Part 12 (1/2)
Thirdly, there is the relation between the destructive power of modern cruisers and flotillas against a convoy unescorted or weakly escorted and the corresponding power in sailing days.
Fourthly, there is the relation between the speed of convoys and the speed of battle-squadrons, which is of importance where the enemy's transports are likely to be strongly escorted. On this relation depends the facility with which the battle-squadron covering our mobile defence can secure an interior position from which it may strike either the enemy's battle-squadron if it moves or his convoy before it can complete its pa.s.sage and effect the landing.
All these relations appear to have been modified by modern developments in favour of the defence. In the first ratio, that of speed of mobilisation to speed of intelligence, it is obviously so. Although military mobilisation may be still relatively as rapid as the mobilisation of fleets, yet intelligence has outstripped both. This is true both for gaining and for conveying intelligence. Preparations for oversea invasion were never easy to conceal, owing to the disturbance of the flow of s.h.i.+pping that they caused. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent commercial leakage of intelligence, but they never entirely succeeded. Yet formerly, in the condition of comparative crudeness with which international trade was then organised, concealment was relatively easy, at least for a time. But the ever-growing sensitiveness of world-wide commerce, when market movements are reported from hour to hour instead of from week to week, has greatly increased the difficulty. And apart from the rapidity with which information may be gathered through this alert and intimate sympathy between Exchanges, there is the still more important fact that with wireless the speed of conveying naval intelligence has increased in a far higher ratio than the speed of sea transit.
As regards the ratio between cruiser and convoy speeds, on which evasion so much depends, it is the same. In frigate days the ratio appears to have been not more than seven to five. Now in the case at any rate of large convoys it would be nearly double.
Of the destructive power of the flotilla, growing as it does from year to year, enough has been said already. With the advent of the torpedo and submarine it has probably increased tenfold. In a lesser degree the same is true of cruisers. In former days the physical power of a cruiser to injure a dispersing convoy was comparatively low, owing to her relatively low excess of speed and the restricted range and destructive power of her guns.
With higher speed and higher energy and range in gun power the ability of cruisers to cut up a convoy renders its practical annihilation almost certain if once it be caught, and consequently affords a moral deterrent against trusting to evasion beyond anything that was known before.
The increased ratio of battle-fleet speed to that of large convoys is equally indisputable and no less important, for the facility of finding interior positions which it implies goes to the root of the old system. So long as our battle-fleet is in a position whence it can cover our flotilla blockade or strike the enemy's convoy in transit, it forces his battle-fleet in the last resort to close up on the convoy, and that, as Kempenfelt pointed out, is practically fatal to the success of invasion.
From whatever point of view, then, we regard the future chances of successful invasion over an uncommanded sea, it would seem that not only does the old system hold good, but that all modern developments which touch the question bid fair to intensify the results which our sea service at least used so confidently to expect, and which it never failed to secure.
II. ATTACK AND DEFENCE OF TRADE
The base idea of the attack and defence of trade may be summed up in the old adage, ”Where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” The most fertile areas always attracted the strongest attack, and therefore required the strongest defence; and between the fertile and the infertile areas it was possible to draw a line which for strategical purposes was definite and constant. The fertile areas were the terminals of departure and destination where trade tends to be crowded, and in a secondary degree the focal points where, owing to the conformation of the land, trade tends to converge. The infertile areas were the great routes which pa.s.sed through the focal points and connected the terminal areas.
Consequently attack on commerce tends to take one of two forms. It may be terminal or it may be pelagic, terminal attack being the more profitable, but demanding the greater force and risk, and pelagic attack being the more uncertain, but involving less force and risk.
These considerations lead us directly to the paradox which underlies the unbroken failure of our enemies to exercise decisive pressure upon us by operations against our trade. It is that where attack is most to be feared, there defence is easiest. A plan of war which has the destruction of trade for its primary object implies in the party using it an inferiority at sea.
Had he superiority, his object would be to convert that superiority to a working command by battle or blockade. Except, therefore, in the rare cases where the opposed forces are equal, we must a.s.sume that the belligerent who makes commerce destruction his primary object will have to deal with a superior fleet. Now, it is true that the difficulty of defending trade lies mainly in the extent of sea it covers. But, on the other hand, the areas in which it tends to congregate, and in which alone it is seriously vulnerable, are few and narrow, and can be easily occupied if we are in superior force. Beyond those areas effective occupation is impossible, but so also is effective attack. Hence the controlling fact of war on commerce, that facility of attack means facility of defence.
