Heresies of Sea Power/Part 2/Chapter 2
II
BASE POWER
Togo's action in Port Arthur Bay on February 9, 1904, alluded to in the last chapter, draws attention to the whole question of arsenals and bases. The' Blue Water School' lays down as a general theory that fortifications, save to a few arsenals and bases, are undesirable. Extremists tend to carry this a considerable distance, but the extremist school is not worth consideration here. What may be termed the 'limitations of passive defence' school,—those who admit the desirability of fortifying arsenals strongly, and outlying posts more or less slightly demand attention. These are they who assign the first and second places to the fleet; the shore and the shore forces come but a bad third. The advocates of naval command of naval bases may be found amongst these.
That an important place like Portsmouth must be heavily defended is accepted as an axiom by practically all schools and parties. Forts able to repel any kind of bombardment are usually admitted as quite necessary.
The extremists, perhaps, would argue that provided the fleet is intact and victorious, no serious attack on a main base is to be expected or indeed possible; and it is difficult to argue that this is untrue. To those who contend that 'the fleet might suffer a reverse,' the extremists reply 'All the more reason why money should be spent entirely on ships and not be devoted to bricks and mortar. Build enough ships, and your contemplated reverse cannot occur.'
Undoubtedly there is a very great deal in this argument, and it might be accepted as conclusive were it not that base attack is likely to be recognised sooner or later as the main objective of naval warfare, and to leave bases open to attack would court such a state of affairs. If the base be weak then a fleet must be tied to it to protect it, and so the extreme opponents of 'bricks and mortar' would, were they given rein, probably defeat their own ends.
Long custom, rather than logical reasoning, has created a system of first-class bases, secondary bases and so on down to minor bases of the fifteenth rank or thereabouts protected by a couple of six-inch guns 'to keep off a hostile cruiser.' How or why the hostile cruiser should come to such a place as—for instance—Lough Swilly, in order to test the six inch-guns, and what harm the guns would do to a modern armoured cruiser are questions that have not apparently entered into the scheme of things to any extent. Custom has decreed that 'moderate fortifications' should exist at certain places, and there is no doubt a pious hope that the hostile cruiser bent on destroying a mercantile port defended by a few six-inch guns will be sufficiently obliging to fire at the fort instead of at the docks and shipping that it 'protects.' The cardinal and obvious axiom that the enemy will not come unless in force calculated to make the defence of no account is invariably ignored altogether. Our forefathers put up martello towers, and the enemy, for lack of anything better to do, used now and again to attack them. On these classical grounds we have erected the martello towers of our own age.
Now, bearing in mind the axiom that the attack will only be delivered in force sufficient to overcome all opposition—unless we presuppose the enemy insane he will attack under no other conditions—it would seem essential to have all fortifications of the very strong order, and at least able to defy anything except perhaps a very considerable battle fleet. In theory, perhaps, such a principle is accepted: in practice the prohibitive expense is in the way. It would cost altogether too much.
A recognition of this fact, coupled with the idea of being able to use the defence elsewhere as offence is undoubtedly the origin of 'coast-defence battleships.' These in the original idea of them were to be scattered around the different harbours to take the place of forts, while, the need for such defence being past, they could be used for various offensive purposes as ships.
Gradually it was perceived that coast-defence ships thus scattered were an attraction to an enemy and an invitation to him to destroy them in detail; and so the idea of concentrating defence squadrons came into being.
At the same time it was found that coast-defence ships were poor sea-boats and practically useless with a sea-going battle squadron, and on such grounds every navy now has dropped them in favour of ships able to act anywhere in all weathers. Thus, by a process of cycle we have returned to the equivalent of the martello tower and batteries. As a result big bases are crammed with guns rarely if ever likely to be fired at an enemy, and lesser places are supplied with a few guns that if attacked at all will be overwhelmed. The situation is on the face of it illogical; but it is also the result of an attempted evolution of something better.
If the fort system be wrong, then there is probably some error in the course of that evolution which took us from forts to ships and then back to forts again. Examined, one is inclined to imagine that perhaps the coast-defence ships idea was not wrong save in its application.
