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THE

NAVAL REVIEW
TO PROMOTE THE ADVANCEMENT AND SPREADING WITHIN THE SERVICE OF KNOWLEDGE RELEVANT TO THE HIGHER ASPECTS OF THE NAVAL PROFESSION.

Founded in October, 1912, by the following officers, who had formed a Naval Society: Captain H. W. Richmond R.N. Commander K. G. B. Dewar R.N. Commander the Hon. 8. A. E. Plunkett R.N. Lieutenant R. M. Bellairs R.N. Lieutenant T. Fisher R.N. Lieutenant H. G. Thursfield R.N. Captain E. W. Harding R.M.A. Admiral W. H. Henderson (Honorary Editor) It is only by the possession of a trained and developed mind that the fullest capacity can, as a rule, be obtained. There are, of course, exceptional individuals with rare natural gifts which make up for deficiencies. But such gifts are indeed rare. We are coming more and more to rewgnise that the best specialist can be produced only after a long training in general learning. The grasp of principle which makes detail easy can only wme when innate capacity has been evoked and moulded by high training. Lord Haldane Issued quarterly for private circulation, in accordance with the Regulations printed herein, which should be carefully studied. Copyright under Act of 1911

Vol. 65

No. 3

JULY 1977

Contents
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EDITORIAL NOTICE ARTICLES:


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THE ROLE O F THE CHAPLIN IN THE ROYAL NAVY SOVIET NAVAL AND OCEANS POLICY THE EDUCATION O F NAVAL OFFICERS T.B. 037-1

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THE CRUISE MISSILE-A THE NORMANDY

CONCEPT O F OPERATIONS

LANDINGS-6 JUNE 1944


INVOLVEMENT

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THE NAUTICAL INSTITUTE-R.N. ALL TO BE O F A COMPANY-I1

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THE ADMIRALTY. BOMBS AND BATTLESHIPS

CORRESPONDENCE
SARTOR RESARTUS

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. F I R E CONTROL 'BETWEEN THE WARS' A-A


RE-SILVERING A.F.O.

. ADMINISTRATION IN THE FLEET

1/56

. GRADUATE OFFICERS
. LOOK

IN

THE SERVICES

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BROACHES-TO

TO YOUR MOAT . NAME DROPPING?

. SIXKING OF THE Haguro THE

REVIEWS REVIEWS

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NAVAL PERIODICALS BOOKS

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Editorial
Morale is more important than matdriel things - political opinions and social attitudes are more important than mechanisms and circuits. Disclosure of secret technology to a potential enemy is less to be feared, in a securityconscious professional journal such as The Naval Review, than revelations of organisational stress within the naval establishment. Yet such stress exists, has long existed, will no doubt continue to exist, and had best be acknowledged. The Royal Navy is certainly not unique in this. Any organised group of people many tens of thousands strong, mostly men between the ages of eighteen and forty, must face the problem - how to harmonise the best interests of the individual with the best interests of the organisation. Articles and correspondence in this and recent issues of The Naval Review reflect a renewed concern with this basic problem, exemplified in the officer and rating structures. The forces for change are social and technical - the first tending towards uniformity and the second towards diversity. The countervailing forces are the abiding need for leadership, and the rationalisation of systems.
O.L.Queue? Winston Churchill, complaining before World War I of the absence of a naval staff in the Admiralty, minuted that the Royal Navy produced many good captains of ships but few good captains of war. Good ship-handling and robust leadership alone could not win sea-battles - sound strategy and creative tactics would be needed also. But the Navy was not stupid, merely slow to adapt. For the fighting power of a sailing man-of-war had depended upon good ship-handling - laying the ship smartly alongside an enemy; and on
- people are more important than

robust leadership - getting the best out of a highly labour-intensive armament. Steam, gas turbine and nuclear power are produced and manipulated by others, on behalf of the captain, who now can concentrate on where to go; and push-button weapon-systems call for intellectual, as well as exemplary, leadership. There must surely be a presumption of 'officer-like qualities', however defined, in all who are selected to be officers. Hence, the organisational problem facing the Navy in regard to the officer-structure is to identify as early as possible, train, and employ appropriately, the future commanding officers of H.M. Ships - the future captains of war. The notion that any combatant officer, or category of officer, should be excluded ab initio from the process of selection for command is now untenable. Even so, it must be conceded that whereas there should be a commanding officer's appointment in every sublieutenant's brief-case, the naval establishment is bound to consist mainly of practitioner jobs, with some consultant jobs, and relatively few combat commands. What does seem certain is that candidates for these key jobs must be drawn from the whole of the officer corps.
A rich mixture If the officer problem is too many chaps chasing too few commands, the rating problem is too many chiefs and too few indians. The problem is to harmonize the best interests of the individual navyman with the best interests of the ship as a fighting unit. Is it not time that the total involvement of officers and men formerly associated with 'coal ship' was given new life and shape as 'clean ship', 'maintain ship', 'train ship' and 'fight ship'? There is much to

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EDITORIAL

be said, also, for exacting from youth a meed of service for the common good - let all the 'under twenties', irrespective of skill-group, help to keep the ship habitable and smart. Some of us had to clean the Gunroom scuttles for Captain's Rounds; and chose, also, to clean the brass dolphins on the picket-boat. And which of us today is totally absolved from household chores?

NOTICE
Annual General Meeting By courtesy of the Committee and Members of the Naval Club, 38 Hill Street, London W. 1, the Annual General Meeting of The Naval Review will be held there at 5.30 p.m. on Monday 26 September 1977. Club bar facilities will be available after the Meeting.

