Not so very long ago the editor of a certain British naval periodical invited me to contribute an article dealing with some phase of the Battle of Jutland. On my suggesting that a comparison of the material—ships, armor, guns, projectiles, etc.—at the disposal of the British and German Fleets might be interesting and instructive, he showed some hesitation, and finally remarked that he would prefer me to write of the human element and the influence that discipline, training, and tradition had exercised on the course and result of the Jutland action, adding that in his opinion the material factor was of negligible importance, especially in this particular battle, where the opposing fleets were evenly matched as far as the quality of their weapons was concerned. This disinclination to examine problems of naval tactics from the hard, matter-of-fact viewpoint of the so-called materialist and the tendency to concentrate instead on the more romantic aspects of naval history, such as individual gallantry, the facing of heavy odds, and heroic efforts, not always successful, to compensate for deficiencies of material by sheer courage and will to win, is very marked among naval students; and anyone who attempts to assign to material its proper value in modern naval operations is liable to find himself crying in the wilderness. And yet it is impossible to dip into the records of sea warfare, especially during the past seventy years, without realizing the prosaic fact, unpalatable though it be to historians of the sentimental school, that the outcome of a naval engagement is always largely governed, and sometimes mainly decided, by the qualities or defects of the material employed.
It need hardly be said that a superiority in material produces the most decisive results when there is virtual equality on the human side, and such equality must necessarily be assumed in any academic discussion on the relative value of naval weapons. Numerous examples could be quoted in which one fleet, superior in numbers and equipment but manned by crews of faulty morale, discipline, and training, and led by a commander of weak and vacillating character, has been utterly routed by another fleet inferior in numbers and armament but handled and fought with skill and resolution. So far as the World War is concerned, it may be said without fear of contradiction that for the first two years or so there was little to choose between the British and German Fleets in respect of the courage, discipline, training, and devotion of officers and men. This was, moreover, the period that witnessed all the most important naval operations, and it is therefore the period that offers the most promising field for a study of the influence of material on modern sea tactics. That the subject is much too vast to be dealt with adequately in a few pages of print goes without saying, and in the limited space at disposal it will be impossible to do more than touch upon the salient data derived from the World War which are pertinent to the issue.
No comparison of the British and German Fleets as they stood in August, 1914, is of much value unless it takes into account various considerations which governed the respective shipbuilding policies of the two powers. While it would be futile to pretend that the British Fleet during the years immediately preceding the war had not been developed largely with an eye to its eventual employment against Germany, it is nevertheless a fact that the North Sea, although recognized as the most likely battleground of the future, was by no means the only sphere with which British naval strategists were preoccupied. Thus, if battleships, cruisers, etc., were designed primarily for fighting in North Sea waters, it was still held to be essential that they should be able, if necessary, to operate just as effectively in any other quarter of the navigable globe. In other words, the British ships of 1914 were, in the well-known phrase, built to "go anywhere and do anything." This involved the pre-emption of a not inconsiderable proportion of the total weight and space in each ship for purposes which did not conduce directly to fighting efficiency. It was necessary, for instance, to provide the officers and men with better living quarters than would have been required had the ships been meant only to make short cruises in the vicinity of their coasts. It was necessary, also, that they should have a large fuel capacity, and, further, that their efficiency for battle should remain unaffected even when they carried their maximum supply of fuel and stores.
These requirements, coupled with the demand for higher speeds and heavier armament than were found in contemporary foreign ships, imposed a most difficult task on British naval constructors, and one that was more complicated than that which German designers had to solve. For the German Fleet was created for the express purpose of fighting Great Britain, and all its capital ships were designed for work in the North Sea or the Baltic, the contingency of their having to operate at points many thousands of miles distant from the Fatherland being thought so remote as not to justify special provision. In the case of these ships, therefore, a lower standard of habitability could be accepted, and although the fuel capacity of German dreadnaughts was nominally as large as that of British vessels of equivalent displacement, it was actually very much less, because many of the coal-bunkers were so placed as to be almost inaccessible and probably were rarely, if ever, used for their ostensible purpose, being regarded rather as part of the protective system of the ship. This particular point has been overlooked in previous comparisons of British and German material, but it will be appreciated by those who inspected the German ships surrendered after the Armistice. On the other hand, it is only fair to acknowledge the great technical skill of German constructors and the ingenuity which they displayed in utilizing every fraction of displacement and every cubic foot of space for increasing the fighting efficiency of the ship.
