OPERATIONS.
COMMERCE DESTROYING.
*The second section of Operations, dealing with the conquest of overseas territory, is here omitted, a translation of it by Commander H. S. Knapp, U. S. N., having already been published in the PROCEEDINGS (see No. 127).
Too much has been written in recent years upon commerce destroying for it to be necessary to explain here what it is and what its avowed object is.
The English were the first to try this system of warfare which France afterwards used so frequently against them. Charles I, always short of money, found, as many people of our own time have, that squadrons are very costly; and, since Holland was an exclusively commercial nation, since she drew her wealth wholly from her sea trade, he thought there was no need to maintain those imposing fleets whose armament was a ruinous expense; it sufficed to launch frigates and light vessels in pursuit of the Dutch merchantmen, and thus to secure the double advantage of drying up the source of the enemy's wealth and at the same time growing rich upon their spoils.
The trial was made, but the results fell short of the hopes to which it had given birth; and the English Navy renounced once for all making commerce destroying the principal objective of a naval war. It was France that inherited the method.
It began to be put to full use under Louis XIV by the first of the Pontchartrains, and for an identical reason: want of money. It may in truth be observed that, at least in the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV, the number of ships in commission depended much less upon the actual state of our forces than upon the financial resources of the naval budget. It was not, as several historians affirm, the disaster of La Hogue which marked the decline of the navy, since, the year following, Tourville still kept the sea at the head of seventy ships; but it is true that the disarming of our squadrons followed close upon that fatal day, and the sole cause of this was the poverty of the Treasury. Pontchartrain then committed the enormous error—not to use a stronger term which would perhaps be more just—of alienating the nation's material and lending its ships to outfitters for carrying on privateering. Under this impulse given by the government, the number of privateers increased to fabulous proportions. Renouncing all commerce in order to capture that of the enemy, having the crews of the King's ships at their disposal for arming their vessels, the privateers settled down upon the Channel and North Sea like a flock of sparrows.
Privateering was then practised either with single ships of very light scantling or with small divisions composed of ships formerly belonging to the State ; and about such divisions there hung independent privateers who profited by their protection and seized upon the booty they let slip.
England, little prepared against a kind of warfare that had never until then been practised to such an extent, does not appear at this period to have organized a system of methodical defense. Instead of seeking to protect her commerce and to prosecute the destruction of our privateers, she took advantage of the free field left her by our squadrons to attempt to destroy the nests where privateers took shelter. Thus she attacked Saint Malo, Dieppe, Dunkirk and Havre. The procedure itself might have been justified, if it had succeeded, but places as strong as our great maritime ports are not to be reduced by shells and a few thousand men.
However that may be, British commerce suffered immense losses. It is said that there were 4200 ships captured during the war of the League of Augsburg: insurance premiums rose to 30 per cent. France none the less was vanquished. If, therefore, privateering had some effect, it was not sufficient to bring the adversary to terms.
During the war of the Spanish Succession, after a trial of squadron warfare which was not without glory (battle of Malaga), privateering was taken up again with energy. We still find a Pontchartrain at the head of the navy, but not the same one; it is his son Jerome: and it appears that the latter does through principle what his father could argue that he only did through necessity.
The Northern division, which had been made illustrious by Jean Bart in the previous war, was re-established, and at first several other small divisions were fitted out; but soon the ships of which they were composed were successively disarmed and there was left nothing but private armed vessels to carry on commerce destroying. Jerome Pontchartrain seemed to have taken upon himself to completely suppress the royal navy. "Not only did he no longer replace, no longer even repair the ships of the State, but he dismembered them and sold a certain number piece by piece. Naval officers were more than once reduced to solicit their pay as an alms, and they were seen condemned to serve for the account of private ship-owners; the soldiers and sailors of the King's ships did the same so as not to die of hunger." On the other hand, privateering was at its apogee: practised by men such as Duguay-Trouin, Forbin, Du Casse, Cassard and the Chevalier Saint Pol, it never had been, and never afterwards was, carried on with so much vigor and audacity. And yet the results are already inferior to those of the last war. The English begin to organize to combat it; they increase the escorts of convoys, send frigates against the privateers. After 1702, attacks upon the coasts are made less frequently; all efforts are directed towards protecting convoys.
Here, according to Campbell, is the result of the first five years of the war: "England has lost 30 warships and 1146 merchant ships, of which 300 were recaptured; on the other hand, she has captured or destroyed 8o warships, 1346 merchant ships and 175 privateers." Throughout the whole war English commerce continued to grow, which indicates that it was efficiently protected.
What was the final result of the war? The provisions of the treaty of Utrecht, humiliating to France, show us.
Under Louis XV, the economical, but inglorious administration of Cardinal Fleury had permitted the navy to sink to the lowest ebb. When the war of the Austrian Succession broke out, it was necessary, after a first effort, to recur to privateering. There was no longer any choice of means.
"Commerce destroying at first gave satisfactory results. Pursued with ardor by the national cruisers and by numerous private ships, it caused very great losses to British commerce and furnished occasion for single-ship actions, glorious for our seamen, and in which La Motte-Picquet and Kersaint won fame. Even in distant seas, notably in the West Indies, where our colonists put all their capital into arming privateers, great damages were inflicted upon the English, not less than 950 vessels being taken from them.
"But, after the disasters of 1747, the French flag no longer appeared at sea. Twenty-two ships of the line constituted the whole French Navy, which sixty years before counted one hundred and twenty such. The privateers made few captures. Pursued everywhere, without protection, almost all of them fell a prey to the English. The British naval forces, without rivals, overran the seas unmolested. In one year, it is said, they took French commerce to the value of nearly 180,000,000 francs. The balance of captures in their favor was estimated at 2,000,000 pounds sterling. 'Estimated in another manner,' says Mahan, 'the losses amounted to 3434 merchant ships for the French and Spanish against 3238 for the English; but the ratio of these figures to the total ships of each country must not be overlooked.
This time, again, did commerce destroying give victory to France? Did the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle efface the clauses of the treaty of Utrecht?
The efficacy of a system that ended in a result diametrically opposed to the one proposed to be attained then began to be doubted; and the ancient ways were reverted to. During the eight years of peace that followed the war of the Austrian Succession, as many ships were laid down as the poverty of our finances permitted. At the beginning of the Seven Years' War, France could put in line sixty ships; but what could be done with such a force? After a fortunate start, nothing more was done to constitute squadrons except some unlucky efforts that were but the death struggles of the navy. Commerce destroying had to be again recurred to.
"From 1756 to 1760, the English lost 2500 merchant ships. This figure seems enormous and yet it represents but a tenth of the English vessels. In return we lost 240 privateers during the same period; our maritime commerce had completely disappeared ; and at the end of the war, in spite of exchanges, we had 25,000 seamen prisoners in England, while the English had only 1200 in France." This difference is characteristic and requires no comment.
What were the hostile squadrons doing then while our privateers whitened the seas? No longer finding themselves faced by forces capable of standing up against them, they ravaged our shores, they took from us, one by one, our colonies; finally they even seized upon Belle-Isle. France could not keep on letting fragments of her flesh be torn from her; it was necessary to negotiate to put a stop to this dismemberment that risked letting the English establish themselves at our gates, in the islands that border our coast and form part of the centuries-old heritage of our fathers. The conditions were hard; we had to give up all that the genius of Dupleix had won for us in the East Indies, besides Canada, Senegal, St. Vincent, Dominica, Tobago and part of Louisiana. Never did commerce destroying so distinctly show its inefficiency.
The infatuation with this system had so completely passed away that as soon as Choiseul succeeded Berryer as Minister of Marine he attempted an invasion of England that it was too late to undertake and devoted himself to reconstructing our fleet. The excess of our misfortunes had, moreover, operated a revulsion; on all sides the building of ships was demanded. "Cities, corporations and individuals contributed to pay for constructing ships. The estates of Languedoc set the example by offering to the King an 80-gun ship. Paris followed them closely by causing to be built at Rochefort the fine ship Ville-de-Paris. Several other provinces, towns and companies followed this generous and patriotic inspiration, and, by the end of the month of January, 1762, the national zeal had created fourteen new ships and a frigate. A prodigious activity then made itself felt in ports but recently silent; everywhere there was building, everywhere repairing of ships."
It was too late, but all these constructions formed the nucleus of the navy of Louis XVI. During the peace, the impulse did not slacken, and the war of American Independence found us ready to make head against the enemy. I have already had occasion to say that in my opinion the French Navy at this period did not make good use of its forces. It was almost always superior in numbers on the field of battle, and, if it had employed against the English the same methods of fighting to the utmost that they employed against us, the result would have been quite different. In spite of all, we succeeded in holding their navy in check, and, on this account, commerce destroying was relegated to the second place; it became the accessory, and no longer the principal. Practised almost exclusively by individuals, it does not seem to have had a great development: the allies (French, Spanish, Americans, Dutch) took from the English 519 ships, and the latter took from them 534. For the first time the treaty of peace was favorable to France.
We come now to the wars of the Revolution and Empire, and are about to see history repeat itself as it were automatically. At first an attempt will be made to struggle in the lists with means that are insufficient, not in respect to numbers, but as regards quality; defeat will result and then recourse will be had to commerce destroying; from time to time squadrons will be reconstituted to attempt a descent upon the enemy's territory; then, in the last years of the war, commerce destroying and such enterprises as depend only upon chance for success will lose favor; we will begin to build up again a fighting fleet, but France will be worn out before the task is accomplished. Such is the spectacle that the two naval wars of the reign of Louis XV have afforded us; such is the spectacle that the two naval wars of the Revolution and the Empire are to exhibit.
Villaret-Joyeuse is beaten in the battle of 13 Prairial and Martin loses the battle of Noli.
The Committee of Public Safety announces to the country, with that emphasis which is one of the characteristics of the period, that it inaugurates a new method of warfare. The preambles of the decree of 23 Thermidor, year III, are interesting to recall; phraseology takes the place of strategy in them: "The new system of political warfare that your committee has adopted is more suitable to our political situation and will procure for us real advantages. This system will harmonize much better with the true interests of the nation than those displays of naval power that do but flatter personal pride and uselessly consume the resources of the Republic . . . . We have a single object to fulfill and this object excites all our solicitudes, is the purpose of all our plans: it is to protect our own commerce and to destroy that of our enemies . . . . The English government, if it will, may flaunt its squadrons and parade them in tactical order (sic), the French will limit themselves to attacking it in what it holds most dear, in what constitutes its happiness and its existence, in its riches. All our plans, all our cruises, all our movements in port and at sea, will have for object only to ravage its commerce, to destroy, to overturn its colonies, to force it finally into a shameful bankruptcy."
"The results obtained seem at first sight satisfactory. According to a table of Lloyd's (London), stopping at year V, the prizes taken by the two nations were distributed as follows:
| Prizes Taken | |
Year | By English | By French |
1793 | 63 ships | 261 ships |
1794 | 88 ships | 527 ships |
1795 | 47 ships | 502 ships |
1796 | 63 ships | 414 ships |
1797 | 114 ships | 562 ships |
Total | 375 ships | 2,266 ships |
"We cite these figures because they are constantly reproduced by all academic partisans of commerce destroying, in support of their thesis; we shall see further on what is to be thought of them.
"To protect their commerce against these raids of our privateers and our single cruisers, the English adopted the double system of convoys and of patrol by light divisions. Merchant ships were assembled, according to their destination, in ports designated in advance, and from these set sail under the protection of ships of war charged to conduct them to their destination. Three hundred, five hundred, even a thousand vessels were to be seen sailing in company in particularly exposed regions, such as the entrance to the Channel or to the Baltic Sea, where a better guard and a stronger protection were needed. This system had, it is true, many disadvantages: time lost in Waiting for the convoy to assemble; inability to follow it on the part of many merchant ships; great lowering of the price of goods when the convoy arrived, owing to the large quantities thrown on the market at one time. Thus many ship-owners preferred to run the risks of voyaging alone; but they were not thereby left completely alone, for upon the principal trade routes were stationed fast frigates, each with a fixed cruising ground and accompanied by light vessels, specially charged with their protection.
"Thus, closed around on all sides, receiving no help from our squadrons, our privateers, after struggles that were often heroic, but almost always disastrous, ended by falling into the hands of the enemy. Contemporary English writers fix at 743 the number of privateers captured from the opening of hostilities to December 31, 1800. Their crews went to crowd the English hulks, in which, in the year VI, there were 22,000 French prisoners.