Spithead-28 June 1977


It made no sense at all to restrict the issue of Silver Jubilee medals earlier this year. In my opinion, everybody serving should have got one. Some might say that would devalue the medal, but surely no more and no less than, say, the Defence and Victory Medals which were issued wholesale in World War Two? Some might point to the cost. Let the recipients buy their own. Everybody I asked, officers, ratings, Wrens, all without a single exception said they would have been quite content to buy their medals out of their own pockets. Medals are fun. They brighten up a uniform and there are so few opportunities of getting one these days. The only snag about them - as their recipients find out all too soon - is how quickly they date you! Certainly, I would myself award several medals each to everybody and anybody who had anything to do with the planning and carrying-out of the Jubilee Review at Spithead. I respectfully tip my hat to them all. I went with the press party, representing a national illustrated magazine and the members of the Naval Review, and I cannot remember when I had a more exciting, enjoyable and moving experience. The mixture of emotions was almost overwhelming laughter, tears, pride and jubilation all

- some 350 reporters and photographers

followed each other in turn. The press

from all over the world - were in the helicopter support ship R.F.A. Engadine, following immediately behind Birmingham, with the Board of Admiralty embarked. When we reached Spit Sand Buoy and the Royal Salute of twentyone guns began, and we looked across a t all those lines of ships, it made up one of the most breath-taking and romantic sights I have ever seen in my life. To any officer or man in any of those ships who has any doubts about the effect it had, let me reassure him. I t looked marvellous. This was the first Royal Review in the Navy's history at which the most powerful warships of their day were not present. There were 180 ships, of eighteen nations, anchored in ten lines, stretching for seven miles - but no Polaris. It had been decided that having a Polaris submarine present would degrade the deterrent. So, at the head of the line was Ark Royal, entering upon what will almost certainly be her last eighteen months of operational life, and now herself the last representative of a Navy that is past. As we rounded Ark's bows, and saw the grey hulls ahead, the superstructures decked with flags, the sailors lining the

SPITHEAD-28 JUNE 1977 decks, all bursting to cheer. it was obvious that this was something special. We were about to see something very rare indeed. It was suggested at the C.-in-C. Fleet's press conference in Ark the day before that Reviews ought to be held more often - to show the public just how small the Navy was getting. The Admiral replied that he thought it would have rather the opposite effect and show what a large Navy we still had! And, of course, he was quite right. Passing down the Review lines, it was at once obvious how hard everybody had worked and what pains they had taken to get everything right. The ships looked absolutely brand new - gleaming fresh grey sides and black boot-topping, anchor cables freshly painted down to the water-line, not an ensign or a jack fouled, not a flag out of place, and the sailors manning the sides grasping the guard-rails in front of them so that they looked as though they were linking hands. Some ships had tended to cheer too early at rehearsal the day before, but on the day they had it right. We heard the cheering coming down the wind (Hurray, and not Hurrah as in 1953, a t the Queen's own request) and could see Her Majesty ahead, on the after gallery deck of Britannia, enjoying it as much as anybody. The rotation of the white caps with each cheer was also well coordinated. Where there was any raggedness, it seemed almost always to be directly under the bridge - could that be due to some acoustic idiosyncrasy in ship's upper-deck loudspeaker systems? I had not properly realised before, how many of the famous names from the Navy's history are still in the Navy List - Tiger and Blake, Kent and London, Sheffield and Devonshire, Arethusa and Phoebe and Hardy and Cleopatra and Tartar and Hermione and Euryalus and Dreadnought and Valiant and Superb. The ships were dressed overall and in festive mood, but festive seems somehow too small a word. There

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was also an air of purposefulness about them. While the great names of our Navy were passing by to starboard, there was much to see of ships from other navies to port. There was a lot of jealous missile counting, comparing theirs with ours. How was it, one wondered, that the Italians seem to have fitted two helicopters into their destroyer Ardito. where we can only get one into ships of that sort of size? The raked funneltopsand stem of Hamburg, so obviously German, aroused uncomfortable memories in some. The U.S. nuclear submarine Billfish was the only ship there that seemed to be anchored by the stern possibly to avoid fouling underwater gear with the cable. There was the diving trials ship Reclaim, the only survivor of the 1953 Coronation Review, and the giant 270,000 BP tanker British Respect, the largest ship present. Her decks were not manned, just as they were empty for rehearsal the day before - perhaps they do everything with pushbu&ons L and the Review 'management' are supposed to have sent her a signal 'Kindly show more British respect'. By contrast, the Shell tanker next to her. Opalia, had what was possibly her full company on deck, fallen in as smartly as any other ship that day. There was Mr. Heath in Morning Cloud V , cutting along beside Britannia, whilst his crew gave three cheers, and the boys of the Sail Training Association and the Sea Cadet Corps manning the yards of Royalist, Malcolm Miller and Sir Winston Churchill, there was a trawler called Princess Anne, and the yacht Sea Spirit from Gordonstoun School, and three inshore rescue craft from the R.N. L.I. and the wives and girlfriends of the hovercraft crews peering out through the forward windows, and the black and buff paintwork of the Portsmouth harbour tugs and service craft who had come out of harbour the after-

