Heresies of Sea Power/Part 3/Chapter 2
II
THE EVOLUTION OF NAVIES
The root idea of the warship, as has already been suggested in these pages, was the evolution of a means whereby soldiers could fight each other on the water as well as on the land. In the course of many thousand years that idea has often been almost entirely lost sight of, but it has nearly always been reverted to in times of great stress and of life and death struggles. It is lost sight of to-day, but sooner or later is bound to re-appear as the integral factor.
The elementary ship has often been pictured as a log of wood used by prehistoric man to cross rivers that were wider than his bridging appliances and too deep to ford. The hollowing out of the tree trunk and the shaping of it into rude boat form were early and natural evolutions, so early that the most ancient historical records show us the ship in a comparatively late stage of development.
Egyptian monuments dating from B.C. 2500 or thereabouts show boats propelled by several rowers, fitted with some species of sail and steered by paddles aft.[1] The existence of ornamentation in the form of a snake figure-head indicates that the type had been brought to some considerable state of finish and that the boat was already an evolved article.
By B.C. 1000, judging by the relative sizes of men and ships, considerable advance had been made in size, lateen sails were in vogue, and, in the case of warships the fighting top (or else a look-out station) had appeared, as well as an armoured breastwork to protect
Egyptian Ship about 2500 B.C.
the rowers. These last two features may be presumed to be the result of experience gained in unknown sea fights. A glance at the illustrations taken from the monument which records the first historical naval battle gives us the warship qua warship, already something that had differentiated from the every-day merchant vessel for a specific purpose.
Large Egyptian Ship in the Red Sea circa 1200 B.C.
By B.C. 700 the Phœnicians had evolved a warship in which the oars were in two banks, presumably so
1. Egyptian Warship in Action 1000 B.C.
2. Asiatic Warship in same Battle.
arranged in order to secure increased motive power in a limited length.[2] Over the heads of the rowers appears a flying deck protected by shields for the fighting members of the crew and finally a distinct ram bow is to be observed.
Now this warship besides marking an advance in attack and defence also marks some kind of return to the original conception of the warship as an instrument for enabling soldiers to fight each other on the water
Phœnician Warship of circa 700 B.C. From Nineveh Monuments.
as well as upon the land. The Egyptian warships of three hundred years before lack this feature to a considerable extent—defence is to be found in them in the breastwork to protect the rowers, but the offensive and military feature so conspicuous in the Phœnician warship is absent.
This type of vessel long survived, but it eventually gave way to the Athenian trireme, of which the exact form is still a matter of some conjecture. We do know, however, from the evidence of contemporary historians, that the Athenian trireme was essentially a 'naval' vessel. The idea of a craft primarily destined to enable soldiers to fight each other on the water was gradually lost in the idea of a ship especially designed to fight and destroy other ships. This object was sought and secured chiefly by speed and handiness, and to obtain these qualities the military element on board was considerably reduced and lightness of construction gone in for. What may be described as the 'heavy and clumsy battleship idea' was abandoned in favour of the 'cruiser idea,' 'the light swift craft able to strike sudden blows.' The crews of the Athenian warships were principally 'sailors' in the narrow meaning of the term. After a career of considerable success[3] the Athenian navy vanished before the heavier 'battleship-craft' of the Syracusans and Peloponnesians.
When Carthaginian Sea Power became predominant in the Western Mediterranean the cruiser idea had, however, again worked itself into favour, The Carthaginian sailor was a 'seaman' rather than a 'soldier at sea.' Sea aptitude was his main characteristic and if hand-to-hand fighting were not lost sight of, it certainly did not occupy the sole prominent position.
This navy was annihilated by the Roman soldiers at sea, by craft that essentially embodied the battleship idea, which carried men bent upon killing other men in ships and relied nothing at all upon skilful tactics or the sea-aptitude necessary to manœuvre ship against ship.
Thereafter for a long time the 'seaman' disappeared as a factor of importance. Ships increased in size and soldier-carrying capacity, Antony's ships at Actium were little removed from floating fortresses. Their opponents to a certain extent relied upon the Athenian and Carthaginian ideals, their ships were small and handy and the men who propelled them were the fighting men. As on previous occasions the result was obscured by other issues than that of specialists against 'all-round men.'
The all-round seaman did not recover his old status to any very appreciable extent, and with a few exceptions for centuries the warship carried soldiers to do the fighting and seamen in the subordinate capacities of rowers or managers of the sail motive power. Battles were chiefly decided by the military element right on to the days of Drake and his fellows, when there was again evolved the all-round seaman able to sail his ship and fight it too.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada which was manned upon the specialist system soon brought the all-round man into vogue. As ever, there were other issues involved than the specialist problem, but these were either not perceived or else not considered worthy of appreciation against the, at that time, obvious advantage of having 'every man on board a combatant.'
