Some Principles of Maritime Strategy

The indecisive campaign which naturally resulted from this lack of strategical grip and concentration of effort came to an end with Tromp's partial defeat of Blake off Dungeness on 30th November 1652. Though charged in spite of his protests with a vast convoy, the Dutch admiral had sent it back to Ostend when he found Blake was in the Downs, and then, free from all preoccupation, he had gone to seek out his enemy.

It was the effect which this unexpected blow had upon the strong military insight of the Cromwellian Government that led to those famous reforms which made this winter so memorable a landmark in British naval history. Monk, the most finished professional soldier in the English service, and Deane, another general, were joined in the command with Blake, and with their coming was breathed into the sea service the high military spirit of the New Model Army. To that winter we owe not only the Articles of War, which made discipline possible, and the first attempt to formulate Fighting Instructions, in which a regular tactical system was conceived, but also two other conceptions that go to make up the modern idea of naval warfare. One was the conviction that war upon the sea meant operations against the enemy's armed fleets in order to destroy his power of naval resistance as distinguished from operations by way of reprisal against his trade; and the other, that such warfare required for its effective use a fleet of State-owned ships specialised for war, with as little assistance as possible from private-owned ships. It was not unnatural that all four ideas should have taken shape together, so closely are they related. The end connotes the means. Discipline, fleet tactics, and a navy of warships were indispensable for making war in the modern sense of the term.

The results were seen in the three great actions of the following spring, the first under the three Generals, and the other two under Monk alone. In the last, he carried the new ideas so far as to forbid taking possession of disabled vessels, that nothing might check the work of destruction. All were to be sunk with as much tenderness for human life as destruction would permit. In like manner the second war was characterised by three great naval actions, one of which, after Monk had resumed command, lasted no less than four days. The new doctrine was indeed carried to exaggeration. So entirely was naval thought centred on the action of the battle-fleets, that no provision was made for an adequate exercise of control. In our own case at least, massing for offensive action was pressed so far that no thought was given to sustaining it by reliefs. Consequently our offensive power suffered periods of exhaustion when the fleet had to return to its base, and the Dutch were left sufficient freedom not only to secure their own trade, but to strike severely at ours. Their counterstrokes culminated in the famous attack upon Sheerness and Chatham. That such an opportunity was allowed them can be traced directly to an exaggeration of the new doctrine. In the belief of the British Government the "St. James's Fight"—the last of the three actions—had settled the question of command. Negotiations for peace were opened, and they were content to reap the fruit of the great battles in preying on Dutch trade. Having done its work, as was believed, the bulk of the battle-fleet for financial reasons was laid up, and the Dutch seized the opportunity to demonstrate the limitations of the abused doctrine. The lesson is one we have never forgotten, but its value is half lost if we attribute the disaster to lack of grasp of the battle-fleet doctrine rather than to an exaggeration of its possibilities.

The truth is, that we had not obtained a victory sufficiently decisive to destroy the enemy's fleet. The most valuable lesson of the war was that such victories required working for, and particularly in cases where the belligerents face each other from either side of a narrow sea. In such conditions it was proved that owing to the facility of retreat and the restricted possibilities of pursuit a complete decision is not to be looked for without very special strategical preparation. The new doctrine in fact gave that new direction to strategy which has been already referred to. It was no longer a question of whether to make the enemy's trade or his fleet the primary objective, but of how to get contact with his fleet in such a way as to lead to decisive action. Merely to seek him out on his own coasts was to ensure that no decisive action would take place. Measures had to be taken to force him to sea away from his own bases. The favourite device was to substitute organised strategical operations against his trade in place of the old sporadic attacks; that is, the fleet took a position calculated to stop his trade altogether, not on his own coasts, but far to sea in the main fairway. The operations failed for lack of provision for enabling the fleet by systematic relief to retain its position, but nevertheless it was the germ of the system which afterwards, under riper organisation, was to prove so effective, and to produce such actions as the "Glorious First of June."

In the third war, after this device had failed again and again, a new one was tried. It was Charles the Second's own conception. His idea was to use the threat of a military expedition. Some 15,000 men in transports were brought to Yarmouth in the hope that the Dutch would come out to bar their passage across the open North Sea, and would thus permit our fleet to cut in behind them. There was, however, no proper coordination of the two forces, and the project failed.

