A Short History of the Naval War 1914-1918 BY ARCHIBALD HURD AND H. H. BASHFORD GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1919 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN To the generous help and criticisms of many participants in the events hereafter recorded, and particularly to Admirals Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa Flow and W. S. Sims of the United States Navy; to Vice-Ad

In the years immediately preceding the Great War, already so hard to reconstruct, it was not uncommonly suggested that the British seafaring instinct had begun to decline. In our professional navy most thinkers had confidence, as in a splendid machine ably manned; but, as regarded the population as a whole, it was feared that modern industrialism was sapping the old sea-love. That this has been disproved we hope to make clear in the following pages—a first attempt, as we believe, to give, in nar

Roman, Phoenician, Saxon, Dane, From these white shores turned not again. Save to the sea that bore them hence, For their delight or their defense, Judgment, persuasion, daring, thrift, Each to the others lent his gift, To whom, when all had shared, the sea Added her own of admiralty. It was early on the morning of July 20, 1914, that a couple of guests, who had courteously been invited to be present in the gunboat Niger for the King's inspection of the Fleet, made their way through the sleeping

In his speech of August 3d in the House of Commons, Sir Edward Grey told his listeners that we had incurred no obligations to help France either by land or sea. In view not less, however, of the increasing difficulties of our diplomatic relations with Germany than of the spontaneous friendship that had been growing between ourselves and our French neighbours, the question of coöperation with the latter, in certain eventualities, had inevitably arisen and been discussed. It had also been pointed

The blood-red sun betrayed our spars, Fate doomed us ere we started, Out-gunned, out-manned, out-steamed, we sank, But not, thank God, out-hearted. Inevitably the chief interest of the naval story clusters about the waters of the North Sea; and most of its dramatic moments have had this ocean for their setting. But, behind the Grand Fleet and its thousand auxiliaries, watching all the outlets of the German bases, lesser squadrons and detached cruisers were keeping guard throughout the world. Sim

Situated off the southeast coast of South America the group of islands, known as the Falklands, had definitely belonged to Great Britain since 1833. It consisted of about a hundred larger and smaller islands, the two chief being East and West Falkland, separated by a narrow channel of water known as the Falkland Sound. About 250 miles, at the nearest point, from Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south of the continent, they were some 300 miles distant from the Atlantic entrance of the Magellan Str

"Our trawlers mined the fairway. Our cruisers spread the bait, We shelled the Briton's seaside towns To lure him to his fate, We set the trap twice over. We left him with his dead—" "But now we'll play another game," The British sailor said. With the destruction of von Spee's squadron nothing of Germany's navy was left at large in the outer seas save one or two cruisers and armed merchantmen, whose days of freedom were already numbered. Of these the survivor of the Falkland Islands' Battle, the

At the outbreak of war, Germany was represented in the Mediterranean by two vessels, the Goeben and Breslau , more likely, perhaps, to become historical than any two that she will ever build. Both were modern vessels, the Goeben , a first-class battle-cruiser, carrying ten 11-inch guns and capable of 28 knots, and the Breslau , a light cruiser of about the same speed and with twelve 4.1-inch guns. Outside the Adriatic, these were the only hostile men-of-war with which the Allies in the Mediterra

Before us rocked the minefields, Behind us flew the planes. The swift destroyers chased us Down the long sea lanes, The stealthy currents fought us, And, everywhere we went, Crept Death, a little finger's breadth, Beside us on the scent. Lined with forts that defied the bombardment of our largest naval guns; protected by minefields that taxed the resources of our most intrepid fleets of sweepers; endowed by nature with an opposing current against which our destroyers, during some of the winter s

We have seen Admiral Cradock, fighting against odds, sunk in the Southern Pacific; Admiral Sturdee victorious in the battle of the Falkland Islands; Admiral Beatty chasing the German raiders back to their minefields over the Dogger Bank; Admirals Carden and de Robeck battering the Turkish forts from the Ægean and the Dardanelles; British lieutenants harrying the enemy in the recesses of the Baltic and the Sea of Marmora; British yachtsmen patrolling the home coasts in search of German submarines

The kings and the presidents go their ways, Their armies march behind them, But where would they be, Said the man from the sea, Without us Jacks to mind them? It is seldom possible, during the course of a war, to appraise the ultimate value of any single action; and it was only by slow degrees, as we have suggested, that the results of Jutland were to become visible. Not until the very end was it fully to appear that the enemy's capital surface ships had been so hammered and cowed as to have fre

Manifold as were the duties, and various as was the composition of the Dover Patrol, it was in the sealing of Zeebrugge and Ostend—among the last naval operations of the war—that its qualities of enterprise, courage, and ingenuity found their most notable expression. How the possession of these places advantaged the enemy has already been indicated in the last chapter; and their continual threat to our communications was a sufficient justification of the proposed attempt. But it was not the only

These were the stars that they followed. Eastward returning, The stars of the old sailors Steadily burning. Fearlessness, loyalty, liberty, These and none others Shone in the eyes that they turned to us, Eyes of our brothers. Among the minor casualties of the war was the disappearance of newspaper contents bills; and it was chalked upon a paving-stone in Holborn, as doubtless upon other paving-stones elsewhere, that a little group of people read the most momentous tidings that had reached London

The bombardment of Durazzo, mentioned in the last chapter, took place on October 2, 1918, and was the last offensive operation, on a large scale, undertaken by the Allied navies. During the fortnight preceding it, there had fallen to the Entente armies, in every theatre of war, such a series of victories as had never been witnessed in the recorded history of mankind. To the sea-borne and sea-fed armies in the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria had been the first of Germany's allies to make unconditional