Not so very long afterwards the mutinous condition of the seamen necessitated the creation of soldiers on shipboard in a new rôle,—that of marines. The marine, however, appeared distinctly as a police force and that he participated in the fighting was mere utilitarianism. The seamen fought the guns and in no way reverted to the old position of specialists in motive power.
In the Nelson era the seaman was supreme and seamanship won the battles.[4] This endured till the advent of steam introduced entirely novel conditions, and a new body of men, engineers, who gradually took over the old seaman duties of control of motive power, while the seamen slipped, almost imperceptibly at first, into the specialist position of the soldiers at sea. There has been, however, one important distinction between this change and similar changes in the past. The seamen changed into soldiers at sea retained the old navigating duties in a more complete form than in previous revolutions, though this of course may mean nothing more than that we are now in the transition stage. Here it is of interest to note that the Russians about the time that steam came in or a little before—it is difficult to trace any more exact date— introduced into their warships a corps of artillery, gunners who had no naval training whatever. The Marine Artillery of the British Navy may also be mentioned. In both one can detect the germ of a return to the old idea of strict specialisation. The Russian Artillery Corps, however, ceased to exist as a distinct body several years ago, and there are some indications of a similar ending to the British Marine Artillery.
At the same time there is a tendency in all navies to merge the executive and engineering branches. Consequently the present position may be put down to an attempt to return to the Drake conception of 'every man able to fight the ship and work it too.' As already noted this conception was destroyed through the chance arrival of steam as a motive power.
'Engineer' is of course a term that to-day has the same effective meaning that 'seaman' had in the days of Drake, saving always that the engineer has in the present transition stage no concern with the steering and manœuvring of the ship. In the future—given evolution upon the lines at present projected—he probably will, and presumably also in the process of time he will take over control of guns and torpedoes, the present military branch being merged into him, and he into them. That would be the Drake idea returned to.
In the old days the military branch was in a great measure dispensed with by being put on shore. At the present time, owing to the vastly increased complication of and the general adoption of machinery, torpedo officers (almost entirely) and gunnery officers (to a very great extent) are in sum and substance members of the engineering profession in its widest sense. Out of these and the engineers proper the navies of the early future will—with evolution following its present course—be compounded. As hinted above, the tremendous complication of modern machinery is a difficulty in the way of return to the all-round man and many people question its possibility. However, it is probable that in the days of Drake it was hotly debated as to whether a seaman could ever acquire proficiency in handling guns, or a soldier in the proper management of ropes and sails—very difficult problems to the lesser intelligences of the men of those times. Still, whatever difficulties present-day critics may see, this is the thing that is likely to come about, and with it—if history goes for anything—some modification of the warship to suit the new order of things, and that modification probably in the direction of the big cruiser.
History does not tell us of the internal naval arguments if any which preceded the evolution of the Athenian trireme. But we may take it for granted that arguments were plentiful enough before the bulk of the heavy-armed fighting men were put on shore, before the heavy protection for these men was dispensed with, before the ship emerged light and swift, trusting for victory to her speed, her manœuvring qualities and her ram.
It may, and indeed has been argued that the rowers merely moved the ship and did not fight it. Academically this is true, but otherwise it is incorrect. The free Athenian citizens who toiled at the oars knew perfectly well that with those oars they propelled the ram upon which they trusted for victory,—the ram was their weapon and it needed oars being pulled to use it just as a gun needs loading for use. They, using the oars, replaced the bulk of the fighting men who added weight to hostile warships. The end of this Athenian seamanship was disaster. They had built their ships too light in the pursuance of their ideal, and the day came when weight told. Incidentally of course fitness to win had passed from them to their enemies, also the circumstances were peculiar, so that it is hard or impossible to say how much their defeat was due to the failure of the cruiser idea opposed to the battleship idea and how much to lack of fitness to win. At Ægospotami the latter was painfully in evidence; but there still remains the fact that the fitter to win relied on the battleship idea and the specialisation necessitated by carrying out what constituted the battleship idea in those days.