This method of securing a decision was not lost sight of; Anson tried to use it in the Seven Years' War. For two years every attempt to seek out the enemy's fleet had led to nothing but the exhaustion of our own. But when Pitt began his raids on the French coast, Anson, who had little faith in their value for military purposes, thought he saw in them definite naval possibilities. Accordingly when, in 1758, he was placed in command of the Channel Fleet to cover the expedition against St. Malo, he raised the blockade of Brest, and took up a position near the Isle of Batz between the enemy's main fleet and the army's line of passage. The Brest fleet, however, was in no condition to move, and again there was no result. It was not till 1805 that there was any clear case of the device succeeding, and then it was not used deliberately. It was a joint Anglo-Russian expedition in the Mediterranean that forced from Napoleon his reckless order for Villeneuve to put to sea from Cadiz, and so solved the problem out of which Nelson had seen no issue. Lissa may be taken as an analogous case. But there the Italians, treating the territorial attack as a real attack instead of as a strategical device, suffered themselves to be surprised by the Austrian fleet and defeated.

This instance serves well to introduce the important fact, that although our own military expeditions have seldom succeeded in leading to a naval decision, the converse was almost always true. The attempt of the enemy to use his army against our territory has been the most fertile source of our great naval victories. The knowledge that our enemy intends to invade these shores, or to make some serious expedition against our oversea dominions or interests, should always be welcomed. Unless History belie herself, we know that such attempts are the surest means of securing what we want. We have the memories of La Hogue, Quiberon, and the Nile to assure us that sooner or later they must lead to a naval decision, and the chance of a real decision is all we can ask of the Fortune of War.

Enough has now been said to show that "seeking out the enemy's fleet" is not in itself sufficient to secure such a decision. What the maxim really means is that we should endeavour from the first to secure contact in the best position for bringing about a complete decision in our favour, and as soon as the other parts of our war plan, military or political, will permit. If the main offensive is military, as it was in the Japanese and American cases, then if possible the effort to secure such control must be subordinated to the movement of the army, otherwise we give the defensive precedence of the offensive. If, however, the military offensive cannot be ensured until the naval defensive is perfected, as will be the case if the enemy brings a fleet up to our army's line of passage, then our first move must be to secure naval contact.

The vice of the opposite method of procedure is obvious. If we assume the maxim that the first duty of our fleet is to seek out the enemy wherever he may be, it means in its nakedness that we merely conform to the enemy's dispositions and movements. It is open to him to lead us wherever he likes. It was one of the fallacies that underlay all Napoleon's naval combinations, that he believed that our hard-bitten admirals would behave in this guileless manner. But nothing was further from their cunning. There is a typical order of Cornwallis's which serves well to mark their attitude. It was one he gave to Admiral Cotton, his second in command, in July 1804 on handing over to his charge the Western Squadron off Ushant: "If the French put to sea," he says, "without any of your vessels seeing them, do not follow them, unless you are absolutely sure of the course they have taken. If you leave the entrance of the Channel without protection, the enemy might profit by it, and assist the invasion which threatens His Majesty's dominions, the protection of which is your principal object."

It is indeed a common belief that Nelson never permitted himself but a single purpose, the pursuit of the enemy's fleet, and that, ignoring the caution which Cornwallis impressed upon Cotton, he fell into the simple trap. But it has to be noted that he never suffered himself to be led in pursuit of a fleet away from the position he had been charged to maintain, unless and until he had made that position secure behind him. His famous chase to the West Indies is the case which has led to most misconception on the point from an insufficient regard to the surrounding circumstances. Nelson did not pursue Villeneuve with the sole, or even the primary, object of bringing him to action. His dominant object was to save Jamaica from capture. If it had only been a question of getting contact, he would certainly have felt in a surer position by waiting for Villeneuve's return off St. Vincent or closing in to the strategical centre off Ushant. Further, it must be observed that Nelson by his pursuit did not uncover what it was his duty to defend. The Mediterranean position was rendered quite secure before he ventured on his eccentric movement. Finally, we have the important fact that though the moral effect of Nelson's implacable persistence and rapidity was of priceless value, it is impossible to show that as a mere strategical movement it had any influence on the course of the campaign. His appearance in the West Indies may have saved one or two small islands from ransom and a good deal of trade from capture. It may also have hastened Villeneuve's return by a few days, but that was not to our advantage. Had he returned even a week later there would have been no need to raise the Rochefort blockade. Barham would have had enough ships at his command to preserve the whole of his blockades, as he had intended to do till the Curieux's news of Villeneuve's precipitate return forced his hand before he was ready.

If we desire a typical example of the way the old masters used the doctrine of seeking out, it is to be found, not in Nelson's magnificent chase, but in the restrained boldness of Barham's orders to Cornwallis and Calder. Their instructions for seeking out Villeneuve were to move out on his two possible lines of approach for such a time and such a distance as would make decisive action almost certain, and at the same time, if contact were missed, would ensure the preservation of the vital defensive positions. Barham was far too astute to play into Napoleon's hands, and by blindly following his enemy's lead to be jockeyed into sacrificing the position which his enemy wished to secure. If our maxim be suffered to usurp the place of instructed judgment, the almost inevitable result will be that it will lead us into just the kind of mistake which Barham avoided.