Beside this fundamental principle we must place another that is scarcely less important. Owing to the general common nature of sea communications, attack and defence of trade are so intimately connected that the one operation is almost indistinguishable from the other. Both ideas are satisfied by occupying the common communications. The strongest form of attack is the occupation of the enemy's terminals, and the establishment of a commercial blockade of the ports they contain. But as this operation usually requires the blockade of an adjacent naval port, it also const.i.tutes, as a rule, a defensive disposition for our own trade, even when the enemy's terminal area does not overlap one of our own. In the occupation of focal areas the two ideas are even more inseparable, since most, if not all, such areas are on lines of communication that are common.
It will suffice, therefore, to deal with the general aspect of the subject from the point of view of defence.
It was in conformity with the distinction between fertile and infertile areas that our old system of trade defence was developed. Broadly speaking, that system was to hold the terminals in strength, and in important cases the focal points as well. By means of a battle-squadron with a full complement of cruisers they were const.i.tuted defended areas, or ”tracts” as the old term was, and the trade was regarded as safe when it entered them.
The intervening trade-routes were left as a rule undefended. Thus our home terminals were held by two battle-squadrons, the Western Squadron at the mouth of the Channel, and the North Sea or Eastern Squadron with its headquarters usually in the Downs. To these was added a cruiser squadron on the Irish station based at Cork, which was sometimes subordinate to the Western Squadron and sometimes an independent organisation. The area of the Western Squadron in the French wars extended, as we have seen, over the whole Bay of Biscay, with the double function, so far as commerce was concerned, of preventing the issue of raiding squadrons from the enemy's ports, and acting offensively against his Atlantic trade. That of the North Sea squadron extended to the mouth of the Baltic and the north-about pa.s.sage. Its main function during the great naval coalitions against us was to check the operations of Dutch squadrons or to prevent the intrusion of French ones north-about against our Baltic trade. Like the Western Squadron, it threw out divisions usually located at Yarmouth and Leith for the protection of our coastwise trade from privateers and sporadic cruisers acting from ports within the defended area. Similarly, between the Downs and the Western Squadron was usually one or more smaller squadrons, mainly cruisers, and generally located about Havre and the Channel Islands, which served the same purpose for the Norman and North Breton ports. To complete the system there were flotilla patrols acting under the port admirals and doing their best to police the routes of the coastwise and local traffic, which then had an importance long since lost. The home system of course differed at different times, but it was always on these general lines. The naval defence was supplemented by defended ports of refuge, the princ.i.p.al ones being on the coast of Ireland to shelter the ocean trade, but others in great numbers were provided within the defended areas against the operations of privateers, and the ruins of batteries all round the British sh.o.r.es testify how complete was the organisation.
A similar system prevailed in the colonial areas, but there the naval defence consisted normally of cruiser squadrons stiffened with one or two s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line mainly for the purpose of carrying the flag. They were only occupied by battle-squadrons when the enemy threatened operations with a similar force. The minor or interior defence against local privateers was to a large extent local; that is, the great part of the flotilla was furnished by sloops built or hired on the spot, as being best adapted for the service.
Focal points were not then so numerous as they have become since the development of the Far Eastern trade. The most important of them, the Straits of Gibraltar, was treated as a defended area. From the point of view of commerce-protection it was held by the Mediterranean squadron. By keeping watch on Toulon that squadron covered not only the Straits, but also the focal points within the sea. It too had its extended divisions, sometimes as many as four, one about the approaches to Leghorn, one in the Adriatic, a third at Malta, and the fourth at Gibraltar. In cases of war with Spain the latter was very strong, so as to secure the focal area against Cartagena and Cadiz. On one occasion indeed, in 1804-5, as we have seen, it was const.i.tuted for a short time an independent area with a special squadron. But in any case the Gibraltar area had its own internal flotilla guard under the direction of the port admiral as a defence against local privateers and pirates.
The general theory of these defended terminal and focal areas, it will be seen, was to hold in force those waters which converging trade made most fertile, and which therefore furnished an adequate field for the operations of raiding squadrons. In spite of the elaborate defensive system, such squadrons might, and sometimes did, intrude by surprise or stealth, and were then able to set at defiance both convoy escorts and the cruiser outposts. But, as experience proved, the system of terminal defence by battle-squadrons made it impossible for such raiding squadrons to remain long enough on the ground to cause any serious interruption or to do serious harm. It was only by a regular fleet of superior strength that the system could be broken down. In other words, the defence could only fall when our means of local control was destroyed by battle.
So much for the defended areas. With regard to the great routes that connected them, it has been said they were left undefended. By this is meant that the security of s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing along them was provided for, not by patrols but by escort. The convoy system was adopted, and the theory of that system is that while vessels are on the great routes they are normally liable only to sporadic attack, and they are consequently collected into fleets and furnished with an escort sufficient to repel sporadic attack. In theory, cruiser escort is sufficient, but in practice it was found convenient and economical to a.s.sign the duty in part to s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line which were going out to join the distant terminal squadron or returning from it for a refit or some other reason; in other words, the system of foreign reliefs was made to work in with the supplementary escort system.