The Carthaginians failed in exactly the same way. Different conditions obtained, but still there was the main fact that the fitter to win relied, like the Peloponnesians, upon the military as opposed to the purely sea-aptitude qualities of their crews. Then once more there came a time when the military element being unduly exaggerated it fell before sea-aptitude. The working of a cycle is apparent, so apparent that the thing right for one age may be the thing quite wrong for another. And yet it is difficult to avoid some inkling of a thought that the military idea is the really right one, that though sea-aptitude and intelligence may win naval battles, the brute force and weight of the soldier-at-sea idea is the more likely to triumph in the long run. The besetting danger of the 'seaman' appears ever to have been a tendency to lose sight of the end in the means, gradually to concentrate upon details and skill at those details for the sake of the details alone. The sin of the 'military' element on the other hand was usually to forget and neglect the means in seeking the end.
The probable course of future naval warfare may at least be suspected upon these lines, once the all-round man asserts his predominance. In the post-Nelson days the all-round seaman took to 'spit and polish,' the neat orderliness which assisted his work became a fetish as important to him as the work itself, once there was a period of peace; the absence of specialists each interested in the predominant importance of his own particular line told. The all-round navy of the immediate future is not likely to fail from 'spit and polish,' because there is nothing, or very little, in the modern warship to cause a re-birth of it for legitimate use. That 'spit and polish' was merely a really essential thing, overdone in the course of long years, cannot be too clearly kept in mind in these days of its decline as a naval accomplishment. The machinery of the far future, whether explosion engine or electric, will no doubt be kept beautifully clean, and this will increase its efficiency. But it is hardly likely to go short of oil on the grounds that 'lubrication is dirty,'—the odds are all against a slavish imitation of the days when guns were not fired for fear of damaging the paintwork. Spit and polish is the overgrown child of seeking after efficiency, but it is not the vice to which those who handle machinery are prone. Rather the errors of the navy of the future are likely, when they come, to take the form of an undue respect for speed. It is sure to be a good thing overdone that brings the decay, not a bad habit acquired. And so very possibly the decaying navy of the future will, just before that decay becomes obvious, make a fetish of speed at any price. It will probably—especially if the times are peaceful—sacrifice armour to increase speed. It will very possibly sacrifice a good deal of seaworthiness and stability to the same ideal. It will strive hard after the lightest possible form of construction, spend its energies perhaps in seeking to reduce superflous pounds in a 40,000-ton ship. Stores will be cut down, the supply of fuel kept meagre, and speeds undreamed of to-day become the ordinary thing.
Very probably a marvellous precision of tactics will be arrived at for the sake of the means without much thought of the end. The suggestion of this is already to be noted in the wedge-shape formation, destroyer almost touching destroyer, evolved by the Germans and copied by the Americans. It may conceivably become the pride of future navies to do this and kindred things at fifty knots with 50,000-ton ships.
Target practice is another very probable form of dry-rot. Already gun-layers' competitions have been elevated to a position altogether out of proportion to their utility. The target practice of the future is tolerably sure to be wonderful. Trick shooting can be foreseen already. Some gun of special precision will appear, not perhaps at all the largest possible, but one in which one or two qualities are sacrificed to a splendid precision. With perfect range finders, perfect speed indicators, and a more or less perfect propellant, hitting the target will be absolutely certain be it still or in motion, and the only uncertainty as to whether the hit is in the centre of the bull's-eye. Torpedoes will probably reach a similar certainty, and speed trials and target practice be done with a precision to evoke unstinted praise. And little by little things will be introduced that will aid these practices to become still more perfect and some small war may serve to demonstrate the perfection.
And then a war with some nation hopelessly inferior in these arts, China[5] perhaps, or Russia. And this other nation, because of its very incompetence in the trick nautical exercises of the future will be driven to fall back on some type of ship, slower, heavier, unable to execute beautiful manœuvres, but carrying, may be, some heavier gun absolutely annihilating when it hits, and heavily defended with armour because the gun specialists want to take care of themselves. It is all too conceivable that such a fleet might go forth, controlled by people with no notions about pretty tactics or target practice, but full of the crude old idea of killing the enemy, and attain the victory which has usually followed the whole-souled pursuit of that simple idea.
If this be not the true picture of the future, it is at least the picture most fully in accord with past history, with the fall of the Athenian and Carthaginian navies.
This should not be taken as implying that sea-aptitude may be of no avail. Undoubtedly it is the most valuable thing so long as it remains, as it should remain, a means to an end. Once it becomes the end only, danger is very near at hand. To cultivate the means without ever losing sight of the one and only main objective, the killing of the enemy, is the ideal to which no Sea Empire has yet succeeded in reaching, and the doom of every once important Sea Empire has lain in its losing sight of the primary reason for which navies exist. The difficulties of the case lie in the fact that danger lurks not in imported vices but in the overdoing of things of themselves good and useful. And this is so true that no Sea Empire can endure for more than a space any more than summer greenery can last beyond the autumn, or the fruit that has ripened to perfection long resist the ravages of decay.