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noon before in solemn and stately line ahead, and the black shapes of the submarines, placed for contrast opposite the dainty white hulls and yellow funnels of the survey vessels. The nuclear submarine Churchill had a piper, in kilt and full fig, standing up forward, and the skirling of his pipes came to us on the wind with the cheering. It took two hours to make the full circuit and when one had a chance to see all the ships there, the mind began to reel a t the sheer size of the problems that the planning staff had surmounted: problems of anchorages, and timing, and mail, and boat services, and food, and radio traffic, and shore patrols, and visitors, and foreign languages, and precedence, and tides, and security, and private craft, and ceremonial, and how best to cheer ship. This last problem was brilliantly solved. Carriers like Ark Royal and Hermes could simply line the whole flight deck, quarterdeck, boat decks and sponsons with every available man. But some of the R.F.A.s and the smaller ships such as the minehunters and survey vessels had obviously had to think hard where they were going to place each man so as to have the best effect. Each class of ship managed to produce a most pleasing picture. The whale-backed nuclear submarines were especially impressive, with a single line of men along the casings from forward to aft. Further out on the fringes, the sail training yachts of all three services had their crews in distinctly coloured kits. A visitor was left with many memories. There was the Admiral himself, deftly fielding questions - from a disgruntled Japanese one about why there were no Japanese ships, to the hoary-whiskered: 'If you've got Polaris, why do you need anything else?' There were the men of the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, who patrolled the edges of the fleet keeping the ring, and shepherding the armada of small

yachts, cabin cruisers, motor boats and pleasure steamers milling about on the outskirts. There was the Navy PR department, who did extremely well. The only complaint I heard was from a fellow ex-NO, now working for a provincial paper, who complained that the hospitality was not alcoholic enough: but as my first sight of him on Review Day was at seven in the morning, when he was breakfasting off a pork pie and a double whisky, perhaps his requirements were unusual. The Captain, officers and ship's company of R.F.A. Engadine also deserve a mention for the hospitable way they looked after the press. And although like all R.F.A.s they only had a small crew, they had their ship gleaming like a new pin. The weather started dull and towards the evening it got much worse. There was heavy rain and a bitterly cold wind. The 30,000 men lining the decks for over two hours must have been heartily glad to get below. The cloud base clamped down and the fixed wing fly-past was cancelled. The helicopter fly-past did take place, but the numbers were cut from 110 to about 80. So all the Fleet Air Arm's carefully practised formation flying, to trace out the letters ER and an anchor in the sky, which had worked so well on rehearsal the day before, was all wasted on the night. The poor visibility dimmed the fleet illuminations and the fire-works. However, the Queen signalled 'Splice the Mainbrace' which, now there is no tot of rum, meant three pub measures of spirits per man. The Queen also entertained 193 ratings and 31 ratings of foreign navies to a reception in Ark Royal where, in the upper hangar later, Her Majesty dined with the admirals and captains of the fleet according to tradition. The Palace had asked that there be no expense to the public purse so the captains had to fork out 15 each for their meal - but they were, in return allowed to keep their dinner plates!

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1977

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But nothing can really detract from the Fleet's achievement on the day. As the C.-in-C said: 'I thought the Review went very well and demonstrated our pride in showing the Fleet off to Her Majesty. I t has well repaid the immense amount of work that has gone into

getting the ships into their present state'. In the end, it was an occasion for the Queen and the men and women of her fleet. It was a privilege to be their guest for the day. JOHNWINTON

The US and Nato-One

Soldier's View

A Statement b y General Alexander he was awarded the Distinguished Haig, Supreme Allied Commander Service Cross, and, after a battlefield Europe (SACEUR), before the United promotion, assumed command of a States Senate Committee on Armed brigade. On return to the United States he went on the staff of West Point, and Services on I March 1977. General 'Al' Haig, born in Philadelphia later became Deputy Commandant. In in 1924, pursued undergraduate studies January 1969 General Haig became at the University of Notre Dame before Senior Military Adviser to the Assistant entering the United States Military to the President for National Security Academy, West Point, in 1944. Follow- Affairs, and in the following year he was ing graduation in 1947 he was com- appointed Deputy Assistant. missioned as a second lieutenant. After During his four years as Dr. Kissinger's service as a rifle platoon leader in the Deputy, General Haig made fourteen far east he became ADC to the Chief of assessment trips to South East Asia as Staff, Far East Command, and Com- the personal emissary of the President: manding General, 10 Corps, during the the last four contributed to the successoccupation of Japan and the early ful negotiation of the ceasefire agreemonths of the Korean conflict. He saw ment between North and South Vietnam wide service in that war, and participat- and the return of United States prisoners ed in the landings a t Inchon. H e later of war. In January 1973 he was appointserved on the staffs of both the United ed Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, States Military and Naval Academies, but no sooner had he become immersed graduated from both the Army and in a fundamental review of the Army's Naval War Colleges, and held various role and mission than in May the top posts in the Pentagon, in which amongst leadership of the White House resigned other things he was concerned with and the President recalled him and Army policy for NATO and Berlin, tasked him to rebuild the presidential planning for the Caribbean, and as staff. Invited by President Nixon to Liaison Officer for the Office of the remain permanently as Chief of the Secretary of Defence with the Office of White House staff, General Haig officially retired from the Army in the President. During the Vietnam war General August 1973, but in October 1974 Haig served with the 1st Infantry President Ford recalled him to active Division, finishing up as the commander Chief United States European Comof an infantry battalion, in which post mand, and on 15 December 1974 the

General became Supreme Allied Commander Europe. There is every reason to suppose that, following the election of President Carter, he continues to enjoy a full measure of presidential support for his objective views. There can be few senior officers in the world who, first commissioned after World War 11, can rival General Haig's experience in both operational and high policy fields. He is widely acknowledged to be an exceptional Supreme Allied Commander, with a grasp of politicomilitary realities, freely and persuasively articulated, second to none; and with an innovative energy and vision which has done much to revitalise thinking in Allied Command Europe in the last two years. Thus when he speaks of NATO, and indeed of the world beyond it, he is worthy of attention. What follows is his 1977 contribution, as Commander-inChief, U.S. European Command, to the annual series of debates in both Houses on the United States military budget, a process which involves invitations to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior officers who may be called, to address the appropriate Committees of the Congress. P.M.S.
SACEUR S P E A K S TO CONGRESS

Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Members of the Committee: I very much appreciate this opportunity to discuss with you the changing context of security in the North Atlantic area, and to present my personal assessment of the implications of this change for the U.S. military commitment to Europe. As you are aware, both issues have become matters of increasing public and governmental concern during the past year, both in the U.S. and in Europe. For that reason alone, your deliberations are particularly timely. Apart from their timeliness, however, these hearings, and the personal concern and effort of individual members of this

