THE BATTLESHIP OF THE FUTURE.
WE publish in another column a very remarkable letter from our correspondent " Civis," who writes from expert knowledge of the highest kind, on the battle- ship of the future. Greatly daring, we should like to supplement that most interesting paper by certain con- siderations of a general character in regard. to what we may term the foundations of naval fighting power. At first sight it seems as if in a matter so highly technical it would be impossible for the outsider to say anything which could be of the slightest value. Experience, however, teaches that the truth of the old proverb, " Onlookers see the best of the game," does not vary inversely in proportion to the technical character of the game, but rather the reverse. The more elaborate and complicated—we had almost said mysterious—the technique, the more possible it is for the onlooker occasionally to contribute something to the solution of the problem. The reason is not far to seek. In a highly specialised art such as the construction of ships for the purpose of naval war the experts are of necessity immersed in a multitude of details. In that immersion they are apt to get their eyes dimmed and to lose touch with realities. To those realities the untechnical onlooker may sometimes be able to bring them back by a word in season. In general, then, he who attempts to tell the experts how the subject strikes the man of common-sense need offer no apology, provided, of course, that his common-sense is real common-sense, and not, what we admit is too often substituted, common- nonsense. In the Highlands of Scotland coffins are, or were, often carried for miles across hills by bearers,—the friends and neighbours of the deceased. There is an old story of how on one occasion during a rest at a convenient spot the bearers, after the wont of their country, became engaged in a deeply interesting, and even heated, theological controversy as to the immortality of the soul, with special reference to the fate of the deceased. So absorbed did they become that they automatically started on their way oblivious of the fact that they had left the coffin by the pathside. They had almost got out of sight before a warning was given by a roadfarer, who shouted after them : " Ye've forgot poor Peggy ! " We certainly do not go so far as to say that our naval experts have " forgot poor Peggy," but at any rate we desire to ask them humbly whether it is not possible that they are in danger of sometimes forgetting poor Peggy. We would begin our inquiry as to the foundations of battle-power at sea by asking the plain question : What is a battleship ? Must not the answer be : A ship which can destroy the ships of the enemy ? That is the sine gad non. If the battleship can do that, she has accom- plished her purpose. If she cannot, it matters not how beautiful her model is, how well armoured and protected she is, how fast, how seaworthy, how stable, or how small a target she may offer to the enemy. These are all the graces and accomplishments of a battleship ; but if the one thing needful is lacking, the power to destroy the ships of the enemy, they are all but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. The next question to be asked is : By what means is the destruction to be accomplished ? Twenty, or even fifteen, years ago the answer might have been : Partly by ramming, partly by the discharge of torpedoes, and partly by gunfire The idea of ramming, however, has been abandoned, we will not say for ever, for that is an impossible word in naval war, but at any rate for the present. Again, the discharge of torpedoes from the battleship may be regarded as of altogether secondary importance. In a word, the power of destruction which belongs to the battleship is at present gunfire. It follows, then, that the sine pcd non of the battleship is the power to destroy by gunfire. But gunfire is not an abstraction. In order to fire your guns you must have somewhere to fire them from. But the need to have something to fire your guns from means, in the science of ship construction, something which cannot be easily destroyed by your enemy. In other words, something that will keep afloat.
How is floatability to be obtained ? Here, indeed, the common-sense onlooker is on very difficult and delicate ground. There is one obvious way of keeping a ship afloat —the way in which the mediaeval soldier tried to keep himself alive—by covering her with thick armour. If you can keep out the enemy's shots by making them glance off you without penetrating, you will clearly be able to remain afloat or alive as the case may be. But a man or a ship in armour can buy immunity from the enemy's attack too dear. You may so load yourself up with armour that you will have no power to move, and, what would be even worse, no power to hold or use your weapon of offence, your sword or your gun. This means that you must purchase your power of keeping alive in the cheapest market. A battleship must obtain her floatability in such a way as not to sacrifice her essential quality,—the power to destroy the enemy by gunfire. In other words, the constructor of a battleship must remember so to keep afloat—that is, to possess defensive power—as not to forget that the main object is always attack. The object is to destroy the enemy, not to get out of harm's way oneself. Frederick the Great asked his Grenadiers whether they wanted to live for ever. The same question might be asked of a constructor too much set on defensive armour. We appear, then, to have reached here something of a dilemma. If you are properly defended by armour, you cannot have your full power of shooting; and if you have your full power of shooting, it will be no good to you because you will not be able to keep yourself afloat. The solution of this apparent paradox is to be found in the saying attributed to Farragut—though no doubt it was one of those great truths which were uttered in earlier generations—that " gunfire is the best form of defence." Experience as well as logic teaches that a ship with plenty of powerful and well-served guns, even though she be only lightly armoured, may be able so to pepper and plague her well-armoured antagonist as to get the best of the game. In a word, gunfire may turn out to be not only the sine gad non. for offence but also for defence. Another, though indirect, form both of defensive and offensive power is mobility, or, rather, we should say, rapidity of movement. No doubt the defensive power with which a ship is endowed by rapid movement may to some extent act as a snare and a delusion. For example, it would. obviously be absurd for a commander of a ship to rely too much upon his powers in this respect. The logical outcome of trusting to speed would be running away out of reach of the enemy, and this would. involve the abandonment of the whole object of a battleship,—the ability to destroy the enemy's ship. Absence from the field of battle is in a sense the highest form of defensive power, but it is a form which could only be relied on in Wonderland. The battleship, then, will only make sacrifices to obtain mobility so far as mobility will help her to destroy her foes, and to carry out the guiding principle of " Engage the enemy more closely." The essential object of mobility is to enable the battleship to bring her wares to market— to bring her guns into play—and if this simple fact is forgotten, and sacrifices are made to obtain mobility for any other purpose, the constructor is losing touch with the essential of