It is in perfection that danger lies. An imperfect, inefficient navy has always a possible future before it. That is why the Russian Navy will probably exist long after the British and Japanese Fleets have sunk into relative non-existence,—the Russian Navy being very singularly far from ripeness. This doctrine of decay through perfection is a pessimistic one; it is also, perhaps, in some degree dangerous, in that taken too literally it may suggest that it is dangerous to aim at perfection, and that badness is the true test of ultimate merit! Fortunately, however, there are modifying qualities. So long as powerful rivals exist no navy is very likely to reach a stage of perfection. It is the Navy which is supreme beyond all possible question that goes in danger of decay. The rivalry of other Powers is the breath of life to a Fleet. Nothing for instance could be better for the British Navy than Germany's avowed ambition to challenge the sovereignty of the seas. Germany's decision in 1905 to build monster battleships of the very first rank was (or should have been) a better tonic for the British Fleet than all the reforms and improvements internally introduced over a period of five or six years. So true is this, that the worst blow Germany could strike at the British Navy would be to declare war and have her entire fleet easily and completely annihilated! It was probably the fact that French ships remained in harbour as a standing menace which saved the British Navy from going to seed after the striking victory of Trafalgar—that, and the excellent fight made by a few of the French ships at Trafalgar.
The navies which at the present day are in the greatest danger of going to seed are the Japanese and United States—the former especially. The ease with which they annihilated the Spanish Fleet did the Americans no good; but the dangers to which they are liable are nothing to the dangers threatening Japan, after her two signal victories over China and Russia. She was saved after the war with China by having to bow to the superior naval power of Russia, France and Germany. But the very ease with which the Baltic Fleet was annihilated must ever be a terrible danger to Japan's future efficiency. The most deadly blow that Russia struck was when Admiral Nebogatoff with a squadron of little-injured ships, including one first-class vessel, surrendered after Tsushima without firing a shot. He surrendered to the mere menace of some distant battleships,—the actual surrender being to some mere cruisers. Had he fought, his annihilation was certain, but it would have been well for Japan had he done some harm before going under.
Had there been the faintest grounds for believing that Nebogatoff surrendered with the idea of creating a moral rot in the Japanese, then the situation might have been saved. But it was perfectly clear to all concerned that he surrendered from sheer despair before the triumphant fleet of Japan. It was the flag he surrendered to, rather than to any particular ship or ships.
The British Fleet is Japan's firm ally, the United States Fleet in no way appeared as a possible enemy. France and Germany, though more or less hostile, both gave indications that their navies were afraid of the Japanese. Some form of 'swelled head' was the inevitable result—victory was secured so very easily.
Japan, no doubt, may fight yet another successful naval war, but her future is bound up in the details of that war. If she wins with the same ease that she won against China and Russia her decay will probably be the immediate sequence. A hard-fought fight will save her; but the dangerous sequelæ of easy victory are thick about her. Efficiency can only be maintained when menace exists; when there is no danger there will not long be any efficiency.
There is, however, one thing which tends to arrest naval decay, and that is the advance of invention. The ever-present danger that some new form of weapon will be sprung upon the naval world tends to keep all fleets on the qui vive. The terrible celerity with which the most powerful ship in the world becomes an 'obsolete old crock' hardly worth consideration, the uselessness of old guns and torpedoes—these facts are bound to cause continual uneasiness and render difficult any arrival at perfection. After the Great War the sailing ship remained much as she had been under Nelson, till steam came and worked its revolution. In such conditions perfection was easy. None could feel the danger of falling behind, ideal perfection was visible to all. To-day there is a different ideal every year, and it is a blessed thing that it is so.
- ↑ I am indebted to Mr. Cecil Torr M.A. for permission to reproduce the first four illustrations in this chapter from his Ancient Ships (Cambridge University Press).
- ↑ To increase the length has always been the main problem in warship construction. See chap. 'Dimensions of Warships.' The two and three decks-ships 1600-1800 all had the duplicated or triplicated gundecks on account of the difficulty of satisfactorily increasing length.
- ↑ See chapter of 'The Peloponnesian War.'
- ↑ The interesting fact, however, of Nelson's 'hammer and tongs' system should be kept well in mind. It suggests that Nelson at any rate had some conception of the old root idea of the ship as a means of carrying men to fight other men as opposed to the ship as an instrument intended to fight other ships.
- ↑ It may be noted that there is a tremendous latent naval possibility in Chinese sailors, judging by the reports of those who have had full opportunity of studying them.