"As for warships, the French Navy, which at the beginning of the war possessed 86 ships and 118 frigates, lost, according to the English historian W. James, 34 ships and 82 frigates by capture, 11 ships and 14 frigates destroyed by incidents of war, and 10 ships and 6 frigates by shipwreck. This is a total of 55 ships and 102 frigates, the latter taken mostly while cruising, in engagements between light squadrons or single ships. If to these figures are added 150 smaller warships and 2000 privateers or merchant ships, captured during these ten years of war; if it is considered that the united crews of all these vessels amount to about mow sailors, that the greater part of these unfortunates perished in combats, in shipwrecks or in the enemy's prisons, the frightful voids then produced in the lists of the maritime inscription can be estimated. 'Out of 80,000 sailors formerly enrolled there remained scarcely half to man ships with at the end of the war. So we may conclude that though privateering enriched some ship-owners during this war as well as in previous wars, it ruined our commerce and our maritime inscription? Commerce destroying itself had not been to our advantage, since, including privateers, our merchant marine suffered losses equal in number to those of English commerce.
"Had it at least ruined that commerce, had it led to the shameful bankruptcy spoken of by the decree of 23 Thermidor, year III? See what Pitt said on February 18, 1801: If we compare this year of war with the preceding years of peace, we shall see in the production of our revenue and the extension of our commerce a spectacle as paradoxical as inexplicable and well formed to astonish us. We have raised our internal and external commerce to a height that it never attained before and we can regard the present year as the most satisfactory ever seen in this country.'"
In fact, external commerce, exportation and importation, which in 1792, the last year of peace, amounted to 44,500,000, increased in 1797 to 150,000000, and in 1800 to £73,000,000.
"Although it cannot be denied that the loss borne by English commerce was a sensible one, it was no more than a war tax that, although burdensome, was incapable by itself alone of exercising a decisive influence on the policy of a powerful and rich country like England. It does not seem to have exceeded 2 per cent or 3 per cent of her total commerce. Taking an average of the figures given by different authors, we may estimate the mean number of English ships captured at about 500 per year. Well, in the three years 1793-1795, the annual number of entries and departures of English ships from English ports was 21,560; in the three years 1798-1800 it was 21,369, of which 500 forms but 2.4 per cent, although the former number includes neither coastwise nor colonial commerce.
"If the total number of ships belonging to Great Britain and her dependencies is taken, it will be found to amount to 16,728 in 1795, and to 17,885 in 1800, of which latter number 500 is about 3 per cent. This is a relative loss slightly greater than that occasioned by accidents of the sea at the same period (from 1793 to 1800 Lloyd's lists indicate a loss of 2967 ships) and much less than the loss borne by French commerce in the earlier years of the war. It must be added that this loss was partly made up for to England by the ships and goods taken by her own cruisers from the enemy and by the extension of her commercial operations under neutral flags."
Such was the balance-sheet of commerce destroying during the first war.
Immediately upon the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon turned his whole attention to the project of invading England, and naval operations were conducted with a view to assuring a passage to the Boulogne flotilla. Commerce destroying was, therefore, at first only practised by private interests, without any well-defined system. But when the disaster of Trafalgar had dispelled the hopes that Napoleon had founded upon the navy, and it had been demonstrated once more that, in its state of dilapidation, it could no longer stand up against the English, the question arose as to how the remnants of our squadrons might be employed until a complete reorganization could assure him strength together with numbers.
The Emperor did not wait for Villeneuve's arrival at Cadiz to ask his minister for propositions in regard to the employment of his forces. Then it was that Decres submitted to him the plan of flying divisions which, as he thought, must ruin English commerce. "Such," said he, "was the sort of war that he approved of." It was commerce destroying again, under a form that was not new, but that till then had only been used accidentally and without methodical development. The model for it was furnished, at this precise period, by Rear-Admiral Allemand's cruise. It is interesting to observe what the fate of all these divisions was.
While the drama of Trafalgar was unrolled, the Brest squadron remained intact. From the ships that composed it, two divisions were formed under the orders of Admirals Willaumez and de Leissegues, put out from Brest together on December 13, and separated at sea to carry out their mission.
The first division, of six ships and two frigates, was to go first to the Cape of Good Hope, then to cruise in the neighborhood of St. Helena to capture convoys coming from India, and then to proceed to the West Indies. After having ravaged the English colonies of those islands, Admiral Willaumez was to steer for Newfoundland, where he was to destroy the fisheries; from there he was to go to Iceland, Spitzbergen and Greenland, where English whalers were to be found, and he was not to return to France until he was incapable of longer remaining at sea.
Willaumez learned while at sea that the Cape had fallen into the hands of the English: he had to change his program, which made him lose a frigate, the Volontaire, which was captured in March, 1806, at the Cape, where she expected to find the division. The other vessels had gone to Guiana, where they separated into three groups which reached Martinique one after the other in June, 1805, after having barely escaped being captured by the English. On July 1, Willaumez left Martinique; but very soon his vessels were scattered; the Foudroyant went into Havana after an action with the Anson; the Impetueux ran ashore on the coast near Chesapeake Bay to escape two English ships, and was burned by them; the Patriote and Eole entered the Chesapeake; the Valeureuse took refuge at Marcushook ; the Cassard returned to Brest. As for the Veteran, she cruised on the Grand Banks until August 25, waiting for her companions, and then steered for Belle-Isle. Chased by a hostile division, she took refuge at Concarneau, where a ship of the line had never before been. She did not get out until three years later, on April 20, 1809."
Of the ships that stayed in America, two were sold on the spot, the Eole and Valeureuse; the Foudroyant, which carried Admiral Willaumez, reached Brest on February 7, 1807; the Patriote did not return until a year later, in January, 1808.
The division had captured seventeen prizes.
Rear-Admiral de Leissegues left Brest at the same time as Rear-Admiral Willaumez, with five ships, two frigates and one corvette. The division reached San Domingo in January, 1806 ; but its presence was very soon made known to the English forces stationed in the West Indies, and, on February 6, de Leissegues, on the appearance of the enemy, had to get under way by cutting his cables and to accept battle. The two frigates and the corvette alone escaped.
Commander le Due set out from Lorient, at the end of March, 1806, with three frigates and one brig to go to Spitzbergen to destroy English whalers. The brig, the Nearque, was taken immediately after the start by the Niobe. Le Duc went first to the Azores, then he steered for Spitzbergen. On June 12, the Guerriere separated from her consorts, and was taken on the 18th by one of the vessels that had been sent in pursuit of the French division. The two other frigates returned to France at the end of September. They had made thirty-nine prizes.
Five frigates and two brigs set sail from the Island of Aix on September 24, 1806. Captain Soleil, who commanded them, had orders to proceed to Martinique to land some troops there. Seen immediately on its departure, the division was followed and attacked by the English blockading squadron. The In fatigable, Gloire, Minerve and Armide were captured; one frigate and the two brigs succeeded in escaping.
The ill success of all these cruises slackened the zeal of Decres, and we must go to the year 1809 to find another one.
Captain Troude set sail from Lorient on February 26, 1809, with three ships, three frigates and two frigates fitted as supply ships. He had orders to revictual Martinique and Guadeloupe, then to prey upon commerce until his supplies were exhausted, and then to return to the Mediterranean. On the voyage Troude learned that Martinique had been taken by the English, and, not wishing to anchor at Guadeloupe, which affords only open roadsteads and was closely watched, he went to Les Saintes. There he was at once blockaded by Admiral Cochrane with five ships, five frigates and 15 light vessels. Not daring to force the entrance, the English admiral adopted the plan of compelling the French division to go out by seizing the heights that overlook the anchorage; 3000 men were put on shore and easily drove back the little garrison. Troude, seeing that he would have to endure a bombardment to which he could not reply, decided to run through the English blockade. On April 14, the three ships got under way at 10 o'clock in the evening. Followed immediately by the enemy, two ships escaped and on May 29 reached Cherbourg; the third was captured.
The dispersion and partial destruction of all these divisions proceeded from the very nature of their mission. As soon as the ships arrived upon their cruising ground, they were obliged to separate, whether to cover a larger extent of sea, or to perform such tasks as putting ashore the crews of captured ships. They therefore cruised only by successive rendezvous, and the enemy bent all his efforts to making them miss these. In fact, as soon as the departure of a division became known, the English government sent in pursuit of it a greater force, which co-operated with the naval forces permanently on the station. After a longer or shorter time, the French divisions were overtaken, because the prizes they made revealed their presence in the region where they were operating. The successive captures of their bases of operations was likewise an obstacle to their movements. We have seen that Willaumez and Troude, proceeding one to the Cape and the other to Martinique, had suddenly to change their plans upon learning of the English captures of those colonies; and it is lucky that they were able to get this knowledge from neutrals soon enough not to fall into an ambush. The capture of the various ports where our vessels could revictual was a further means of cutting short cruises against commerce.
Whether for lack of foreign bases, or because of the tragic fate of our divisions, or perhaps for both these motives, an end was put to Decres' system, and commerce-destroying raids ceased after 1809; they were only really energetically carried on during the two years following Trafalgar. Thereafter, we were content to send out frigates in pairs, without subjecting them to too rigid instructions, and they were ordered to seek the nearest port when they could no longer keep at sea. Most of these frigates were captured.
The Emperor had accepted Decres' propositions after Trafalgar without conviction. For a long time he had his mind made up as to the effectiveness of commerce destroying; but he saw in it a means of training crews in the interval until he had built up again a navy. Ships were being built in all the ports of France, as well as at Antwerp, in Holland and at Genoa. In 1809 we possessed already 6o ships. When the Empire fell, there were 44 of them in ports outside of France, of which we were able to retain but a part. The navy of the Restoration was constituted of those left to us by the enemies. Napoleon, therefore, saw no other way of waging war at sea than by attacking the enemy's naval forces: after an experience of more than 20 years, he reached the same conclusion as the seamen of the reign of Louis XV.
Such are the facts. It remains for us now to determine what the causes are that have always made commerce destroying fail, and how conditions have been modified by the use of steam and the relative condition of modern navies. Finally we shall have to consider how effective it would be in a conflict with England.
***
The discussions to which the question of commerce destroying has given rise have often led its partisans to search out somewhat curious arguments in favor of their thesis. Thus it has been asserted that the preference shown by admirals for squadrons originated in the desire to hold on to fine commands: I doubt if a motive of this sort has ever influenced, even unwittingly, the views of our chiefs; but this reason, if it existed, would not suffice to explain the repugnance manifested by a great majority of officers for any system that led to making commerce destroying the prime object of a naval war. As far as those are concerned for whom an admiral's stars are as inaccessible as the stars that glitter in the heavens, and their name is legion, such a consideration would have no weight with them. I will even go further: if we were not firmly convinced that commerce destroying, raised to the estate of a system, would compromise the maritime destinies of France, our sympathies would be won for it from the start. There is no doubt, in fact, that a direct struggle against the naval strength of a country which, like England, has and will for a long time yet have an incontestible superiority over us, would be a difficult part to play, and one in which we would all risk losing our lives and reputations. Confronted by this grave danger, we would much prefer to devote ourselves exclusively to pursuing the enemy's commerce and to content ourselves with avoiding attack by the enemy's cruisers, if we did not think that we should thus be playing the part of dupes. We must, therefore, have arguments of another sort to influence us, and such I shall now endeavor to set forth.
"Naval warfare, we are told, should not remainindefinitely cast in the same mold, and direct attack upon the hostile forces has been tried; to it we owe our worst disasters. Is it not foolish to persist in practising a system of war that has never yielded anything but failures?"
The reasoning of the partisans of commerce destroying is thus, we believe, faithfully summed up.
This way of putting the case is not exact; although squadron warfare has brought us disasters, we owe to it and to it alone our naval glory.
In what periods has the French Navy shone with the most brilliant luster? During the first part of the reign of Louis XIV and during the war of American Independence; that is to say, in the periods when it held the enemy's forces in check. On the contrary, the blackest pages of our history correspond to the periods when commerce destroying was exclusively practised. It is true that the latter usually followed a defeat; but it was not always imposed by .the helplessness of our navy: the poverty of our finances was often much more its cause than lack of vessels.
It should not be held, therefore, that France has persisted in wishing to struggle in the lists, when it is manifest, on the contrary, that on several occasions she has abandoned prematurely, and after a single reverse, a policy that had not been without glory, and that she has persisted in attacking commerce in spite of the negative results thereby gained. And if, contemplating the past, there is something we may regret, it is less the principle itself of squadron warfare than the way in which we practised it.
