DISPUTED COMMAND IN GENERAL

The condition of disputed command of the sea is the normal condition at the outbreak of any war in which operations at sea are involved between two belligerents of approximately equal strength, or indeed between any two belligerents, the weaker of whom is sufficiently inspired by the animus pugnandi—or it may be by other motives rather political than strategic in character—to try conclusions with his adversary in the open. This follows immediately from the nature of command of the sea, which is, it will be remembered, the effective control over the maritime communications of the waters in dispute. I must here repeat, that the phrase command of the sea has no definite meaning in time of peace. No nation nowadays seeks in time of peace to control maritime communications, that is, to exercise any authority or constraint over any ships, whether warships or merchant vessels—other than those flying its own flag—which traverse the seas on their lawful occasions. There was, indeed, a time when England claimed what was called the "sovereignty of the seas," that is, the right to exact at all times certain marks of deference to her flag, in the form of certain salutes of ceremony, from all ships traversing the seas surrounding the British Islands, the narrow seas as they were called. But that is an entirely different thing from the command of the sea in a strategic sense, and has in fact no connection with it. It has long been abandoned and it need only be mentioned here in order to be carefully distinguished from the latter. Any nation seeking to exercise or secure the command of the sea in this sense would in so doing engage in an act of war, and would be regarded as so engaging by any other nation whose rights and interests were in any way affected by the act. Hence the difference between the two is plain. The claim to the sovereignty of the seas and the exaction of the ceremonial observance—the lowering of a flag or a sail—which symbolized it, was not in itself an act of war, though it might lead to war if the claim were resisted. An attempt to assert or secure the command of the sea is, on the other hand, in itself an act of war and would never be made by any nation not prepared to take the consequence in the instant outbreak of hostilities.

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 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 other words, it seeks to drive its adversary's warships from the sea, and either by the capture of his merchant vessels to appropriate the wealth they contain or by destroying them to deprive the adversary of its enjoyment. This is all that naval warfare as such can do. If the enemy is not constrained by the destruction of his warships and the extinction of his maritime commerce to submit to his victorious adversary's will, other agencies, not exclusively naval in character, must be employed to bring about that consummation. This means that military force must be brought into operation, either for the invasion of the defeated adversary's territory or for the occupation of some of his possessions lying across the seas, if he has any. If he has none, or if such as he has are not worth taking or holding—either as a permanent possession or as what is called a material guarantee to be used in the subsequent negotiations for peace—then the only alternative is invasion. But that is a subject which demands a chapter to itself.

It rarely happens, however, that a great naval Power is devoid of transmarine possessions altogether, or that such as it holds are esteemed by it to be of so little value or importance that their seizure by an enemy would leave matters in statu quo. Sea power is, as a rule, the outcome of a flourishing maritime commerce. 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. It was not, indeed, the needs of maritime commerce which induced the United States to acquire Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Their acquisition was, as it were, a by-product of victorious sea power. But the vast expansion of the United States Navy which the last dozen years have witnessed is the direct result and the logical consequence of their acquisition.

Applying these principles to the defence of the British Empire we see at once that the command of the sea, in the sense already defined, is essential to its successful prosecution. The case is not merely exceptional, it is absolutely unique. The British Isles might recover from the effects of a successful invasion, as other countries have done in like case. But the destruction of their maritime commerce would ruin them irretrievably, even if no invasion were undertaken. Half the maritime commerce of the world is carried on under the British flag. The whole of that commerce would be suppressed if an enemy once secured the command of the sea. The British Isles would be starved out in a few weeks. Whether an enemy so situated would decide to invade or invest—that is, so to impede our commerce that only an insignificant fraction of it could by evasion reach our ports—is a question not so much of strategy as of the economics of warfare. But really it hardly matters a pin which he decided to do. We should have to submit in either case. What would happen to our Dominions, Dependencies, and Colonies is plain. Those which are defenceless the enemy would seize if he thought it worth his while. In the case supposed they could obtain no military assistance from the mother-country. But those which could defend themselves he would have to overcome, if he could, by fighting. The great Dominions of the Empire would not fall into an enemy's lap merely because he had compelled the United Kingdom to sue for peace. To subdue them by force of arms would be a very formidable undertaking.

