THE NAVY LEAGUE ANNUAL.*
WE heartily welcome the continued appearance of The Navy League Annual. In the absence of Captain Alan Burgoyne, the creator and editor of the Annual, who is on active service, the work has been undertaken by Mr. Robert Yerburgh. Mr. Yerburgh has been helped by Mr. Archibald Hurd and Mr. Gerard Fiennes, and there is an essay on the influence of the British Navy on the course of the war by Lord Sydenham. Mr. Hurd's special chapter is headed " The Triumph of Sea Power," and Mr. Fiennes has written on " Foreign Navies and the War." Among the other articles we must mention " The Collapse of German Naval Speculation," by Mr. H. C. Bywater ;
The French Navy in the War, 1914-1915," prepared by direction of th French Naval War Staff ; " The Russian Navy in the War," by a Russian Naval Officer ; " The Italian Navy and its Attitude towards the War," by Rear-Admiral R. Mazzinghi ; " A Brief Outline of the Imperial Japanese Naval Operations in the War," by a Japanese Naval Officer ; " Aircraft in the War," by Mr. C. G. Grey ; and " Naval Engineering and the War," by Engineer-Captain J. Langmaid. But interesting though the special articles in the Annual have always been and are again, the chief merit of the work is that it contains a compact mass of information about naval affairs which one cannot come by in so well arranged or accurate a form anywhere else. Part IL contains the text of the Acts and Orders in Council relating to the Navy, a statement of the measures adopted to blockade Germany, and the despatches describing the naval actions in the war. Part IIL contains, as usual, exceptionally valuable tables prepared by Mr. Maurice Prendergast, which must have caused him much labour. They show the strength of all the Navies engaged in the war. Some of the tables
• The Navy League Annual. Edited by Robert Yerbnrgh, assisted by Archibald Hurd and Gerard Fiennes. London : John Hurray. lbs. net.)
have been temporarily suspended for good and obvious reasons. The illustrations are also well chosen. It is hinted that we might have had even more interesting photographs had it not been desirable to with- hold them—photographs of monitors, for instance. Altogether, Mr. Yerburgh, who has done so much in the past to encourage sound ideas about the Navy and to deepen the admiration with which Englishmen regard it, is to be congratulated on his latest effort. It is not necessary to 'agree with all the views expressed by the writers in the Annual to be able to say that it is the best and most convenient means published of arriving at such an intelligent knowledge of naval affairs as every English landsman ought to have.
Because the British Navy has done its work without the glamour of terrific sea-battles on a grand scale, even observant onlookers are apt to forget that what has been accomplished is something quite unprece- dented in history. Nelson never commanded the seas in the sense in which Sir John Jelicoe commands them. As Mr. Yerburgh says, " the sea power of the enemy, upon which the constructive thought of the German people and the resources of the German Empire have been lavishly expended for a generation, has been throttled and demoralized, and the merchant shipping of the enemy has been swept, within a few months after the declaration of war, from the waters of the world." Although Mr. Balfour has publicly stated the fact, it is often forgotten that, in spite of our loss of many ships, we have not lost one in open battle from the guns of the enemy except in the tragic encounter off the coast of Chile. While the German High Sea Fleet remains in the Kiel Canal (no doubt losing something of its moral, for want of practice at sea) attention is necessarily turned mainly to submarine warfare. The ice has broken up in the Baltic, and we await with confidence and curiosity news of the doings there of the British and Russian submarines. The German hopes of completely controlling the Baltic have already been dispelled. We may quote here what Mr. Hurd says about the development of German submarine warfare since the beginning of the war. It is to be noted that the dependence upon submarines is an entire change of plan :- " It can hardly be doubted that the Marineamt was surprised by the success achieved by underwater craft during the early period of the war, and, in particular, by the coup which resulted in the destruction in quick succession of no fewer than three large, if obsolescent, British cruisers. Though Grand Admiral von Tirpitz is a torpedo specialist, he regarded the submarine for several years with disfavour. The only movement in France for the creation of large submarine flotillas was looked upon by German naval officers of high standing with a feeling little removed from contempt. Even when at