Can Sea Power Decide the War?

THE progress of the German armies has raised insistently in the minds of those of us whose traditions, beliefs, and training cause us to feel with the Allies, a fear that the worst may come, that the Germans may win on land, and that only Great Britain’s sea power will be left to oppose them. We are assured of its potent might: Mr. Balfour and Mr. Churchill declare it ‘ will finally decide the fate of the warring nations.’ That such was its influence in past crises we know. That its part in the present war has been striking and significant we do not so readily accept. But it is already clear that its achievements — the quiet closing of the seas to the Central Empires, the prompt transportation of colonial and Indian troops whose presence was of incalculable moral value, the steady stream of food and supplies from America, the arrival of which may prove eventually to have been the decisive element of the first months of the defensive campaign in France—have been as truly important as they have been lacking in dramatic appeal. Yet, after all, the real issue before us to-day is not the importance of sea power as an element in the situation never to be underestimated and least of all forgotten, but the ability of Britain’s sea power to decide the war ultimately in favor of the Allies. We are really comparing the relative offensive strength of sea power and land power. We wish to know whether the sea power, easily able to protect Great Britain, can also save France and defeat Germany.

We have been accustomed to speak in what was perhaps an unwarrantably loose fashion of Great Britain’s sea power, when we have really meant the totality of effort which Great Britain has exerted directly or indirectly through the sea power. The navy has been only one element in a number of factors whose action and interaction have produced the offensive and defensive strength of the sea power.

So peculiarly are the British Isles located in relation to the Continent, so extraordinary is the play of winds and currents around them, that the commerce of the world has been practically forced to use the English Channel as its highway. Chance located nearly all the available harbors on the English side; chance made it necessary for sailing ships to hug the English coast and utilize English harbors in case of storm; chance provided winds and currents so variable that large fleets seldom found conditions favorable for the crossing of the Channel; the result being that only three of about fifty attempts to invade England succeeded, and the majority of the fleets never left the Continental harbors. The interrelation of the Channel weather and the British fleet made England invulnerable. Yet this invulnerability was in large measure dependent upon the limitations of wooden sailing ships. Scarcely less important was the fact that adequate supplies for the construction or repairing of wooden fleets were to be found only in the Baltic. The French and Spanish fleets, once demolished by Nelson, could not be rebuilt because overland transportation was not capable of providing the necessary materials.

A scarcely less important arm of the sea power has been Great Britain’s merchant marine. Two centuries ago it became clear that England could not feed herself or consume the swelling bulk of her own manufactures. Her merchant marine must be capable of carrying, under any circumstances, and without assistance, her food and her exports of manufactured goods. For the successful performance of this defensive duty, the merchant marine must have access to the source of the needed supplies. It must be protected by the fleet, which must therefore control the water routes leading to these supplies. The defensive aspect of the sea power became subtle and complicated — the interaction and interrelation of a number of factors, only a few of which were primarily naval.

The great offensive strength of England’s sea power in the past lay primarily in its control of the foreign and domestic commerce of Europe. Until very recently the transportation of bulky goods overland was difficult and expensive, and the bulky goods, which were all that Europe then produced, were exchanged necessarily by water. Western Europe, however, has no eastand-west water communication. Commerce between the Rhine and the Elbe, or the Rhine and the Seine, proceeded down the river, through the North Sea or the Channel, and up the other river. This reliance upon water transportation, and the routes it necessarily took, made it possible for the British fleet to control the greater part of the commerce of Western Europe, domestic as well as foreign. Not in the fleet itself lay the true offensive strength of Britain’s sea power, but in the river system of Europe, the peculiar position of the British Isles, the formation of the English Channel.

The strength of Britain’s economic position in the past, her comparatively greater wealth, her more highly developed commercial fabric, were all important factors in the sea power, and their coöperation with the navy has at times made the latter irresistible. True, these coöperating factors were themselves the legitimate children of the sea power. Whence else came the early attainment of domestic peace and security, the opportunity to develop the Industrial Revolution behind the secure wall of Channel and fleet? But the many forms of this economic strength became, none the less, themselves indispensable members of that bundle of factors, each century more numerous, complex, and subtle, which we have become accustomed to regard as Britain’s sea power. They, and not the fleet itself, enabled her to furnish her European allies with money, food, manufactured goods, and munitions of war. For this reason was her influence decisive in the Seven Years’ War; for this reason was it conclusive in the defeat of Napoleon. The more carefully we analyze the history of Great Britain the more tightly do we find the sea power interwoven in its development, the more we become accustomed to find its unmistakable traces where at first we least looked for them. Yet the more we study, the more conscious we become that the sea power itself has been a complex tangle of interrelated forces, whose conjunction and interaction have been themselves essential elements of the subtle but potent institution.