Committee, constitute a valuable indeed, essential - contribution to our efforts to make much-needed improvements in NATO's security posture. Together with the reassuring encouragement offered by the President and VicePresident, the clear interest of the Congress in our NATO military posture is welcome confirmation of the continued vitality of this nation's commitment to a stable and peaceful Europe. Today, the greatest single threat to that stability and peace continues to reside - as it has for twenty-seven years - in the immediate presence of massive Soviet military power. T o say that is not necessarily to make any apocalyptic judgments concerning current Soviet intentions. It suffices to acknowledge that fundamental political, social, and moral issues continue to divide East and West; that these issues continue to offer the material for dispute and confrontation; and that the risks of such dispute persist in the context of the greatest peacetime aggregation of military power the world has ever seen. Managing this power, and assuring that confrontation does not become conflagration, remains the most crucial task of Western diplomacy. And however we might wish it otherwise, the precondition for success in that task remains the maintenance of a military balance adequate to discourage resort to force. Today, that requirement is complicated by fundamental transformations both of the nature of Soviet military power, and of the environment within which off-setting Western efforts must be made. Earlier witnesses before this Committee have provided thorough descriptions of current and projected Soviet military capabilities, and I won't even attempt to recapitulate their efforts. Viewed in historical perspective, however, these developments reflect basic changes in the nature of Soviet military power - changes having significant

implications for U.S. security generally and the security of Western Europe in particular. First, it is clear that the capabilities deployed by the U.S.S.R. in Europe and elsewhere are not the product of some precipitous shift in Soviet priorities. Rather, they reflect a determined, sustained effort dating back a decade or more - an effort, moreover, which has proceeded relatively independent of Western defense allocations. Today, that determined effort has procured for the U.S.S.R. a military posture quantitatively superior to that of the West in many key areas, and constantly increasing in technological sophistication to the point where the West's traditional qualitative advantage is rapidly evaporating. Most important, the emergence of these capabilities has been accompanied by the development of a modern, expanded production base capable of fielding military hardware in greater quantities, and of greater sophistication, than we have ever previously observed. The direct impact of these developments on the contemporary military balance needs no elaboration. But what is perhaps more important is their impact on the West's ability to respond to an unfavorable change in the international climate. In a nutshell, we have been deprived of the great luxury of leisure. Our military capacity to safeguard Western interests a decade hence will depend on what we do today. The second key characteristic of the expansion of Soviet military power is the extent to which it has been distributed across all major categories of capability - nuclear and conventional; land, sea, and air; immediate combat power and sustaining logistical capability. During the past decade, the Soviets have methodically isolated and addressed force weaknesses and vulnerabilities which enabled the West to counterbalance traditional Soviet strengths without seeking to match them. Today,

as a result, no single area of military capability is susceptible to unilateral Western exploitation. The day of the quick technological fix is over. That does not imply that the West must now match Soviet capabilities missile for missile, tank for tank, or man for man. It does imply that the West can no longer afford postural panaceas which would ignore whole categories of capability. Finally, in the process of their sustained and balanced allocation of resources to military capabilities, the Soviets have fundamentally transformed both the character and utility of their military posture. Once essentially continental in capability, the military forces of the U.S.S.R. are today increasingly offensive in character and global in reach. Their impact on European security is thus no longer limited to the direct threat of land invasion, but rather incorporates a novel and expanding threat to the broader political and economic relationships which undergird the prosperity and economic vitality of the industrialized world. Accordingly, it is clear that neither the European allies nor the U.S. can any longer afford to apply artificially restrictive criteria to the definition of North Atlantic interests. NATO may or may not concern itself with Soviet challenges beyond the strict geographical confines of the Alliance; it cannot avoid being affected by them. And it would be tragic indeed, if at the very moment when both our allies and our potential adversaries are beginning to recognize the nature and importance of this broader security nexus, the U.S. were to move in the opposite direction, and to fix its attention narrowly on a single region to the disregard of others. Together, these three changes in the nature of Soviet military power pose an unprecedented challenge to Western defense policy - a challenge which must be met in an environment of limited economic resources; in which the

costs of military manpower and technology have skyrocketed; and in which Western governments face increasing responsibilities for the economic and social welfare of their citizens - responsibilities which inevitably and legitimately compete for scarce budgetary resources. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising to find proposals emerging which call for radical reconfiguration of NATO's strategic doctrine and posture, concentration on one o r another component of our NATO TRIAD, or more extensive reliance on novel technology as an alternative to the maintenance of increasingly expensive but nevertheless essential traditional military capabilities. Certainly we cannot afford to dismiss such proposals out of hand. Strategy must evolve or court sterility. But neither can we afford to delude ourselves that there is some magical, cheap solution to the maintenance of a stable military balance. Rather, I think it is clear that, in the face of increasingly multiplex Soviet capabilities, nothing less than a balanced Western military posture will adequately assure either the deterrence of war or the Alliance unity upon which such deterrence critically depends. - Balance, in our evaluations of the nature and implications of the threat; - Balance, in our concern for and attention to the requirements of deterrence on the one hand, and of pure warfighting capability on the other; - Balance, in our capacity both to react swiftly and in strength to aggression, and to sustain operations for as long as that aggression persists; - Balance, in the regional allocation of effort, recognizing that the Alliance has flanks as well as a center, and that all must be considered a single entity if both unity and deterrence are to be maintained. - Balance, in the quantitative and qualitative improvement of our forces,