last the United States, and later on Great Britain, decided to build submarines, the Marineamt held its hand. The new policy which was inaugurated by the British Admiralty in 1901, when small submarines of the Holland type were laid down at Barrow, was commented upon in Germany as being that of a Power which was adopting a defensive weapon of an untried type. It was even suggested that the new departure indicated that the British Admiralty was no longer confident m the ability of the British Fleet to perform its imme- morial mission, and that the submarine had been welcomed as offering an additional measure of security against invasion in view of the moral menace which it constituted. The German naval authorities persisted in their attitude towards submarine craft for a period of five years. Experiments with small ships of the Nordenfeldt type had been carried out in the early nineties with disappointing results. The Marineamt was convinced on the evidence thus obtained that the submarine would not add to the power of the German Fleet, and they remained of this opinion during the early years when the British Admiralty were engaged in developing British flotillas, and were encouraged possibly in main- taining their rigid opposition by the losses incurred with British sub- marines. The result of the delay in constructing underwater craft was conspicuous at the opening of the war. In August 1914 the Germans possessed less than thirty submarines, while the British Navy had over seventy. It cannot be doubted that after the sinking of the. three Cressys the Germans at last realised that the submarine might prove a weapon of military importance in a war of attrition, and offered peculiar attractions to a Power relying in large measure on a policy of frightful- ness.' The development of the new policy took time."
Another point which Mr. Hurd states with clearness and unanswerable force is that if Britain had not taken part in the war, or the British Navy had failed in its aim, Germany would already have won the war.
" Germany would have possessed the incalculable advantage of being able to land troops at carefully chosen points on the coasts of France and Russia, thus taking in the rear and on the flank the armies of her opponents. Even those who have watched most carefully the unfolding of the great war drama have hardly comprehended how narrowly Germany missed the chance of obtaining command of the sea." Writing of the losses suffered by the various Navies, Mr. Fiennes
says:—
"Next to Germany Italy has suffered the most heavily, having lost two good armoured cruisers, Amalfi and Giuseppe Garibaldi, by submarine attack, and the battleship Benedetto Brim by internal explosion. France has lost the battleship Bouvet and the armoured cruiser Leon Gambetta, the gunboat Me, the destroyers Mousquet and Dague, and the sub- marine Curie. Austrian losses have not been severe, thanks to the prudence of the Austrian Fleet. They consist of the armoured cruiser .Kaiserin Elizabeth and the light cruiser Zelda, with two submarines and a torpedo-boat. The Russians have lost the armoured cruiser Pallada, the light cruiser Jemtchug, the mine-layer Yenissei, and three gunboats ; and the Turks the battleships Hairredin Barbarosea and Messudiyeh, the light cruiser Medjidieh, and four gunboats. The German losses have, of course, been very serious. They consist of the battleship Pommern, the battle-cruisers Goeben and Moltke (heavily damaged), the armoured cruisers Blucher, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Y orck, and Friedrich Earl, the light cruisers Ariadne, Magdeburg,
Kan, Mainz, Hela, Emden, Leipzig, Dresden, Konigsberg, Ni;rnberg, Karlsruhe, and Breslau, the mine-layers Albatross and Konigin Luise, seven gunboats, seventeen torpedo-boats, a number of auxiliary cruisers and—who shall say how many submarines ? In addition, two other battle-cruisers were badly damaged in the action off the Dogger Bank, and the Roon was reported heavily hit in the Baltic. Seeing that Germany has not been engaged in the Dardanelles operations, which have cost us so much, she has probably suffered more than any nation which has not ventured on a fleet action ever lost before."
As regards the probable course of German naval action, Mr. Bywater does not believe that the logic of events will bring the German Navy out in a desperate Berserker rage to inflict as much damage as it can before it perishes. He thinks that the great naval speculation of Ger- many has already collapsed, and that she will consent to the anomaly of having temporarily ceased to be a naval Power, although still in possession of a large and powerful Fleet. We are not so sure of that— indeed, we believe the contrary.
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