Although the British navy has never been more efficient or adequate, although the British have to-day as great a natural superiority in seamanship over other nations as they ever had, the sea power is to-day defensively different, and in it the fleet itself and the seamanship of its admirals and men play a preponderant part where before their rôle was at best secondary. Old factors, vital in the past, have disappeared— changes not necessarily fatal, but vastly significant. The Channel as an almost impregnable defensive barrier, requiring only occasional aid from the fleet, has succumbed to the steamship, with whose movements the winds and currents so long fatal to sailing ships are unable to interfere. The fleet is now itself Britain’s primary defense. Nor can the annihilation of an enemy fleet in battle have ever again the same results as at Trafalgar. Fleets are now built of materials which no nation can monopolize, and by processes which no country controls. Seldom, in the past, did enough ships for a successful coalition exist in the combined European navies; to-day such a potential coalition is already afloat. Never again will fleets be defeated by preventing their construction, nor coalitions made impossible by Britain’s existing control of the approaches to the Baltic supplies. Here are significant changes in the old sea power’s most fundamental elements, whose disappearance or alteration cannot fail to exert a potent influence upon its subtle and intricate structure.

With its secondary factors, which fleets originally did not create and which they are powerless to maintain, the nineteenth century has also been busy. The natural difficulties of internal communication, which gave the sea power for so many generations such peculiar offensive strength, have disappeared. The railroad has conquered the geographic obstacles to overland communication; and a wonderful network of canals also affords Germany and France adequate water communication from one end of the country to the other, entirely out of reach of the British navy. Hardly less significant has been the disappearance of the artificial obstacles to overland trade in the customs lines which restricted commerce by enhancing the ultimate cost of the article to the consumer. It used to be cheaper for the world to trade with London than with Berlin or Munich, which had to be reached across many customs boundaries.

An important part of British influence in Europe was long due to her control of a part or the whole of the supply of sugar, coffee, tobacco, dyes, — the well-known colonial goods. It was this monopoly which Napoleon found it so hard to combat. Europe declined to go without sugar, tobacco, and tea, and refused to observe, wherever they could be broken, his commercial regulations. The sea power was of course a main element in the monopoly, but the monopoly and not the sea power itself produced the important result. Great Britain no longer possesses any such control of these necessary supplies. Germany and Austria supply themselves with beet sugar, and contact with the Far East and its great supplies of such products is perfectly possible by rail, out of reach of British sea power.

Nor should we forget for a moment that a part, if not a major part, of Britain’s decisive action against Napoleon was due not only to her monopoly of colonial goods, but to her monopoly of the then new manufacturing processes. She was the only nation in Europe able to produce anything like an adequate supply of manufactured goods for the European market, and she was able therefore, not merely to blockade European ports, but to control the stream of importations at its source. To the extent that Europe did buy British goods, Napoleon’s own subjects were financing the campaign that Great Britain was prosecuting against him. Her isolation from Europe by Napoleon’s regulations did little harm, for she herself was the source of supplies.

She is not to-day as independent of the rest of Europe, nor is she, by any means, the only adequate source of European supply. A boycott of Europe against Britain would be far more detrimental to her than any boycott of Europe that she could enforce by sea power. In the old days when she could put an end to all cheap domestic transportation and force the continental countries to trade with one another overland, she wielded a weapon of the utmost potency. To-day the overland communications in continental Europe are as normal as was water transportation in the days of Napoleon, and they are infinitely more adequate. Moreover, as the British have frequently pointed out to the Germans, to prove to them that colonies are unnecessary, the trade of nearly all the continental countries with each other is far more lucrative than their trade with the Americas and Asia, and forms in fact the major part of their business.