German capital ships were, indeed, not cruising ships but fighting ships par excellence. Moreover, they were designed on tactical principles which differed in some important respects from those favored by the British Admiralty. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, the creator of the Imperial German Navy, had his own ideas about warship design, and it must be admitted that many of them were vindicated by war experience. In his judgment, the first requirement of a vessel built for the line of battle was that it should keep afloat and retain its power to fight even after receiving very heavy punishment. It was useless, he argued, to endow a ship with tremendous offensive power while at the same time leaving her so vulnerable that she might be knocked out by a lucky hit before she had a chance of bringing her weight to bear. When the first British battle cruisers of the Invincible class came into service, Tirpitz called them "Fisher's ten-minute ships," meaning that ten minutes was the limit of time they could hope to remain in the battle line in view of their very light protection. The fate of the Invincible and the Indefatigable at Jutland seemed to corroborate this estimate, while, on the other hand, the survival of most of the German battle cruisers after a terrific hammering from large-caliber guns testified to the soundness of the Tirpitz theory that protection was a feature of design which could not be subordinated to armament or speed without incurring the risk of summary destruction.
Again, the loss of the Queen Mary, Invincible and Indefatigable furnishes a conclusive answer to those who maintain that the personal element can always rise superior to deficiencies of material. Animated by dauntless courage, thoroughly efficient in every branch of their work, the thousands of splendid officers and men in these three ships were, nevertheless, the victims of a fatal defect in material which they could under no circumstances have overcome. Why the three ships should have been destroyed so easily is a mystery which has never been solved, and probably never will be unless their designs are made available for inspection. It seems, however, that those who inspired the designs had miscalculated the effect of fire from medium caliber guns, for it is notorious that each of the three vessels succumbed to a few salvos of twelve-inch and eleven-inch shell. In these early British battle cruisers an attempt was made to give them a speed that would enable them to choose their own range, and guns of sufficient power to outshoot the enemy, the idea being that the latter should be brought under fire and knocked out before he, with his lighter and shorter-ranging weapons, could reply with any effect. But the Germans, with great prevision, had forestalled this plan by giving their ships a degree of protection that enabled them to resist this initial punishment, thus compelling the heavier-armed but more vulnerable British ships to come nearer, in order to make their fire more decisive, and incidentally bring themselves within range of the lighter but very effective German artillery.
There seems no doubt that Lord Fisher and the tactical school he represented had exaggerated the effect on well-armored ships of a few hits from heavy shell. On the strength of paper formulae it had been calculated that a few rounds from 13.5-inch or 15-inch shell would put any ship out of commission. This, however, was so far from being the case that after the Battle of Jutland twenty-five hits from 15-inch shell and as many more from projectiles of lesser caliber were counted on the Derflinger alone; yet the ship was still afloat, her machinery was intact, and she was still able to use part of her armament. What is the explanation of this striking discrepancy between, on the one hand, the theoretical and the actual results of British gunfire at Jutland, and, on the other, the powers of resistance exhibited by battle cruisers of the respective fleets? The answer is easy. British principles of design and armament were based for the most part on theory, while the German principles were founded upon actual experience derived from tests. During the years that the British naval authorities were building up their dreadnaught fleet they made very few experiments to determine debatable points relating to design, and never, to the best of the writer's belief, undertook such gunnery tests as might, and probably would, have given them betimes the experience that was purchased so dearly during the war, Germany, on the contrary, prefaced each new stage of development by exhaustive experiments made regardless of cost. The gunnery and torpedo trials alone which they carried out between 1908 and 1914 must have run into a figure exceeding the cost of an additional dreadnaught, yet this lavish expenditure on practical demonstration was undoubtedly the soundest form of economy in the long run. On one occasion they built a target representing the midship side and underwater section of a modem battleship; it weighed several thousand tons, and was used principally for trying out alternative methods of localizing sub-surface explosion. By this drastic method they were able to perfect underwater protection to such a degree that not a single German capital ship of the dreadnaught type was lost by torpedo or mine, though casualties of this nature were far more common in the German Fleet than in the British. Gunnery tests were conducted on the same realistic and extensive scale. In the years before the war the High Sea Fleet regularly fired at whole squadrons of obsolete ships, some of which had been partly reconstructed for the purpose and fitted with modern armor-plate over part of their hulls. Experiments of this kind not only gave invaluable practice in gun pointing, fire control, and fire discipline, which subsequently bore good fruit in the war, but rendered it possible to test the various types of projectiles and thus enabled the Germans to produce the remarkably efficient armor-piercing shell that made their gunnery so effective at Jutland.