avoiding over-reliance on attractive but typically transient technological advantages; - Balance, in our recognition that coalition security requires a fair apportionment of the risks of deterrence failure; - Balance, in our concern for an equitable sharing of security burdens on the one hand, and for our own irreducible interest in a Europe free of Soviet domination on the other: - and finally, balance among the major components of our TRIAD, recognizing that today, it is the interdependence among these components which constitutes NATO's fundamental deterrent strength. T o argue for balance in our approach to European security is to recognize implicitly that there can and will be legitimate disagreements concerning the optimum allocation of defense resources - disagreements both among the members of the Alliance and within the security establishments of the individual nations themselves. To the extent that these disagreements promote clearer analysis of our requirements and more innovative approaches to meeting them, NATO can only benefit. But that benefit is assured only if consultation is both extensive and meaningful. Our allies will accept - indeed, they solicit American creativity; but they will not accept American dictation. Nor, for that matter, is there any reason to suppose that we have a corner on the idea marketplace. To survive, NATO must be collective in fact, not merely in appearance. I might note that in my judgment, the recent effort of Senators Nunn and Bartlett is a model for the kind of careful and sensitive assessment most useful to the improvement of Alliance security. As their evaluation makes clear, the maintenance of a confident NATO military posture is by no means beyond our grasp, notwithstanding the economic pressures under

which we all labor. Required only are the willingness to establish clear priorities, and the determination to follow through on them. Today in Allied Command Europe, we have adopted and are pursuing such an effort. And I am confident that with your support, and that of your fellow Parliamentarians throughout the Alliance, it will produce the balanced and effective security posture we all seek, and which alone can justify to our citizens the contributions we ask of them. The heart of that effort is the improvement of our conventional land, sea, and air forces - not because we view nuclear deterrence as less important, but because we view a stalwart conventional capability as the prerequisite for such deterrence, and because the deficiencies in our conventional posture are currently the most grievous. To correct them, we are placing priority on the improvement of the readiness of in-place forces, to guarantee their capacity on short notice to move rapidly to their defensive position3 materially and psychologically prepared to fight; on the rationalization of our forward defense, to insure that our multinational, multiservice forces are able to operate effectively in concert; and on the enhancement of our reinforcement capabilities, to insure that the external and rapidly-mobilizable theater forces which underwrite our forward defense are enabled to close rapidly and smoothly with forces already engaged. Together, these improvements will insure a conventional posture in which every echelon contributes at maximum effiicency. I wish I could state confidently that such improved utilization of existing resources will suffice to meet our strategic requirements. But the fact is - and I have made this equally clear to our allies - the most efficient resource

management in the world will not compensate for a serious imbalance of raw military resources on the ground. Nothing your European commanders can do will compensate for insufficient levels of manpower and equipment; for sustaining capabilities inadequate to the demands of today's intense and lethal battlefield; or for the density and availability of reinforcements through which to guard against the high rates of attrition our assessments tell us we can anticipate. For these basic resources, we must rely on the vigorous and active support of our member governments, and of the citizens they represent. The additional effort required is not unmanageable. We are not talking about massive increases in manpower and equipment. Rather, we are talking about adequately supporting those forces already committed to a European security mission, together with modest but important improvement in those areas in which we are most clearly vulnerable, and which therefore promise the highest security return on our resource investment. Nor are the costs involved extraordinary; indeed, just this past year our political authorities agreed that additional efforts of no more than 5% annually in real terms constituted a reasonable economic challenge to the member states. Clearly, it would be preferable to avoid these costs. But in the absence of equitable and verifiable negotiated reductions, I can see no alternative but to meet them. In the final analysis, the West must recognize that it cannot indefinitely permit Soviet military investment to outpace Western efforts without risk to its vital security interests, in Europe or elsewhere. And it must be clearly understood that the interests at stake are not exclusively European; they are also American interests. Our commitment to the security of Western Europe is no act of charity, but simply a reflection of

the inextricable link between that security and our own. For twenty-seven years, this link has preserved the peace in a region in which tension and war were once endemic, and in which

America has twice found it necessary to invest its own blood. The reasons for our commitment are still more compelling today. I t is a commitment which deserves the support of every American.

The Role of the Chaplain

the Royal Navy

Come with me, and I will make you fishers o f men. (Mark 1 : 17) You did not choose me; I chose you. I appointed you to go on and bear fruit that shall last. (John 15: 16) Forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead I press on towards the goal to win the prize which is God's call to the life above in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3: 13-14)

T o say that we live in a society which is changing so rapidly that 'it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place' is almost a truism. Indeed it must seem at times that change is prompted rcerely for the sake of change rather than for any real measure of progress or improvement that might be achieved. Certainly we live in a society and a t a time that is questioning all the customs and traditions which we have grown up with and which we have come to accept unquestioningly. Former values, established dogmas and cherished ideals are all being examined and being rejected (or so it may seem to many of us) and replaced by mass media opinion, instant beliefs and fleeting ideas. On the other hand, educational standards throughout the country have risen co~siderably since the 1944 Education Act. Along with this has come vast expansion of the public lending libraries, evening classes and information bureaux, , so that people have the opportunity to be better informed than ever before. This general improvement has resulted in a marked narrowing of the gap between officers and men not only educationally but also socially and

culturally; and in some cases the intellectual lead of the officer may even have been overtaken by his men. Our daily lives both ashore and afloat, both civilian and Service, have changed markedly and rapidly - and seem likely to go on changing in the foreseeable future. What then are we to say about the role of the Chaplain in such a rapidly changing society? In many respects his role must necessarily remain the same because the Gospel message, that God is, remains the same; and also because people remain the same however much their attitudes may change. Simply being human dictates continuing and unchanging needs for sympathy, understanding, and that disinterested concern for one another that Christians call love. So the Chaplain will continue to be, as stated in Queen's Regulations, 'the friend and adviser of all on board'. He fulfils a spiritual function which is quite unique and which cannot be done by anyone else. He is still 'The Godbotherer' - bothering his people about God, reminding them of the existence and the demands of God; and bothering God about them, praying for them and

THE ROLE OF THE CHAPLAIN IN THE ROYAL NAVY

21 1

interceding with God on their behalf. He is always the priest - mediating between God and man, representing God to men and men to God. His role is and always will be to make and sustain Christians. What has changed, however, and what will be continuously changing to meet the changing needs of society, are his methods.