Its application may have been wrong in this wise. The coast-defunders, even the early American monitors, were always primarily ships. They were bad ships in the matter of nautical qualities, but they were still always more ships than floating forts. The floating battery proper hardly survived its first inception, when the needs of the Crimean war produced it for offence against land fortifications. In the Crimea the floating batteries were eminently successful, and at Kinburn accomplished in a short time what no battle fleet of those days could ever have done in any time. Unfortunately, perhaps, the idea then fell into the hands of the ' seaman,' and there emerged things with masts and yards—palpable imitations of the old steam shipsof-the-line. Compromise was immediately sought and the first idea—save in so far as protection was concerned—went by the board, never to be revived. Eor though a later age built coast-defence monitors, these were always the ship rather than the fort, and the equivalent of the martello tower was constructed on land as heretofore.
Now suppose instead of the compromise the armoured ship had been evolved as the armoured ship, and the floating battery as the floating battery. Let us imagine floating batteries on raft bodies, or some other species of monitor in which speed is sacrificed for invulnerability. Ability to move is all that is required, their heavy guns fitted for high-angle fire would mainly constitute their radius, which would be the horizon. The primary defensive use of such monitors would be against long-range bombardments.
A long-range bombardment may be defined as an attack from below the horizon. Comparatively few ships can as yet use the necessary elevation, but most modern gun mountings are designed with an eye to such application; and almost all ships can be inclined to admit of it. A bombardment of this kind is, of course, absolutely aimless, and little likely to do harm save by a lucky shell—unless continued for a considerable time. A dockyard, however, covers a very large area, and that area can be exactly located by chart. The futility of bombarding land towns is held to be proved by the Boer bombardment of Ladysmith in the South African War, but such bombardments were carried out with little intelligence: had the British bombarded Pretoria, it is probable that bombardments would occupy a higher place in the scale than they now do. At Ladysmith no special area was selected, had the Boer guns taken the town piece by piece they would certainly have razed it in time, even as Port Arthur was being razed when it surrendered. A dockyard, moreover, is infinitely more vulnerable than a town, and there is little or no comparison possible between the destructive effects of big naval shell and those of shore guns which average a hundred pounds at the very most, and are apt to be much nearer twenty pounds. The big high-explosive shell is a fait accompli now and one such shell dropped into a dockyard would if it fell anywhere near shops, slips or docks do indescribable mischief. Probably a big common shell would do little less harm. It is true that Santiago de Cuba was subjected to a bombardment from the dynamite guns of the Vesuvius (which simulated a long-range bombardment fairly well) and the Vesuvius seems to have done no harm at all; but against this it must be remembered that the American vessel discharged very few projectiles all told, and had no large dockyard to aim at. Of the few that she did fire one fell near a destroyer. It might as well have been a ship, and that ship would undoubtedly have been injured or destroyed.
Port Arthur is another story. Here there is no doubt that the bombardment caused a cessation of repair work in the dockyard, destroyed many important shops in the yard and generally contributed largely to the inability of the Russian fleet to repair damages after the battle of Round Island. This result was mostly achieved by land batteries, the naval guns afloat took little part in the affair. But it is a matter of some wonder that the Japanese never managed to originate armoured floating-batteries with which to attack Port Arthur by sea. It could have been done; and it would surely have been effective to a degree.
Supposing merely twelve guns to be engaged in bombarding an arsenal from beyond the horizon, and assuming a rate of fire per gun of one round every five minutes, in four hours only no less than 250 projectiles will be discharged. Each gun would be laid on the big area of dockyard, and probably a balloon would be employed to locate the hits. It is certainly conceivable that from ten to thirty projectiles would fall in the aimed-at area, and they would very probably accomplish damage that it would take at least a month to remedy. Each ship having fired 48 rounds per gun would have some ammunition left to fight with in the event of an attempted counter attack, even if they did not (as they in all probability would) carry a special extra supply for bombarding. Unless within a hundred miles at the time, no friendly fleet, however powerful, would be of the slightest utility against this attack. The defensive capacity of a fleet is, therefore, limited by its ability to blockade the enemy in his own harbours, or annihilate him on emerging.