In any event, it is at least strange to propose as a novelty to-day a system that France practised for more than a century with unexampled fury and of which she has made a specialty.
Of the two schools that divide the navy, neither has found a new formula: one is inspired by the traditions of Colbert, Seignelay and Castries; the other has entered upon the heritage of the tribe of Pontchartrains, Berryers and all those ministers who may be considered the assassins of our naval power. We draw no conclusion; we merely state the fact.
When the partisans of commerce destroying point out how vulnerable England is in her commerce, when they complacently enlarge upon the number of merchant ships that furrow the seas, upon the amount of food supplies that they carry, upon the small provision held in the United Kingdom, etc., they make a statement of reasons that does not lack impressiveness. But all these arguments are but the statement of the problem; they do not furnish us with its solution. It is not enough to say: we will starve out England; it is above all necessary to see what means we shall have at our disposition for attaining our object and what means England has to oppose them with. The result of this comparison will give us a correct opinion as to the efficacy of commerce destroying. But this nub of the question has always been put aside by partisans of commerce destroying, as if they were afraid to touch it.
Yet, when a cause has had in its service such men as Jean Bart, Duguay-Trouin, Forbin, Cassard, the Chevalier Saint Pol and still others whose names are less known (Thurot for example), when we see so much heroism and perseverance end in failure, we have the best of reasons to think that, though the principle of commerce destroying is attractive, its application presents serious difficulties; that, though it is easy to capture commerce, it is equally possible to protect it.
How can any sincere man fail to be impressed by the fact that, during war, English commerce, instead of declining, increased?
If, therefore, to-day we hope for a better result, it is either because a navy of sailing ships was not as well adapted to commerce destroying as a steam navy, or because in the past the thing was • badly done. We will now examine into this.
In the 17th century the respective situation of each side was as follows:
England had a war fleet and a commercial fleet, and the latter could not give up business on account of the economic situation of the country.
France had a war fleet and a commercial fleet, and the latter abandoned traffic to prey upon the enemy's commerce.
Thus privateers supplemented our fleet with a swarm of light vessels that cost the State neither a ship nor a cent, while the English, on the contrary, had to divert a number of ships from their fighting fleet to protect their commercial fleet.
As long as the French squadrons held in check the English squadrons and forced them to remain concentrated, privateers could with impunity chase the enemy's commerce, but nothing less than this diversion could permit them to venture to sea, since they were almost all of small size.
Practised under such conditions, commerce destroying could not but be advantageous for France. If by itself alone it did not suffice to reduce England, at least it did her serious harm and contributed its share in the general operations. It constituted a net gain, without any counter gain to the adversary.
But as soon as commerce destroying, ceasing to be the monopoly of private interests, became more and more the objective of the navy, which devoted its own ships to it, England could divert from her fleets a sufficiently great number of ships to organize a systematic protection of her commerce, without ceasing to possess superiority on the field of battle. So the period of full development of commerce destroying is not that when its results were most considerable.
To-day letters of marque are done away with. To carry on commerce destroying, it will be necessary to devote to it national vessels, paid by the State, manned by crews belonging to the State. Consequently, our fleet of the line will be by so much diminished, and England will be able, as well, to diminish hers correspondingly without causing any change in the ratio of forces. To our commerce destroyers she will oppose cruisers. The result will be: on the one hand a fleet of the line opposed to a fleet of the line; on the other hand, a fleet of commerce destroyers chased by a fleet of cruisers. The situation will no longer be the same: it will have become worse.
France can diminish the number of her battleships to increase that of her commerce destroyers: England will do the same, or rather she has already done so. By consulting a list of the English fleet, we see that her superiority in cruisers is as great as her superiority in battleships, because every time that we lay down fast ships, her naval program is augmented by a greater number of cruisers that are as fast as ours and are ready before them.
And if France, yielding to public opinion, decides to turn wholly to commerce destroying, she will cease building new fighting ships and, after a while, will have nothing but commerce destroyers. England, for her part, will likewise have only cruisers. And then we shall find ourselves again, in the matter of the employment of forces, in the situation we were in under Louis XV and after Trafalgar, with this double difference that instead of employing, for or against commerce destroying, ships and frigates, each side will have a special material, and that we French will no longer have the help of the privateers that, taken all together, formed the most numerous part of the commerce-destroying fleet. As far as the means for attacking commerce are concerned, the navy of to-day, therefore, affords resources for commerce destroying inferior to those of former times.
Will we, at least, find compensation on the side of commerce itself? It does not seem so.
With steam navigation, merchant ships will be more difficult to find, because they are no longer to the same extent as formerly obliged to make land at the limits that mark the turning points of commercial routes.
Moreover, although British commerce has increased in great proportions, the number of ships that transport it has diminished, because their capacity has largely increased.
There is also another factor that will sensibly affect the results of war upon commerce.
Formerly, neutral commerce was of small importance, and when it fell into the way of our privateers it was always lawful prize under pretence of carrying contraband of war. As the nations to which it belonged had no navies to support their claims, neutrals borrowed the English flag to enjoy its protection. But to-day England no longer has an exclusive monopoly of maritime transportation, and in time of war this circumstance will be useful to her. We shall be obliged to be mindful of the susceptibilities of neutral powers, in order not to indispose towards us navies as strong as those of Germany and the United States. A part of the products indispensable to Great Britain will sail under neutral colors. Under this aegis, commodities will come to be heaped up in the storehouses of Germany, Belgium and Holland, whence they will only have to cross an easily guarded arm of the sea.
Finally, the economic conditions of the life of nations have been profoundly altered in a century and have their retro-action upon the duration of conflicts. But commerce destroying, from its very nature, requires a certain period of time; time is necessary to make its influence felt and, by the privations it engenders, to determine in the country that suffers from them a current of opinion favorable to peace. Can war last long nowadays, seeing the sacrifices that it exacts? For France it will entail an absolute stoppage of maritime transportation; the colonies will be completely isolated; the great commercial ports will remain deserted. At the same time we shall lose our best customer, which is England herself. How long will such an abnormal condition be able to endure? Is it not to be feared that in seeking, by a prolonged effort, to make the English die of hunger, we shall ourselves succumb to starvation?
In truth, neither the steam navy nor the economic conditions of the nations can bring to commerce destroying the elements of success that have been wanting to it in the past.
But perhaps we have not known how to practise it.
Commerce destroying is a guerilla warfare carried on upon an immense plain: the sea. This plain is furrowed by the commercial routes that merchant ships follow. If we trace these routes on a chart, we observe that in certain regions traffic is very dense, and especially so in the vicinity of England's shores. Let us now shade all the places where traffic is concentrated. All the shaded parts constitute the field of action of commerce destroyers; they are attracted there as larks by a mirror.
So long as they remain sole masters of the field, they operate quite at their ease, and, if affairs continue in this state, there is no doubt but that results will accord with forecasts; but as soon as hostile cruisers hasten there the situation is altered.
Part of the commerce destroyers succumb; the rest quit their field of action. The latter are then obliged to fall back upon other regions less frequented, where they are still pursued, and, finally, those that escape take refuge in waters so deserted that their captures have no effect upon the enemy.
There are, therefore, likewise fields of battle in warfare upon commerce, just as in no matter what system of war; the only difference is that they are very extensive. If they are easy to take possession of, they will be the more difficult to keep; and there as elsewhere advantage will rest with numbers—that is, will be England's.
Naturally, vast regions cannot be swept clear in an instant; time and method will be needful. It is for this reason that commerce destroying always passes through a period of great profit at the beginning of a war; but bitter disillusions will come from basing calculations on the results of the early phases of hostilities.
The weak points in commerce destroying are now apparent.
In order that it may be efficacious, it is necessary not only to occupy the field, but also to remain master of it by force. Well, it has not succeeded in the past precisely because neither privateers nor flying squadrons were of sufficient strength.
If we admit that England will not let herself be starved to death without using every possible effort to feed herself, we are forced to this same conclusion in spite of ourselves.
Let us first fix upon the type of commerce destroyer to adopt, for they cannot be improvised on the day when war is declared.
Looking at commerce destroying from our former point of view, we need a vessel whose principal qualities are speed and radius of action. These two elements can only be obtained at the expense of armament and protection, and thus we shall have the Guichen type.
This vessel, in the presence of a hostile cruiser, has not two courses to follow; there is but a single one: to flee. The next step would be to examine the effects produced upon the results of commerce destroying by the necessity of keeping constantly on the qui-vive and abandoning one's cruising ground to avoid being captured; but, without going so far, it is more than doubtful if speed will guarantee impunity to the commerce destroyer, since he has other things to do besides fleeing; he is there to stop merchant ships and this obligation will put him in constant danger.
Let us try to take account of what would happen.
We are cruising on board the Guichen. Smoke is seen on the horizon; we run down towards it. Is it a freighter? or is it a hostile cruiser?
It is a freighter. A shot is fired across her bows. She stops. A boat is lowered and takes a boarding officer to examine her papers.
The vessel is English and so is good prize. A prize crew is put on board and she is sent to France.
The Guichen, resumes her cruising.
A second smoke appears. This time it is a fast vessel; with the telescope three funnels are seen rising above the horizon, and the ship approaches rapidly.
Is it not a cruiser? The captain becomes cautious; he considers whether he shall take to his heels.
At this instant the vessel changes course; she has seen us and wishes to fly. Full speed.
The Guichen fires a shot. It is a lucky one; the shell, fired at extreme range, falls close by the steamer, which at once stops and turns her broadside to show she has done so.
The same formalities as before take place.
But, while the prize is being manned, which threatens to take a long time, since it is necessary to transship part of the personnel, a third smoke is seen to appear. It is another big ship, doubtless a German transatlantic liner: she has four funnels. But no, she heads for the Guichen. Malediction! It is an enemy cruiser that was following the steamer; we have fallen into a snare. Fire up, full speed ahead, and let us fly from her.
At what distance will the commerce destroyer recognize the cruiser? When guns were only effective up to 500 meters one could always take flight well before being within cannon shot, but now . . . . At 6000 meters it is hard to tell an English cruiser from a liner; for France is the only country that has given its vessels that long snout which reveals their identity from far off. Thus, our commerce destroyer, before she is under full head of steam, will already see shell raining about her; and, as she has neither guns (or so few as to count for nothing) nor protection, there are nine chances in ten she will be hit and have her speed reduced. And then she is lost.
And at night what is to be done? No doubt boarding vessels ought not to be practised, but it will be impossible to guard against disagreeable encounters.
In truth these vessels that will have the double care of watching for merchant ships—to stop them—and for warships—to escape from them—seem to me of no account. It is to be feared that anxiety for self-preservation, which is here a necessity, will outweigh desire to capture commerce, and the results of the raid will thereby be sensibly affected.
It may be admitted that commerce destroyers ought not seek to fight, but none the less they will often be obliged to make a stand, and it is not permissible that they should be constantly compelled to interrupt their cruising or to abandon prizes.
Therefore commerce destroyers must have means equivalent to those of cruisers; that is why the Guichen and Chateau-Renault are absolutely unfit for the role that is assigned them.
This conclusion seems now to be admitted; the navy, after having sacrificed 32,000,000 francs (actually thirty-two millions) to meet the views of partisans of commerce destroying, has renounced this type of ship to take up with armored cruisers.
Superiority of speed, that superiority which is counted upon, quite wrongly, to give escape from all bad places, therefore, no longer exists in fact. As we have already said, no power holds a monopoly of speed. This can only be obtained by developing motive power at the expense of military power, and to equal forces will correspond sensibly equal speeds.
If we seek an increase of strength by an increase of displacement," France may have on the stocks an unrivaled vessel, like the Jeanne-d'Arc, but she will be immediately followed, caught up with and distanced. In this race of displacements, she will not be able to pretend to possess a collection of cruisers of a mean value equal to that of the English cruisers.
It, is not to our interest, moreover, to seek the "stronger," which necessarily ends in the "bigger." Since commerce destroying is advocated as an economical system of making war and since, from its very nature, it demands a great number of vessels, it is an absurdity to practise it with instruments no less costly than battleships. Yet despite ourselves we are drawn into the fatal downward path by solicitude not to be gotten the better of, and to be convinced of this it suffices to measure the advance made from the Dupuy-de-Lome to the Jeanne-d'Arc. While the latter was struggling through her trials, the English were already able to oppose to her the cruisers Bacchante, Cressy, Hogue and Sutlej of 900 tons greater displacement. The Leon-Gambetta of 12,300 tons was then begun, but the Good-Hope of 14,100 tons was in service before her. So a cruiser of 16,000 tons is talked of. And who make such a proposition? The partisans of commerce destroying, those who have not Ceased to protest against a navy of floating millions, the adversaries of "leviathans."
