James R. Thursfield

“ It is not because she has had at all times—it may indeed be doubted if she has had at any time—organized military force sufficient to repel an invader, if he could not be stopped at sea. It is because she can only be invaded across the sea, and because whenever the attempt has been made she has always had naval force sufficient to bring the enterprise to nought. It is merely a truism to say that the invasion of hostile territory across the sea is a much more difficult and hazardous enterprise than the crossing of a land frontier by organized military force. ”

“ For what is it that a nation seeks to do when it attempts to exercise or secure the command of the sea? It seeks to do nothing more and nothing less than to deny freedom of access to the waters in [Pg 51] dispute to the ships, whether warships or merchant ships, of some other nation. It denies the common right of highway, which is the essential attribute of the sea, to that other nation, and seeks to secure the monopoly of that right for itself. ”

“ In proportion to the volume and value of the national trade afloat is the potency of its destruction as an agency for bringing the national will into submission. If, for example, the maritime trade of England could be suppressed by her enemies, England would thereby be vanquished. Her commerce is her life-blood. On the other hand there are nations, very powerful in war, which either by reason of their geographical position, or because their oversea trade is no vital element in their national economy, would suffer comparatively little in like circumstances. ”

“ If you are not strong enough to dispose of the enemy's naval force you are certainly not strong enough to escort an invading [Pg 71] force—itself helpless afloat—across the sea in his teeth. If you are strong enough to do this you will certainly be wise to beat him first, because then there will be nothing left to prevent the transit of your troops. In other words, command of the sea, if not absolutely and in all cases indispensable to a successful invasion, is at any rate the only certain way of ensuring its success. ”

“ So long as a hostile fleet is in being there is no command of the sea; so soon as the command of the sea is established there is no hostile fleet in being. Each of these propositions is the complement of the other.
Nevertheless, the mere statement of these abstract propositions solves none of the concrete problems of naval warfare. War is not governed by phrases. It is governed by stern and inexorable realities. The question whether a particular fleet in any particular circumstances is or is not a fleet in being is not a question of theory, it is a question of fact. ”

“ That the decision has always been in favour of the British arms is at once a lesson and a warning—a lesson that immunity from invasion can only be ensured by superiority at sea, a warning [Pg 78] that such superiority can only be secured by the adequate preparation, the judicious disposition, and the skilful handling of the naval forces to be employed, as well as by an unflinching animus pugnandi. But no nation which goes to war can hope for more or be content with less than the opportunity of obtaining a decision in these conditions. The issue lies on the knees of the gods. ”

“ The ships are not there for the sake of the base. It is a fatal inversion of all sound principles of naval strategy to suppose that the ships owe, or can afford, to the base any other form of defence than that which is inherent in their paramount and primary task of controlling the maritime communications which lead to it. So long as they can do this the base will be exposed only to such attacks as can be delivered by a force which has evaded but not defeated the naval guard, and to this extent the base must be fortified and garrisoned ”

“ For these reasons I hold that no serious apprehension need be entertained lest the supply of oil to our warships should fail so long as we hold the command of the sea. If ever we lost the command of the sea we should not be worrying about the supply of oil. Oil or no oil, we should be starving, destitute and defenceless. ”

“ At first sight this hybrid type of vessel might seem to be an anomalous intrusion into the time-honoured hierarchy of battleship, cruiser, and small craft, which the ripe experience of many wars, battles, and campaigns had finally established in the last golden days of the sailing ship period. It is indeed held by some high authorities that the battle-cruiser is in very truth a hybrid and an anomaly, and that no adequate reason for its existence can be given. ”

“ In order to protect German trade and commerce under existing conditions, only one thing will suffice, namely, Germany must possess a battle fleet of such strength that even for the most powerful naval adversary a war would involve such risks as to make that Power's own supremacy doubtful. For this purpose it is not absolutely necessary that the German fleet should be as strong as that of the greatest naval Power, for, as a rule, a great naval Power will not be in a position to concentrate all its forces against us. ”

