TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE TRUE NAVAL SPIRIT.
11HE naval enterprises at Zeebrugge and Ostend were glorious in spirit and action, and the influences they spread are bound to be far-reaching and great, whatever the material results of the action may prove to be. The accounts of those enterprises have been read with a kindling of all the senses, and not with least emotion by those who understood as they read that the daring action organized by Vice-Admiral Keyes meant the turning of an important page in recent naval history. The policy of an offensive pushed along very daring and hazardous lines has been justified. Many effects will flow from this most gratifying fact.
On October 14th, 1916, we published an article in which we drew attention to a school of thought that was being gradually if silently cultivated in the .Navy. About a dozen years ago the theory began to become fashionable that major naval operations must always have for their object " passage and communication." That is to say, the Fleet must be occupied mainly in guarding our communications and seizing those of the enemy. The " command of the sea," according to this theory, meant control of communications. But the synonym was quite unreal, for it is possible to control communications, as we do now, without having the command of the sea in the sense that we have destroyed the enemy's Fleet. The theory is in fact morally enervating. In accordance with it, the duties of the Navy were defined as being " the furtherance or hindrance of operations on land, the protection or destruction of commerce, and the prevention or securing of affiances, which functions may be discharged by direct territorial attacks or by getting command of the sea—i.e., establishing ourselves in such a position that we can control the maritime communica- tions of all parties concerned, so that we can operate by sea against the enemy's territory, commerce, and allies, and they cannot operate against ours." We ventured to say that this theory was inadequate, and we predicted that if the old spirit dominated the Navy, as we well knew that it did, however much obscured temporarily, the brilliant officers at the head of the Fleet would not be content until they had snatched more opportunities. Of course, the enterprises at Zeebrugge and Ostend were not major naval operations, though they were considerable operations. We are writing here not of naval operations in themselves, but of the spirit which animates them all, both great and small. If the true Nelsonian spirit of the universal offensive—the policy of continually worrying the enemy, of never leaving him alone, of never allowing him to pass a single day or night without feeling that a new blow may fall upon him—is to continue, it will not exist side by side with such a theory of naval policy as we have described. It is because the wonderful performance of the Navy at Zeebrugge and Ostend strikes at the heart of that theory that we attach far more importance to it than would be justified by its merely demonstrable results. If a young naval officer were brought up in the creed that everything could be achieved by merely containing the enemy, instead of by going out to seek him and destroy him, it would be no blame to him if thoughts of battle with the enemy seldom figured in his mind. He would not really grow up to believe that the spirit of attack was every- thing. Although he might have learned as a boxer that the man who fights defensively is nearly always beaten, and although he might have read in history that the cavalry which charges nearly always routs the cavalry which receives the charge, he would nevertheless be forced to believe that those lessons did not apply to naval warfare. He would in effect be told to study " naval poker " instead of the Nelson touch.
The scheme planned by Admiral Keyes had all the elements of imagination, careful preparation, extreme audacity, and surprise which constitute the moat memorable sorts of naval action. If the plan had been laid before one of the " naval poker " school of thinkers, he would no doubt have repeated the well-worn axiom that ships of war cannot stand up against shore batteries ; he would have argued that it would be a futile sacrifice to throw ships and men as fodder for the.bristling ranks of German shore guns—not to mention the unknown German minefields. But Admiral Keyes and the gallant volunteers who worked with him did not happen to belong to that school, and they knew that when a surprise is complete a certain number of conditions can always be relied upon to serve the cause of the attacker, even in an apparently forlorn hope. There are always, for instance, the confusion of the enemy, and the fact that even the redoubtable shore batteries cannot in all cases be successfully laid on their target when the attackers have come right up under the protection of shore works. Words fail one to express enough admiration for the combination of precision and courage required in such under- takings as Admiral Keyes carried oat. Weeks, if not months, must have been spent in the elaboration of the details, and when the moment arrived the complicated programme of synchronization would have been of ne value whatever if the pluck of our seamen had not been equal to putting a heart into the body of the scheme. During the long preparation there was plenty of time for men's blood to freeze. It is easy enough to fight as a rat fights when it is suddenly attacked and sees no means of escape, but the sort of cold-blooded affair which has just been carried out with a notable degree of success is another matter altogether. It required what the Duke of Wellington used to call altogether. four-o'clock-in-the-morning courage."