It's all laid down or is it? Queens Regulations for the Royal Navy quite firmly lays the responsibility for encouraging religious observance in his ship on the Commanding Officer. He is to see that an example is set by himself, by his officers and by his senior rates that will ensure that religious observance is regarded as of primary importance in the ongoing life of the ship. The Captain is fortunate who has a Chaplain in his team to assist in giving a lead in matters of worship, for patterns of worship are changing. The most obvious example is in the language of the Church's services. Worship is, or at least should be, the offering of ourselves, our souls and our bodies, to God in His service and in the service of our fellowmen. Such present offering is properly expressed in contemporary language rather than the language of the Reformation. So the language of the main services of Churches of all denominations has recently been modernized. After all, the meaning of words change all the time. A simple example is to be found in the Naval Collect: 'Prevent us, 0 Lord, in all our doings. . .' 'To prevent' in today's usage means almost exactly the opposite to the intentions of the compiler of this lovely prayer. There is a place in our thinking about God for such contemporary prayers as those of Michel Quoist' and even Carl Burke.' There is also a gradual movement away from the somewhat monastic traditions of 'Divine Service' (when what is meant is Morning Prayer or Mattins)

. .. .

to the more sacramental service of Holy Communion. We are recovering some feeling for the centrality of the Christian family meal whenever the Christian family meet together. Even in ships and establishments where no Chaplain is borne it is possible to retain such a feeling for this centrality of the Godgiven sacrament of Holy Communion by using the first half of the modern service as a form of Morning Prayer. 'Never preach any practical morality to the regiment. That would only be throwing away your time. T o a man they all know, as well as you do, that they ought not to get drunk or commit adultery: but preach to them on the Trinity, the attributes of the Deity, and other mystical and abstruse subjects, which they may never before have thought o r heard of. This will give them a high idea of your learning: besides your life might otherwise give the lie to your preaching.' So wrote Francis Gose in 1782 in his Advice t o the Officers o f the British Ar my. Preaching and teaching remain a most important part of the Chaplain's role, but once again a change has overtaken the methods he must use to be effective in our changing society. A recent revision of Chapter 44 of Queens Regulations (the chapter dealing with Religion in the Royal Navy) has re-introduced the concept of 'Chaplain's Hours' - 'as a means of promoting an interest in religious matters among the officers and men of the Royal Navy' (Art. 4404 para. 3). Now, 'promoting an interest' is not quite the same thing as 'instructing', and to some this may seem an unnecessary dilution of the Chaplain's task. I believe, however, that this is n o more than honest recognition of a situation that has obtained for many years. We may instruct in a subject for as
'Prayers of Life by Michel Quoist, pub. Logos Books. 'Treat me Cool, God by Carl Burke, pub. Corgi Books. See also God is Beautiful, Man by Carl Burke.

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many hours as God gives us, but unless and until we can promote a genuine interest in it we shall get nowhere. In this questioning age it is no longer appropriate to do more in the first instance than to set out the various points for and against a Christian belief. Though, of course, once interest has been aroused and a genuine enquiry initiated then more instructional methods may be appropriate leading we hope, to confirmed Christian commitment to the life of faith. The Chaplain as leader and listener Leading the worship of the Christian community within a ship or an establishment is properly the primary function of the Chaplain. I t will be balanced by his pastoral activities, chief among which is his 'visiting around the parish'. Again, the role remains the same, the method has changed. The Chaplain visits, not as a salesman, peddling faith like others peddle insurance, though he may have his leg pulled about the apparent similarity. In any case, from a reading of St. Paul's letters it is quite clear that we cannot buy faith or grace o r salvation since it is God's free gift to each one of us. All the Chaplain can do is to create and offer an opportunity for each man to make his own choice, either to accept o r reject the gift of God offered in the person of Christ through his priest. By his very presence the Chaplain should be presenting an opportunity to talk about matters of faith, and morals, and ethics: and to this end a most important aspect of his work is the ability to listen. H e must be prepared to listen. He may very well be the only person on board or in the community who has the time and the patience to listen. In a society increasingly dominated by time - in which time has to be saved, in which there is always too much to do and too little time to do it in and in which everything has to be done 'at the rush' - there is a pressing

need for someone who has the time to spare, someone who has the time to listen to people, someone who can afford the time to be deeply interested and genuinely concerned about individual people. For people matter more than things" a truth that we may be losing sight of in an increasingly materialistic society. To this end we shall not expect to see the Chaplain rushing around anywhere and everywhere in ever decreasing circles. He will rather be strolling, not quite aimlessly although it may appear that way to the less well informed, but always ready to stop and to be stopped for a chat about anything, listening to people and then offering the Christian point of view in love and humility. The Chaplain's job is not an easy one - but then it never was and no one has ever seriously said it will be. Even to be a Christian is a constant struggle, a continuing battle against forces of evil. But the battle is only one in a war which has already been won. On the Cross of Calvary the worst that Man and Evil could do was confronted with God's love in a climactic struggle of Crucifixion - and Love triumphed! For the present, however, there are still battles to be fought and the Chaplain is not immune because of his calling: 'It is a continual struggle to remain completely a t the service of Christ and of others. A priest needs no praise o r embarrassing gifts: what he needs is that those committed to his charge should, by loving their fellows more and more, prove to him that he has not given his life in vain. And, as he remains a man, he may need once in a while a delicate gesture of disinterested friendship." NIGEL POND Notes: Bible Quotations are taken from the New English Bible.
3People Matter More than Things by Bishop John A. T. Robinson, pub. S.C.M. Press. 'Quaist ibid p.49.