From this fact may be judged how complex the problem of commerce destroying, so simple in its conception, becomes when an attempt is made to apply it. Even if we devote all our resources to building cruisers, we will never have more than a very restricted number of such dimensions.
See then what will happen.
Disposing of only a small number of vessels, we shall be still more imperatively than our ancestors under the necessity of going to seek merchant ships in regions where traffic is very dense; and we will send our commerce .destroyers to cruise upon fixed lines which will thus become barriers.
It is easy to see that England will not let them operate in peace without doing anything. Disposing of a greater number of cruisers, she will launch them in pursuit of ours, a part of which will be captured; the rest will have to evacuate a region where there will no longer be any safety for them.
Yet it will be very necessary to return there, for if our cruisers undertake to traverse the seas without system, they will separate themselves from the zones of concentration of commerce and the number of their prizes will at once fall very considerably. They will still inflict upon the enemy losses, but they will only amount to 4 per cent or 5 per cent of his total commerce.
Thenceforth commerce destroying will have been truly bankrupted. Not only will it not have attained its object, which is to starve England, but it will have left us wholly disarmed against all the enterprises of the enemy, who will take our colonies one by one; it will only discount a war tax that we will repay when peace is made.
Another method will then be sought, which, by increasing the strength of the commerce destroyers, will permit them to maintain themselves on the cruising ground. For single cruisers, groups of two or three cruisers will be substituted; and even, for full measure, they should be accompanied by a few light vessels. The object of these divisions will lie to hold their own on the cruising ground while the light vessels spread about them, hunting for merchant ships.
Already the principle of commerce destroying is altered. Its action is decomposed. On the one hand, a division representing the idea of force; on the other, light vessels which depend upon it not to be captured by the enemy's single cruisers?
For a time these new arrangements will disturb the enemy's plans, but after a few days he will follow the movement and adopt a like distribution of forces. Ours will end, therefore, by being taken, as Decres' divisions were, if they are not reinforced in time, and thus, from thread to needle, we shall be led to collect, in regions constituting fields of battle of commerce destroying, all the forces at our disposal, of whatever nature, in order to remain in control.
Thus commerce destroying, which starts out to be a war of skirmishers, would in the long run end in a war of squadrons, if sufficient means were available to prolong the struggle indefinitely.
From the moment that two adversaries contend for a field, each of them despite himself is led to outbid the other so as to remain master of it, until all the resources, on each side, have been exhausted. The encounter of two masses is, therefore, not the result of a more or less correct conception—it is a consequence of the state of war.
We have a striking proof of this in the Dutch-English wars.
No struggle between nations has had to an equal degree the character of an economic conflict. Between England and Holland, the destruction of commerce was not, as it was later on for France, a means; it was the very object of the war. The question at issue was to whom should belong the monopoly of maritime commerce. Nevertheless, no other war offers us the spectacle of so great a number of pitched battles and the assemblage of such great masses. And the two adversaries did not come thus to contend in the lists with fixed determination through a tacit understanding. They were led there despite themselves, by insensible degrees, because they could not do otherwise. And what proves it is that the concentrations took place especially at the end of each war, after each side had fruitlessly endeavored to attack and protect commerce directly.
Here then is how we look at industrial warfare.
The objective is to prevent merchant ships from leaving ports without being captured and to arrest in passage those that are entering them. Against England, therefore, it would be necessary to occupy in force the Channel, the North Sea and St. George's Channel, and to station there squadrons in sufficient number to hold their ground while light vessels radiate from them."' There would necessarily result battles in which we would be worsted, because, receiving the onset instead of provoking it, we would be beaten in detail.
Practically, therefore, it is necessary to abandon temporarily commerce destroying and to employ our forces in defeating squadrons, not in the Channel or the North Sea, but on the field of battle that offers us the greatest chance of success. If we are conquerors, we will then bring our forces back to the field of commerce destroying, and occupy it in sufficient strength to prevent the remnants of the hostile squadrons from driving us off. As may be seen, in this case as in all others, the final object will only be attained after a contest; it will be the fruit of victory.
I anticipate the objection here: we shall be beaten.
It is probable. When a navy has allowed itself to be distracted from its objective by devoting its resources to the chimerical pursuit of direct defense of the coast and to the Utopia of commerce destroying, it finds itself taken unaware when it is obliged to descend into the arena; but if we could restore to the offensive and to battle all that has been taken from them, we would have a strength so formidable that the strongest navy would not engage in a struggle against us without apprehension. None the less we would be the actual inferior. Even so, what then? That would not prove that guerilla warfare can be carried on in an open, level country, nor that the necessity of fighting can be evaded, whether one be strong or weak. War would verily be too easy if a formula were enough to cause the specter of the English Navy to disappear. And I confess, to my shame, that there is something I cannot comprehend when I hear this theory sustained that commerce can be destroyed without having to fight with those who defend it.
Between advocates and opponents of commerce destroying there is no difference of opinion as to the best method of warfare to adopt, but only as to the best way of carrying it out. Ought we attack directly property afloat or is it necessary first to aim at the military forces that are the safeguard of that property? The whole question lies there.
Here we are then back at our point of departure; for if reference is made to the opening of this study, it will be seen that this is the question that arose in the first days of modern naval warfare.
So, for a century and a half, maritime nations have dispensed treasures of energy to reach discovery of the most efficient way to destroy maritime wealth, and to-day it is proposed that we should make the same experiment over again at our own expense. It is because France has never been willing to admit, or has not been able to perceive the lesson revealed by events, because for so long a time she has recommenced history with each new war. Persisting in indefinitely pleading the same process, she has always lost it, because the cause was bad.
Does this mean that there is nothing to gain from direct attack upon the riches scattered over all the seas of the earth?
Perhaps there is, but only on condition that it is made a secondary operation, with the object of immobilizing at small expense a large number of the enemy's vessels.
We have said that it was the necessity of always keeping the same cruising grounds that ruined the privateers; but if it is no longer sought to starve the enemy, if we limit ourselves to threatening his property so as to compel him to protect it, it is'apparent that very mobile divisions can appear in a region which they know to be temporarily unprotected; then, after having made their presence felt so as to attract the enemy, they can suddenly change their field of action and appear at another point far away. Then the enemy, arriving too late, will remain on the spot for fear of a return to the attack. Evidently the necessity of constantly moving about and of traversing great unoccupied stretches of sea will never permit doing enough harm to commerce to seriously affect the fate of the war; but if there can thus be created a sufficiently important diversion to turn the enemy aside from attack upon our colonies, which our foreign stations are too weak to defend, if, above all, he is forced to detach part of his cruisers from his squadrons, the general operations will have been seconded.
We come thus to a system which resembles that of the light divisions of the First Empire, but which must be perfected so as not to reach the same result. Those divisions ended by disintegrating, for lack of maintenance; for losses always occur in a naval force on active service, even when it does not meet the enemy (which one can never be sure of) ; moreover, even though moving about, they delayed too long in a single region and ended by being come up with.
In order to avoid these disadvantages, it is necessary that our divisions be more mobile and that they be strengthened in permanent fashion by mutual co-operation.
But the effect of these dispositions can have but a limited duration; at the end of a certain time the enemy will always finish by seeing into our game and by getting at the commerce destroyers. They will produce their effect, therefore, especially at the beginning of a war, before the system of defense has been organized; if they escape long enough to enable decisive blows to be struck on another field, the object will have been attained.
But it would be a mistake to weaken oneself by building a special material for this sort of diversion, or to employ in it ships of the first class. Everything indicates that the ships on foreign stations should be devoted to this role. To that end let us assign to such stations vessels of reasonable characteristics, not wooden ships without speed, and especially without radius of action.
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We cannot close this chapter, written before the Russo-Japanese war, without adding to it the conclusions to be drawn from that conflict in respect of commerce destroying.
The belligerents adopted different attitudes with regard to the destruction of commerce.
Japan occupied herself first with securing freedom of the sea, and completely neglected attacks upon commerce. She only began to stop commerce by cutting off access to the two Russian ports of Vladivostok and Port Arthur after there were no more hostile ships to fight.
Russia preferred to divide her efforts; she wished to carry on concurrently military action with the Port Arthur squadron and commercial action with the Vladivostok cruisers. She thus weakened herself in the principal theater of operations without doing appreciable damage to Japan; since the cruiser division, pursued from the moment its presence was revealed by captures, was obliged to quit its field of operations and hastened to return to port.
One fine day there happened what must inevitably happen: the cruisers had to accept battle and one of them succumbed. From that moment it was all over with commerce destroying.
What a lesson for the advocates of war upon commerce!
IV.
BLOCKADES.
Blockades consist of stationing in the vicinity of a port a naval force charged with watching its approaches so that no vessel can enter or leave without being seen and pursued.
The system of blockading dates from the wars of the 'Revolution and Empire. Until then France had often seen English fleets cruising off Ouessant.to watch the going out of our ships or to intercept the Levant contingent on its arrival; but these appearances were only momentary, and they never had either the permanence or the duration that characterize true blockades. Under the Monarchy, vessels had not yet acquired the nautical qualities, the endurance and the self-dependence necessary to guard the entrance of a hostile port in all seasons and through all weathers. We know, moreover, that fleets were accustomed to disarm at the end of the autumn; so that naval operations only lasted for a few months and began again on a new basis each spring.
These customs had a direct influence on the fitting out of ships and on the rules of naval warfare. Fleets of many ships never had enough provisions for cruises of considerable duration; vessels were not arranged to carry great quantities of food and water, and to that cause should be attributed the epidemics that so often flourished on board of them and hindered their operations.
When, in 1793, a new period of naval wars opened, which until 1814 was only broken by the short peace of Amiens, the nautical art was already in evident progress. The hydrography of the most frequented shores was better known, and the long voyages of exploration undertaken after the American war had brought about modifications in the construction of ships that made them more manageable instruments; at the same time there were formed officers and crews capable of encountering the elements instead of letting themselves be enslaved by them.
But it was the special character assumed by the war which, more than any other cause, forced England to enter upon a new way. The government of the Revolution did not conceal its in. tention of taking up on the sea the gage flung down by England, just as it had not feared to stand up against all the continental powers on land; and it had proved, by Hoche's abortive attempt in Ireland, by General Humbert's expedition and by that to Egypt, that it would not stop at the most risky operations and also the most unexpected.
Little anxious to experience again so disagreeable a surprise as the conquest of Egypt, fearing all from a nation so enterprising, uneasy lest she might see renewed on the ocean, and at her expense, the prodigies that national enthusiasm had raised up on land, England saw herself forced to abandon the old methods that until then had sufficed to give her dominion over the sea and to guarantee the safety of her territory. For a new situation, new means were necessary. And it was then that she thought of paralyzing our navy and that of our allies by holding the fleets shut up in port. According to an expression now in use, she aspired to carry her frontier to the enemy's shores; and, behind that frontier, the sea would belong to her.
What is stranger is that after having conceived this gigantic plan she succeeded in realizing it, if not completely, at least in an efficient form.
But the Admiralty did not have recourse to this extreme means at. the very first by intuition; the necessity of it appeared little by little. The war began on the old basis; the squadrons of the two sides went out and in without being watched; they encountered one another when opposing interests led them to the same place.
But when Villaret-Joyeuse is beaten at Groix, at the end of June, 1795, Bridport, who has a convoy of emigres to land at Quiberon, blockades him at Lorient. The blockade lasted till the day when the Count d'Artois left the island of Yeu, definitely renouncing putting foot in France. It had lasted five months.
It was an indication. From this moment Brest is constantly watched; but the bulk of the English forces continue on station in England. The sortie of Morard de Galle, with a fleet of 45 ships, shows the need of a stricter watch; and after 1797 the lookouts of Ouessant, save for short intervals, will lose sight of the English fleet no more.
The blockade was extended to Toulon, Rochefort and Lorient in succession; then, as new enemies threw themselves into the arena, it enveloped the Texel, Ferrol and Cadiz. The English Navy has never done anything greater.
