BOOKS.
THE GRAND FLEET, 1914-16.*
LORD JELLrCOVS candid and circumstantial history of the Grand Fleet during the first two years of the war is of the highest interest. His narrative, as precise and unadorned as a ship's log, will be eagerly read because it reveals for the fleet time what the Navy was doing behind the Northern mists, and puts in their proper relation the isolated episodes of which we were told as much as it was safe to te-ll. His commentary, explaining and defending his strategic policy, will form the subject of debate between rival schools of naval warfare for many years to come, and will also, we hope, enable the public to gain a truer appreciation of the services which the Grand Fleet has rendered to the Empire in this war. The popular belief that the British Navy in 1914 was greatly superior to the German Navy gave the nation confidence in victory, even when the war on land was going badly for us. At the same time, it led many people to underestimate the difficulties of the Navy's task, and to complain of the delay in using our naval power, which by the hypothesis was overwhelming, to drive the enemy from the sea. Now Lord Jellicoe's fundamelital conten- tion is that this popular belief was ill-founded, that the British Navy had a small advantage over the enemy in Dreadnoughts but was inferior in destroyers and submarines, and that the Grand Fleet was by no means so well prepared for war as the German High Sea Fleet. When the author took over the command on the morning of August 4th, 1914, from Admiral Callaghan, ho had twenty Dreadnoughts and four battle- cruisers to oppose to the enemy's thirteen Dreadnoughts and three battle-cruisers. His light cruisers were less numerous but more efficient than the German ships of that class, but he had only forty-two destroyers to set against Germany's eighty-eight. The British Navy possessed only sixteen submarines of the 11 and E classes which were fit for-cruising, whereas Germany bad twenty-four of superior strength; our submarines had no wireless equipment, and were therefore of lees value for scouting than the enemy ' '-boats. Lord Jellicoe realized the great possi- bilities of the submarine, the long-range torpedo, and the mine in modern naval warfare. He foresaw that an active enemy might try to wear down the strength of our Battle Fleet by mine-laying or torpedo attacks until our very narrow margin of superiority disappeared, whereupon the High Sea Fleet might sally forth to challenge our command of the sea. His first object was to preserve the Battle Fleet intact against the day of reckoning. We had no secure naval base when war began. There had not been, ho tells us, any money to spare for harbour defences against submarines at Scapa or at Rosyth or Cromarty. For the first six months of the war the Grand Fleet, when it lay in, Scapa Flow, was exposed to the attack of any adventurous ' '-boat. On Siptember 1st, 1914, the report that a periscope had been sighted in the Flow sent the whole Fleet to sea in haste, and this unpleasant experience was not the last. The enemy, on the other hand, had safe bases in the Ems, Weser, and Elbe and at Kiel, behind an elaborate system of minefields, where his ships could lie in complete security. The Grand Fleet, being almost continually at sea in these early months, suffered from wear and tear of boilers and machinery. When the ' Audacious ' was mined on October 27th, 1914, off Loch &stilly, three Dreadnoughts were refitting for minor defects, and the Iron Duke' and ' Ajax ' were having much trouble with their condensers, so that the Grand Fleet at that moment had only seventeen effective Dreadnoughts and five battle-cruisers against the enemy's fifteen Dreadnoughts and four battle-cruisers with the Blucher.' It is not surprising that Lord Tellico° asked the Admiralty to keep the lees of the ' Audacious ' secret as long as possible, though official reticence in this ease was carried to • 2116 Gland Met, 5514-14: as °Kaftan, Development, and Work SY Admiral Lord Jclllmc of Scapa London: Cowen. Wis. ed. net
such absurd lengths as to cast discredit on all Admiralty bulletins for months afterwards.
Lord Jelliene lays great stress on the superior defensive power of the German battleships, which were broader in the beam and more completely armoured than ours. The extra breadth of beam enabled the German designer to place the protective bulk- head further inboard than was possible in our narrower ships :— "The result was that, although it is known that many German capital ships were mined or torpedoed during the war, including several at the Jutland battle, the Germans have not no far admitted that any were sunk, except the pre-Dreadnought battleship ' Pommels ' and the battle-cruiser Letzow,' whose injuries from shell-fire were also very extensive. On the other hand, British capital ships mined or torpedoed rarely survived."
The ultimate reason for this difference was, according to Lord Jellieoe, that our Admiralty built Dreadnoughts which could be berthed in the existing docks, whereas, as the Emperor told him, " in Germany they had provided the dock accommodation first and had designed the ships subsequently." We took risks in order to obtain, at the earliest moment, a superiority in capital ships, and we attached more importance to gun-power than to armoured upper decks or under-water defence. Lord Jellicoe admits that our heavier armament was effective, but be evidently felt uncertain whether our battleships and battle- cruisers could stand punishment if the enemy's firing was good or lucky. He had had a prevision from the outset of the fate which overtook the Queen Mary' and Indefatigable' at Jutland. He tells us, too, that he thought highly of German gunnery, which had made fuller use of the new mechanical devices than we had done by 1914, and which was aided by a far better armour-piercing shell than we possessed up to June, 1916. Moreover, Lord Jellicoe had a great opinion of the enemy's destroyers, and expected them to take advantage of their two- fold superiority in numbers. He found it difficult also to cope with the U'-boats in the early days, because he had very few destroyers available for escort work and scouting. It must always be remembered, of course, that the British Navy had to think of the Seven Seas, while the enemy was concerned solely with the Bight and the Baltic), and that the Grand Fleet had to maintain a constant blockade, while the High Sea Fleet lay in harbour. We can well understand how Lord Jellicoe, with all these difficulties ever present to him, and with the profound conviction that the Grand Fleet alone stood between the Allies and disaster, was resolved sot to expose his Fleet to any undue risk, although, like Nelson and other great seamen, he was convinced that the destruction of the enemy's fleet was his "first objective." He reminds us that at Trafalgar Nelson had little more than a third of our capital ships, and that a large number were building. At Jutland Lord Jellicoe had all the Dreadnoughts in commission, and only five were on the stocks. Behind the Grand Fleet there were no reserves, as there had been in 1805.
