read. The answer to the questions he raises will determine the manner in which the doctrine of the Navy will be framed in future. We have not space to go into the details of Mr. Pollen's argument, nor do we profess an unreserved agreement with all that he says, but he has stated the main problem so clearly that his book is worthy of all attention. It is for the: intelligent public to read and to judge. Mr. Pollen recognizes a salutary revolution of naval doctrine in mid-war, when in May, 1917, the machinery of administration at the Admiralty was reorgan- ized and a new Higher Command developed on the Staff principle which had been long resisted. This change was brought about, he says, because criticism had shown that the old regime had failed both to anticipate and to thwart a new kind of attack on sea communications. Two kinds of naval warfare were in fact going on at the same time. There was the old-fashioned surface warfare, for which alone, in Mr. Pollen's opinion, the Admiralty had provided adequately ; and there was the new-fashioned undersea warfare, which the old-fashioned ideas touched but did not parry. Under the Staff system of administration the principle of convoys for merchant vessels was introduced. Within six months the rate at which ships were being lost was halved, and within a year it had been reduced by sixty per cent. The creation of a Staff had, in fine, introduced the special knowledge of the experts, mainly younger men. who had formerly stood quite outside the small sacred circle of the Executive. We are sure that Mr. Pollen's argument for the Staff principle is sound, though we should like to have more information about the number of destroyers which would have been available if 'the method of convoy had been introduced sooner. Without sufficient protection a convoy is merely a splendid target for the enemy, the speed of the convoy being the speed of the slowest vessel. A convoy begin's to be an aggressive force only when the gun-power of the escort is high. Then the convoy may welcome the attack of submarines, and if all vessels are convoyed a submarine can deliver no attack at all without braving a shattering amount of gunfire. Thus it happens that the Navy is saved the trouble to a considerable extent of searching out the submarine. If the submarine is to do anything at all, it must face the convoy.
The principal, and necessarily most personal, application of Mr. Pollen's teaching comes in the chapters about the battle of Jutland. It will.be perceived at once that the fashion- able pre-war naval doctririe could not have more -excuses than those with which the conditions of the battle of Jutland provided it. Guns, owing not to improvement in .explosives, but to improvement in sighting, have now a range which was never dreamt of even a few years ago. Surely, some one will say, the path of wisdom was to do what damage could be done by gunfire at extreme range without running any serious risks of losing several capital ships by closing, or by braving torpedoes.and mines. Let it be remembered—so the-argument will run—that nothing but-the British Navy stood between the Affiance and utter defeat, and it was obviously better, even if the pre-war naval doctrine was not quite perfect, to act upon it rather than run the risk of ruin. Some such argument, coupled with an extraordinarily high sense of personal responsi- bility, was, we may fancy, in Lord Jellicoe 's mind when he " broke off" the battle of Jutland. Quite other arguments, as Mr. Pollen believes, governed Sir David Beatty, who, though he took many risks, took no more than he thought essential. Such a conflict of theory and practice appeared in other actions as well as in the battle of jutland, as Mr. Pollen ex- plains ; but even as the battle of Jutland was greater than all other naval actions, so is the conflict of doctrine presented there in a more dramatic form. Lord Jellicoe has not yet given his thoughts to the world ; we must await them, but, judging from the facts as we see them, the doctrine of " decisive victory " is triumphant and the doctrine of " passage ant communication " is condemned.
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