“ Here again we may discern some of the larger implications of that potent and far-reaching agency of naval warfare, the command of the sea. If a belligerent not aiming at the command of the sea, and having no sufficient naval force wherewithal to secure it, thinks to crush his enemy by directing sporadic attacks on his commerce, he will, if history is any guide, soon find out his mistake. His naval forces available for this purpose, are, by the hypothesis, inferior to those of the enemy. ”

“ We have now had a pretty good view of their fleet, which consists of near, if not quite, eighty men-of-war fit to lie in a line and thirty fire-ships; a strength that puts me beside hopes of success, if we should fight, and really may not only endanger the losing of the fleet, but at least the quiet of our country too; for if we are beaten they, being absolute masters of the sea, will be at great liberty of doing many things they dare not attempt while we observe them and are in a possibility of joining Vice-Admiral Killigrew and our ships to the westward. ”

“ Either the belligerent in such a plight must detach a naval force sufficient to cover the outlying base, and thus, by dispersing naval forces which he desired to keep concentrated, he must expose his detachment to destruction by a stronger force of the enemy, or he must leave the base to its fate, in which case it is certain to fall in the long run. In point of fact the occupation of distant bases by any naval Power is merely the giving of hostages to any and every other Power which in the day of conflict can establish its command of the sea. ”

“ We have seen that the paramount purpose of all naval warfare, and, indeed, of all warfare, is the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy. His armed forces are in the last resort the sole instrument of his will, and their destruction to such an extent as is necessary to subdue his will is the sole agency by which peace can be restored. ”

“ It is true that the whole art of war, whether on sea or on land, consists in so disposing your armed forces, both strategically and tactically, that you may be superior to the enemy at the critical point and moment, and that success in this supreme art is no inherent prerogative of the belligerent whose [Pg 29] aggregate forces are superior to those of his adversary. ”

“ If ever in the naval battles of the future it becomes expedient for an admiral to order a general chase, it stands to reason that ships of the battle-cruiser type will be invaluable for the purpose. Their speed will enable them to hold the tail of the enemy's line, and their power will enable them to crush it unless the retreating admiral who seeks to avoid a decisive action turns back to succour such of his ships as are assailed and thereby renders a decisive action inevitable. ”

“ In the War of 1870 again, although the supremacy of France on the seas was never seriously challenged by Prussia, yet her collapse on land was so sudden and complete that her superiority at sea availed her little or nothing. The maritime trade of Prussia was annihilated for the time, but it was then too insignificant a factor in the economic fabric of Prussia for its destruction to count for much, and the fleets of France rode triumphant in the North Sea and the Baltic ”

“ The only limitation of your efforts that you can tolerate is that they should involve the least expenditure of energy that may be necessary to make your policy prevail. But that is a question of the economics of war; it is not a question of "limited war" or of "war for a limited object." Your sole object is to bend the enemy to your will. That object is essentially an unlimited one, or one that is limited only by the extent of the efforts which the enemy makes to withstand you. ”

“ England has not been invaded since A.D. 1066, when, the country having no fleet in being, William the Conqueror effected a landing and subjugated the kingdom. During the eight centuries and more that have since elapsed, every country in Europe has been invaded and its capital occupied, in many cases more than once. It is by no means for lack of attempts to invade her that England has been spared the calamity of invasion for more than eight hundred years. ”

“ But even between equal forces, equally well led and handled, there is no reason to suppose that the losses of one side will be more than equal to those of the other; whereas if one side is appreciably superior to the other it is reasonable to suppose that it will inflict greater losses on the enemy than it suffers itself, while even if the losses are equal the residue of the stronger force will still be greater than that of the weaker. ”

“ A warship, considered in the abstract, may be defined as a vessel employed, and generally constructed, for the purpose of conveying across the seas to the place of conflict, the weapons that are to be used in conflict, the men who are to use them, and all such stores, whether of food or other supplies, as will give to the vessel as large a measure of enduring mobility as is compatible with her displacement. ”

