United States or Australia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Of the battle-fleet and its attendant units it is of course true, so long at least as the enemy has a battle-fleet in being. It is true, that is, of all operations for securing control, but of operations for exercising control it is not true. In the case we have now to consider-defence against invasion-the objective of the special operations is, and always has been, the enemy's army.
What Tirpitz says he asked for above everything was a definite policy for war, and this he could not get the leave of Bethmann to lay down, nor could he get the volatile Emperor to stick to definite conceptions of it. For coast defense he had a supreme contempt. The great German Army would take care of this, so far as invasion was concerned, and an adequate battle-fleet would do the rest.
Try as they would, they were faced ultimately by one of two alternatives they must either defeat our covering battle-fleet in battle, or they must close their own battle-fleet on the transports, and so set up the very situation which it was their main design to avoid.
We keep a hold on it, firstly, by flotilla blockade and defence stiffened as circumstances may dictate by higher units, and secondly, by battle-fleet cover. It is on the flotilla hold that the whole system is built up.
Our most dearly cherished strategical traditions were shaken to the bottom. The "proper place" for our battle-fleet had always been "on the enemy's coasts," and now that was precisely where the enemy would be best pleased to see it. What was to be done? So splendid a tradition could not lightly be laid aside, but the attempt to preserve it involved us still deeper in heresy.
It should be instructive and convincing to the American people to note that when two powerful armored ships of the enemy were thus on their way to attack at one end of the world an admiral and a division that had deserved so well of their country, our whole battle-fleet, properly so called, was employed to maintain off Santiago the proportions which foreign officers, writing long before the conditions arose, had fixed as necessary.
For all the nicely framed plan and the perfect deception, the inherent difficulties, when it came to the point of execution, had as usual forced a clumsy concentration of the enemy's battle-fleet with his transports, and we on our part were able to forestall it with every advantage in our favour by the simple expedient of a central mass on a revealed and certain line of passage.
Unable to reinforce his transport escort sufficiently without dividing his battle-fleet, he is forced to bring his whole force up to the army or abandon the attempt till command shall have been secured by battle. Thus the traditional British system has never failed to bring about the deadlock, and it will be observed it is founded on making the invading army the primary objective.
In methods of exercising command are included all operations not directly concerned with securing command or with preventing its being secured by the enemy. We engage in exercising command whenever we conduct operations which are directed not against the enemy's battle-fleet, but to using sea communications for our own purposes, or to interfering with the enemy's use of them.
Logically, therefore, if the enemy holds back from battle decision, we must relegate the battle-fleet to a secondary position, for cruisers are the means of exercising control; the battle-fleet is but the means of preventing their being interfered with in their work. Put it to the test of actual practice. In no case can we exercise control by battleships alone.
Word Of The Day