Naval Warfare Part 4

It is essential to note that the base is there for the sake of the ships. The ships are not there for the sake of the base. It is a fatal inversion of all sound principles of naval strategy to suppose that the ships owe, or can afford, to the base any other form of defence than that which is inherent in their paramount and primary task of controlling the maritime communications which lead to it. So long as they can do this the base will be exposed only to such attacks as can be delivered by a force which has evaded but not defeated the naval guard, and to this extent the base must be fortified and garrisoned; for, of course, if the naval guard has been decisively defeated, the control of maritime communications has pa.s.sed into the hands of the enemy, and nothing but the advance of a relieving naval force, too strong for the enemy to resist, can prevent the base being invested from the sea and ultimately reduced. It will be seen from this how absurd it is ever to speak of a naval base as commanding the adjacent seas. As such it does not command, and never can command, any portion of the sea which lies beyond the range of its own guns. All that it ever does or can do is, by its resources for repair, refit, and supply, to enable the fleet based upon it constantly to renew its efficiency and mobility, and thereby to discharge its appointed task of controlling the maritime communications entrusted to its keeping. But such command is in all cases exercised by the fleet and not by the base. If the fleet is not there or not equal to its task, the mere possession of the base is nearly always a source of weakness and not of strength to the naval Power which holds it.

It is held by some that the occupation of naval bases in distant seas by a Power which is not strong enough to make sure of controlling the maritime communications which alone give to such bases their strategic value and importance is a great advantage to such a Power and a corresponding disadvantage to all its possible adversaries in war. It will readily be seen from what has been said that this is in large measure a delusion. As against a weaker adversary than itself the occupation of such bases may be an appreciable advantage to the Power which holds them, but only if the adversary in question has in the waters affected interests which are too important to be sacrificed without a struggle. On the other hand, as against an adversary strong enough to secure the command of the sea and determined to hold it at all hazards, the occupation of such distant bases can very rarely be of any advantage to the weaker belligerent and may very often expose him to reverses which, if not positively disastrous, must always be exceedingly mortifying. Of two things one. Either the belligerent in such a plight must detach a naval force sufficient to cover the outlying base, and thus, by dispersing naval forces which he desired to keep concentrated, he must expose his detachment to destruction by a stronger force of the enemy, or he must leave the base to its fate, in which case it is certain to fall in the long run. In point of fact the occupation of distant bases by any naval Power is merely the giving of hostages to any and every other Power which in the day of conflict can establish its command of the sea. That is the plain philosophy of the whole question.

It only remains to consider very briefly the question of the supply of fleets operating in distant waters. In a very interesting and suggestive paper on the "Supply and Communications of a Fleet," Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge has pointed out that "in time of peace as well as in time of war there is a continuous consumption of the articles of various kinds used on board ship, viz., naval stores, ordnance stores, engineers' stores, victualling stores, coal, water, etc." Of these the consumption of victualling stores is alone constant, being determined by the number of men to be victualled from day to day. The consumption of nearly all the other stores will vary greatly according as the ship is more or less at sea, and it is safe to say that for a given number of ships the consumption will be much greater in time of war, especially in coal, engineers' stores, and ordnance stores, than it is in time of peace. But in peace conditions Admiral Bridge estimated that for a fleet consisting of four battleships, four large cruisers, four second-cla.s.s cruisers, thirteen smaller vessels of various kinds, and three torpedo craft, together with their auxiliaries, the _minimum_ requirements for six months--a.s.suming that the ships started with full supplies, and that they returned to their princ.i.p.al base at the end of the period--would be about 6750 tons of stores and ammunition, and 46,000 tons of coal, without including fresh water. The requirements of water would not be less than 30,000 tons in the six months, and of this the ships could distil about half without greatly increasing their coal consumption; the remainder, some 15,000 or 16,000 tons, would have to be brought to them.

In time of war the requirements of coal would probably be nearly three times as great as in time of peace, and the requirements of ammunition--estimated in time of peace at 1140 tons--might easily be ten times as great. Thus in addition to the foregoing figures we have 16,000 tons of water, and in war time a further _minimum_ addition of some 90,000 tons of coal and 10,260 tons of ammunition, making in all a round total of 170,000 tons for a fleet of the size specified, which was approximately the strength of the China Fleet, under the command of Admiral Bridge, at the time when his paper was written.