To form an idea of the effort required by such a task, the situation of these squadrons must be imagined, cruising far from any base, during entire years, winter and summer, and threatened at each instant with being driven upon a hostile coast by an on-shore gale.
The solution adopted by England was not perfect. It was exempt neither from disadvantages nor from dangers; but under the circumstances it was still the best.
At first the blockades were never permanent; bad weather always ended by sweeping away the blockading force and opening the entrance to our ports. Bruix and Ganteaume in this way were enabled to go out from Brest; Brueys and Villeneuve from Toulon. And the success that seemed to favor these admirals, at the beginning of their operations, might make us doubt the efficacy of blockades. But when we reflect that the war lasted twenty years, we are astounded that during such a lapse of time our squadrons were able to find only five or six opportunities of escaping. And, furthermore, under what conditions? The bad weather that drove off the English squadron visited our ships as soon as they went out; and as their long inaction inside had not prepared them to struggle with the elements, their mission, scarcely begun, was endangered. The very tempest that permitted Morard de Galle to leave Brest dispersed his ships. Bruix likewise saw his ships dispersed, and it is a miracle that he was able to reassemble them. Villeneuve experiences such damage on his sortie from Toulon that he is forced to return.
In order to realize how vigorous the blockades of this period were, we must call to mind that our squadrons, and particularly those of Brest and Ferrol, remained in port whole years when they should have been constantly at sea, only returning'to port for supplies or after an action. We ought also to take into consideration the complete stoppage of all coastwise communications, which made it very difficult to supply and provision our ports.
One of the advantages, and not the least one, of the blockades was the moral ascendency that they gave to the blockaders. By everywhere rushing to meet the enemy, challenging him to combat, England showed her superiority and demoralized her adversaries. She did not hesitate to take advantage of this situation to diminish, in cases of urgency, the strength of her blockading forces. The English ended by having such self-confidence that they ceased to take precautions any longer; they anchored in our roadsteads and set up their rigging there.
Let us now consider the dangers that flow from the system of blockades.
All the English forces were scattered and isolated from one another, without power to sustain each other; so that if one of our squadrons succeeded in escaping and all trace of it was lost, it could fall unexpectedly upon one of the blockading squadrons of less force and free the blockaded ships; during this interval the detachments sent in pursuit in wrong directions would be wholly out of touch with the operations. After that the whole system would go to pieces like a house of cards. England had the good luck to escape this danger, but she owed it only to the disorganization of our navy and to the deadly fear that her ships inspired in our admirals, which would tend to demonstrate to us that under normal conditions it would have been necessary to renounce blockading. Two examples will make us see this. We have already seen that Bruix, after having left Brest without being followed by Bridport, appeared suddenly before Cadiz. Lord Keith was blockading Mazzaredo there. Bruix could oppose 25 ships to 18. Logically he ought to carry off a brilliant success. But it was needful to fight; he did not do it. Therefore, the maneuver had no serious consequences, but it might have had such, if 25 French ships had been able to beat 18 English ships.
Later, Villeneuve, who was returning from the West Indies after having escaped the blockade of Toulon, fell upon Calder, who was blockading Ferrol. The same disproportion of forces: 20 ships against 15. If Calder had been beaten, the blockades of Brest and Rochefort would have been broken, but he was the victor!!! Such a result is disconcerting.
The situation of all these squadrons was so perilous that history has recorded the apprehensions of the English admirals. "Calder," wrote Collingwood, "is reduced to a skeleton."
At this period, everybody in France, Napoleon included, had complete contempt for the consequences entailed upon each side by the system of blockades. The current opinion was that the English were wearing themselves out in thus keeping the sea while we were maintaining our material in good condition. Certainly such perpetual cruising entailed excessive fatigue; certainly the ships were greatly taxed; but this cruising formed incomparable crews and officers. The monotony of this duty, the continual watchfulness, exasperated the men, but they engendered a state of mind that favored the Admiralty's designs. Each one saw the end of his sufferings only in a battle which, by suppressing the cause, would suppress the effect; an encounter came thus to be ardently desired. Thenceforth victory was assured.
Our squadrons, on the contrary, were worn out with inaction; the ships, manned by green crews, put to sea only to be the sport of the elements; the least bit of a gale reduced them to the state of wrecks. Between the crews of the two nations there was the difference that exists between the newly enlisted soldier and the veteran whose arms are rusted and garments worn.
* * *
Blockades were not carried out everywhere in the same manner.
At Brest, under Bridport and Cornwallis, the bulk of the forces remained off Ouessant, while a light squadron that was called the In-shore Squadron was stationed in the Iroise, pushing in as far as the narrow entrance and placing some vessels in the Bay of Douarnenez to watch the Sein Race. When the weather was fine, the fleet anchored at the entrance of the Iroise or at Douarnenez. Finally, a certain number of ships went periodically to an English dockyard to be repaired and resupplied.
When Nelson was charged with the blockade of Toulon, in 1803, he proceeded differently. He stayed off the port with all his forces during an entire month; then he withdrew to Magdalena to give his crews a rest, leaving only some frigates on guard. The line of conduct adopted by Nelson was perhaps imposed upon him by the circumstances; in any event, it was thoroughly accordant with the opinion he held concerning his role. He maintained, in his letters to the Admiralty, that his object was not to prevent the French from coming out, but only to fight them if they did come out. This way of looking at things was the correct one, for, if he succeeded in meeting our ships at sea and in destroying them, the question was settled in the Mediterranean, and the forces employed in blockading became available for other uses; but it was necessary, nevertheless, to maintain a sufficient guard not to let the blockaded force get wholly away. And this was not done.
On a first occasion Villeneuve was able to go out and to return three days later without being molested; and on a second Nelson went in a wrong direction to look for him. Therefore, Magdalena was a base too far removed from Toulon.
Moreover, it is not clear how frigates could cruise with impunity off Toulon without being supported by their squadron. There are always, in a naval force, vessels of speed greater than the rest; nothing would have been easier than to send out some ships at night, without lights, to bring the English frigates to a stand against the coast and to force them to fight. If Villeneuve had persistently pursued the scouts that watched him during Nelson's absence, the latter would have had to take them with him whenever he withdrew to Magdalena. Nor does it appear that Villeneuve thought of profiting by the enemy's absence to go out and put his vessels through exercises which they certainly greatly needed before taking the sea.
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With steam navies all thought of blockading disappeared. At first, no possibility was seen of making long cruises with vessels that had but a small supply of coal and whose machinery was frequently in need of overhauling. The blockade of a hostile port very near ihe English coasts, such as Brest, alone would have been possible; and it would still have been necessary to employ forces at least double those blockaded.
Long years passed thus, but a day came when English publicists, supported by politician admirals, gave warning that England was without defense. Pamphlets set forth the invasion of British soil, London besieged, the navy annihilated, etc.
It has always been enough to press the spring of invasion to open the purse of the islanders. Such was the origin of the enormous development of the English fleet. When they had ships, they took thought how to use them and quite naturally came back to the old ways that had proved their efficiency; but then a new element had to be reckoned with—the torpedo-boat.
This latter, when it first appeared, did not have very brilliant nautical qualities; scarcely could it quit the immediate neighborhood of the shore. Built to attack battleships by surprise, it had no chance of encountering them unless they themselves came within reach of its blows. Blockades were, therefore, particularly favorable to the employment of torpedo-boats, and, in purposing to watch our battleships, England risked losing her own. These considerations determined the construction of the flotilla of destroyers. But if danger from the torpedo-boat was thus diminished, it was not wholly removed; and the questions raised by the use of steam remained living ones, even though improvements in the economy of the machinery had considerably increased the radius of action of ships. The system of distant blockade, which is only an extension and perfection of Nelson's method, thus came into existence.
Here is what it consists in.
The blockading squadron takes for a base an anchorage defended against the approach of torpedo-boats, in proximity to the hostile coast. It detaches a flotilla of destroyers to cruise in the immediate vicinity of the blockaded port, supporting them with a few cruisers. Finally, a line of communications connects the fighting body with the advance guards, and keeps the former informed of the movements of the enemy.
Thus single ships that come to enter the port will run upon the cruisers; and, if the blockaded forces make a sortie in a body, they will be followed by scouts that will bring the squadron into touch with them.
It has even been said that England, to increase the rapidity of communications, has in view the laying of a cable one end of which would lead on board a vessel, or perhaps onto one of our sea-coast inlands.
A variation of this form of blockade consists in supporting the light vessels and cruisers by a battleship division that is periodically relieved.
Thus, for example, to blockade our Northern squadron in Brest, the English squadron would take the Scilly Islands as base of operations (it is said to be for this purpose that they have been made an advanced base) ; the destroyers would be stationed in the Iroise, and the cruisers between Ouessant and Sein bridge, with detachments in the Race and the Four; finally, a chain of scouts or a cable would connect the blockaders with their squadron.
Such, it appears (though we know nothing certain in this respect), are the ideas that are current on the other side of the Channel. But the carrying out of this program raises many objections; happily we do not lack means of opposing these ingenious arrangements.
As far as direct blockade is concerned, that is not to be thought of; though the battleships may be sufficiently protected from torpedo-boats by destroyers, to-day they must reckon with submarines, which will go to seek them much further than is commonly supposed. These latter will find it all the easier to show their power because, blockades being lengthy operations, it will be allowable to wait the most favorable conditions for attacking.
For the same reason, the idea of supporting the blockaders by a battleship division must be renounced.
The cruisers and destroyers will, therefore, find themselves face to face with all the blockaded forces. They will be constantly exposed to sudden sorties of the light squadron, supported by some battleships, and it appears doubtful that they would always succeed in withdrawing without losses. Moreover, even in the case we are considering, the submarines will have a part to play. Admitting that the destroyers may be safe from torpedoes (which is not proved), cruisers and scouts are not; and these vessels must anticipate being blown up.
Furthermore, will the English be able to take possession of an island on our coast to land a cable there? That would suppose a singular incapacity on our part. And how will they keep it, unless by protecting it with their entire squadron, which would mean direct blockade?
No, blockades will have no more fears for us when our flotilla of submarines has attained its full development. We might even welcome one, at the beginning of a war, to cut off from the hostile force some of its units, if there were not advantage in impressing upon the operations the desired direction by a vigorous offensive.
* * *
We cannot leave this subject without saying a few words concerning the blockade of Santiago by the American squadron and that of Port Arthur by the Japanese Navy.
Contrary to all precedents, Admiral Sampson distributed his ships on an extended line that doubled the cordon of light vessels and enclosed the narrow entrance of the harbor; that is, he established a military blockade upon the principle of commercial blockades.
It does not seem that this method ought to be retained. It had no serious consequences, because the Spaniards had made their minds up not to fight; but if they had fallen in a body on one end of the line, the Americans might have suffered useless losses.
Admiral Togo, on the contrary, carried out during ten months, and with full success, a distant blockade, such as has been defined above. He took as base the Elliot Islands, which are only 65 miles from Port Arthur, and, from this anchorage, he permanently detached his torpedo-boats and light vessels to maintain a watch over the approaches of the port. The blockade was never absolute, in the sense that a few junks loaded with provisions succeeded from time to time in getting through the line of guards; but it was none the less effective as far as results go.
As the Russians had no submarines at Port Arthur, we see no reason for modifying our previous conclusions.
V.
PASSAGES BY MAIN FORCE.
The object of passages by main force is to get through the passes that give access to a harbor or river. The operation is always a daring one, on account of the concentration of defenses, and the greatness of the result alone can justify the sacrifices it entails.
Examples of this kind are not abundant; we will content ourselves with citing two that may be considered the most noteworthy.
To reach Mobile, Farragut was obliged first to reduce the outer works. A first attack being without result, the American admiral determined to force a passage into the bay. It was not his first essay of the sort, but the difficulties had never been so great.
On August 5, 1862, at 5.40 a. m., the Federal squadron got under way. Seven corvettes, each having a gunboat lashed to it on the port side, formed in column, with the corvette Brooklyn in the lead; immediately after her came the flagship Hartford. Four monitors formed a second column to starboard of the squadron and consequently between the latter and Fort Morgan.
We cannot give a better account of this passage by main force than by reproducing, in part, the official report of Admiral Farragut:
"It was only at the urgent request of the captains and commanding officers that I yielded to the Brooklyn being the leading ship of the line, as she had four chase guns and an ingenious arrangement for picking up torpedoes, and because, in their judgment, the flagship ought not to be too much exposed. This I believe to be an error, for apart from the fact that exposure is one of the penalties of rank in the navy, it will always be the aim of the enemy to destroy the flagship, and, as will appear in the sequel, such attempt was very persistently made, but Providence did not permit it to be successful.