Such are the tremendous effects of an adverse command of the sea on an insular kingdom and an oceanic empire, which carries on—not by virtue of any artificial monopoly, but solely by virtue of its hardly won ascendency in the economic struggle for existence—half the maritime commerce of the world. On the other hand, its effects on any nation which does not depend on the sea for its existence can never be so overwhelming and may even be insignificant. Germany was very little affected by the command of the sea enjoyed by France in the War of 1870. But in view of the enormous growth of German maritime commerce in recent years, a superiority of France at sea equal to that which she enjoyed in 1870 would now be a much more serious menace to Germany. In all such cases the issue must be decided by military operations suitable to the circumstances and the occasion—operations in which naval force may take an indispensable part even though it may not directly decide the issue. It was, for example, the United States army that captured Santiago and secured the deliverance of Cuba; but it was the United States Navy alone that enabled the troops to be in Cuba at all and to do what they did there. Again, in the war between Russia and Japan it was the capture of Port Arthur and the final overthrow at Tsu-Shima of all that remained of Russia's effective naval forces that induced Russia to entertain overtures for peace. But the reduction of Port Arthur was mainly the work of the military arm and the continued successes of the Japanese armies in Manchuria must have contributed largely to Russia's surrender. These successes were, it is true, rendered possible by the Japanese Navy alone. It cannot be said that the Japanese ever held the undisputed command of the sea until after Tsu-Shima had been fought and won. But at the very outset of the war they established such an ascendency over the Russian naval forces in Far Eastern waters that the latter were in the end reduced to something less than even a "fortress fleet." At Port Arthur, writes Admiral Mahan, the fleet was "neither a fortress fleet, for except the guns mounted from it, the fleet contributed nothing to the defence of the place; nor yet a fleet in being, for it was never used as such." Its animus pugnandi was fatally depressed on the first night of the war, and finally extinguished after the action of August 10.

The truth is, that in all the larger achievements of sea power—those, that is, to which a combination of naval and military force is indispensable—it is impossible to disengage the influence of one of these factors on the final issue from that of the other, and perhaps idle to attempt do to so. They act, as it were, like a chemical combination, not like the resultant of two separate but correlated mechanical forces, and their joint effect may be just as different from what might be the effect of either acting separately as water is different from the oxygen and hydrogen of which it is composed. But their operation in this wise can only begin after the command of the sea has been secured, or at least has been so far established as to reduce to a negligible quantity the risk of conducting military operations across seas of which the command is still nominally in dispute. Now there are several phases or stages in the enterprise of securing the command of the sea; but they all depend on the power and the will to fight for it. There is no absolute command of the sea, except in the case of hostilities between two belligerents, separated by the sea, one of whom has no naval force at all. The solitary case in history of this situation is that of the War in South Africa. A similar situation would arise if one of two belligerents had completely destroyed all the effective naval force of the other. But that is a situation of which history affords few, if any, examples. Between these two extremes lies the whole history of naval warfare.