Soviet Naval and Oceans Policy


The sea is used variously for the containers stuffed with men and equipconveyance of goods and people, for the ment, and there are five main types of projection of military power, as a source competition involved. First, we have the nationwide compeof living and non-living resources, as an international garbage dump, and as the tition for investment funds. I t seems landing area for space flights and fairly certain that the requirements of missile tests. Ocean science research is the major ocean-users are considered conducted to further these uses. Navies, under existing categories such as besides participating directly in the defence, foreign trade, and food and projection of military power, are used to agriculture, rather than under a special secure or prevent these uses. There is maritime category. The navy has to inherent conflict between many of these compete for funds within the defence different uses, and between the enjoy- budget; merchant ship requirements are considered within the general demands ment of these uses by different states. Because the Soviet Union has a central for domestic and foreign trade, the need planning process, it is often assumed to earn foreign exchange, and the that its leadership has therefore sought, avoidance of undue dependence on or managed to impose, an overall strategy Western bottoms; and the fishing on these conflicting uses, designed to industry is viewed in terms of the promote some long-range international national requirement for protein, and the goal. And it is sometimes claimed that prospects of the agriculture sector of the growth of the Soviet merchant and the economy. External factors are taken fishing fleets, and the distant deployment into account, such as the fishing fleet's of Soviet naval forces, denote the contribution to the foreign exchange adoption of Mahanist concepts concern- problem, the merchant fleet's capacity ing the role of seapower as an instrument to supply the Eastern Front in a war of policy. However, more detailed with China and to deliver arms and analysis suggests that neither of these equipment to client states, and the conassumptions is correct and the purpose tribution by both of them to foreign of this chapter is to outline some of the policy goals. But these are likely to be factors involved. To this end I consider, seen as by-products, and do not appear in rather general terms, five elements of to be the primary determinants for the problem, before turning to discuss allocating funds. Second, we have the competition for Soviet policies towards ocean use and the role of 'seapower' in Soviet foreign Soviet shipyard capacity. The Ministry of Shipbuilding Production already policy. serves the navy, the merchant, fishing Elements of the problem and river fleets, the border guards, the The allocation of resources. The Academy of Sciences' oceanographic allocation of resources goes to the heart interests, and will probably serve the of the planning process, and to varying offshore oil industry. Competition for degrees the different ocean-users are in facilities appears to have been resolved direct competition with each other for in large measure by freezing the allocascarce resources. Policy, in the shape of tion of yard capacity and by a fair degree decisions between competing claims, has of type specialisation, with certain yards therefore to be made, but the question (and facilities within yards) being is, on what basis? Ships are metal devoted to particular types of produc-

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tion. To some extent this is inevitable, given the increasing sophistication of warships, the differentation between all types of ship, the constraints imposed by investment in prefabrication and series production, and the very different construction techniques required for the different types of vessel. There are some adjustments, as for example in South Yard, Nikolaev, where the large building-way has been used variously for naval construction, fish factory ships and merchant vessels, and in other yards unplanned gaps in naval production have been filled by civilian construction. However, the increasing yard specialisation does tend to fix each customers' share of shipyard facilities on a longterm basis. The last major shift in allocation took place in the middle fifties, when seven of the thirteen cruiser/battleship building ways were reassigned to civilian construction. A gradual shift in the proportional share of facilities has also been occasioned by the building of new yards. Of the five major yards which entered production since World War 11, four were designed for the series construction of merchant ships, and only one was assigned to naval construction.' The shift is, however, somewhat less than the figures might suggest, since there has also been considerable movement in expanding and remodelling naval construction facilities, particularly the main nuclear submarine building yards. Third, we have the demands levied on the economy at large. Shipbuilding is an assembly industry, which reaches into every sector of the economy. Different clients will have different requirements, large bulk carriers placing heavy demands for steel, while naval construction competes a t the high technology end of the economy. Nevertheless, there remains a considerable overlap in the nature of these demands, and it wasn't for nothing that Khrushchev castigated the havy as 'metal eaters'. Raymond

Hutchings has made an interesting survey of the opportunity costs of the resources used in naval construction.' Fourth, we have foreign exchange. Russia has for a long time bought a substantial proportion of her non-naval tonnage abroad. A large part of these orders are placed with Warsaw Pact countries and Finland, but a fair number of fishing vessels (including fish factory ships) have been built in Western and Japanese yards. We do not know the grounds on which it is decided to order ships abroad, and whether it is balanced against the currency costs which would otherwise be incurred, but this practice obviously has an effect on other claims for foreign exchange and on reducing the ocean-users' claims on the domestic economy. The shipbuilding industry now earns a certain amount of foreign exchange on its own account, although mainly with the Warsaw Pact and client states. Fifth, we have the competition for manpower. Here again the conflict lies more with different sectors of the economy, than between ocean-users. The days when the Newfoundland Banks trained men for the Royal Navy are long past. Although all sailors share a common mistress whom they must respect and learn to handle, their daily occupations are very different. A large part of the fisherman's time is spent gutting, the merchant seaman has long periods of relative inactivity, while Gorshkov's 'navyman' is required to be a technically-oriented operator of sophisticated equipment. There is of course much greater overlap in the engine room and on the bridge between 'Ship Systems Command, U.S. Department of the Navy, Soviet Shipbuilding, December 1969. Figure 1. 'R. Hutchings, 'The Economic Burden of the Soviet Navy' in M. MccGwire, ed.,
Soviet Naval Developments: Context and Capabilities (New York : Praeger, 1973). pp. 210-222.