II. BLOCKADE

Under the term blockade we include operations which vary widely in character and in strategical intention. In the first place, blockade may be either naval or commercial. By naval blockade we seek either to prevent an enemy's armed force leaving port, or to make certain it shall be brought to action before it can carry out the ulterior purpose for which it puts to sea. That armed force may be purely naval, or it may consist wholly or in part of a military expedition. If it be purely naval, then our blockade is a method of securing command. If it be purely military, it is a method of exercising command, and as such will be dealt with when we come to consider defence against invasion. But in so far as military expeditions are normally accompanied by a naval escort, operations to prevent their sailing are not purely concerned with the exercise of command. Naval blockade, therefore, may be regarded for practical purposes as a method of securing command and as a function of battle-squadrons. Commercial blockade, on the other hand, is essentially a method of exercising command, and is mainly an affair of cruisers. Its immediate object is to stop the flow of the enemy's sea-borne trade, whether carried in his own or neutral bottoms, by denying him the use of trade communications.

From the point of view of the conduct of war, therefore, we have two well-defined categories of blockade, naval and commercial. But our classification must go further; for naval blockade itself is equally varied in intention, and must be subdivided. Strictly speaking, the term implies a desire to close the blockaded port and to prevent the enemy putting to sea. But this was not always the intention. As often as not our wish was that he should put to sea that we might bring him to action, and in order to do this, before he could effect his purpose, we had to watch the port with a fleet more or less closely. For this operation there was no special name. Widely as it differed in object from the other, it was also usually called blockade, and Nelson's protest against the consequent confusion of thought is well known. "It is not my intention," he said, "to close-watch Toulon"; and again, "My system is the very contrary of blockading. Every opportunity has been offered the enemy to put to sea." It is desirable, therefore, to adopt terms to distinguish the two forms. "Close" and "open" express the antithesis suggested by Nelson's letter, and the two terms serve well enough to mark the characteristic feature of each operation. Close blockade, it is true, as formerly conceived, is generally regarded as no longer practicable; but the antithetical ideas, which the two forms of blockade connote, can never be eliminated from strategical consideration. It must always be with the relations of these two forms, whatever shape they may take in future, that the strategy of naval blockade is chiefly concerned.

With regard to commercial blockade, in strict analysis it should be eliminated from an inquiry that concerns methods of securing command and postponed to that section of exercising command which deals with the attack and defence of trade. It is, however, necessary to treat certain of its aspects in conjunction with naval blockade for two reasons: one, that as a rule naval blockade is indissolubly united to a subordinate commercial blockade; and the other, that the commercial form, though its immediate object is the exercise of control, has almost invariably an ulterior object which is concerned with securing control; that is to say, while its immediate object was to keep the enemy's commercial ports closed, its ulterior object was to force his fleet to sea.

Commercial blockade, therefore, has an intimate relation with naval blockade in its open form. We adopt that form when we wish his fleet to put to sea, and commercial blockade is usually the most effective means we have of forcing upon him the movement we leave him free to attempt. By closing his commercial ports we exercise the highest power of injuring him which the command of the sea can give us. We choke the flow of his national activity afloat in the same way that military occupation of his territory chokes it ashore. He must, therefore, either tamely submit to the worst which a naval defeat can inflict upon him, or he must fight to release himself. He may see fit to choose the one course or the other, but in any case we can do no more by naval means alone to force our will upon him.

In the long run a rigorous and uninterrupted blockade is almost sure to exhaust him before it exhausts us, but the end will be far and costly. As a rule, therefore, we have found that where we had a substantial predominance our enemy preferred to submit to commercial blockade in hope that by the chances of war or the development of fresh force he might later on be in a better position to come out into the open. That he should come out and stake the issue in battle was nearly always our wish, and it was obvious that too rigorous a naval blockade was not the way to achieve the desired end, or to reap the strategical result which we might expect from paralysing his commerce. Consequently where the desire for a decision at sea was not crossed by higher military considerations, as in the case of imminent invasion, or where we ourselves had an important expedition in hand, it was to our interest to incline the enemy's mind towards the bolder choice.

The means was to tempt him with a prospect of success, either by leading him to believe the blockading force was smaller than it was, or by removing it to such a distance as would induce him to attempt to evade it, or both. A leading case of such an open blockade was Nelson's disposition of his fleet off Cadiz when he was seeking to bring Villeneuve to action in 1805. But merely to leave a port open does not fulfil the idea of open blockade, and in this case to opportunity and temptation Nelson added the pressure of a commercial blockade of the adjacent ports in hope of starving Villeneuve into the necessity of taking to the sea.

Finally, in a general comparison of the two forms, we have to observe that close blockade is characteristically a method of securing local and temporary command. Its dominating purpose will usually be to prevent the enemy's fleet acting in a certain area and for a certain purpose. Whereas open blockade, in that it aims at the destruction of an enemy's naval force, is a definite step towards securing permanent command.