his task, the building of a ship with the maximum power of destroying other ships by gunfire To put it in another way—if, instead of keeping his eye upon the object, he lets himself think too much of what we have called the accomplishments of the ship, he may wake up to find that he has been making a floating fort, capable of rapid movement, but practically useless for his essential purpose, since it has only a low power of destruction by gunfire. In fact, he will have " forgot poor Peggy " in the metaphysical maze of defensive armour and engine-power. We now come to perhaps the most difficult point in the whole business of battleship construction, at any rate as it strikes the outsider. What is the proper size of a battle- ship ? Here is a question which at first sounds so simple as to be almost absurd. Yet on the answer the fate of the world may hang. The question from many points of view seems to be on the same plane as that which is said to have been asked by a Chancery Judgewho suddenly found himself confronted with the necessity of trying a criminal case. " What," he was heard to say in an agitated aside to his marshal, " is the proper sentence for stealing blacking-brushes ? " " It depends upon the circumstances," was the correct reply of his severe but youthful subordinate. At first sight it seems as if this is all we can say about the size of the battleship. Perhaps, however, some enlightenment may be obtained from the following considerations. If the battleship is large, then no doubt it Will be possible to give her a good flavour of accomplishments as well as of the sine gad non. of potent gunfire. In a big ship you can have not only large guns but a great number of them, and also floatability and a great amount of defensive armour, and further, great rapidity of movement. From this point of view, then, the big battleship has a clear advantage. Further, the big battleship—the big unit—has the advantage that, if you consider her in isolation, she can beat and destroy not only one smaller unit of the enemy, but very likely several smaller units combined. Besides, those who command her and work her obtain the moral advantage which comes from the sense of possessing superior power, both offensive and defensive. The notion that Providence is on the side of the big battalions has a very reassuring effect on those who know themselves to be big. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that wars, naval as well as military, are often won by those who will take the greatest risks. But unquestionably it is far easier to get the normal man to risk a small unit, a unit which has not cost too huge a sum, and which does not carry too many hums n beings. The commander of the huge unit knows that there are only a comparatively small number of those units in existence, and he would not be human if he did not think of the risk. Contrariwise, the man in command of the small unit is helped to run risks by the thought : " After all, if we perish, there are plenty more like us." Leaving these moral and metaphysical questions out of account, we come back to where we began,—to the question of gunfire. Gunfire is everything, or if not everything, the thing without which nothing happens. But is it not possible that gunfire may be quite as effective when it is converging upon the enemy's ship from, say, six comparatively small units as when it is coming from one unit ? In other words—to go to the sister- science of land. war is it better to mass all your guns at one point and to blaze away from that point, or to distribute your batteries over a wide field. and to fire from a number of detached points ? Shall we centralise or decentralise our gunfire ? Shall we con- centrate it or distribute it ? There is the problem. That we are capable of solving it we do not sug- gest for a moment. We should like, however, to point out that the true solution will not be supplied without some thought being given to the question of a nation's material powers of production. If the nation's capacity to turn out the big units were unlimited, then clearly nothing but the question of naval tactics would have to be con- sidered. But however great the sacrifices which a nation is willing to make in regard to material production, it is obvious that there is a limit, and a very strict limit, to production. Therefore the matter cannot be decided without consideration of the cost and sacrifice required to produce the big unit. No doubt in answer to this it will be said that it is no more expensive to lose six smaller units than one great unit which costs six times as much as each of the smaller units. But here another consideration comes in. Chance, or perhaps it would be better to say the exigencies of wind, weather, collision, floating mines, and exceptionally lucky hits, are bound to play a great part in naval warfare. That being so, and other things being equal, it is obviously better to employ the smaller rather than the big unit. This can easily be seen in a reductio ad a,bsurdum. Even if it were possible to build one ship of extraordinary power and rapidity of movement, no nation would care to put all its eggs into that one basket, since admittedly a collision, or a floating mine, or a rock, or a sandbank on a foggy night might bring the State's whole Navy to ruin at one blow.
It would seem as if the problem were narrowing down to the question : How far is it safe to carry out the sound principle of spreading your risks ? It clearly is not safe to spread them to such an extent that you would be induced to employ an inferior gun, for then you would be losing touch with the sine gad non of destruction by gunfire. Whatever else happens, the battleship of the future must carry the most powerful and most efficient guns to be found in the naval market, and must also carry enough of them. Here the proverb of not having all one's eggs in one basket applies, as it were, from the other side. A battleship with only one big gun might have its whole usefulness forfeited and become an utterly worthless unit owing to some chance accident or caprice of fate. Next, the battleship must clearly have rapidity of movement, but it must be obtained without too much sacrifice of other accomplishments. Again, she must have the power of keeping afloat. Is this power of flotation to be obtained. through defensive armour or in other ways ? The question is one for the experts. If they can give us floatability at a less sacrifice of other things than they can give us defensive armour, we shall clearly be at an advantage, for we can then get what we have a special and compelling desire to obtain,— greater gunfire. We can, in brief, have more of our sine qua non,—of the power of destroying the enemy by gunfire.
It appears, then, to the common-sense onlooker that the battleship unit of the future will be as small as is compatible with obtaining potent gunfire and the capacity to keep afloat and move rapidly. In her construction three things will never be forgotten for an instant, —(1) that the essential use of the ship is to destroy the enemy's ships by gunfire ; (2) that gunfire is in itself one of the most effective forms of defence ; and (3) that the power of keeping afloat is to be purchased in the cheapest market,—with the minimum of sacrifice of gun-power. Have these considerations been in any degree overlooked in our newest battleships, or do they correspond to the common-sense ideal ? That is a question well worth examination, though we have ourselves no capacity to answer it.
Previous page