So convinced was von Tirpitz of the value of stout armor protection and extensive subdivision, that rather than sacrifice this feature he was content to give his battle cruisers a lower speed than that of their British "opposite numbers" and to arm both them and his battleships with guns of smaller caliber than were mounted in the British Fleet. He claimed that the adoption of this lighter armament involved no real sacrifice of fighting power, because the Krupp guns were superior in accuracy and all other ballistic properties, and could drive their projectiles through the comparatively thin armor of British ships at maximum battle range. By accepting smaller guns he saved a great deal of weight that was mostly utilized for improving protection, though some allowance had to be made for the greater weight of the German cartridges, which had to be packed in brass cases owing to the construction of the Krupp breech-block. It may be pointed out, in passing, that the ideal of unsinkability which German constructors strove to attain had long prevailed in their navy, for as far back as 1896, Herr Dietrich, on the designing staff of the German Admiralty, stated in a paper read before one of the learned societies that German warships of that day differed from the British in that they were divided up into as many watertight compartments as was deemed possible without interfering with the working of the vessel. "Perhaps," he added, "we have already gone too far in this, and service on board may be obstructed. Every athwart ship bulkhead is solid and unpierced. Communication from one engine room to another or from one stokehold to another must be established only over the protective deck above water, or may be carried on below by telegraphs and speaking tubes."
Some interesting particulars of the development of German armor-piercing shells were given in a book, Die Technik im Weltkriege, published in Berlin after the war. In this volume Naval Constructor Betzhold offers the following observations on British ammunition at the Battle of Jutland, though his patent desire to make propaganda for German industry has probably led him into some exaggeration. "The British projectiles in part did not burst at all, and in part detonated outside the armor; while the German fuse did not produce an explosion until the shell had passed through the armor. The composition and stowage of the British powder charges and their inadequate protection formed an ever-present source of danger to the whole ship. Both in disposition and thickness the British armor proved unequal to the attack of the medium caliber German guns; on the other hand, the strength and quality of the German armor was such as to defeat attack by the heaviest British calibers. The 15-inch shell was unable to penetrate our 13.7-inch armor even at ranges from six and one-quarter to nine and one-half miles." Another writer in the same volume. Commander Kinzel, states, with reference to the superior functioning of the German projectiles, that the Ordnance Department of the Marine Amt had long recognized the importance of improving A.P. shell and had devoted endless thought and experiment to the subject. "Thus, the German shell used at Jutland was the result of years of collaboration between the naval authorities and the firm of Krupp. It was made of Krupp crucible nickel-chrome steel, which was unsurpassed in hardness and toughness. It tapered at the nose to a long and fine point, which was protected by a cap made of softer material. The discovery of the most favorable form and the most suitable material for this cap was only made after numerous experiments, which cost a great deal of money. To obtain the maximum effect from a burst it was necessary to employ a highly-explosive aromatic composition; but since substances of this nature usually detonate upon impact against armor, the difficult problem had to be solved of so 'phlegmatizing' the charge that it could be brought safely through the thickest armor, though without in any way impairing the violence' of its disruption. The severity of this problem may be judged by the fact that at the date of Jutland the British had not succeeded in solving it. In spite of prolonged experiments, they had been compelled to load their armor-piercing shell almost exclusively with black powder which, although less sensitive, was far less efficient than the high explosive compounds. Equal care was displayed in perfecting the fuse, which is, of course, the all-important element of an A.P. projectile. Thanks to an unwearying devotion to duty, which rose superior to the many disappointments met with, we succeeded eventually in devising a delay-action fuse which was unaffected by any shock, and which allowed the intact projectile to penetrate well into the vitals of a hostile ship and then caused it to explode. In this wise, therefore, was put into the hands of the German Fleet an armor-piercing shell as perfect as human foresight could make it—a weapon superior to anything that our foemen possessed."