For the present it is obvious that if a fleet is able to slip out, it is certainly able, and might certainly attempt, to conduct a long-range bombardment: no sane commander would attempt directly to engage forts on the chance of silencing them; he would be silenced himself first, given any efficiency on the part of the shore-gunners. But if he keeps below the horizon the forts cannot hit him. They may locate him with a balloon, or even see him from high-site forts; but at a distance of some miles a ship is an infinitesimal speck. She averages, say, 400 by 75 feet, less than 1/1000 the target offered by a square mile of dockyard. Be rangefinders never so perfect, the chances of a damaging shell from the ship on to the Yard are infinitely greater than the chance that the ship is hit, even if stationary. By damaging a main dockyard a fleet ensures that, if it be subsequently defeated in a naval battle, its opponents will be unable to repair damages and so be heavily handicapped. Considerations such as these may induce a losing action which otherwise would not be attempted. In other words, this means that the course of affairs may be governed by the conditions of the bases of the other side and the ease with which damage can be done to them. A realisation of this fact gives bases an added importance.
Bases—not fleets—will surely eventually be the aim of all naval warfare, a truth all will incline to admit in principle even now, though few may clearly recognise it in detail. To destroy a base is worth far more risk and far more loss than to defeat a fleet, which, like the Russians at Port Arthur between February and August 1904, may retreat to the base for repair and then come out again. That base attacks are always the ultimate end of a guerre de course is generally ignored by those who affect to despise, the jeune école.
France is the home of guerre de course theories, and her naval policy is always tinted by these theories. Hence the long adherence to coast-defence battleships which are small and cheap, little able to engage big sea-going battleships, but eminently fitted for longrange bombardments and coast operations generally. In the Siegfried class Germany imitated these ships without embodying or perhaps understanding their raison d'etre; for the German coast-defenders have short-range guns.
The objection to coast-defence ships is that their range and utility are limited, and that they are relatively more vulnerable than large ships. Hence the advocacy of floating batteries in which speed is entirely sacrificed to invulnerability. Such craft are probably best armed with something very superior to the best modern 12-inch and a strong battery of 4.7 or 4-inch against torpedo boat attack, though, as they would have to carry little that any ordinary ship needs, it should be possible so to build them that torpedo attack is little to be feared. They could safely move a few miles out to attack a fleet attempting a long-range bombardment, while their moral menace would probably prevent such a bombardment being attempted by an enemy liable to be interrupted by a defending fleet coming up. To close them would be a very grave risk—from afar off they could not be hurt.
Garrison Artillery would well serve to man such batteries, with possibly a naval warrant officer as 'master,' and a navigator, locally employed in general command of the masters. There would be no need for other sailors on board them, let alone that it would be a long day before sailors could be spared for such duties. As things are at present Garrison Artillery are in a great measure a wasted force, or rather so much sunk and unemployed capital. In mobile batteries they would not only be better able to defend their harbours against attack, but they would also (a most important point) be eminently able to attack the forts of the enemy.
It is surely the enemy's bases not his fleets that must be attacked. If a stronger power wars with a weaker, and the weaker battle-fleets remain in harbour declining combat on the sea, the stronger battle-fleets have but a limited utility and will come to represent sunk capital that cannot be realised save in bad weather, when monitors and the like would have to make harbour.
It is of the nature of a digression, but one may well pause here to inquire whether the battleship is really logical, or really needed save to oppose other battleships. The 'ironclad' was born in the American civil war. The combatants there were ill-matched, the South had not the building resources of the North. Had things been otherwise, had the combatants had equal resources in the construction of monitors, it is at least permissible to speculate as to whether the battle-fleets of to-day would ever have grown into existence. The Thunderer, the Kearsage, and the Trisvititelia would perhaps seem the line along which ship-building would have proceeded, and naval warfare, realising the spirit as well as the substance of modern times, would have become solely a matter of attack on bases. As things are we would seem to have taken the substance without the spirit. Nothing is so conservative as the sea service, and as already noted, directly almost that the ironclad was formulated, efforts were made to harmonise it with old conditions. The most modern ironclad is merely the three-decker redivivus, controlled and directed chiefly by the spirit of the old days. This may partly be attributed to the existence of 'seamen.' When the ironclad idea first entered, the seaman appeared likely to be superseded by the 'soldier at sea'—the integral idea of the earliest ages. Fleets and sailors represented an immense amount of sunk capital,—so much 'stock' as it were.