All these supplies have to be delivered or obtained periodically and at convenient intervals in the course of every six months. They are supplies which the ships must obtain as often as they want them without necessarily going back to their princ.i.p.al base for the purpose, and even the princ.i.p.al base must obtain them periodically from the home sources of supply. There are two alternative ways of maintaining this continuous stream of supply. One is that in advance of the princ.i.p.al base, what is called a secondary base should be established from which the ships can obtain the stores required, a continuous stream of transports bringing the stores required to the secondary base from sources farther afield, either from the princ.i.p.al base or from the home sources of supply. The other method is to have no secondary base--which, since it contains indispensable stores, must be furnished with some measure of local defence, and which, as a place of storage, may turn out to be in quite the wrong place for the particular operations in hand--but to seize and occupy a "flying base," neither permanent nor designated beforehand, but selected for the occasion according to the exigencies of the strategic situation, and capable of being shifted at will in response to any change in those exigencies. History shows that the latter method has been something like the normal procedure in war alike in times past and in the present day. The alternative method is perhaps rather adapted to the convenience of peace conditions than to the exigencies of war requirements. During his watch on Toulon Nelson established a flying base at Maddalena Bay, in Sardinia, and very rarely used the more distant permanent base at Gibraltar. Togo, as I have stated in an earlier chapter, established a flying base first at the Elliot Islands and afterwards at Dalny, during the war in the Far East. Instances might easily be multiplied to show in which direction the experience of war points, and how far that direction has been deflected by the possibly deceptive teaching of peace. I shall not, however, presume to p.r.o.nounce _ex cathedra_ between two alternative methods each of which is sanctioned by high naval authority. I will only remark in conclusion that though the establishment of permanent secondary bases may, in certain exceptional cases, be defensible and even expedient, yet their multiplication, beyond such exceptional cases of proved and acknowledged expediency, is very greatly to be deprecated. The old rule applies--_Entia non sunt praeter necessitatem multiplicanda._

My task is now finished--I will not say completed, for the subject of naval warfare is far too vast to be exhausted within the narrow compa.s.s of a Manual. I should hardly exaggerate if I said that nearly every paragraph I have written might be expanded into a chapter, and every chapter into a volume, and that even so the subject would not be exhausted. All I have endeavoured to do is to expound briefly and in simple language the nature of naval warfare, its inherent limitations as an agency for subduing an enemy's will, the fundamental principles which underlie its methods, and the concrete problems which the application of those methods presents. Tactical questions I have not touched at all; strategic questions only incidentally, and so far as they were implicated in the discussion of methods. Political issues and questions of international policy I have eschewed as far as might be, and so far as it was necessary to deal with them I have endeavoured to do so in broad and abstract terms. Of the many shortcomings in my handling of the subject no one can be more conscious than I am myself. Yet I must antic.i.p.ate one criticism which is not unlikely to be made, and that is that I have repeated and insisted on certain phrases and ideas such as "command of the sea," "control of maritime communications," "the fleet in being," "blockade," and the like, until they might almost be regarded as an obsession. Rightly or wrongly that has, at any rate, been done of deliberate intent. The phrases in question are in all men's mouths. The ideas they stand for are constantly misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misapplied. I hold that, rightly understood, they embody the whole philosophy of naval warfare. I have therefore lost no opportunity of insisting on them, knowing full well that it is only by frequent iteration that sound ideas can be implanted in minds not attuned to their reception.

INDEX

Aircraft, 121

Alabama, the, 109

Alexander, his conquest of Darius, 48

Allemand, his escape from Rochefort, 66, 67

Amiens, Peace of, 73

_Animus pugnandi_, 46, 47, 48, 49, 55, 58, 59, 61, 78

Antony, Mark, 72

Armada, the, 79, 112

Bacon, quoted, 6

Baraille, De, his part in the Dunkirk campaign, 87, 88

Barham, Lord, 18, 64; and Nelson, 66, 67; his conduct of the Trafalgar campaign, 118

Base, flying, 142; naval, 137

Battle-cruiser, its functions, 122-128

Beachy Head, Battle of, 32, 35; campaign of, 70, 78

Berlin Decrees, 100

Bettesworth, 118

Blockade, 17; a form of disputed command, 20-29; military, its methods, 23; military and commercial, 21

Bolt from the blue, 80, 89

Boscawen, at Lagos, 79

Brest, 33, 35; blockaded by Cornwallis, 30; blockaded by Hawke, 79; De Roquefeuil at, 81, 82

Bridge, Admiral Sir Cyprian, on a fleet in being, 31; on supply and communications of a fleet, 140; his estimate of Torrington, 32, 40; on Torrington's trial, 42

Brundusium, Caesar at, 72

Cadiz, Killigrew at, 34

Caesar, his Pharsalian campaign, 71, 72

Calais, the Armada at, 79

Calder, his action off Finisterre, 118; Barham's instructions to, 64

Camperdown, Duncan at, 126

Cape St Vincent, meeting of Nelson with Craig and Knight off, 65

Capital ships, 113

Carthagena, Spanish ships at, 66

Charles, Prince, 82

Chateau-Renault, 33, 35

Clausewitz, his definition of war, 4; on limited and unlimited war, 5, 22

Colomb, Admiral, on differentiation of naval force, 114; on Torrington's strategy, 40, 43, 79

Command of the sea, 6, 10, 11-19, 20, 21, 50, 52, 54, 71, 94, 98, 121, 133, 134, 135; its true meaning, 15, 135; no meaning except in war, 15, 135

Command of the sea, disputed, in general, 49-67

Commerce, maritime, extent of British, 53; in war, 93-110; its modern conditions, 101-110

Concentration of naval force, its conditions, 132

Conflans, at Brest, 79