"It was inevitable that there should be some failures. Not every opportunity has been seized, nor every chance of victory pushed to the utmost. Who can doubt that there are a hundred points of detail in which your material, the methods open to you, the plans which tied you, might have been more ample, better adapted to their purpose, more closely and wisely considered? For when so much had changed, the details of naval war had to differ greatly from the anticipation. In the long years of peace-that seem so indefinitely far behind us now-you had for a generation and a half been administered by a department almost entirely civilian in its spirit and authority. It was a control which had to make some errors in policy, in provision, in selection. But your skill counterbalanced bad policy when it could; your resources supplied the defects of material; too few of you were of anything but the highest merit for many errors of selection to be possible.

"And the nation understood you very little. Your countrymen, it is true, paid you the lip service of admitting that you stood between the nation and defeat if war should come. But war seemed so unreal and remote to them, that it was only a few that took the trouble to ask what more you needed for war than you already had.

"And you were too absorbed in the grinding toil of your daily work to be articulate in criticism; too occupied in trying to get the right result with indifferent means-because the right means cost too much and could not be given to you—to strive for better treatment; too wholly wedded to your task to be angry that your task was not made more easy for you. Hence, you took civilian domination, civilian ignorance, and civilian indifference to the things that matter, all for granted, and submitted to them dumbly and humbly, as you submitted silent and unprotesting to your other hardships; you were resigned to this being so; and were resigned without resentment. If, then, the plans were sometimes wrong, if you and your force were at other times cruelly misused, if the methods available to you were often inadequate, it was not your fault-unless, indeed, it be a fault to be too loya! and too proud to make complaint."

CHAPTER II. A RETROSPECT

This chapter was written in August, 1918, and in it Mr. Pollen makes a broad survey of the war on the sea as carried out up to that time. After calling attention to the fact that reversals in the land warfare had been frequent and startling, he shows that the various crises which occurred in the war on the sea, while fewer in number, were more extreme: "This has not been the case at sea. The transformations here have been fewer; but they have been extreme. For two and a half years the sea power of the Allies appeared so overwhelmingly established and so abjectly accepted by the enemy, that it seemed incredible that this condition could ever alter materially. Yet between the months of February and May, 1917, the change was so abrupt and so terrific that for a period it seemed as if the enemy had established a form of superiority which must, at a date which was not doubtful, be absolutely fatal to the alliance. And, again, in six months'

time, the situation was transformed, so that sea power, on which the only hope of allied victory had ever rested was once more assured."

Mr. Pollen then proceeds to trace the four great crises of the war on the sea. During August, 1914, the British command of the sea had seemed complete. But soon the tide seemed to be turning in the favor of the Germans and doubt began to creep into British minds as to whether the British Navy could retain the supremacy. Let Mr. Pollen describe the situation:

"During September an accumulation of errors came to light. The enormity of the political and naval blunder which had allowed Goeben and Breslau to slip through our fingers in the Mediterranean, and so bring Turkey into the war against us, at last became patent. There was no blockade. There were the raids which Emden and Karlsruhe were making on our trade in the Indian Ocean, and between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The enemy's submarines had sunk some of our cruisers-three in succession on a single day and in the same area. Then rumors gained ground that the Grand Fleet, driven from its anchorages by submarines, was fugitive, hiding now in one remote loch, now in another, and losing one of its greatest units in its flight. For a moment it looked as if the old warnings, that surface craft were impotent against under-water craft, had suddenly proved true. Von Spee, with a powerful pair of armored cruisers, was known to be at large. As a final insult, German battle cruisers crossed the North Sea, and battered and ravaged the defenseless inhabitants of a small seaport town on the west coast. Something was evidently wrong. But nobody seemed to know quite what it was."

These events caused the first crisis. Prince Louis of Battenburg was relieved from his post as First Sea Lord and Lord Fisher appointed in his place. The situation now changed as if by magic. Emden was destroyed; Von Spee's squadron, with the exception of Dresden, was sunk; Karlsruhe disappeared and finally, in the battle of the 24th of January, Hipper was driven back with the loss of the cruiser Blucher. The Churchill-Fisher administration at the Admiralty was apparently completely successful. But this success was not caused by any efficiency of the Admiralty administration. The loss of Karlsruhe was a pure accident. The destruction of Emden was an event which had to come sooner or later. It is true that Lord Fisher gains the credit for the sending of the battle cruisers to the Falkland Islands in search of Von Spee, but the instant success of Sturdee's mission was merely an astonishing piece of luck. The battle of the 24th of January was really far from creditable to the British, as Mr. Pollen shows in his detailed description of this action.