There is, moreover, one characteristic of naval warfare which has no exact counterpart in the conduct of military enterprises on land. 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. The only effective answer to this which the superior belligerent can make is, as has already been shown, to establish a blockade of the ports in question. This procedure is analogous to, but not identical with, the investment by military forces of a fortress in which an army has found shelter in the interior of the enemy's country. But the essential difference is that the land fortress can be completely invested so that no food or other supplies can reach it, whereas a sea fortress cannot, unless it is situated on a small island, be completely invested by naval force alone. In the one case, even if no assault is attempted, starvation must sooner or later bring about the surrender of the fortress together with any military force it contains, whereas in the other the blockaded port being, as a rule, in open communication with its own national territory, cannot be reduced by starvation. Moreover, for reasons already explained, a maritime fortress cannot nowadays be so closely blockaded as to prevent the exit of small craft almost at all times or even to prevent the exit of squadrons of battleships in circumstances favourable to the enterprise. Now the exit of small craft equipped for torpedo attack is a much more serious threat to the blockader than the exit of small craft, not so equipped, was in the old days of close blockade. In those days small craft could do no harm to ships of the line or even to frigates, whereas a torpedo craft is nowadays in certain circumstances the equal and more than the equal of a battleship. For these reasons the escape from a blockaded port of a squadron of battleships might easily be regarded by the blockading enemy as a less serious and even much more welcome incident of the campaign than the frequent issue of swarms of torpedo craft skilfully handled, daringly navigated, and sternly resolved to do or die in the attempt to reduce the battle superiority of the enemy.

It follows from these premisses that a naval blockade—or a connected series of blockades—can never be regarded as equivalent to an established command of the sea. At its best it can only achieve a temporary command of the sea in a state of unstable and easily disturbed equilibrium. At its worst, that is when it is least close and least effective, and when the animus pugnandi of the enemy is unimpaired and not to be intimidated, and is therefore ready at all times to take advantage of "an opportunity too tempting to be resisted," it amounts to a state of things in which the "fleet in being" becomes the dominant factor of the situation. It is mainly a psychological problem and scarcely a strategic problem at all to determine when the actual situation approximates to either of these extremes, and the principle embodied in the words bene ausus vana contemnere is the key to the solution of this problem. If the blockaded fleet is merely a fortress fleet, or not even that, as was the Russian fleet at Port Arthur for some time after the first night of the war, and even more after the critical but indecisive conflict of August 10, then it is legitimate, as Togo triumphantly showed, to regard the situation so established as so far equivalent to a temporary command of the sea that military operations, involving the security of oversea transit and the continuity of oversea supply, might be undertaken with no greater risk than is always inseparable from a vigorous initiative in war. But had the Russian naval commanders been inspired—as, perhaps, the ill-fated Makaroff alone was—with a genuine animus pugnandi, they might have perceived that their one chance of bringing all the Japanese enterprises, naval and military, to nought, was by fighting Togo's fleet "to a frazzle," even if their own fleet perished in the conflict. Then the Baltic Fleet, if it had any fight in it at all, must have made short work of what remained of Togo's fleet, and the Japanese communications with Manchuria being thereby severed, Russia might have dictated her own terms of peace. The real lesson of that war is not that a true fleet in being can ever be safely neglected, but that a fleet which can be neglected with impunity is no true fleet in being. It should never be forgotten that the problems of naval warfare are essentially psychological and not mechanical in their nature. Their ultimate determining factors are not material and ponderable forces operating with measurable certainty, but those immaterial and imponderable forces of the human mind and will which can be measured by no standard other than the result. By the material standard so popular in these days, and withal so full of fallacy, Nelson should have been defeated at Trafalgar and Rozhdestvensky should have been victorious at Tsu-Shima.

It is, of course, idle to press the doctrine of the command of the sea and the principle of the fleet in being so far as to affirm that no military enterprise of any kind can be prosecuted across the sea unless an unassailable command of the sea has first been established. Such a proposition is disallowed by the whole course of naval history, which is, in truth, for the most part, the history of the command of the sea remaining in dispute, often for long periods, between two belligerents, the balance inclining sometimes to one side and sometimes to the other, according to the fortune of war. The whole question is in the main one of degree and of circumstances. Broadly speaking, it may be said that the larger the military enterprise contemplated the more complete must be the command of the sea before it can be prosecuted with success and the more certain the assurance of its continuance in unimpaired efficiency until the objects of the enterprise are accomplished. Conversely, the strength, even if inferior, of the fleet in being, its strategic disposition, its tactical efficiency, and, above all, its animus pugnandi must all be accurately gauged by a naval commander before he can safely decide that a military expedition of any magnitude can be undertaken without fear of interference from an enemy's fleet. It was the neglect of these principles that ruined the Athenian expedition to Syracuse. It was equally the neglect of the same principles that entailed the failure of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt and the ultimate surrender of the army he had deserted there. It was the politic recognition of them that, as Admiral Mahan has shown in a brilliant passage, compelled Hannibal to undertake the arduous passage of the Alps for the purpose of invading Italy instead of transporting his troops by sea.