Enough has now been said to show that the question of choice between close and open blockade is one of extreme complexity. Our naval literature, it is true, presents the old masters as divided into two schools on the subject, implying that one was in favour of the close form always, and the other of the open form. We are even led to believe that the choice depended on the military spirit of the officer concerned. If his military spirit was high, he chose the close and more exacting form; if it were low, he was content with the open and less exacting form. True, we are told that men of the latter school based their objections to close blockade on the excessive wear and tear of a fleet that it involved, but it is too often suggested that this attitude was no more than a mask for a defective spirit. Seldom if ever are we invited to compare their decisions with the attendant strategical intention, with the risks which the conditions justified, or with the expenditure of energy which the desired result could legitimately demand. Yet all these considerations must enter into the choice, and on closer examination of the leading cases it will be found that they bear a striking and almost constant relation to the nature of the blockade employed.

In considering open blockade, three postulates must be kept in mind. Firstly, since our object is to get the enemy to sea, our position must be such as will give him an opportunity of doing so. Secondly, since we desire contact for a decisive battle, that position must be no further away from his port than is compatible with bringing him to action before he can effect his purpose. Thirdly, there is the idea of economy—that is, the idea of adopting the method which is least exhausting to our fleet, and which will best preserve its battle fitness. It is on the last point that the greatest difference of opinion has existed. A close blockade always tended to exhaust a fleet, and always must do so. But, on the other hand, it was contended that the exhaustion is compensated by the high temper and moral domination which the maintenance of a close blockade produces in a good fleet, whereas the comparative ease of distant and secure watch tended to deterioration. Before considering these opposed views, one warning is necessary. It is usually assumed that the alternative to close blockade is watching the enemy from one of our own ports, but this is not essential. What is required is an interior and, if possible, a secret position which will render contact certain; and with modern developments in the means of distant communication, such a position is usually better found at sea than in port. A watching position can in fact be obtained free from the strain of dangerous navigation and incessant liability to attack without sacrifice of sea training. With this very practical point in mind, we may proceed to test the merits of the two forms on abstract principles.

It was always obvious that a close naval blockade was one of the weakest and least desirable forms of war. Here again when we say "weakest" we do not mean "least effective," but that it was exhausting, and that it tended to occupy a force greater than that against which it was acting. This was not because a blockading fleet, tempered and toughened by its watch, and with great advantage of tactical position, could not be counted on to engage successfully a raw fleet of equal force issuing from port, but because in order to maintain its active efficiency it required large reserves for its relief. So severe was the wear and tear both to men and ships, that even the most strenuous exponents of the system considered that at least a fifth of the force should always be refitting, and in every case two admirals were employed to relieve one another. In 1794 one of the highest authorities in the service considered that to maintain an effective close blockade of Brest two complete sets of flag-officers were necessary, and that no less than one-fourth of the squadron should always be in port.16

Now these weaknesses, being inherent in close blockade, necessarily affected the appreciation of its value. The weight of the objection tended of course to decrease as seamanship, material, or organisation improved, but it was always a factor. It is true also that it seems to have had more weight with some men than with others, but it will appear equally true, if we endeavour to trace the movement of opinion on the subject, that it was far from being the sole determinant.

It was in the Seven Years' War under Anson's administration that continuous and close blockade was first used systematically, but it was Hawke who originated it. In the first three campaigns the old system of watching Brest from a British western port had been in vogue, but it had twice failed to prevent a French concentration in the vital Canadian theatre. In the spring of 1759 Hawke was in command of the Channel Fleet with the usual instructions for watching, but being directed to stand over and look into Brest, he intimated his intention, unless he received orders to the contrary, to remain off the port instead of returning to Torbay. His reason was that he had found there a squadron which he believed was intended for the West Indies, and he considered it better to prevent its sailing than to let it put to sea and try to catch it. In other words, he argued that none of the usual western watching ports afforded a position interior to the usual French route from Brest to the West Indies.

Since rumours of invasion were in the air, it was obviously the better course to deal with the enemy's squadrons in home waters and avoid dispersal of the fleet in seeking them out. In spite of extraordinarily bad weather, therefore, he was permitted to act as he advised. With Boscawen as relief, the new form of blockade was kept up thenceforward, and with entire success. But it must be noted that this success was rather due to the fact that the French made no further effort to cross the Atlantic, than to the fact that the blockade was maintained with sufficient strictness to prevent their doing so. In certain states of weather our fleet was forced to raise the blockade and run to Torbay or Plymouth. Such temporary reversions to the open form nearly always afforded an opportunity for the French to get away to the southward with two or three days' start. Against any attempt, however, to get to the east or the north in order to dispute command of the Channel or other home waters the system was thoroughly efficient, and was unaffected by the intervals of the open form.