The second crisis soon took place. The Germans commenced their first submarine campaign against merchantmen in February, 1915. The naval attack upon the Dardanelles was a total and disastrous failure. The people began to see the real lesson of the escape of Hipper's cruisers. "The German battle cruisers escaped at Heligoland for exactly the same reasons that the attempt to take the Dardanelles forts by naval artillery was futile. We had prepared for war and gone into war with no clear doctrine as to what war meant, because we lacked the organism that could have produced

the doctrine in peace time, prepared and trained the navy to a common understanding of it and supplied it with plans and equipped it with means for their execution. What was needed in October, 1914, was not a new first sea lord, but a higher command charged only with the study of the principles and the direction of fighting." Mr. Churchill was relieved as first lord by Mr. Balfour and Lord Fisher was relieved by Sir Henry Jackson. Again the tide seemed to turn in favor of the British, for the submarine campaign died down in October, 1915, and although revived again in March, 1916, was stopped then by the threat of American intervention. The British supremacy was seemingly definitely proved by the results of the battle of Jutland, which showed to both the British and the Germans that the German High Seas Fleet could never gain the command of the seas. But the unsatisfactory ending of this battle caused a great controversy. "The critics established themselves in two camps. One side was for facing risks and sinking the enemy at any cost. The other would have it that so long as the British Fleet was unconquered it was invincible, and that the distinction between 'invincible' and 'victorious' could be neglected. After all, as Mr. Churchill told us, while our fleet was crushing the life out of Germany, the German Navy could carry on no corresponding attack on us; and when the other camp denounced this doctrine of tame defense, he retorted that victory was not only unnecessary but that the torpedo had made it impossible.

"Yet, within two months of the battle of Jutland, the submarine campaign had begun again, and, at the time of Mr. Churchill's rejoinder, the world was losing shipping at the rate of three million tons a year. As there had never been the least dispute that to mine the submarine into German harbors was the best, if not the only, antidote, never the least doubt that it was the German Fleet that prevented this operation from being carried out, it seemed strange that an ex-First Lord of the Admiralty should be telling the world, first, that the German Fleet in its home bases delivered no attack on us and therefore need not be defeated! And, secondly, as if to clinch the matter and silence any doubts as to the cogency of his argument, we were to make the best of it because victory was impossible."

The German submarine campaign of the fall of 1916, therefore, brought on the third crisis. "Once more the old wrong remedy was tried. The government and the public had learned nothing from the revelation that we had gone to war on the doctrine that the fleet need not, and ought not, to fight the enemy, and were apparently unconcerned at discovering that it could not fight with success."

While Admiral Jellicoe came to the Admiralty as relief of Sir Henry Jackson the system remained unchanged. The situation grew worse rather than better. "Thus, without having lost a battle at sea-but because we had failed to win one-a complete reverse in the naval situation was brought about. Instead of enjoying the complete command Mr. Churchill has spoken of, we were counting the months before surrender might become inevitable. During the 10 weeks leading up to the culminating losses of April, a final effort was made to make the public and the government realize that failure of the Admiralty to protect the sea-borne commerce of a seagirt people was

due less to the government's reliance on advisers ill-equipped for their task, than that the task itself was beyond human performance, so long as the higher command of the navy was wrongly constituted for its task.

"But when reason and argument had been powerless to prevail, the logic of facts gained the victory. At last, in the fourth crisis of the war, it was realized that changes in personnel at Whitehall were not sufficient, that changes of system were necessary. Before the end of May the machinery of administration was reorganized and a higher command developed, largely on the resisted staff principle."