The limits of legitimate enterprise across seas of which the command although firmly gripped is not unassailably established, are perhaps best illustrated by the story of Craig's expedition to Malta and Sicily towards the close of the Trafalgar campaign. This remarkable episode, which has received less attention than it deserves from most historians, has been represented by Mr Julian Corbett in his instructive work on The Campaign of Trafalgar as the masterly offensive stroke by which Pitt hoped to abate, and, if it might be, to overthrow the military ascendency which Napoleon had established in Europe. That view has not been universally accepted by Mr Corbett's critics, but the episode is entitled to close attention for the light it throws on the central problem of naval warfare. Pitt had concluded a treaty with Russia, which involved not merely naval but military co-operation with that Power in the Mediterranean. Craig's expedition was the shape which the military co-operation was to take. It consisted of some five thousand troops, and when it embarked in April 1805 it was convoyed by only two ships of the line in its transit over seas which, for all the Government which dispatched it knew, might be infested at the time by more than one fleet of the enemy.

Here, then, is a case in which the doctrine of the command of the sea and the principle of the fleet in being might seem to be violated in a crucial fashion. But the men who directed the arms of England in those days knew what they were about. Long before they allowed the expedition to start they had established a close and, as they thought, an effective blockade of all the Atlantic and Mediterranean ports in which either French or Spanish warships ready for sea were to be found. Nevertheless we have here a signal illustration of the essential difference between a command of the sea which has been made absolute by the destruction of the enemy's available naval forces—as was practically the case after Trafalgar—and one which is only virtual and potential, because, although the enemy's fleets have for the time been masked or sealed up in their ports, they may, should the fortune of war so determine, resume at any time the position and functions of a true fleet in being. On the strength of a command of the sea of this merely contingent and potential character Pitt and his naval advisers had persuaded themselves that the way to the Mediterranean was open for the transit of troops. Craig's transports, accordingly, put to sea on April 19. But a week before Villeneuve with his fleet had left Toulon for the last time, had evaded Nelson's watch, and passing rapidly through the Straits, had called off Cadiz, and picking up such Spanish ships as were there had disappeared into space, no man knowing whither he had gone. He might have gone to the East Indies, he might have gone to the West Indies, as in fact he did, or he might be cruising unmolested in waters where he could hardly fail to come across Craig's transports with their weak escort of two ships of the line. It was a situation which no one had foreseen or regarded as more than a contingency too remote to be guarded against when Craig's expedition was allowed to start. How Nelson viewed the situation may be seen from his reply to the Admiralty, written on his receipt of the first intimation that the expedition was about to start.