"The attacking fleet steamed steadily up the main ship channel, the Tecumseh firing the first shot at 6.47. At 7.06 the fort opened upon us and was replied to by a gun from the Brooklyn, and immediately after the action became general.
"It was soon apparent that there was some difficulty ahead. The Brooklyn, for some cause which I did not then clearly understand, but which has since been explained by Captain Alden in his report, arrested the advance of the whole fleet, while at the same time the guns of the fort were playing with great effect upon that vessel and the Hartford. A moment after I saw the Tecumseh, struck by a torpedo, disappear almost instantaneously beneath the waves, carrying with her her gallant commander and nearly all her crew. I determined at once. as I had originally intended, to take the lead, and after ordering the Metacomet to send a boat to save, if possible, any of the perishing crew, I dashed ahead with the Hartford, and the ships followed on, their officers believing that they were going to a noble death with their commander- in-chief.
"I steamed through between the buoys where the torpedoes were supposed to have been sunk. These buoys had been previously examined by my flag-lieutenant, J. Crittenden Watson, in several nightly reconnoissances. Though he had not been able to discover the sunken torpedoes, yet we had been assured by refugees, deserters, and others of their existence, but believing that from their having been some time in the water, they were probably innocuous, I determined to take the chance of their explosion.
"From the moment I turned to the northwestward to clear the Middle Ground we were enabled to keep such a broadside fire upon the batteries at Fort Morgan that their guns did us comparatively little injury."
* * *
"With the exception of the momentary arrest of the fleet when the Hartford passed ahead, the order of battle was preserved, and the ships followed each other in close order past the batteries of Fort Morgan, and in comparative safety, too, with the exception of the Oneida. Her boilers were penetrated by a shot from the fort, which completely disabled her; but her consort, the Galena, firmly fastened to her side, brought her safely through, showing clearly the wisdom of the precaution of carrying the vessels in two abreast."
* * *
"Our ironclads, from their slow speed and bad steering, had some difficulty in getting into and maintaining their position in line as we passed the fort."
The reports of the commanding officers attribute the comparatively small number of injuries to the rapid fire of the squadron and the smoke, and they note that the broadsides of grape delivered by several vessels as they passed close by the fort reduced entirely to silence the Confederate batteries.
The losses of the squadron amounted to 52 killed and 180 wounded, without counting the 120 men who went down with the Tecumseh.
The dispositions taken by Admiral Farragut are noteworthy. Every naval force that may desire in the future to force a passage should draw inspiration from them.
Let us now consider the feat performed by two French gunboats, of wood, with no protection. I follow the account of the vessels' officers whom I had occasion to see a few days afterwards.
The Inconstant and the Comete presented themselves at the Mei-Nam bar, on July 13, 1893, on their way up to Bangkok. The Inconstant called for a pilot, and met with a refusal. The captain of the Jean-Baptiste-Say, a French steamer making regular runs between Saigon and Bangkok, went on board to act as pilot and, as soon as there was enough water on the bar, the vessels stood for the mouth of the river.
At 4000 meters the Siamese forts opened fire. Commander Bone had not expected this attack; he could still have turned back, but he did not think of such a thing. His orders directed him to go up to Bangkok—he executed his orders. The masts were housed, magazines opened, and as soon as ready the vessels replied to the fire.
As they draw near the light-ship that marks the entrance of the river, a torpedo explodes ahead of the Inconstant without doing her any harm. The gunboats cross the bar and pass through the midst of the Siamese fleet drawn up in two lines.
Night falls.
The most difficult task had not been accomplished. It was still necessary to pass at 200 meters distance under the fire of Paknam fort, which is at mid-distance between Bangkok and the mouth of the river. The Comete, which saw it first, fires a shot. The fort delivers its broadside too soon; the boats pass. At 9 o'clock they anchored off the French consulate. On the following day, at colors, they dressed ship in honor of the 14th of July. Two killed, three wounded.
Many officers think that under present conditions passages by main force are no longer possible. The Inconstant and Comete have given a striking denial of this. It may be argued, however, that they had affair with Siamese and that things would have happened differently with Europeans. We will be satisfied, therefore, with feeling proud of this feat of arms, without drawing conclusions from it.
What basis exists for interdicting the forcing of passages?
Lines of torpedoes are a hindrance; they are not a prevention. It is true that they sunk one of Farragut's vessels; but all combats occasion losses, and the forcing of a passage is a combat; all that is asked is to be the victor.
Coast-defense cannon are more powerful than they were forty years ago; but ships are better protected, and after all batteries have no other armament than that used by ships in conflict with them. Let us not forget that it is not a question here of a regular contest in which the batteries must have the best of it, but of a rapid passage during which a hail of fire is poured upon the works to stop their fire momentarily. Well, ships are not annihilated as quickly as one juggles a pea. And then very little is needed for a torpedo not to explode at the moment or place intended, for a shell not to reach the mark. There will also be a certain period, at the beginning of the war, when all the batteries will not yet have been fully manned.
As a matter of fact, all passages by main force have succeeded. It would be absurd to conclude from this that all passages can be forced; let us be satisfied with allowing that the operation is not a priori impossible. All passages are not defended like the entrance of Brest or like the approaches to our naval arsenals; there are even some that have no lines of torpedoes.
Still, if Duguay-Trouin, after having cleared the narrow entrance of Rio-de-Janeiro, had not been sure of having nothing more to fear for his ships, he would perhaps have given up the expedition; if the Inconstant, after having passed under the forts of the Mei-Nam entrance, had found at Bangkok batteries that it would have been necessary to reduce one after the other, she would without doubt have succumbed; if Admiral Courbet had not known that there was no interior defense abreast Fouchou arsenal, he would not have run into such a trap.
It is the inner defenses, therefore, those with which it will be necessary to undertake a regular contest, that will prevent the forcing of passages. The others will wound the enemy; these latter will finish him.
These considerations show us in what spirit the defense of our places ought to be organized. I insist upon it, because reason has not always been respected in the arming of secondary places.
FOURTH PART.
THE AUXILIARIES OF STRATEGY.
I.
THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN.
We have seen, in the first part of this study, that the manner of distribution of one's forces is not an immaterial matter, and that, for equal effort, the result varies according to the direction impressed upon operations. A well-matured plan of campaign is, therefore, necessary.
When war breaks out is not the moment for asking oneself what must be done. In the entire naval sphere each one will then be overwhelmed by the cares of mobilization; the central department will have to provide for imperious necessities and will be burdened with the solution of thousands of questions; no one will any longer have the calm and coolness indispensable for the complete working out of a plan of operations.
If, at this critical instant, nothing has been prepared; if there are no orders all ready; if, in a word, the whole machinery can only be set going by throwing everything out of gear, we shall be carried away by events 'in spite of ourselves and will rush our squadrons to sea, shutting our eyes to what happens.
To establish a plan of campaign, the general direction that it is wished to give to operations is first determined, with a view to securing the maximum effect. An outline is thus sketched, then the number and kind of forces necessarj for carrying out the plan with chances of success are inquired into, keeping in view all the elements of strategy that are of a nature to strengthen the action of the ships.
These preliminary labors bring to light defective features, whether in the disposition of ships or in their strategical qualities. Thus the plan of campaign has an influence upon building programs and upon the characteristics of vessels.
As new units, designed upon a more rational basis, come into service, the work little by little is perfected. It is not enough to ask what can be done with the material at one's disposal; it is necessary that it be the material that is adapted to the conditions of war, as they spring from general laws.
The plan of campaign also has the advantage of connecting together, with a view to a precise object, the different problems that, in peace time, seem to us to be independent of one another because they are studied separately. Thus we avoid attaching an exaggerated importance to operations that have but a secondary influence upon the final issue.
It does not seem to be difficult, if we do not let ourselves be taken unawares, to draw up a rational plan of campaign.' We have to guide us the advice of men of the greatest competence, and we have leisure to study the means at the enemy's disposition and the manner in which he can use them. Nevertheless, war constantly shows us enormous faults that are due much more to errors of principle than to a condition of inferiority. This results in the first place from generally not attaching enough importance to reflex actions, to the reactions that events have upon each other, which leads to making fruitless efforts that waste forces without any gain. But the initial cause of those queer conceptions that have no result comes from the fact that as much energy and moral worth are necessary to plan war as to carry it on. Radical solutions are generally repugnant, yet without such no success is possible; it is sought to conciliate opposing interests and diffuse plans are thus arrived at.
When France declared war against England in 1778, the government of Louis XVI was in possession of a plan of campaign to the elaboration of which a man of great worth, the Count de Broglie, had devoted twenty years of his life. Constantly perfecting his work, guided by the exclusive sentiment of the object to be attained, he had made something that could stand by itself. Well, during the war, on several occasions ideas were taken from this work, but without reflecting that they had no value excepting as forming part of the whole. Thus we had a badly built structure, because all that made it strong had been taken away from it.
* * *
What is the part that belongs, in the drawing up of plans, to the principal agents of execution?
In China, Admiral Courbet was constantly obliged to follow a line of conduct that he disapproved; and the despatches that he received prove that the government had no very exact ideas about the economic and social situation of the Celestial Empire, any more than about the geographic conditions of those regions. These false ideas were the cause of our vessels and troops being uselessly wasted against Formosa.
The correspondence exchanged, before and during the Spanish- American war, between Admiral Cervera and the Minister of Marine, revealed a perpetual divergence of opinions between these two general officers, and it is very difficult to decide which of them was right, if, on the one hand, the minister's singular optimism testified to an absolute ignorance of the material that he had charge of, of the enemy's resources and of the elementary principles of war; on the other hand, the chief of squadron's everlasting complaints do not seem to have sensibly bettered the situation. Finally, Admiral Cervera had to yield with groans, which, it will be agreed, is not a guarantee of success.
Disagreements of this sort can have only fatal consequences. In principle, a chief ought never to be obliged to do what he thinks bad, because nothing is done well that is not understood. Moreover, all officers have not the same qualities, nor the same faculties rendering them fit for the accomplishment of all missions; only what they are capable of can be demanded of people. On the other hand, the departments, from which the plans of campaign emanate, have a tendency always to measure too nicely and they thus demand impossible things; situated far from the scene of war, they do not take account exactly of the difficulties of execution, because they lack means of estimating at its true value the coefficient of utilization of the naval forces. Everyone knows that at a distance things always seem easy and that assurance is lost in proportion as one draws near. Finally, the departments have no effective responsibility; if an operation fails, they are not the ones who go before a court-martial, and, in spite of themselves, this immunity influences their decisions and makes them demand things the execution of which they themselves would not accept. Quite to the contrary, he who is on the spot, who sees things close at hand and who risks his life, and above all his reputation, that one is prone to fall into the opposite excess and to see obstacles everywhere. It is not everyone that, like Admiral Courbet, has an exact appreciation of the situation and of the advantages that can be drawn from it.
There is but one method of conciliating everything; that is to put everywhere, in the departments as well as in the field, the right man in the right place.
II.
PUBLIC OPINION.
Present-day governments have to contend with a very powerful adversary that sometimes will not leave off making the conduct of operations difficult. I mean public opinion.
It is well known that the public does not look upon war from the same point of view as professionals; its attention is turned aside by what is going on close at hand, and it perceives only vaguely the far-off horizons where the objective is hidden. Well, there is no use in saying that the notion formed by the masses as to the scope of operations is not the true one; if it were, the military art would not exist, and genius would be within everybody's reach. All that was powerful in Napoleon's campaigns only becomes apparent to us after the act, when occurrences have illumined our minds and revealed to us new aspects of which we would never have thought.
The public, when it estimates events, is much more solicitous of the evils that threaten it than of the object to be attained; military men, on the contrary, think that war, being an evil in itself, can engender only evil, and that the sole excuse for making it is to do so successfully.
This divergence of views determines from the beginning a misunderstanding between those who are spectators of the war and those who have the grave responsibility of directing it.
As soon as the first encounter takes place, the population loses its head, the journals constitute themselves the spokesmen of its complaints; the government is attacked, and the admirals are not let off. If, then, there is at the head of affairs a man who is not energetic enough to stand fast against the storm, or who is not capable of explaining his acts, because he himself does not know their scope, all the dispositions taken will be reversed. A poor arrangement will be adopted; sacrifices will be made to public opinion by giving over a part of one's forces in order to meet its views. It is known to be an error, but it is done all the same. It would be better not to wage war than to do so in such a way, for what is the end of it all? Everything is compromised without satisfying the public; when defeat comes, it will no longer be possible to protect anything; therefore, it is only going back to start over again.