“ Maritime commerce as it expands, tends, even apart from direct colonization, to bring territorial occupation in its train. The origin and history of the British rule in India is a signal illustration of this tendency. There are other causes of territorial expansion across the seas, as Admiral Mahan has pointed out in his latest work on Naval Strategy, but it is a rule which admits of no exceptions that territorial possessions across the seas, however they may have been acquired, compel the Power which holds them to develop a navy which, in the last resort, must be capable of defending them. ”

“ No naval Power can now afford to place its battleships at a fixed station, or even in close touch with a fixed rendezvous, which is within reach of an enemy's torpedo craft. The torpedo vessel which operates only on the surface is, it is true, formidable only at night; in the daytime it is powerless in attack and extremely vulnerable. But the submarine is equally formidable in the daytime, and its attack even in the daytime is far more insidious and difficult to parry than that of the surface torpedo vessel is at night. ”

“ Indeed, although private property on land is exempt from capture, and at sea it is not, yet there are many nations which would suffer far more from the interruption of their mercantile communications which war on land entails than they would from the destruction of their commerce at sea.
For these reasons I hold that the proposed exemption of private property from capture or molestation [Pg 97] at sea is a chimerical one. War is essentially an act of violence. It operates by the destruction of human life as well as by all other agencies which are likely to subdue the enemy's will. ”

“ The maritime trade of a nation at war has always been regarded by the other belligerent as his legitimate prey. In the Dutch Wars the suppression of the enemy's commerce was the main objective of both parties to the conflict. In all wars in which either belligerent has any commerce afloat worth considering one belligerent may always be expected to do all that he can for its capture or suppression, while the other will do as much as he can for its defence. ”

“ For the moment it may perhaps be said that its offensive capacity—its capacity, that is, to determine or even materially to affect the larger issues of naval warfare—is inconsiderable. I say nothing of the future, whether immediate or remote. Any day may witness developments which will give entirely new aspects to the whole problem. In the meanwhile the chief functions of aircraft in war will probably be, for some time to come, those of scouting, observation, and the collection and transmission of intelligence not obtainable by any other means. ”

“ To go down in no order and for each man to take his bird would mean that each ship, whether large or small, would be free as far as circumstances permitted to select an adversary not disproportioned in strength to herself, so that there was no very pressing need for the fleet to consist of homogeneous units, nor for the elimination of comparatively small craft from a general engagement. ”

“ This is the power which a naval belligerent has of withdrawing his sea-going force out of the reach of the sea-going force of the enemy by placing it in sheltered harbours too strongly fortified for the enemy to reduce by naval power alone. ”

“ It epitomises the principles upon [Pg ix] which success in naval warfare depends. It shows how the moral factor in all cases and at every epoch dominates and controls the material; how the "animus pugnandi," as Mr Thursfield calls it, the desire to get at the enemy in "anything that floats," transcends every other weapon in a nation's armoury; how if that spirit is present, all other difficulties can be surmounted, and how without it the thickest armour, the biggest all-shattering guns shrivel in battle to the measure of mere useless scrap iron. ”

“ Naval warfare is no essential part of the armed conflict between contending States. In some cases it exercises a decisive influence on the conduct and issue of the conflict, in others none at all or next to none. But sea power, that is, the advantage which a nation at war derives from its superiority at sea, may largely affect the issue of a war, even though no naval engagements of any moment may take place. In the Crimean War the unchallenged supremacy of England and France on the seas alone made it possible for the Allies to invade the Crimea and undertake the siege of Sebastopol ”

“ War is the armed conflict of national wills, an appeal to force as between nation and nation. Naval warfare is that part of the conflict which takes place on the seas. The civilized world is divided into separate, independent States or nations, each sovereign within its own borders. Each State pursues its own ideas and aims and embodies them in a national policy ”