The affair had a strong resemblance to that kind of naval action which our ancestors used to call a " cutting-out " expedition. The object earlier used to be to surprise the enemy in his harbours, to cut the cables of the vessels lying at anchor, and to take as many of them as possible out to sea. Readers of history will call to mind easily enough the instances of Blake's attack on Santa Cruz in 1657 (which Clarendon called " incredible "), of Vernon's dash into the harbour of Porto Bello, and the unsuccessful action of Nelson at Santa Gritz, when he tried, among other things, to bring off a richly laden ship which had recently arrived from Manila. Although Admiral • r al Keyes's expedition resembled these closely in being a dash into hostile harbours, its principal object was, of course, not to cut out ships, but to block the channels by which the German submarines and destroyers have been accustomed to come out to sea. Of the two bases involved, Zeebrugge has been considerably the more important. Whenever our Monitors have shelled the entrance to the Zeebrugge Canal, the destroyers and submarines have been withdrawn up the canal which runs to the docks at Bruges. The only way in which Zeebrugge could be made useless to the enemy was by blocking up the exit, so that, at all events till the obstacles had been removed, the German submarines and destroyers could not come out. Quite recent history provides several instances of such blocking action. In the Spanish- American War of 1898, for example, Lieutenant Hobson sank a merchant vessel, the ' Merrimac,' in the channel leading out from the harbour of Santiago de Cuba. The ' Merrimac ' did not completely block the channel, but it was nevertheless of some use to the Americans, as when Admiral Cervera's Fleet came out of the harbour in July, 1898, it did so in " single line ahead," and the American ships, waiting outside, were able to destroy the Spanish ships one by one as if they were rabbits bolting from a hole. More remarkable examples were provided by the Russo- Japanese War. Three different attempts were made by the Japanese to block the exit from Port Arthur. All three were more or less failures. The second attempt came nearest to success, as the merchant vessels sunk were actually in the channel, though the Russians were able later to remove the obstruction. All these examples prove how very difficult it is successfully to block a channel. If it be true that the two obsolete cruisers filled with cement which were sunk at Zeebrugge are right across the mouth of the channel, we may consider that Admiral Keyes's undertaking has been more successful than any other of its kind. The Mole at Zeebrugge has a curving arm nearly a mile and a half long. The shore end of this structure is made of wooden piles, and further out to sea the Mole is a heavy structure of masonry. For the plan of attack to be successful it was necessary for our block-ships to pass inside the Mole. A perfect network of diversions had been contrived in order to give the main part of the plan every chance of success. First of all, there was a bombardment of the coast by our Monitors. Bombardments by our Monitors have so often occurred before that the Germans no doubt supposed that nothing was to follow. But there was much to follow. The sinking of the two cement-laden block-ships at Ostend was an independent operation. The attention of the German garrison on the Mole at Zeebrugge was engaged by a landing party while the block-ships deliberately steamed inside the harbour to their positions. An essential part of the plan was that two sub- marines loaded with explosives were to be driven against the wooden part of the Mole near the shore in order to cut off the garrison further out to sea. The story how the old cruiser Vindictive,' with its " brows," or gangways, for the landing parties of bluejackets and Marines, was laid alongside the Mole will always adorn a noble page of naval history. The losses among our men, we are told,, were extremely heavy, and the wonder is that any of them returned. It seems that the masonry of the Mole, when once the ' Vindictive ' had been laid alongside, protected the more vital parts of the ship. The same circumstance perhaps saved the large ferry-boats, which used to be well known in the Mersey, and which were used on this occasion for the landing parties.
It will be very interesting to find out, as our Navy and aerial observers will of course try to do, exactly how much German naval traffic is impeded at Zeebrugge and Ostend, and how long the obstacles will remain there. Of course the Germans will try to blow up the sunk block-ships, but if, as we believe, a great deal of sand is continually being moved about by the tides in the mouth of the Zeebrugge Canal, the obstructions will soon become embedded in sand, just as sand is heaped up against groynes on the beaches of our seaside resorts. Moreover, when obstruc- tions are blown up in harbours and the neighbourhood of docks, great precautions have to be taken lest damage be done by violent shocks—yet nothing short of a violent shock would quickly remove cement well embedded in sand. We may prove to be hoping for too much ; but if we are not, we may see during the next few weeks an appreciable effect upon the figures of our merchant losses at sea. But when all has been said, we attribute even more importance to the moral effects of Admiral Keyes's great success than to the blocking of the Zeebrugge Canal. Those who direct our naval policy will be definitely encouraged to continue along their present courses. Last August Lord Jellicoe, speaking of the Belgian coast, said that " the Germans have applied to this length of sand-fringed coast the same principle of intensive fortification adopted higher up on the North Sea and the Island of Heligoland. The coastline is studded with heavy guns, which in themselves constitute infinitesimal targets at a range of more than twenty thousand yards on which any bombardment could be carried out." That per- fectly true statement might have seemed to all who remember that the British Navy is the shield of the whole Entente Alliance—without which shield the Alliance would certainly crumble away—to forbid every kind of naval action that could be called hazardous. After reading the details of Admiral Keyes's enterprise, however, we can read the words of Lord Jellicoe with much less foreboding. Surely every one must feel that, and it means a great deal. When malignant eighteenth-century pamphleteers used to pretend that Howe spent his time in running in and out of Torbay, they travestied, because they misunderstood, the acts of a brave man. But behind all the malignity was the sense—a perfectly just sense— which our eighteenth-century seamen had caused to grow up in the nation, that the only true naval spirit was to search out the enemy and destroy him. The affair at Zeebrugge has not stood alone among the daringly conceived actions of the past three weeks.- We have read of the audacious and wholly successful sweeping movements in the Kattegat and the Heligo- land Bight. It is certain now that we shall hear of more still.
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