During the Spanish-American war, the influence of public opinion was manifested on both sides.
As far as the United States are concerned, the Naval Council thought itself obliged to divide their forces in order to satisfy the northern sections, which were unwilling to remain unprotected; and Mahan, who was a member of the Council, frankly confesses that this solution was absolutely contrary to military interests. No harm resulted from this, for the reason that the Spaniards did not think of attacking either the coast or the hostile ships; but, on the part of Spain, the public apprehension had more serious consequences.
What a sad history is that of that poor Spanish squadron! Blockaded in Santiago by superior forces, demoralized, it was destined to certain destruction if it went out. In Spain, the journals were wroth at such inaction; they did not comprehend that four cruisers, poorly armed, could not measure themselves against so many battleships, supported by several cruisers. Politics intervening, the squadron ceased to be anything but a means for battering down the government. At first the Minister of Marine put a good face on the matter. He explained to the Cortes that ships were not made to be destroyed; but his resistance was of short duration. He sent to Cuba the order to make the squadron go out and, in signing that order, he signed the death-warrant of his sailors.
Admiral Cervera's vessels were marked in advance with the seal of destiny. Nevertheless, would it not have been better to let them stay in port, thus preserving the single chance of saving Santiago, rather than to sacrifice them stupidly to the contentions of the press?
The tone of the sea-coast journals, during the grand maneuvers of 1889, gives us but a feeble idea of what will happen in case of war. Not a squadron will be able to go out of sight of shore without there arising cries of treason. And what will happen on the day when an admiral requisitions coast-defense vessels to take them with him?
What is the remedy for this state of affairs? To educate the nation; to show it what its true interests are. There is nothing to conceal in the principles that govern warfare. What neither the enemy nor the public ought to know is only the manner in which it is intended to apply them.
Well, it is not impossible to form public opinion and to turn it in the direction of the general interests of the country. Admiral Colomb calls attention to the fact that the English people were never more tranquil than when their squadrons were at sea, because they had a sufficiently clear comprehension of the affairs of war to know that naval forces can only give protection by acting.
During the hostilities against Russia, the Japanese government was able to make the nation accept a line of conduct that, in France, would have raised recriminations without end and might have caused a modification of the plan of campaign.
III.
PREPARATION.
It is not enough to send one's squadrons out to fight; it is also necessary that they be of such strong composition that equality of numbers may secure equality and, if possible, superiority of strength.
Historians, who are principally concerned in recounting facts, distribute praise or blame among chiefs of squadrons according to the results of their encounters. Rarely do they take pains to inquire whether the means at the disposal of the vanquished permitted doing anything else than what they did. How many, among those whom fortune betrayed, would have left the reputation of skilful leaders, if they had only had means equal to those of their adversaries! It is very difficult not to commit errors when one finds himself disarmed by mediocrity of material and insufficiency of personnel; what it is needful to do is easily seen then, but it cannot be done.
The humiliations of battlefields are but too often an effect whose causes are due to lack of preparation.
Between combatants of two hostile nations, there is frequently to be noted a different state of mind, which, by itself alone, is the best presage of the result of the struggle. On one side, the confidence that engenders courage and gives birth to bold plans; on the other, apprehension, mother of discouragement and of bastard solutions. This difference of moral state could have been observed between the Austrians and Italians, before Lissa ; between the Japanese and Chinese, before the Yalu and Wei-hai-wei ; between the Americans and Spaniards, before Cavite and Santiago; between the Japanese and the Russians. The confidence on one side had its source much more in training than in numerical superiority, since the more numerous were not always the victors. The swagger with which admirals like Barrington, Hood and Cornwallis used to withstand the attacks of greatly superior forces gives us a measure of the moral influence exercised by the consciousness of strength.
The naval greatness of a nation, therefore, depends principally upon the manner in which its forces are prepared and trained.
* * *
In this connection, it is well to call particular attention to the question of personnel.
The numerical insufficiency of crews was, in the past, one of the main causes of the weakness of the French Navy. Even during the American war, ships never had their full complements. It was much worse during the Revolution and Empire; the custom grew up of making up shortages of seamen with soldiers. Marked inferiority in gunnery was an immediate consequence of this.
To-day, the naval enlistment is functioning normally, and it is admitted that we have more sailors to carry on a war with than we need. It is possible; but what is certain is that in peace time we are still reduced to expedients. Crews never attain the regulation number, neither at ordinary times, nor during grand maneuvers, in spite of the addition of reservists. Men of one specialty are embarked to take the places of those of another specialty, and it will be understood that that does not fill the bill.
The question of personnel in our navy has always been relegated to a secondary place: it is preferred to man more vessels and to man them badly. With reduced effectives, the old ways would reappear in a new form, like corpses that rise to the surface.
The idea that has led to having ships that are manned and yet not manned is not without its attractions. With crews reduced one-half, the material is as well taken care of as in a condition of full armament; and as organized and enrolled forces are thus provided, it suffices to fill up the complements to make them ready to put to sea almost immediately, if the depots are capable of furnishing the necessary contingent; mobilization is reduced to its very simplest form.
The misfortune is that ships manned with reduced crews cannot cruise, and it is at sea that seamen and officers are trained. When the whole French fleet has to be mobilized, it will be necessary to call upon the reservists; all the more necessary is it that they be not joined to men whose experience has been confined to harbor work.
All historians agree in recognizing that the English crews were trained by prolonged blockades, and that Nelson's prodigious successes had their source in those cruises, while our ships, stationary in harbors, were like beings all of whose members are benumbed by inaction. Well, the vessels of our Northern squadron that, yesterday still, had only reduced crews, those vessels were blockaded, though only by their own state; they got under way only to have target practice, and were incapable of making a passage of any length. When, in the spring, they put to sea, they had crews that were afraid of the sea, borrowed officers, an admiral who perhaps knew how to lead his squadron, but who did not know what could be gotten out of it. When this squadron met with that of the South, as in 1900, the difference between the two forces was striking.
The system of reduced crews is dangerous; it gives the illusion of a state of preparation that does not exist. The further we go in reducing the length of military service, the more the complexity of our material increases (alas!), the more necessary it is to give our men sea experience. Well, vessels cannot go to sea without crews.
The normal complement of vessels is ample to satisfy all requirements; it would even be inconvenient to increase it during peace time; the men would no longer have sufficient occupation. But in time of war it would be advantageous to have an addition to the personnel, if it be true that we dispose of reserves for whom we shall have no employment.
The idea of forming on board ship supplementary crews who would serve, as far as required, to replace dead and wounded, has already been put forward. Perhaps the author of this project exaggerated its application; in any case it is regrettable that the principle was not preserved, with freedom to reduce it to the right proportions. It is difficult to admit that during a combat guns may be out of action for lack of men, while there are idle seamen on shore. But, setting fighting aside, there is a whole class of men whose number ought to be quite doubled at the very beginning of war, if it is wished to utilize all the resources of strategy. It is that of firemen.
Movement, as we have said elsewhere, is the soul of strategy. Well, the fireman is the soul of movement.
Our vessels seldom cruise with all their fires lighted. Solicitude to conserve the machinery and the allowances of coal allotted to squadrons do not permit making high speed frequently. The complements of firemen are calculated accordingly.
When squadrons have power trials, the vessels have only to make a spurt, and an effort is then required from the whole fireroom personnel that could not be kept up; but when a single vessel has to maintain high speed for a long time on account of some special mission, it becomes necessary to send men from the deck force into the bunkers. Such conditions as this are not permissible in time of war.
It is well known that there are in the navy convinced partisans of speed, who imagine that it can make up for anything. This is an evident exaggeration, for, though speed can make force effective, it cannot take its place; but, after all, it cannot be denied that the faculty of moving rapidly from one place to another is an element of success. Well, it is necessary that it be known that our vessels, and particularly torpedo-boats, are incapable, under existing conditions, of doing their best on account of lack of firemen.
IV.
THE DOCTRINE.
To build the ships that are needed, and no others; to give them the armament suitable to each and to equip them properly, it is needful to know what it is wished to do and how it is to be done; an aim and a doctrine are necessary.
How many millions would be saved every year, if we could come to an agreement, not about all types of ship (that would be asking too much in the existing anarchy of ideas), but merely about a single one. We would then have a vessel whose characteristics would be well defined, which would respond to a precise object and fulfil fixed conditions; each new unit would be but the improved reproduction of the preceding one. Then by specializing constructions by public and private shipyards, we should arrive at having a division of labor and an industrial organization that, according to some engineers, would procure a saving of 25 per cent; our naval strength would find itself increased by a quarter. While now each new ship represents a new work, new models, new installations, new principles, new bargains.
And progress?
Let us understand one another. Naval material is not the result of the more or less ingenious conceptions of various per- Sons; it ought to derive from the needs of warfare. Therefore, all units of the same type ought to have points in common. Progress will not consist in always making something new; it will consist in perfecting the old. Thus we shall have more powerful guns on a less weight, stronger machinery in less space, more resisting armor of less thickness and, finally, better lines; but the general dispositions of the plan will remain the same. Neither is it necessary, on each new vessel, to turn all the arrangements upside down so that six months are needed to know one's ship.
Well, where can there be found any continuity in passing from the Redoutable to the Suffren, through the Duperre, Formidable, Magenta, Brennus, Bouvet and Charlemagne, without counting the Requin, Jemmapes and Bouvines? They all have different forms, different systems of armor protection, a different battery arrangement, etc.
What happened, between the first and the last, that necessitated this incoherent diversity? Nothing, except that each of those who contributed to the bringing forth of these ships worked for his own account and had his own special point of view, without there appearing anywhere a guiding principle. Thus we have Mr. X's ship, Mr. Y's ship, . . . . but we are still waiting for the impersonal ship that meets the requirements of war. It is clearly to be seen that each constructor has sought the solution of a problem that interested him; usually he has found it; but he has remained outside of the question.
And so it is that our navy is composed of sexless vessels, the degenerate products of hybrid conceptions.
Seeing the usage that has been made of progress, one is tempted to believe that it sometimes marches backwards.
Where is progress when, beyond 17 knots, the Massena wastes in vain efforts the power of her machinery? Where is progress when, after having abandoned on the Bouvet and Charlemagne the battery arrangement of the Breimus, it is returned to on the Suffrent Where is progress when there is thought of adopting to-day a form of conning-tower that was to be found on the Gloire thirty years ago. Does progress prevent coming to an understanding, once for all, as to the arrangement of piping, of auxiliary engines, of subdivisions, of the drainage system, of the handling of boats, of ventilation, of superstructures, of interior fittings?
What happens, in the midst of this anarchy? Just this,—as soon as a vessel is commissioned, line officers and engineers take possession of her to change her from top to bottom, and, until her death, this martyr to transformation will never moor off an arsenal without becoming the prey of workmen. They interpose, juxtapose, superpose; they add but never take away. Then the vessel sinks deeper, always deeper. After a few years, her armor belt becomes useless; sunk beneath the water, it no longer is anything but an enormous useless burden.
Each modification, taken by itself, seems to increase the value of the vessel; all joined together diminish it, because the ship, built to have fixed arrangements, does not accommodate itself to those that are afterwards added, and because each one pulls in his own direction without regard to harmony.
All this costs dear, all the dearer that the work is done under uneconomical conditions, taking advantage of short stays in harbors to send on board workmen who lose half their time in coming and going. And it may well be asked if it would not have been better to utilize all our vessels, such as they were, and to devote all those millions to building new ones. Our naval strength would certainly have been greater than it now is.
Do you know what our mania for change cost us at the time of the Fashoda incident? The disability of six battleships, of an entire squadron! We could cite their names.
It is not necessary to be too exclusive: it must not be made a fixed principle not to touch a vessel any more after she has finished her trials.
Reconstructions, when they are carried out according to a complete plan in which everything is made to harmonize, can give renewed youth to old vessels of no value; but then it is needful to execute them at one time, and rapidly. Well, since vessels are periodically laid up by the need of new boilers, that is plainly the time to do other work on board. Except at this period, work should be limited to making repairs, and the moment of going into dock ought even to be waited for except when they are of an urgent character.