Where no such s.h.i.+ps were available and the convoys were of great value, or enemy's s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line were known to be out, similar units were specially detailed for convoy duty to go and return, but this use of battle units was exceptional.
Such a method of dealing with the great routes is the corollary of the idea of defended areas. As those areas were fertile and likely to attract raiding squadrons, so the great routes were infertile, and no enemy could afford to spend squadrons upon them. It is obvious, however, that the system had its weak side, for the mere fact that a convoy was upon a great route tended to attract a squadron, and the comparative immunity of those routes was lost. The danger was provided for to a great extent by the fact that the enemy's ports from which a squadron could issue were all within defended areas and watched by our own squadrons. Still, the guard could not be made impenetrable. There was always the chance of a squadron escaping, and if it escaped towards a critical trade-route, it must be followed.
Hence there were times when the convoy system seriously disturbed our dispositions, as, for instance, in the crisis of the Trafalgar campaign, when for a short time our chain of defended areas was broken down by the escape of the Toulon squadron. That escape eventually forced a close concentration on the Western Squadron, but all other considerations apart, it was felt to be impossible to retain the ma.s.s for more than two days owing to the fact that the great East and West Indies convoys were approaching, and Villeneuve's return to Ferrol from Martinique exposed them to squadronal attack. It was, in fact, impossible to tell whether the ma.s.s had not been forced upon us with this special end in view.
In the liability to deflection of this kind lay the most serious strategical objection to the convoy system. It was sought to minimise it by giving the convoys a secret route when there was apprehension of squadronal interference. It was done in the case just cited, but the precaution seemed in no way to lessen the anxiety. It may have been because in those days of slow communication there could be no such certainty that the secret route had been received as there would be now.
Modern developments and changes in s.h.i.+pping and naval material have indeed so profoundly modified the whole conditions of commerce protection, that there is no part of strategy where historical deduction is more difficult or more liable to error. To avoid such error as far as possible, it is essential to keep those developments in mind at every step. The more important of them are three in number. Firstly, the abolition of privateering; secondly, the reduced range of action for all wars.h.i.+ps; and thirdly, the development of wireless telegraphy. There are others which must be dealt with in their place, but these three go to the root of the whole problem.
Difficult as it is to arrive at exact statistics of commerce destruction in the old wars, one thing seems certain--that the bulk of captures, which were reckoned in hundreds and sometimes even in thousands, were due to the action of privateers. Further, it seems certain that, reckoning at least by numbers, the greater part of the damage was done by small privateers operating close to their bases, either home or colonial, against coastwise and local traffic. The complaints of merchants, so far as they are known, relate mainly to this kind of work in the West Indies and home waters, while accounts of serious captures by large privateers on the high seas are comparatively rare. The actual damage done by the swarm of small vessels may not have been great, but its moral effects were very serious. It was impossible for the strongest Governments to ignore them, and the consequence was a chronic disturbance of the larger strategical dispositions. While these dispositions were adequate to check the operations of large privateers acting in the same way as regular cruisers, the smaller ones found very free play amidst the ribwork of the protective system, and they could only be dealt with by filling up the s.p.a.ces with a swarm of small cruisers to the serious detriment of the larger arrangements. Even so, the proximity of the enemy's ports made escape so easy, that the work of repression was very ineffective. The state of the case was indeed almost identical with a people's war. The ordinary devices of strategy failed to deal with it, as completely as Napoleon's broadly planned methods failed to deal with the _guerilleros_ in Spain, or as our own failed for so long in South Africa.
By the abolition of privateering, then, it would seem that the most disturbing part of the problem has been eliminated. It is, of course, uncertain how far the Declaration of Paris will hold good in practice. It is still open even to the parties to it to evade its restrictions to a greater or less extent by taking up and commissioning merchantmen as regular s.h.i.+ps of war. But it is unlikely that such methods will extend beyond the larger privately owned vessels. Any attempt to revive in this way the old _picaresque_ methods could only amount to a virtual repudiation of statutory international law, which would bring its own retribution.
Moreover, for home waters at least, the conditions which favoured this _picaresque_ warfare no longer exist. In the old wars the bulk of our trade came into the Thames, and thence the greater part of it was distributed in small coasting vessels. It was against this coastwise traffic that the small, short-range privateers found their opportunity and their richest harvest. But, now that so many other great centres of distribution have established themselves, and that the bulk of the distribution is done by internal lines of communication, the Channel is no longer the sole artery, and the old troublesome disturbance can be avoided without a vital dislocation of our commercial system.