Here we have a typical example of that patient, scientific striving for perfection which made German naval equipment so efficient and formidable on the day of battle. Thanks to their superior range-finders and fire-control apparatus—which had been developed on the same principle of thoroughness and attention to detail—the German gunners were usually able to get on to the target almost at once, and once they had found it they knew that every shell that went home could be depended on to produce the maximum effect. This, unfortunately, could not be said of the British projectiles in use at the date of Jutland. As Lord Jellicoe afterwards wrote: "The battle convinced us that our armor-piercing shell was inferior in its penetrative power to that used by the Germans, and immediately after the action I represented this with a view to immediate investigation. With one of the old type of armor-piercing shells of a particular caliber as used at Jutland the shell would, with oblique impact at battle range, break up whilst holing a certain thickness of plate, and the shell could not, therefore, reach the vitals of the enemy's ships. A shell of the new type and same caliber, as produced by the 1917 committee, would at the same oblique impact and range pass whole through a plate of double the thickness before exploding, and could, therefore, with delay-action fuse, penetrate to the magazines of a capital ship. Had our ships possessed the new type of A.P. shell at Jutland, many of the enemy's vessels, instead of being only damaged, would probably not have been able to reach port." How, in face of this admission, is it possible to maintain that the material factor is of negligible importance in naval combat? As a consequence of the neglect to produce a thoroughly efficient projectile, much of the fine work done by British gunners at Jutland was lost endeavor. Eighteen months later (November, 1917) there occurred an incident that further emphasized the lesson. A British squadron, which included the battle cruiser Repulse, surprised German mine-sweepers at work in the Bight under cover of a light cruiser screen. A brief action ensued at high speed, during which the Repulse scored a raking hit from her 15-inch battery on the German light cruiser Konigsherg. The projectile, weighing over 1,900 pounds, passed through all the funnels and exploded in one of the forward bunkers. It broke up into a few large fragments, the detonation being so feeble that only minor local damage was done. Had this shell functioned efficiently it would probably have destroyed the ship.
As with gunnery equipment, so with torpedoes and mines: the German weapons were of uniformly high quality and rarely failed to do what they were expected to do. The torpedoes generally ran true, thanks to meticulous care in manufacture and adjustment, and the effect of their explosion was always disastrous because the war-head was exceptionally large—the desirability of increasing the charge having been demonstrated by peace-time experiments. The German type of mine, too, retained its supremacy to the end of the war. This high standard of material was not due to any inherent superiority of German science or engineering. Invention is not, and never has been, the German forte. But where the race excels is in its capacity for improving on the ideas of others, for taking up an idea at the point where it has been dropped by the originator and patiently improving it to the utmost limit. This faculty has led to remarkable results in many spheres of activity other than that of naval technique, e.g., the development of aniline dyes, synthetic drugs, and optical glass.
In the writer's opinion, experience has proved beyond dispute that good material is as essential as good personnel to the attainment of decisive results in modern naval warfare, that the two elements are interdependent, and that serious shortcomings in the one cannot be balanced by superiority in the other. Naval men who insist on the vital importance of aiming at super-quality in ships, armament, and equipment may be dubbed "materialists" by the unthinking, but the epithet is really a term of honor. There was a time, it is true, when false doctrines of materialism prevailed in the higher councils of the British Navy; when it was believed that the key to victory lay in huge displacements and monster ordnance; and when so much attention was devoted to the piling up of tons and guns that perfection in detail was neglected, with the result that the advantage conferred by superior weight and numbers was largely nullified. But the lesson has been taken to heart, and today the British Navy is second to none in its zeal for one hundred per cent efficiency in material, no less than in personnel.