The reader who has noted carefully Lord Jellicoe's respect for the enemy's navel strength, which none had better opportuni- ties of knowing than he had, will understand more clearly than before his conduct at Jutland. It is obvious from his admirable chapters on the battle, which add a good many details to the despatch, that the Commander-in-Chief found it hard to discover what was happening in the sea-mist, which veered and shifted every moment and was thickened by the smoke from the funnels and the heavy cordite fumes from the guns. He says that he did not know till the next morning of the loss of the two battle-cruisers Queen Mary' and Indefatigable,' although they were sunk between four and half-past four o'clock in the after- noon. " Low visibility," which Lord Jelliree had noted during a sweep " in September, 1914, as a characteristic of the Bight, prevailed to the confusion of friend and foe. He explains and defends, with a diagram, his much-criticized monomer° of deploying on the port wing, away from the enemy fleet, instead of on the starboard wing. The situation during the main action, he says, " had never been really clear to me owing to the fact that I had not seen more than a few ships at a time." But he Was resolved not to risk his capital ships in night actions, which " must always be very largely a matter of chance, as there is little opportunity for skill on either side " in fighting at close range. "The greater efficiency of German searchlights at the time of the Jutland action and the greater number of torpedo tubes fitted in enemy ships, combined with his superiority in destroyers, would, I knew, give the Germans the opportunity of scoring heavily at the commencement of such an action." Lord Janice° therefore steered south, hoping to renew the battle by daylight, as he believed himself to be between the enemy and
his bases. He sent his destroyers well to the rear to attack the enemy battleehips, which they did with much success, despite the enemy's " use of star shells, at that time unfamiliar to us," and his " excellent " methods of fire control. Lord Jellicoe had intended, he says, to close the Horn Reef at daylight, when, as he afterwards learned, the High Sea Fleet was passing that way to seek the shelter of its minefields. But the Grand Fleet was scattered after steaming eighty-five miles during the hours of darkness, and in the misty morning it was slow to reunite. "The cruisers were not sighted until 6 a.m., the destroyers did not join the Battle Fleet until 0 a.m., and the 6th division of the Battle Fleet . . . was not in company until the evening," owing to the damage sustained by the `Marlborough' in a torpedo attack. Thus the enemy escaped destruction. But he had suffered heavily, as Lord Jellicoe justly points out, and, except for an abortive raid in the follow- ing August, the High Sea Fleet did not venture again far beyond Heligoland. Lord Jellicoe disclaims any intention of enticing the enemy out by sending the battle-cruisers far in advance. He was simply searching the Bight, as he had done In the previous April and Slay. He thinks that the enemy came out in the hope of intercepting our light cruisers, which had been active in the Skagerrak, and that be did not expect to meet the Grand Fleet. To that extent Lord Jellicoe was favoured by fortune.
Lord Jellicoe's book abounds in interesting details. He says, for instance, that in October, 1914, he asked the Admiralty to block Zeebrugge, but was told that it was impracticable ; ho himself, as First Sea Lord, ordered plane for the attack to be prepared in September, 1917, when the Paaschendaele Battle had come to a deadlock. He tells us that after Jutland he urged the extensive mining policy in the Bight which he carried out when ho returned to the Admiralty. He shows that the sinking of the German raider Greif' was the result of skilfully planned operations, and was not due to chance, as the public and the enemy were led to suppose. He describes the loss of the Hampshire' with Lord Kitchener ; the cruiser was sunk by a mine laid by a '-boat in a channel which was under constant observation. Lord Jellicoe says that he would have taken the Grand Fleet to sea by the same route that stormy night if it had been necessary. In the very heavy sea that was running, none but the twelve men who clung to a raft could have survived. Lord Jellicoe does, not spare his praise of the energy and enthu- siasm of the officers and men under his command, despite all their hardships. The Grand Fleet, whatever may have been its initial defects, improved steadily as the war continued, whereas the German Navy's moral went to pieces. As to himself, Lord Jellicoe remarks of his promotion to the Admiralty in November, 1916 ;— " I was sander no delusion as to the difficulty of the task before me. The attacks already made upon the Admiralty in con- nection with the shipping losses duo to submarine warfare, and on the subject of night raids on our coast, which it was impossible to prevent with the means existing, fully prepared me for what was to come. I knew then that no fresh measures involving the production of fresh material could become effective for a period of at least six to twelve months. Indeed, I was so certain of the course that events would take that in bidding
farewell to the officers and men of the ' Iron Duke' very difficult task in view of the intense regret that I felt at leaving them), I said that they must expect to see me the object of the same attacks as those to which my distinguished predecessor, Sir Henry Jackson, had been exposed. I was not wrong in
Lord Jellicoe leaves it at that, feeling rightly enough that ho must be judged by his work when the full circumstances are known hereafter.
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