With regard to the primary mission of a navy in war, it was for long maintained that the chief object of the fleet should be to engage that of the enemy. To such an extent did this doctrine obsess certain minds that as lately as the year 1914 it was asserted by a distinguished British naval authority that the Admiralty ought not to be responsible for the passage of the British Expe ditionary Force to France until the German High Seas Fleet had been defeated.
There can be no doubt that, as a means of fulfilling its true mission, the destruction of the enemy's main fleet is of very great importance, because it is the most drastic and probably the most effective action which can be taken to deprive him of the use of the sea. But under modern conditions it is extremely improbable that an adversary would risk an obviously inferior fleet in an encounter which is likely to end in disaster. Moreover, nowadays, an inferior fleet can safeguard itself against being forced into an unequal contest by outer defences, such as mines and submarines, which enable it to lie in secure retreat, where at least it exerts the influence of a "fleet in being"; a potential danger and therefore a drain on the opponent's warlike resources. The old days when it was possible to invade an enemy harbour and destroy his fleet at anchor, as Nelson did at Aboukir Bay and Codrington at the battle of Navarino, are no more, although in the not too distant future the development of air power may recreate the possibilities of attacking an enemy fleet, in its base. To argue that the principal duty of a navy is to defeat the main fleet of the enemy is, however, to confuse the object with the means of its attainment. It is nevertheless a first essential in the strategical disposition of naval forces that the main fleet should be so based vis-a-vis the enemy's main fleet that any and every opportunity of bringing the latter to action can be seized. The importance of this is self-evident when it is realised that all other naval dispositions must depend for their security and efficiency on the main fleet being able to counter effectively any attempt by the enemy to take the offensive with superior forces.
No more striking example of this statement can be found than that given by British naval strategy in the World War. At the mere threat of hostilities the Grand Fleet, as it was afterwards called, went to its war base at Scapa Flow. Later the Firth of Forth was developed sufficiently to allow it to move south to this more convenient anchorage. But throughout the War this pre dominant force, far up in the North Sea, contained the German High Sea Fleet so effectively that the latter was unable to prevent the complete eviction of German cruisers from the seas and the passage of armies and war materials to do battle against the German army and its allies in whatever part of the world their enemies desired. Such was the balance and interdependence of naval and military strategy throughout the war that the security and maintenance of the British and allied armies in every theatre of war was directly dependent on the British main fleet in the North of Scotland. (See also BATTLESHIP and BELGIAN COAST
OPERATIONS.) Although British naval strategy in the World War proved to be sound enough in the main, some serious blunders were made, notably in the case of the Dardanelles campaign. Owing to the lack of a properly constituted naval staff at the Admiralty at that time, there was no clear appreciation of the influence and limitations of warships when used in conjunction with military forces on a sea coast or of the support they could give to an opposed landing. These limitations hinge largely on two tactical principles which may be stated in general terms to be: (I) Ships' gun-fire cannot dominate territory threatened by hostile land forces, save for a very limited period. (2) Ships' gun-fire cannot be relied upon to destroy enemy guns mounted on shore; or in other words ships' gun-fire may be able to keep down the fire of land batteries for a limited period, but it will probably break out again as soon as the ships withdraw or cease firing owing to expenditure of their ammunition.
The strategy which governed the employment of naval forces at the Dardanelles was not co-ordinated with military effort as it would have been had there been proper co-operation between a fully developed naval staff at the Admiralty and the General Staff at the War Office. The ultimate object necessitated occupy ing and holding both banks of this narrow waterway; the initial conception of ships blasting their way through it in the face of land defences and mined channels and eventually threatening Constantinople at the point of their guns was proved to have been fundamentally unsound. The employment of ships to bom bard the shore defences before military forces were available in sufficient strength to ensure a successful landing and advance on both sides to the straits was a strategical error of judgment which prejudiced the campaign at the very outset. The best that can be said of the Dardanelles expedition as it was actually carried out is that it acted as a diversion on a large scale, holding up forces and distracting the attention of the enemy to an extent which assisted operations in other theatres of war. But there can be no question that, as a diversion, the huge expenditure of life and war material was not justified, while as a major opera tion it failed, owing to lack of proper strategical co-ordination. As such it must remain an historical example of the dire results of attacking prematurely with insufficient force, of failure to appreciate the interdependence of sea and land warfare in coastal operations and, lastly, of the vital necessity for clearly defining the object of a campaign and then for proper staff work to formu late the strategy to be employed before forces are put into motion.