When, now, we address the issue of the ability of the present sea power of Britain to decide the war in favor of the Allies, we must admit that the changes of the nineteenth century in the component parts of the sea power and in their relation to each other, have lessened its chances of deciding the issue. Certainly it can no longer decide it by use of the old weapons. As a military asset, it is practically limited to the moving of troops of its own or another nation from one part of the world to another, or to the supplying of armies by water. Its influence on the military situation will therefore be directly proportioned to the necessity of these operations to the armies. Formerly both were vitally important. Then water transportation was much swifter than any pace at which an army could march, and frequently enabled the British to outdistance their enemies or to land an army in a place inconvenient to defend; and the supplying of armies by sea power was incomparably more important still. An army of any size can remain together only so long as it can be fed; and, when it must live off the country or be sustained by overland transportation, its size was in former wars seriously restricted and its operations circumscribed. The armies supported by sea power did possess a significant advantage of real military importance, and an army which could be augmented by the sea power had a still greater advantage over one which must depend upon reinforcements proceeding overland.

To a very large extent, the railroad has robbed the sea power of its importance as a military adjunct. Armies are now moved and fed by rail with greater ease and certainty than they ever were by water; and they are also free to campaign wherever they wish, without regard to the configuration of the country or the location of the rivers. Even the ability of the sea power to land troops in unexpected or inconvenient places is of doubtful value today; the British ability to transport troops to France and to the Near East has not yet proved decisive, nor has the stupendous feat of moving armies from India and the colonies yet had military significance, though its moral effect has been striking.

The sea power must to-day prove itself a military factor by limiting the importation of supplies by its enemies and by preventing their exportation of their own goods. It will be quite obvious that this factor will be decisive only when the enemy imperatively needs imports, or when that country is itself incapable of consuming its own manufactures or of providing its own raw materials. The measure of the sea power’s importance will be solely the result of this interference upon the efficiency or size of the enemy forces actually in the field; the suffering of the civilian population, which does not impair the power of enemy armies, will be neither decisive nor important. If importation or exportation are vitally necessary and a commercial crisis follows the blockade, crippling the ability of the enemy to maintain the army in the field, and leading to its defeat, the sea power will then have been the decisive element in the military campaign. On the other hand, should the enemy country be self-sufficing or able to readjust its industrial organization in time to produce itself what had previously been imported, and to consume what had been exported, the offensive weapon of the blockade will not exert any considerable influence. The offensive strength of the sea power will then be reduced to its naval forces, which in turn will be important only so far as naval operations are essential to defeat the enemy armies.

Such a decisive economic result the British blockade of the Central Empires has not yet had. Not only has it failed to impair noticeably the size or efficiency of their armies, but most observers, even in Great Britain and France, hold that it has yet to affect seriously the prosperity of industrial Germany. The war itself, the necessary shift of industry from a peace to a war basis, has been in Germany as elsewhere the chief economic difficulty. Its paralyzing effects upon industry and the difficulties caused by the blockade have both been obviated in large measure by forethought and coöperation between the government and business men, and by the inventive ability of German industrial scientists. The blockade has annoyed the Germans, compelled a somewhat more extended transformation of industry than would otherwise have been needed, postponed its completion for some months; but the principal losses directly resulting from the blockade have been borne by neutral nations. That any serious economic blow can now be inflicted upon the Central Empires by the present British sea power under existing circumstances, seems improbable; and that there can now be dealt a blow sufficiently telling to result in a victory for the Allies, seems almost incredible. The readjustment in Germany to the blockade, as to the war itself, will become more and more perfect month by month; the worst problems have already been solved, and the rest are even more capable of easy solution.

Indeed, the unexpected has happened. It has been German and not British sea power which has exerted decisive influence upon military operations. The German control of the Baltic and of the Black Sea has been vastly more significant in a military sense than the much more difficult feat performed by the British navy of blockading Germany and of driving her commerce from the seas. Russia’s grain would be of immense value to Britain, and ability to export it would provide Russia with an outlet for produce which she cannot herself consume, and enable her to buy with it manufactured goods which she desperately needs and which she is not capable of producing. The Russian industrial fabric is still weak; her munition factories are even more inadequate than was feared before the war; and her needs are truly imperative. The Germans claim, probably with some truth, that the economic straits of Russia will compel her to export food and oil to the Central Empires and buy their manufactured goods. She will thus be forced to relieve the worst straits of the latter’s civilian population. There are indications already, despite the censorship, that the leakage into Germany and Austria through the blockade, from both Great Britain and Russia, is very considerable and is constantly increasing. Not improbably, if the Germans can maintain their hold on the Baltic and the Dardanelles, Russia will be compelled to trade freely with the Central Empires or face economic ruin. The longer the war lasts the more imperative will her need be, and the more completely, therefore, this trade will relieve the pressure upon Germany of the British blockade. It may indeed assume proportions which would go far to offset the effects of the war itself upon German industry. A monopoly of Russian trade in manufactured goods is a thing to conjure with.