The complexity and variety of present-day material are such that vessels are no longer properly fitted out; it has become impossible to find one's way in the labyrinth. Some ships put to sea with their material incomplete; on others the arsenals mask their poverty by putting on board them rejected articles, made for other vessels, and whose sole use is to fill the blanks in the equipment sheets. And this distressful state comes from the fact that, nothing being interchangeable, not even the simplest objects, it is impossible to constitute storehouses that will function properly.
The coming into use of steam and steel, by turning our naval material topsy-turvy, must inevitably throw ideas into some confusion; but this disorder, the consequence of a period of transition, ought to have ended with the latter; and it has remained permanent. Yet it would seem that steam, armor, rifled cannon, and torpedoes are of sufficiently ancient date for the rules that ought to direct their employment to have been fixed upon. For fifteen years there has been nothing apparent that might have prevented the organization of our forces in a reasonable and economical manner; nothing except the absence of a doctrine.
There exist, nevertheless, general principles that are independent of new inventions, and that might have served as a guide. Here are some of them.
The power of guns is one thing; the intensity of their fire is another; one has no value without the other. If we allow ourselves to be hypnotized by power alone, we will build bigger and bigger guns that will naturally be less and less numerous. The preponderance of power will soon end in an absurdity, under the form of Tonnerres and Caimans.
Speed is a factor in strength; but still it is necessary that it should not require an increase of personnel that vessels do not possess in regular service; otherwise one finds himself in the position of a capitalist who has a great fortune but whose possessions are sequestrated.
It is the same with the radius of action. The arrangement of bunkers ought to permit getting the coal to the furnaces; in war time the personnel will be worn out by constant vigils, and it will not be possible to employ it every day in transporting coal from one bunker to another.
Neither is the speed with which a vessel can fill up with coal a matter of indifference; it plays a part in military operations, and the author of plans ought to take account of it.
Supplying a fleet with ammunition is so much the easier as the material is less various. It is time, therefore, to put a curb upon this debauch of novelty that has cost us one hundred and twentyeight different projectiles. Progress can perhaps manifest itself less continuously and proceed by successive leaps, so that before loading our shell rooms and magazines with a new projectile we may be sure of an appreciable advance. People do not seem to have realized the effect that this motley material will have upon strategy. It will interdict every displacement of forces because for each squadron there will be but a single port capable of renewing the contents of its magazines.
Nobody doubts the utility of armor; still it is necessary that its weight should be in proportion to the offensive power whose value it enhances. In the equation of displacement of a ship there is, therefore, a fixed relation between the two terms, protection and armament.
The ventilation of warships ought to take account of battle conditions; well, on certain battleships where the ventilators have inlets on the battery deck, it has been completely lost sight of that the noxious gases from bursting shell will be drawn down into the engine and fire rooms and will compel their abandonment.
When the needs of taking stations for battle require the presence of ten persons in a conning-tower, it is regrettable to be able to accommodate only half that number.
Finally, simplicity and strength are two military factors whose importance is often preponderant.
Considerations of this sort apply not only to the interior organization of a ship, but also to the part it is intended to play.
It has never been considered doubtful that the light vessels which radiate from squadrons should have a radius of action superior to that of the force to which they are attached. All the scouts of Condor type, which are incapable of keeping the sea as long as a battleship, are, therefore, only dead and useless capital.
These observations could be continued indefinitely.
Whence comes it then that it has taken several generations of ships to elucidate a part of these questions, and that others still remain without solution?
In the first place, uncertainty of ideas: we shall never possess a material appropriate to the conditions of war so long as we do not know exactly how it will be employed. Then, from the application of a defective method. In the conception of a ship, there are two different points of view to consider: power and efficiency, theory and practice. Well, all the anachronisms we have pointed out merely reveal the struggle between these two factors, a struggle in which power tends always to absorb efficiency because it manifests "itself more directly to the eyes of the constructor. Efficiency, on the contrary, is a modest personage whose qualities only reveal themselves after much acquaintance. But to obtain a harmonious product, these two rival elements must be joined together.
Before undertaking to lay down a ship, therefore, a sort of list of conditions ought to be drawn up that would not only indicate its characteristics, but would show under their various aspects the elements of efficiency and would impose absolutely such solutions as were already acquired.
The day when this ideal shall have been attained, a progress will have been realized much more important than that which consists of doing the opposite of what has been done before. We shall then be guided by a common idea that will economize much money and much labor.
There is complaint, and with good reason, that the French Navy takes five years instead of two to build a ship, so that vessels are out of date before entering active service. The reason for this is quite simple: the workmen who build our fleet are the same who worked on the tower of Babel.
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This confusion would not exist if we had a doctrine. But what is this famous doctrine then?
It is the bond thanks to which all those who participate in a common work act in accordance with common ideas and principles. If we do not possess this connecting-link, each will act according to his own inspirations; and there are a great many chances against hitting on the true solution. For, as we have already said, war is not a matter of improvisation; it is something to be learned. It is subject to very definite laws that disengage themselves from the results of previous struggles; and it is this aggregate of rules that constitutes the doctrine.
Some fifteen years ago the navy was flooded with articles and anonymous pamphlets whose authors thought they were inventing naval war. Under the pretence of modernizing military science, they assumed to free themselves from the past; and they did not perceive that they were thus making war as children do when they amuse themselves with lead soldiers. It was they who preached that scattering of our forces which the Minister of Marine has called a sanitary cordon, and who thought they had found the true formula when they had placed a fraction of our forces everywhere where the enemy could appear. What remains of these lucubrations to-day, in the realm of ideas? Scarcely a memory, because they did not rest upon a solid base. But as far as our material is concerned, the influence of these amateurs has been considerable. Nobody had set forth the principles of naval warfare, and we had no doctrine to oppose to these childish conceptions. The result was that the public adopted them, and they had sufficient effect to give a trend to our naval construction that has fatally damaged the navy.
Fortunately, the War College, newly created, came to act as counterpoise; and little by little the doctrine has emerged from the teaching of this school. Well, its mere existence sufficed to arrest the development of ephemeral ideas; for its teaching does not rest upon affirmations, like works of pure imagination, but upon demonstrations. It is for this reason that the doctrine takes a long time in developing and requires the co-operation of a succession of professors each of whom brings his contribution to the common edifice. The building is already well advanced, and it must be said that the exclusive credit for it belongs to the War College, whose teachings have spread even outside of the navy; we have had proof of this in the discussion of the naval appropriation bill.
We can, therefore, face the' future with confidence; for the moment we have to liquidate a past whose debt is very heavy.
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We possess all the elements necessary for constructing as well and even better than no matter what nation; our sea-coast population, so devoted, is capable of supplying incomparable crews. What we have lacked is guidance. We do not succeed in agreeing as to what we need; and thenceforth it becomes impossible to introduce the spirit of continuity into our organism.
The English admirals are not those who built up the naval power of their country. If England has had Rodney, Hawke and Nelson, we have had Duquesne, Tourville and Suffren. It is that impersonal being that is called the English Admiralty; it is that which has prepared all the elements of British greatness; it is that which has known how to create homogeneous fleets, to arm them, equip them, enlist crews for them (God knows at the price of what sacrifices) ; to place at their head the most capable men. Its severity has often been excessive; but, in exchange, it has never haggled with admirals for its support.
What a spectacle the French Navy afforded us during this time! Directed alternately by men of genius and by incapables, it described a sinusoid, passing alternately from greatness to nothingness."' While army officers, such as d'Estrees " and d'Estaing, commanded its fleets, men like La Motte-Picquet and Suffren remained in subordinate positions. But what was most fatal was letting ourselves be dazzled by the charm of figures, seeking number without strength. Hence those squadrons that put to sea with incomplete crews, an incomplete armament, incomplete supplies. .In brief, under the Monarchy, indifference or illwill; under the Revolution, anarchy; under the Empire, impotence.
To-day, it is another affair. The magic of words has replaced the magic of figures. We have a scientific school that integrates war. From all this jumble, vague formula disengage themselves: defensive, police of the seas, coast defense, commerce destroying. All this while war is forgotten, that work of force and destruction; war, with its laws, its necessities, its exigences. Each wishes to dress the navy in his own fashion, and, adding a piece to its cloak, contributes to dressing it out like a harlequin.
A Minister of Marine, contemplating all this disorder, cried out: "Our fleet is a fleet of samples." The phrase, struck like a coin from the die, has remained—the thing also.
V.
GRAND MANEUVERS.
The grand maneuvers have been of incontestable advantage to the navy. They have, been the means of stirring the torpor of our squadrons, which, without them, would waste away in inaction, since they have been deprived of the coal and personnel necessary for cruising. It is only during these periods of activity that some of the necessities of war can be taken account of. They train crews and officers; they show commanders that in war time they will be obliged to give over a part of their authority in order to rest, while, during short sorties, they assume to do everything themselves. From all these points of view there is only benefit to be derived from annual maneuvers.
As far as strategy is concerned, they furnish indications rather than conclusions. The sole fact that the guns are not loaded gives the operations a conventional form. When it is sure that an encounter with the enemy will not have irreparable consequences, it costs nothing to attempt the most unlikely adventures; and the rules that impose themselves immediately one risks the fate of his ship are thus deviated from.
It is above all exercises of getting and keeping contact that are given a false aspect by the fictitious character of maneuvers. It can be foreseen that when shell are fired a new light will be shed upon the conclusions of times of peace.
The frequency of attacks upon batteries seems, for example, to indicate that naval material could be freely risked in an operation of this sort, whereas the Chinese-Japanese, Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars seem to prove the contrary. Moreover, the fashion in which these attacks have sometimes been conducted leads to the supposition that what is sought is less to extinguish the fire of the batteries than to be safe from their shots, in which case the only logical conclusion is that it would be better to abstain altogether.
But a greater danger comes from the choice of themes when they are false a priori. They then reveal regrettable tendencies and completely falsify the spirit of the maneuvers. Admiral Aube, to whom belongs the honor of having introduced these annual tests into our navy, would be greatly astonished, if he were living, to see the use that has been made of them.
At a certain period, the question of protecting the coast with a force superior to the enemy's could not be escaped from. What was sought to be proved? That the principal role of the navy is coast defense? Or even that we have no better use to make of our forces than to immobilize them along the coast, even with numerical superiority? The result has been to spread abroad false ideas that some day will return to trouble us.
The officers themselves are influenced by these dangerous practices. By repeating indefinitely the same exercises, they end by persuading themselves that things ought to be just so; that they cannot happen otherwise; and this impression becomes a part of them without being discussed. The day when one passes from convention to reality, one quite naturally recurs to giving the same solution to the same problems.
It is important, therefore, to put in practice only likely themes, and to apply them in a likely manner.
Thank heaven we are speaking of a time already long past; in the periods when the fleet was formed, the importance of the effectives permitted enlarging the circle of combinations, and it was sought to elucidate questions of greater interest than the everlasting coast defense; but, there again, the details of execution brought out regrettable consequences.
The cycle of our maneuvers is not yet closed. Many points upon which there is need of throwing a ray of light still remain obscure. For example: there have already been several attempts to break blockades; but it ought first to be ascertained if they are still possible with submarines in existence, and under what conditions. Commerce destroying itself also affords a vast field for investigations. Almost nothing is known of the problems that its application raises; hitherto it has only been pointed out to us through economic considerations that relegate it to the domain of pure theory.
Finally, it has been so much repeated that it is possible to assure the protection of the coast solely with flotillas of torpedo-boats and submarines that it is time to justify the assertion. We possess in the Mediterranean numerous defense flotillas and a veritable fleet that would be capable of playing the part of assailant. We, therefore, have in hand all the elements needed to clear up this question.
For a long time yet we have plenty to give an always new interest to our maneuvers.
VI.
THE WAR GAME.
In default of grand maneuvers, the war game, which is within the reach of all purses, can be employed; with it the whole fleet can be mobilized and an unlimited duration can be given to operations; but it should be used with discretion.
From the tactical point of view, distractions of this sort ought to be repudiated. Battle depends wholly upon the intelligence of the commander; and tactics is only the slave of this intelligence. Well, it is impossible, with toys, to approach even remotely to the reality; and there is risk of warping one's judgment by taking what is only a game seriously.
In strategy, on the contrary, the war game can render some service. Thus, it will show, better than maneuvers, what becomes of scouting lines as soon as narrow seas are left. But it must not be forgotten that on the board the sea is always calm; vessels can always give their full speed without ever suffering from scale in the boilers; in short, damages to the machinery need not be feared. Here again general indications must be sought rather than precise conclusions.