At the beginning of hostilities the strategic position in the Pacific and Indian oceans should have been one that could have caused no possible naval anxiety to the Allies. Japan had at once thrown in her lot with us, and as we had squadrons in the China Seas, in the Indian Ocean, and in Australasia there was, when the forces of our eastern allies are added to them, a total naval strength incalculably greater than that at the disposal of the enemy. But this fact notwithstanding, there was for some months extraordinary uncertainty, and the arrangements adopted by the Admiralty permitted a serious attack to be made on our shipping and involved a tragic disaster to a British squadron. The facts of the case are far from being completely known, but the main features of the original situation and its development make it possible to draw certain broad inferences, which are probably correct.

In the summer of 1914 the German sea forces at Tsing-Tau consisted of two armoured cruisers, two light cruisers, certain destroyers and gun-boats. Leaving the destroyers and gun-boats behind, Von Spee in the month of June abandoned his base at Tsing-Tau, and, after calling at Nagasaki, made for the German possessions in the Caroline Islands. His flag flew in Scharnhorst, and this ship with her sister vessel Gneisenau constituted his main strength. He had the two light cruisers, Leipzig and Emden, in his company, and on July 20, when the situation was becoming166 acute, he ordered Nürnberg, which was at San Francisco, and Dresden, which was at Vera Cruz, at the other side of the American continent, to join him. Nürnberg reached him in a couple of weeks; Dresden not till the end of October. By mid-August, then, his force consisted of two armoured cruisers, each with a broadside of six 8-inch and three 6-inch guns, and three light cruisers armed only with 4-inch. Of the light cruisers Emden and Nürnberg had a speed of between 25 and 26 knots; Leipzig of about 23 or 24. The fighting value of the armoured cruisers was approximately equal to that of Minotaur and Defence and probably superior to that of the Warrior class. The German 8-inch guns fired a projectile only slightly lighter than the British 9.2, so that, gun for gun, there should have been little to choose between them; while from the point of view of the control of fire, the broadside of six homogeneous guns could probably be used quite as effectively as a mixed armament of four 9.2’s and five 7.5’s, and more so than one of four 9.2’s and two 7.5’s. To engage such a squadron with the certainty of success, therefore, at least three British armoured cruisers of the latest type would have been required.

Neither of the British squadrons in eastern waters possessed the combination of speed and power that would have made them superior to Von Spee’s force. Vice-Admiral Jerram, in the China station, had under his command Triumph, Minotaur, Hampshire, Newcastle, and Yarmouth. But Triumph was not in commission at the outbreak of war, and, though armed with 10-inch guns, she was three knots slower than the German cruisers. Sir Richard Peirse’s command in the East Indies consisted of Swiftsure, a sister ship of Triumph; Dartmouth, a cruiser of the same167 class as Newcastle; and Fox, a cruiser of old and slow type. Neither squadron, then, could have sought for Von Spee with any hope of bringing him to action, if he choose to avoid it, or with any certainty of defeating him, if he accepted battle. Australia possessed a navy of her own of vastly greater force than either of these outpost forces of the mother-country. Of ships finished, commissioned, and ready for sea, it consisted of Australia, a battle-cruiser of the Indefatigable class; two protected cruisers of the Dartmouth type, Sydney and Melbourne; and Encounter, a sister ship of Challenger, with destroyers and submarines. A fast light cruiser, Brisbane, and some destroyers were building. In the Japanese Navy the Allies had, of course, resources out of all proportion to the enemy’s strength.

When war became imminent Admiral von Spee, as we have seen, left his base for the Polynesian islands. He did this because it was obvious that he could not keep Tsing-Tau open in face of the strength that the combined Japanese and British forces could bring to bear against it, and to have been trapped would have been fatal. The same reasons that made him abandon Tsing-Tau forbade his trying to keep possession of Rabaud in the Bismarck Archipelago. He faced his future, then, without a base—just as Suffren did in 1781. There were several elements peculiar to the situation that made this possible. In the coast towns of Chile and Peru the Germans had a very large number of commercial houses and agents, and there were German ships in every South American port. Their trade with the islands was considerable and, no doubt long before war, it had been arranged that, on receiving the right warning, a great deal of shipping should be equipped and mobilized to supply the German squadron. The widely scattered German outposts afforded also a168 service hardly less valuable than coal and food. They constituted an intelligence organization that was indispensable. Having no base, and no source of supply other than these German houses in South America and the islands, it was inevitable that Von Spee should look to the east, and not to the west, in any operations that he undertook, if those operations were to be extended and made by a squadron, and not by detached ships. In discussing, then, the strategy which the German Admiralty pursued, these facts must not be lost sight of.

