INTENSIVE WARFARE.
11 AST week we urged upon our readers and our countrymen the necessity, if we were to end the war quickly and suc- cessfully, of an intensive cultivation in every theatre and in every clement. In doing so we little thought how soon events would illustrate and enforce our moral and the lessons we sought to draw, They are writ large this week in the air, under the water, and on the land. Our main contention last week was that., granted the need for intensive warfare in the abstract, its specific manifestation must be combined operations by sea, land, and air on the Western front. As Admiral Jellicoe so well put it in his interview on April 12th, " the fortified Belgian coast is a fact which we have to face." But the proper way to face it is to deliver a blow from the shoulder at Zeebrugge or Ostend or both, followed by a knock-out (or shall we say a " solar plexus punch " ?) which will not only sweep the nuisance from our doorstep, but put us in a position the advan- tages of which the merest tiro in strategy can understand— advantages so well described by the Naval Correspondent of the Times, quoted by us last week. His words are worth re- cording once more. " Short of tackling these places [Ostend and Zeebrugge] from the land side, which must require military co-operation, there is no more efficacious treatment than un- ceasing attacks from the air and from the sea." Though this is not the prime reason for urging intensive war cultivation on " the fortified Belgian coast," it happens that annoyances— that they are no more than annoyances is of course the first thing to be noted about them—like the raid of Wednesday, with its pitiful tale of maiming and destruction and of so many " a piece of childhood thrown away," would be banished from the capital if we tackled in earnest the problem of " the fortified Belgian coast." It is behind the line of the Dunes that the aeroplanes which have worked their evil will upon London and Folkestone, the mouth of the Thames and the South-East Coast, have their nests. They have proved that they can annoy us in the daytime, and will no doubt continue to annoy us in that fashion, because they are so close. The nests are at our doors and ought to be taken. So much for the argument drawn from the air for intensive cultivation of the war. Equally strong is the submarine argument. This week shows that our hopes that we had mas- tered the submarine menace were to a great extent premature. They were premature because we have hitherto been content to deal with the submarines sporadically and at sea, to catch them where they " bobbed up " and not by the radical remedy of destroying the nests. And here we may interpolate some very Sound and helpful criticism made by Mr. Gerard Fiennes, the able naval critic of the Observer, in last Sunday's issue :— " The presence of a strong force of above-water craft at Zeebrugge and Ostend is essential to the prosecution of submarine work in the Channel. All the German attempts were easily defeated before they accumulated torpedo-boats there. It seems, therefore, not unlikely that they may attempt to use bigger units of their fleet in order to prevent the neutralisation of these ports which further successful operations on our part may bring about. The air-raid on the Thames Estuary last Tuesday may not have been un- connected with a desire to ascertain the force available there to interfere with operations planned by the enemy to relieve the situation off the coast of Belgium. If affairs go in accordance with our hopes, they have the appearance of working up for a decisive event at sea, for if the enemy once begins to attempt to support his flotillas with heavier craft, it will, sooner or later, result in the battle-fleets being drawn in."
Our third argument must be drawn from the glo.ious land battle, the victory of the Messines Ridge. Here no doubt the cultivation was as intensive as any one could have wished it, nay, as it could possibly have been. When General Haig strikes, every ounce of power is used, and he wculd be an ingenious man who could prove that the hitting might have been harder. And yet one feels that the splendid work done at Mesaines, in which every plan was laid and every plan came off, was robbed of half its effect by the fact that the conditions under which the Army fought had only allowed a local objec- tive, and not that full and complete plan of action which would be employed in combined operations.
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