The principal result of the inauguration of the new system was the establishment of the convoy system which saved the situation as far as the submarines were concerned; but while the system had been changed the persons identified with all the previous failures and who were responsible for the methods and plans that had led to them remained in power. In January, 1918, however, Admiral Wemyss relieved Admiral Jellicoe as first sea lord and Sir Eric Geddes became first lord. From this point on the British naval policy was changed from a passive defensive to a strong offensive. Sir Roger Keyes was appointed to the Dover command and a mine barrage was laid across the Straits of Dover. At the same time another great mine-field was laid across the North Sea from Scotland to the Norwegian coast, and still another was laid in the Kattegat. A very successful raid was made into the Kattegat and Sir Roger Keyes carried out two splendid attacks on the German bases at Zeebrügge and Ostend. The entire situation had been changed and the old supremacy on the sea was definitely assured.

CHAPTER III. SEA FALLACIES

Mr. Pollen defines the ideas regarding the navy and sea power which were held by the British people. Among the many false ideas the two chief ones were the idea at the beginning of the war that battleships were everything, and the later idea that battleships were useless and that submarines were supreme.

"He was wrong then and he is wrong now. It was an error to think of sea power only in terms of battleships. It is a still greater error to suppose that sea-power can exist in any useful form unless based on battleships in overwhelming strength."

CHAPTER IV. SOME ROOT DOCTRINES

There were two schools of thought regarding the navy before the war. One was for the gaining of the decision by fighting. The other idea was to have such a superiority in strength as to gain the victory without having to fight. The later school predominated. According to Mr. Pollen "we showed that our policy was not to attack but to wait attack, and then not to do anything to compel the enemy to attack."

The ideas of the two schools are described by Mr. Pollen as follows: But in recent history we have witnessed the curious spectacle that an inversion of the order of these two statements did actually create two

different and opposed schools of naval thought. The first school saw in victory the first and constant preoccupation of the fleet. It concerned itself, therefore, chiefly with the essentials to victory, and as victory can only come from fighting it was at the elements of fighting that it worked. It sought to find the most perfect methods of using weapons because it realized that it was only from the evolution of these that right tactics could be deduced. It studied the campaigns of the past to discover the two great groups of doctrines that our fighting ancestors have bequeathed to us, the first dealing with the science of strategy, the second with the principles of command. They realized that weapons and the ships that carry them do not fight themselves but must be fought by men; and they wished those men rightly educated and trained in the subtle and complex science of their high calling. To them, in short, sea war was an affair of knowledge applied by men trained both in the wisdom and in the lofty spirit of those that had excelled in the naval war before. And, faithful to the traditions of the past, no less than eager for research into all the undeveloped potentialities of the products of modern progress, they pinned their faith on their ability to force the enemy to battle, and to beat him there when battle came.

"The other school went for a short cut to naval triumph. If only they could get a fleet of ships so big, so fabulously armed, so numerous as to make it seem to the enemy that his fleet was too feeble to attack, why then battle would be made altogether superfluous, and no further worry over so unlikely a contingency was necessary. They did not, therefore, trouble to inquire either into the processes needed for bringing battle about, or into what was necessary for success when battle came. They passed on to the contemplation of what can only be the fruit of victory-as if victory were not a condition precedent!

“It was, unfortunately, this group, hypnotized by a theory it did not understand, which controlled naval policy in Great Britain for the 10 years preceding the war, and for the first three and a half years of it. Their error lay, of course, in supposing that a fleet, so materially strong and numerous that its defeat was unimaginable because no attack on it could be conceived, must-so long as any serious lowering of its force by attrition was avoidedbe the military equivalent to one which had already defeated the enemy; that 'invincible' and 'victorious' were, in short, interchangeable terms. So masterful was this obsession that their apologists-shutting their eyes to the obvious and appalling consequences of this creed in action-two years after the event, still regarded the only encounter between the main fleets in this war as a great victory, because the larger, by avoiding the risk of close contact with the lesser, came out of the conflict with forces as substantially superior to the enemy's as they were before the opportunity of a decisive battle had been offered."

CHAPTER V. ELEMENTS OF SEA FORCE

In this chapter Mr. Pollen describes the policy of the Admiralty in more detail. In 1909 the war staff was instituted but was never given real power. "But the war staff was never put into the position to discharge the functions which the 1909 committee had designated as its main purpose. So