World War I - 9 Book Collection: Nelson's History of the War, The Battle of Jutland & The Battle of the Somme. Buchan John
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The Vindictive, the Iris, and the Daffodil got away at full speed, and the German salvos followed them with remarkable regularity, but always a few yards behind; the ships were soon covered too by their own smoke. Of the three destroyers two came safely off; the third, the North Star, was sunk by gun-fire near the block-ships, but her men were brought away by the Phoebe. Of the motor-boats (under command of Captain R. Collins) many performed feats of incredible audacity at point-blank range, and all but two returned. The co-operation of all forces was from first to last beyond expectation and beyond praise; a mortal enterprise could hardly come nearer to perfection, whether of foresight, daring, or execution.
During the Zeebrugge attack the wind shifted and blew the smoke off shore. This helped to cover the retirement, but at Ostend it caused a partial failure of the blocking operations. Commodore Hubert Lynes successfully laid his smoke screen, and sent in the Sirius and the Brilliant to be sunk between the piers of the harbour mouth. But the enemy sighted and sunk the motor-boats and their guide lights; the block-ships missed the entrance and were blown up 2,000 yards to the east. The Germans, to guard against a renewal of the attempt, removed the buoy at the entrance and kept a patrol of nine destroyers in the harbour. But on the night of 9th May, Commodore Lynes took in a larger flotilla, and this time the Vindictive herself was the block-ship. In spite of fog and darkness her commander (Godsal, late of the Brilliant), piloted by Acting-Lieutenant Cockburn in a motor-boat, ran her 200 yards up the channel and then ordered her to be sunk. He died in the act, but the work was completed by Lieutenant Crutchley and Engineer-Lieutenant Bury. The losses were heavy, for the Germans had a fair target; but even when day broke the nine destroyers made no attempt at a counterstroke, and the expedition returned triumphant.
This whole attack was a legitimate enterprise planned only for a definite and practical purpose, but in the result it proved a greater affair than had been foreseen: the moral effect of so splendid a feat of arms came as a timely gift from the Navy to the Allied cause.
PART V.
BEHIND THE LINES.
CHAPTER XXX.
BEHIND THE LINES AND AT HOME.
"We are fighting," said Lord Curzon in July 1918, "seven distinct campaigns ourselves—in France, Italy, Salonika, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt, and we have raised 7,000,000 men. We have been the feeder, clothier, baker, armourer, and universal provider of the Allies."
The achievement of Britain in the war cannot be judged only from her successes in the field. In 1914 she set herself resolutely to prepare a great fighting-machine which would not only be superior to that of Germany, but which would also serve the needs of all the Powers who fought by her side. It was the perfection of this machine, built up through four patient and laborious years, which enabled her in the final war of movement to deliver the succession of blows which led to victory.
Take first the numbers of enlisted men. In August 1914 the British land forces were made up of 250,000 Regulars, 200,000 trained Reserves, and 250,000 partly-trained Territorials. Lord Kitchener asked for 100,000 volunteers, and these were enrolled in less than a fortnight. In one day 30,000 enlisted. By July 1915 there were 2,000,000 men in arms. In May 1916 the King announced that over 5,000,000 men had enrolled voluntarily in the army and the navy. In August 1918, 8,500,000 men were enrolled in the armed forces of the Crown.
The navy, in August 1914, had 145,000 officers and men and a tonnage of 2,500,000. Four years later the figures were 450,000 men and 8,000,000 tons. In one month in the year 1918 British warships travelled 1,000,000 sea miles in home waters alone, and in the same period auxiliary vessels travelled 6,000,000 miles, or 250 times the circuit of the globe. During the war the British navy transported 20,000,000 men, of whom only 2,700 were lost by enemy action; 2,000,000 horses and mules, 25,000,000 tons of explosives, 51,000,000 tons of oil and fuel, and 130,000,000 tons of food and other materials. All this was done while fighting a constant warfare against enemy submarines.
The work of the British people at home in supplying munitions was one of the main factors in the enemy's defeat. The Ministry of Munitions was formed in June 1915, and soon became the largest of the Government departments, controlling the iron, steel, engineering, and chemical trades, and employing 2,500,000 men and 1,000,000 women. Over 10,000 firms worked for it, and Government factories increased from three in 1914 to 200 in 1918. In 1918 the figure of the first year of war in the production of certain classes of ammunition was multiplied four hundred times, and in the production of guns forty times. During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Britain issued every week to her armies in France an amount of ammunition equal to the entire stock available for her land service at the outbreak of war; and during the last battles of 1918 the volume of shells fired was more than double that expended in the Battle of the Somme. All the railways of Britain were taken over by the State, and from October 1916 materials for thousands of miles of track, over 1,000 locomotives, and many thousands of wagons were shipped to various theatres of war, in spite of the fact that more than 170,000 railwaymen had been released for service with the army.
FIELD-MARSHAL EARL KITCHENER.
The business of an army in the field is not merely to fight, or rather, its chief task, fighting, is only possible if there is a first-class organization behind the lines. How brilliant and complete that organization was towards the close of the struggle would take a volume to expound. In France, for example, the British Army had its own Forestry Department, and produced from French forests over 2,000,000 tons of timber. It was its own farmer, and in 1918 it saved the crops of 18,000 French acres, harvesting them at night. It did its own tailoring and boot-making. It did all its mending of every kind, and it saved broken and derelict material to be remade in the factories at home. It did its own catering, and there never was a war in which men and horses were better fed—a remarkable feat when we remember that provision had to be made for men of different races and tastes—curry for the Indians, nut-oil for the Chinese, and coffee for the American soldiers. It did its own banking, insurance, and printing. Its transport service was a miracle. In 1914 the Expeditionary Force landed in France with 40,000 horses and a few hundred lorries, while its railway transport was managed by the French. In 1918 it ran its own railways, and it had 500,000 horses and mules, 33,500 lorries, 1,400 tractors, and 15,800 motor-cars. It did the business of almost all the trades on earth, and did it with exactness, economy, and an amazing flexibility, so that whenever a new call was necessitated by the strategy of the generals, it was fully and promptly met.
The war was therefore a united effort of the whole British people. In Cromwell's day the start of one battle was delayed because it got mixed up with a fox hunt. Even in the Napoleonic wars there were thousands of families in England which lived remote from the struggle, and readers of Jane Austen's novels would not gather from their placid narrative that her country was involved in a European campaign. But between 1914 and 1918 every aspect of national life and every branch of national thought was organized for the purposes of the war. Hospitals sprang up in every town and in hundreds of country districts. Articles of food were controlled to release shipping for war purposes. The country enormously СКАЧАТЬ