The true inwardness of this may perhaps be made clearer by a reference to an incident of every-day life. A publisher, let us say, prints 2,000 copies of a book upon some subject that quickly grows out of date. Having sold 1,000 of his first edition, he finds that the book is out-of-date, new facts having come into existence since the work was published. To reprint an up-to-date book means practically a new book, and it certainly entails the sacrifice as waste paper of half the first edition. Business instinct forces the publisher, first to postpone any new edition as long as possible, so as to sacrifice as little as may be of his stock, secondly all his efforts are directed to utilizing the stock to bring it to date by adding addenda pages to the original book.
This is exactly what happened with the navies of the world: all nations that had large fleets of unarmoured ships avoided the ironclad as long as they dared, and, forced to adopt it, sought to do so as cheaply as possible. It was grafted on to the old navies and evolved to suit the old navies. Thus masts and yards—bound up with the existence of seamen—were adhered to as long as possible, and the mastless ship only very slowly evolved. The very existence almost into the twentieth century of a school which claimed the utility of mast and yard work as sound training for bluejackets who would never have to apply their knowledge; is a proof of how the new navy was grafted on to the old. Long before the ironclad appeared it was obvious that steam alone was fully sufficient as a motive power. A hundred million pounds were expended to avoid the wasting of less than ten millions of 'invested capital.' To create a modern navy in the early sixties would have entailed heroic sacrifices, the sweeping away of all the naval service and the substitution of the oldest sea warrior, the soldier at sea. It has taken the nations nearly forty years to realise and accomplish that fact; even to a partial extent. It has needed, in fine, a new generation of sailors who are not 'seamen,' sailors still in name, but, in actual fact, compounds (in the wide sense) of engineers and marines. Such an assertion is hardly received afloat; but that is because men forget that this is what the great early sailors were. The 'seaman,' though such famous names as Nelson are enrolled in his lists, is simply the rower of the past put to do the fighting as well as the moving. The process of a similar evolution to-day would be to eliminate all except the naval engineers and put them to do the fighting; the opposite alternatives to convert the military ranks into engineers. Most nations have adopted a compromise whereby the engineer partially replaces the old time seaman, and the deck officer and his men the old time soldiers-at-sea.
Ancient history has only a relative bearing on modern practice. Learned professors have evolved wonderful histories of military strategy in the early and middle ages and in past centuries, the study of which is supposed to help the modern soldier. But such modern soldiers as are out of the rut of ordinary progress seem to pin little faith in the Past as a criterion for the Future. Its utility is a classical idea, and in great measure bounded by the fact that the enemy has the same fancy. It was the modern idea not the Past that enabled Germany to beat France in 1870–71.
On the sea greater changes have been at work. On the land there has been a steady and constant evolution, nothing approaching a complete revolution has occurred. On the sea the revolution has been immense, and if there has not been a complete volte face, it is due only to the retarding influences alluded to above. 'Tactics alter, but principles of strategy do not,' says the gospel of the day. It is not true. Tactics remain much as they were, because the old idea of a warship still remains—strategy on the other hand has completely changed. The destruction of bases by Sea Power in the days of the great French war was impossible—to-day it is fully possible to the nation that chooses to avail itself of modern advance, and has the power to carry it through. Substantially it is what Japan did do at Port Arthur in 1904, though her policy was hampered by traditions and the means for effective warfare against a base were not hers. A respect for tradition caused Togo to make the Port Arthur fleet his objective; but those much-condemned bombardments of his show that he also had a clear conception that, the base destroyed, the fleet would matter nothing. This is where strategy has so altered: in the old days the fleet not the base was the heart of things: to-day the base is the heart pure and simple and the ships, whatever their radius, are but arms of the base. Admiral Togo's real claim to immortality is, perhaps, not that he won the battle of the Sea of Japan, but that he bombarded Port Arthur, did enough damage to retard the repair of ships and subsequently landed a naval brigade whose shore battery made it out of the question for the Russians to repair their damaged vessels.
Still Togo (or Japan) imperfectly understood base-attack, since the Japanese Fleet lay inactive till Rogestvensky, after many delays, drew near. It then took the unnecessary hazard of a naval battle which it could have avoided had it taken Vladivostok in the months of waiting. The brilliant success of the battle in which the Baltic Fleet was annihilated is a detail and a side issue. Had Russian shooting been good, had Rogestvensky had a proper supply of torpedo craft, victory might have been his. It was always possible that he might win. Hence the risk of the sea fight upon which Japan staked everything—because of tradition.
