The Command of the Air

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER II IN THE LAST chapter we briefly examined the land aspect of the World War, its outstanding characteristics and the consequences of an error in evaluating a technical factor. In this chapter we shall consider the sea aspect of the war, and there we shall find that another technical factor, this one peculiar to the sea, was wrongly evaluated, a mistake which entailed almost exactly similar consequences. Admiral Lord St. Vincent once attacked Prime Minister Pitt in the House of Lords because he seemed in favor of encouraging experiments with the torpedo and submarine. He told the Prime Minister: "I think you are the biggest fool that ever lived if you are in favor of an instrument of war which we who dominate the sea do not need at all, and which if successful will take that domination from us." Well, the great English Prime Minister was certainly not a fool; but neither was Lord St. Vincent a false prophet. That instrument was perfected, and after almost a century took away the dominion of the seas from the English. In spite of the improvements of the submarine arm during the 110 years which had passed since Fulton with his Nautilus and his torpedo for the first time in history blew up a ship, the brig Dorothea) the technicians of the English Navy did not realize the truth of Lord St. Vincent's words. Therefore, the German submarine war caught them by surprise and found the English Navy totally unprepared. During that long span of time some people with imagination had foreseen and tried to call attention to the possibilities of the submarine arm for war; but it did no good. Wells, the English novelist, foresaw the submarine war completely; but because he 167 168 The Command of The Air was a novelist, and a writer of fantasy besides, serious people could not take him seriously. Shortly before the war, the English Admiral Sir Percy Scott, famous innovator in firing tactics for naval artillery and an expert on guns and armor, wrote: Given the actual power of the submarine, battleships have become useless for offense as well as defense; and therefore to keep on building them would be a waste of the money citizens contribute to the defense of the Empire. But even Sir Percy Scott's opinion was sunk by a barrage of criticism from the upholders of the ultra-superdreadnought. During the English naval maneuvers of 1913 a submarine attacked the Admiral's ship six times in a row, and six times the imprudent submarjne commander received the following acknowledgment from the Admiral: "Go to hell!" Admiral Sims of the American Navy wrote: Until the great war, the opinion held about submarines by most admirals and naval captains was that they were wonderful toys, good for spectacular feats, but only in carefully selected localities and under good weather and sea conditions. Competent naval circles declared that the submarine could operate only by daylight and with favorable weather, that it was useless in fog, that it had to rise to the surface to fire torpedoes, that its interior was unfit for human life, so that crews had to be changed every week or so, that it had no probability of success on the high seas, that it needed mother-ships in order to operate, and several other such objections. All this despite the fact that the submarine was already a tangible reality! These strange prejudices were not dispelled even by the sinking of the Hague, Cressy, and Aboukir, because, it was claimed, these three cruisers had been sunk under circumstances exceptionally favorable to submarines, while navigating inside a narrow stretch of sea. Only after the sinking of the Audacious on the northwest coast of Ireland, several hundred miles from the nearest German base, did the possibilities of the new arm begin to be realized. The German submarines [wrote Admiral Sir Percy Scott] deprived the English ships of their freedom of movement, as on account of Probable Aspects of Future War 169 them no big ships dared to go out of a naval base without being protected by an escort of torpedo boats and destroyers; they prevented the Great Fleet from bombarding the German ports; they sank 100,000 tons of our warships; compelled us to keep as far away as we could from enemy shores; compelled the Fleet to go to Bermuda in order to carry on fire drills, and to hide ships which were sent against the Dardanelles...