THE HEROIC RECORD
of the
BRITISH NAVY

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-Admirals Sir F. Doveton Sturdee and Sir Reginald H. Bacon; and to Lieutenaut-Commander A. D. Turnbull of the United States Navy, the authors desire to express their most grateful acknowledgment.

CONTENTS

Foreword

CHAPTER

I. August 4, 1914
II. The Battle of the Bight
III. Coronel
IV. The Battle of the Falkland Islands
V. Back to the North Sea
VI. The Seamen at Gallipoli
VII. Sub-mariners of England
VIII. The Battle of Jutland
IX. The Dover Patrol
X. The Sealing of Zeebrugge and Ostend
XI. The Coming of the Americans
XII. The Harvest of Sea Power

Index

FOREWORD

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 narrative form, a reasonably complete and consecutive history of the naval war. We have indeed gone further, for we have tried to show not only that the spirit of admiralty has survived undiminished, but that we have witnessed such a re-awakening of it, both in Great Britain and America, as has had no parallel since the days of Elizabeth. We have also tried to make clear that, in a thousand embodiments, in men and boys fallen or still living, it has shone with a spiritual even more than any material significance; and that it has again declared itself to be the peculiar expression in world-affairs of the English-speaking races.

Nor was the little apparent interest shown, just before the war, in the navy and the navy's exercises very remarkable. Our attitude, as a people, toward it had always been a curious union of apathy and adventure. We had been sea-worshippers so long that our reverence had often been dulled by much familiarity, and to such an extent, at times, that, only by the supremest efforts, had we, as a nation, escaped catastrophe. But if, on the one hand, we had lost the neophyte's fire, we had perhaps gained a little in tolerance. The seas had not found in us jealous masters. Our harbours and ships had been at the world's disposal. No empire in history had been so leisurely or less designedly built up, as none was to prove, perhaps, to have been so apparently loosely but yet so organically knit—probably because the idea of empire had always meant less to us than the growing idea of admiralty. Nor is that so obscure as it may at first seem, since, in spite of so much outward indifference, the call of the sea, as closer examination will show, was still among the most insistent to which we responded. There was scarcely a cottage, for instance, even in the remotest highlands, in which the picture of a ship did not hang upon the walls, or that had failed to send a son or a brother or a cousin to serve either in the navy or the mercantile marine. Even in the greyest and most smoke-laden of our central industrial cities, wherever there was a pond, the children sailed their little boats upon it; and, once a year, as to some lustral rite, the town-bred inhabitant took his family to the coast.

That these were indications of any racial significance the non-seagoing Briton had seldom, perhaps, realized. That, because of them, his language had become a familiar tongue in the uttermost parts of the earth; that because of them every would-be world-tyrant, since Philip of Spain, had been frustrated; that because of them the freedom of nations, no less than that of individuals, had slowly become humanity's gospel—this had been as little present to him as to the inhabitant of Turnham Green that he was living in the greatest harbour of the world; and yet that it was so was but a matter of fact, and indeed the natural outcome of our origin. Since Britain had become an island every wave of invaders had necessarily come to it in ships and with experience of the sea. However various may have been their other contributions to the ultimate nation into which they were to be merged, this had been common to them, they had all been seamen, of whatever temperament or complexion; and, while of the earliest inhabitants of what are now the British Islands, no boat-lore can definitely postulated, the discovery of the famous barge in the Carse of Stirling shows that, 3,000 years before Christ, there must have been some knowledge of navigation; while, of the first Celtic immigrants enough must be assumed, at any rate, to have enabled them successfully to cross the Channel.

Of these the Gaelic Celts, landing from Spain upon the coasts of Devon and Cornwall and in Ireland, seem to have