with units well used to acting together is, therefore, likely to succeed with such tactics.
Whether divided squadron tactics are really a new thing is open to debate.
Alcibiades at the battle of Cyzicus[1] did something of the sort when he divided his fleet into three. Again in the first Punic War Atilius off Tyndaris flung ten triremes on the Carthaginians, and held them thereby till his main body arrived. In neither case were the operations very akin to those of the modern divided squadron, but the integral idea of securing victory by using the fleet in detachments instead of as a whole was equally present. Again, Togo off Port Arthur was continually more tactically divided than was academically desirable. As already stated his tactics were more than once those of Alcibiades,[2] and the results were satisfactory to him. Nelson at Trafalgar employed a species of divided squadron[3] of set purpose and with a definite object, and Togo was divided at Tsushima, though for some time apologists with views of their own as to what he should have done, attempted to prove that he was not. The man who did not divide was Rogestvensky—who of all men ought to have done so, in order not to hamper his few good ships.
On the whole it may be argued that history has