There seems to be no escape from the conclusion that this war, like most previous wars, must be ended on the battlefield. If the Allies are to win, there must be another Waterloo. It may be that the British control of the seas will blaze the path of her Allies to victory, as it has done before, but it will probably not accomplish that feat without the assistance of powerful non-military and non-naval factors, among which can be reckoned few of those so potent in the past. Meanwhile, the armies of the Allies must avoid a second Sedan or Sadowa. Those of us whose hopes are with the Allies need not as yet despair. Because the old props beneath the sea power have fallen away, because its very nature is changed, it does not at all follow that its power has disappeared, or that it has not already sunk new foundations in the very factors and forces which undermined the old. It has been in just such moments of dark tempest, when apparently all was lost, that the genius of the English people shone the brightest. What European predicted victory for England against Spain in 1588? What conservative men in 1796 thought the worst could be avoided? What inefficiency and gloom preceded the days of Blake! If the evidence of the past proves beyond contravention the disappearance of some of the most significant factors of Britain’s strength, it proves as indubitably the ability of the British to adjust themselves to changed conditions.

We have still to ask of Britain’s fate should the Allies be decisively defeated on land while she still retained her present hold upon the sea. Can she, single-handed, decline to accept the settlement of the Central Empires? Can the sea power alone maintain a war against a land power supreme in Europe? It has never been able to do so in the past. It has never yet won through against land power without the aid of armies. Frederick the Great and Wolfe were needed to supplement the victories of Boscawen and Hawke. After Trafalgar had given the British a supremacy on sea as complete as any in history, at a time when the difficulties of land transportation and the structure of the Channel enabled the fleet to throttle the domestic as well as the foreign trade of Northern Europe, when the Industrial Revolution gave Britain a practical monopoly of manufactured goods, Napoleon maintained himself triumphantly for eight long years. Even then his downfall had to be compassed at Leipzig and Waterloo by armies. There is little reason to suppose that the sea power can now succeed unaided in accomplishing a feat which it could not earlier perform without the aid of powerful armies and an almost unparalled juxtaposition of economic factors.

The weapons of the sea power against a victorious military power are solely economic, and are powerful only when the victors’ need is imperative for what the sea power can exclude. What the blockade cannot accomplish during the war, it will hardly be able to do when trade is resumed after the war between the Central Empires and the rest of Europe. The greater part of the European nations are now leagued with the sea power, closing by their own administrative action their harbors and railways to trade meant for the Central Empires. These a military victory will open, and through them will pour a stream which the sea power cannot stop without throttling the commerce of the world itself. And even if it should successfully do so, it could at most compel the victors to retain somewhat longer their wartime expedients for coping with the present blockade. Indeed, business circles in Great Britain are viewing with concern the new German inventions and substitutes, for fear that they may permanently meet the old demand. In any case, the Germans could then close to the British continental markets far more indispensable to the latter than are the British and colonial markets to Germany.

Isolation of a victorious military coalition by the sea power is no longer possible. Waiving the many naval potentialities, and assuming that the British fleet could in very fact maintain after the war an absolute control of the world’s waterways, England could not use it without compelling all nations to join with the victors to deprive her of such an abuse of the sea power. Before 1815, England was the only nation really dependent on a continuous stream of sea-borne commerce. Long-distance trade was chiefly in luxuries, and the continent easily supplied itself in time of peace with most bulky produce and raw materials. No country’s prosperity, to say nothing of its economic existence, then was threatened by British control of the ocean highways.

To-day the world is interdependent. The commercial prosperity of every highly developed community rests literally upon access to the ocean routes to the international markets. The economic structure of the world is too closely interrelated and interdependent to permit the sea power alone to interfere with the freedom of international exchange. To-day, its ability to interfere depends upon the potent aid of France, Russia, and Italy. Were their interests those of the Central Powers and of the present neutral states, an attempt to put economic pressure on the Central Empires would risk the formation of a general coalition to destroy the sea power which the latter could not resist. A boycott executed simultaneously by the land powers would rob the sea power of its own necessary imports and bring it to terms. This very isolation has been the bugbear of British statesmen for three centuries, and they too will accept terms when their allies are driven to sue for peace. They must all stand together; Great Britain will be the last to try to stand alone.