Of warlike policies he had a choice of two. He might either keep his ships together and embark on a war of squadrons, or he could scatter his ships and devote himself to commerce destruction. In the first case, as we have seen, he could only look for objectives in the east. In the alternative the greatest fields of his operations were either north of the Carolines, where the Chinese trade could be attacked; or northwest, where the Asiatic and Australian trades converge to Colombo; or still farther to the west, where the whole eastern trade runs into the mouth of the Red Sea. To the eastward there was no focal point of trade where great results could have been achieved—unless indeed he took his ships round the Horn to attack the River Plate trade or, better still, the main route that passes Pernambuco. It was an obvious truth of the situation that, according as the attack on trade promised great results, so would that attack encounter the greatest dangers, for it seemed to be a certainty that the focal points would be the best protected. The most frequented of these, the approaches to the Red Sea, were also the furthest from his source of supply, and had he in fact resolved upon commerce destruction, his ships would have had to maintain themselves, as did Emden, by coaling169 and re-victualling out of the prizes that they took. The advantage of scattering and going for the trade ruthlessly would have been the virtual certainty of inflicting very formidable damage indeed of an economic kind. The advantage of keeping his squadron together was the chance of some coup that would turn the scale—even if only for a time—in his country’s favour. The disadvantages of the first policy were that there was the certainty that each ship would ultimately be run down and destroyed by superior force, and grave risk that one or more ships would be paralyzed by want of supplies, before a sufficient destruction of trade could justify the sacrifice. The weakness of the second was that, as a squadron, his ships might accomplish nothing at all.

I have so far discussed the German Admiral’s alternatives as if they had been debated at the time when war became certain. But it can be taken for granted that the principles on which he acted were not solely his own, but had determined German policy in this matter long before. And, in the main, the decisive arguments probably arose from the character of his force.

Writing in 1905, Admiral Sir Reginald Custance exposed the whole tissue of fallacies on which the policy of building armoured cruisers had been based. The main duties of cruising ships are, first, to assist in winning and maintaining command of the sea, by acting as scouts and connecting links between the battle squadrons, and, secondly, to exercise command, once it has been established by the attack on and defence of trade. For the successful discharge of these functions the essential element is that the cruisers should be numerous. So long as their speed is equal, or superior, to that of the enemy cruisers, there is no reason why their individual strength should be greatly170 or at all superior. The armoured variety represents, roughly speaking, the value of three cruisers of ordinary type, and is manned by a crew almost proportionately larger. When first designed, it was possible to build these large cruisers of a speed superior to that of the smaller vessels, and having this monopoly, the French invented the type in pursuance of the idea that a sea war that consisted chiefly of attacks on commerce, promised brighter prospects than one which could not succeed unless based on battle-fleet supremacy. But this monopoly vanished nearly twenty years ago. For cruising purposes proper, then, this bastard type, while individually enormously more powerful than the light cruiser, was slower and so could not cover even one-third of the ground of its equivalent value in the smaller vessels. Over nine-tenths of the field of cruising, then, it represents a loss of between 60 and 70 per cent. of war efficiency, and this merely from its size.

But because size means cost and because cost has certain definite influences on the human appreciation of values, it was confidently prophesied that no one in command of a number of units of this value could fail to give an undue consideration to the importance of conserving them. Armoured cruisers, in short, would never be treated as cruisers at all, but would be kept in squadrons, just as capital ships are kept, partly to ensure a blow of the maximum strength, if to strike came within the possibilities of the situation, much more, however, for the protective value of mutual support, for fear of an encounter with superior force. This protective tendency would obviously have a further and much more disastrous effect upon the cruising value of such vessels. It would simply mean that, instead of each doing one-third of what three smaller171 cruisers of the same value might have done, they would really do no cruising, properly so called, at all; and not only this, but would probably monopolize the work of two or three small cruisers to act as special scouts of a squadron so composed, so diverting these units in turn from their proper duties. If any one will take the trouble to read the chapter in Barfleur’s “Naval Policy” dealing with this topic, he will find in Von Spee’s conduct an exact exemplification of what that accomplished and gallant author suggested must happen. Von Spee’s policy, in other words, was probably settled for him by the logic of the situation and the doctrine which prevailed to create it.

Von Spee actually did, then, what it was fully anticipated he would do. He kept his ships together and travelled slowly eastward, maintaining himself in absolute secrecy from the outbreak of war until November 1. What were his exact hopes in the policy pursued, and what the consideration that led him to adopt it? His hopes of achieving any definite strategic result can only have been slender. The composition of his force was so well known that he could hardly have supposed it possible that he would ever meet a squadron of inferior strength. He cannot, then, primarily have contemplated the possibility of any sort of naval victory. Failing this, he may have had various not very precisely defined ideas in his mind. There was to begin with the possibility of picking up a sufficient number of German reservists off the South American coast to have made it possible, not only to attack and seize the Falkland Islands, but actually to have occupied them by an extemporized military force. This, as we know, he did attempt. He might further have contemplated crossing the South Atlantic to the Cape, with a view to supporting an insurrection of the Boers, if that172 materialized, or in any event of backing up the German colonists, who would be open to attack. Or, having struck a blow at the Falkland Islands, he might have sent his ships on a final mission in raiding the Atlantic trade. So long as his squadron was afloat, there were many possibilities—and always a certainty that it would force counter concentration on his opponents and thereby embarrass them in the task of searching for him.

But one thing was certain. He could not combine squadron war with commercial war. Emden he detached in August to attack the trade in the Indian Ocean. But the only support he could lend her was such immunity from pursuit as would result from the concentration he forced upon the British forces. It is highly probable that, had he sent all his ships on the same mission, he would have had at least a month’s run before effective measures could be taken............