"As the 'Fisgard' sailed from Gibraltar on the 9th instant, two hours after the enemy's fleet from Toulon had passed the Straits, I have to hope she would arrive time enough in the Channel to give their Lordships information of this circumstance and to prevent the Rear-Admiral and Troops before mentioned"—that is Craig's expedition—"from leaving Spithead." In other words, Nelson held quite plainly that had the Admiralty known that Villeneuve was at sea outside the Straits they would not have allowed Craig to start. That Nelson was right in this assumption is proved by the fact that acting on the inspiration of Barham—perhaps the greatest strategist that ever presided at Whitehall—the Admiralty, as soon as they had grasped the situation, sent orders to Calder off Ferrol, that if he came in contact with the expedition he was to send it back to Plymouth or Cork under cruiser escort and retain the two ships of the line which had so far escorted it under his own command. The fact was that if Craig's expedition once passed Finisterre it would find itself totally without the naval protection on which the Admiralty relied when it was dispatched. Villeneuve was outside the Straits no one knew where, and had been reinforced by the Spanish ships from Cadiz. Nelson, whose exact whereabouts was equally unknown to the Admiralty, was detained in the Mediterranean by baffling winds and also by the necessity of making sure before quitting his station that Villeneuve had not gone to the Levant. Orde, who had been blockading Cadiz with a weak squadron which had to retire on Villeneuve's approach, had convinced himself, on grounds not without cogency, that Villeneuve was making for the northward, and had, quite correctly on this hypothesis, fallen back on the fleet blockading Brest, being ignorant of the peril to which Craig was exposed. Thus Craig's expedition seemed to be going straight to its doom unless Calder could intercept it and give it orders to return. However, Craig and Knight, whose flag flew in one of the ships of the line escorting the expedition, passed Finisterre without communicating with Calder, and having by this time got wind of their peril, they hurried into Lisbon, there to await developments in comparative safety, though their presence caused great embarrassment to the Portuguese Government and raised a diplomatic storm. It was not until Craig and Knight had ascertained that Villeneuve was out of the way and that Nelson had passed the Straits that they put to sea again and met Nelson off Cape St Vincent. Nelson had by this time satisfied himself, after an exhaustive survey of the situation, that Villeneuve had gone to the West Indies, and resolved to follow him there as soon as he had sped the expedition on its appointed way. But so apprehensive was he of the Spanish ships remaining at Carthagena, that, inferior to Villeneuve as he was, he detached the "Royal Sovereign" from his own squadron, and placed her under Knight's command. It only remains to add that the expedition reached its destination in safety and that its result was the Battle of Maida, fought in the following year—the first battle in which Napoleon's troops crossed bayonets with British infantry and were beaten by an inferior force. The expedition was also the indirect cause of the Battle of Trafalgar itself, for it was in order to frustrate the coalition with Russia of which it was the instrument that Napoleon had ordered Villeneuve to make for the Mediterranean when he finally left Cadiz to encounter Nelson on his path. Thus was it, as Mr Corbett says, "to prove the insidious drop of poison—the little sting—that was to infect Napoleon's empire with decay and to force his hand with so tremendous a result."

Yet it very nearly miscarried at the outset. Nelson and Barham—between them a combination of warlike energy and strategic insight, without a parallel in the history of naval warfare—both realized the tremendous risks it ran. It may be argued that had Villeneuve gone to the north he would have found himself in the thick of British squadrons closing in on Brest and vastly superior in force. Yet Allemand, who had escaped a few weeks later from Rochefort, was able to cruise in these very waters for over five months without being brought to book. It is true that the destruction or capture of five thousand British troops would not seriously have affected the larger issues of the naval campaign, but it would have broken up the coalition with Russia by which Pitt set so much store, and which Mr Corbett at any rate represents as having exercised a decisive influence on the ultimate fortunes of Napoleon. The moral of the whole story seems to be that competent strategists—for the world has known none more competent and none more intrepid than Nelson and Barham—will not risk even a minor expedition at sea unless its line of advance is sufficiently controlled by superior naval force to ensure its unmolested transit. The principle thus exhibited in the case of a minor expedition manifestly applies with immensely increased force to those larger expeditions which assume the dimensions of an invasion. It was not until long after Trafalgar had been fought, and the command of the sea had been secured beyond the possibility of challenge, that the campaigns in the Peninsula were undertaken—campaigns which ended and were always intended to end, should the fortune of war so decree, in the invasion of France and the overthrow of Napoleon. This opens up the whole question of invasion, which will be discussed in the next chapter.