The army of Nogi, transferred to the front after the fall of Port Arthur very probably contributed to the victory of Mukden; but Mukden was relatively a useless victory. Oyama, with half as many men as he had, entrenched anywhere in Korea, would have served to occupy Kuropatkin enough for Nogi to begin investing Vladivostok. Vladivostok is a far superior base to Port Arthur, but Japan after the fall of Port Arthur could certainly have installed a land battery capable of destroying the dockyard, and Togo's ships by long-range firing could have assisted that end. Without a base before him Rogestvensky would never have come to the Far East at all. Thus Russia would have preserved her Baltic Fleet; but that would have been immaterial to Japan. If the base be destroyed, it is immaterial whether the fleet belonging to it floats or lies under the waves—it has ceased to be a weapon. With Vladivostok taken or rendered untenable, six months of the war would have been saved, for Japan would then have been supreme upon the water and in possession of all for which she fought. By delaying the attack on Vladivostok, she left the taking of that place dependent on the chance of Russia being prepared to make peace or else upon a siege begun six months later than it need have been. And six months in a modern war costs a very great deal. To Japan it meant that Vladivostok remained Russian.
A remarkable illustration of the importance of bases has been afforded by Russia herself. When the crew of the Kniaz Potemkin Tavritchesky mutinied (1905) and declared 'war,' what possibilities might have seemed to be theirs. They had nothing to fear from the remaining Russian battleships, coal was to be had for the seizing of Russian colliers, food for the demanding. And the ship did—nothing. Lack of agreement amongst the mutineers, some for the bold course, some for the safer, might account for this in part, but by no means wholly. They had, however, no base, and so drifted to a neutral harbour and inglorious surrender. This the Russian Admiralty, which had had ample opportunity to realise the importance of the base question probably recognised: hence the casual official acceptance of the situation when the mutiny began.
It may be urged that had the Japanese invested Vladivostok and so prevented Rogestvensky from coming East, the Baltic Fleet would have been left to damage Japanese commerce in the Indian Ocean or around the Straits of Malacca. Its lack of a base, however, would have prevented this, even supposing appreciable commerce to have been open to attack. Rogestvensky could have done nothing except morally; and moral menaces do not long bring forth fruit. The failure to destroy or neutralise Vladivostok was, therefore, surely a grave error, condoned only by the lucky chance that Rogestvensky proved easy to defeat at Tsushima. Is not the hostile base rather than the hostile fleet the true objective of modern naval war?
The importance of bases is usually fully recognised afloat: indeed it is afloat that all the apostles of what—for want of a better term—may be called 'Base Power' are to be found.
In the days of sailing ships the base was almost non-essential. Six months' stores were carried, and the base was necessary merely for powder, shot and spars. Powder and shot were, however, easily to be found anywhere and did not need frequent replenishing, while any forest almost was able to's apply spars. In the matter of spare sails any merchant ship could be commandeered, consequently a fleet was able to extemporise bases anywhere. Orthodox bases, at the same time, were easily defended and made impregnable and liable to no dangers save that of blockade—tedious work for which few navies were fitted. The hostile fleet was the only objective. Base attacks were rarely if ever attempted later than the seventeenth century—practically they ceased to be made long before that except in exceptional circumstances. Generally speaking the base was impregnable.
To-day hardly an impregnable base exists, though by courtesy nearly all bases are so styled. Actual impregnability is conferred only by the existence of a fleet, which, in its relation to a base exactly reproduces the conditions of the members in relation to the belly in the fable. Fleet and base are inter-dependent, except that whereas the fleet cannot exist without a base, the base can go on existing for a considerable period without a fleet. While it exists, unless invested, it is a constant danger because of its ability to create fresh ships. It must be taken or neutralised. Surely the cheapest way to take it is with monitor-batteries which can go in, invulnerable, to victory; and the most economical way to create such floating batteries would seem to be to build them instead of forts. If, however, they are built as of old as adjuncts of the sea-going navy then presumably the old cycle will be imitated with the old results.