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the merchant, fishing and oceanographic units, but it is not clear that these categories are in short supply within the Soviet Union. Service a t sea provides the average man the rare opportunity to see the world outside Russia, and pay scales are relatively good. The setting of objectives. Looking back at the evolution of the main ocean-using organisations in the post-war period, one has the strong impression that in the past, each has marched to its own drum. Shifts in Soviet naval policy have reflected changes in perception of the strategic threat to the Soviet homeland. Investment in the fishing industry began shortly after the war and was prompted by economic studies, showing that it cost twice as much to produce one ton of beef as it did to produce one ton of fish." The build-up of the Soviet merchant fleet began in the middle fifties, reflecting wider policy changes in the wake of Stalin's death. The Soviet Union increased the scope and intensity of her foreign economic activities,' and there was a move towards cultivating Third World support with trade, aid and arms supply. Fishery operations extended to exploit existing fisheries and open up new ones. The Merchant Fleet's importance as a foreign currency earnerlsaver increased over the years and, to make economic use of their ships, Soviet shipping companies had to engage in crosstrading, joining the appropriate liner conferences in the process. Both fleets (or industries) were under increasing pressure to operate on a commercial basis, and were required to develop their own investment funds from internal profits. Meanwhile, on the Soviets' own admission, the decision that the navy should move forward in strategic defence was prompted by the new threat of nuclear strikes against Russia from distant sea areas. The protection which this naval presence might afford to merchant vessels and fishing fleets was

a bonus, and it was not even mentioned by the navy prior to 1967. Further evidence that in the past, a t least, Russian ocean-users have not worked to a common strategy, is provided by the development of their respective positions on the law of the sea. William Butler has pointed to the conflict between naval and fisheries' interests during the fifties and early sixties, and how slow the navy was to adjust its position so as to match the new operational posture which had recently been adopted." There is also the fragmentation of oceanographic research, vessels working primarily in support of their parent organisation. Thus fisheries research vessels (and submarines) evaluate new fishery grounds; vessels coming under the Academy of Sciences pursue more fundamental research; and naval hydrographic units are defence directed. There iq obviously a considerable overlap of interests and it would appear that results are collated centrally; and of course the work of Academy of Science units is closely related to the navy's concerns. Nevertheless, the separate subordinations persist and how well the programmes are coordinated is not clear. Organisational structure. Distant water fishing fleets are under the command of a Commodore and the fleet's internal structure follows naval lines. This appears to be more in the interests of effective administration and contrpl (all fishermen are pirates), than of having a quasi-military organisation. The Commodore is himself a member of the industry. ,'Richard T. Ackley, 'The Soviet Fishing Fleet', chapter...of this volume. 'R. Athay, 'Perspectives on Soviet Merchant Shipping Policy' in Soviet Naval Developments. p. 94; see also Richard T. Ackley, 'The Soviet Merchant Fleet', chapter ... of this volume. W. Butler, 'The Legal Dimensions of Soviet Maritime Policy' in Soviet Naval Developments. pp. 118-1 19.

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Merchant and Fishing Fleet officers carry reserve rank in the navy. Since the middle fifties naval officers have gone to sea in merchant ships to gain distant water experience and to reconnoitre distant coasts. The Merchant Fleet is a uniformed, well-disciplined service with its own training schools and fleet-wide career structure, and it is headed and run by civilians. The structure of Russia's internal organisation, its essential services, its military reserve system, all reflect the lessons of June 1941 and hangovers from the cold war. National mobilisation is still a live concept and the Merchant and Fishing Fleets reflect that requirement. However, although they are structured on military lines, in their day-to-day operations their officers mainly pursue standard commercial objectives. Operational control. In the main, the pattern of deployment and the operational employment of individual oceanusers is the responsibility of the parent organisation, delegated as appropriate to the man a t sea. It is generally accepted that merchant and fishing vessels are predominantly engaged upon their 'lawful' pursuits although all ships are required to report information of operational interest to Moscow.' Fishing fleets working in the more strategic areas are likely to include one o r two ships which are specially fitted for intelligence work, and minor collection requirements will be levied on the officers of merchant vessels visiting foreign ports. All merchant, fishing and other ships are required to report their daily position at sea, hence Moscow knows the location of all Soviet vessels around the world, and can deploy them if required. Among other things, this facilitates the navy's use of freighting tankers for refuelling, although its organic replenishment capacity is progressively improving. Merchant ships are used to deliver military supplies to client states, and to

combatants. But this does not differ from Western practice, except for the organisational/contractual arrangements. On a day-to-day basis, Moscow has much greater direct operational control of all Soviet flag vessels than does the West over its ships, and this has various operational advantages, particularly in a sudden crisis or at the brink of war. The Soviets gave a limited demonstration of this capability during VESNA-75, when they diverted merchant ships and ordered others to leave port in mid-loading, in order to stage a convoy exercise in the N.W. Pacific. The West has comparable arrangements for wartime control, which can be implemented if circumstances demand. Meanwhile, the close but informal links between Western governments and shipping companies were demonstrated in the redeployment of tanker traffic during the 1973 oil crisis. Strategic infrastructure. The spread of Soviet trading and fishery interests has created a growing influence-structure of Soviet consular and trade officials, of fishery plant and port installation advisers, and even a harbour master. The Russians have helped to build new merchant and fishing port facilities and to develop local fishing industries. The Soviet Navy has also been developing base facilities of various kinds in Cuba, Egypt, Syria, and Somalia, and apparently hopes to gain access to westernmost Africa. Does this process follow any coordinated pattern? Do we see an initial penetration by the merchant fleet, expanded by the fisheries people and finally exploited by the navy? On rather limited evidence I would answer no. Each organisation appears to pursue its own special interests. The navy seems to have clear geo-strategic requirements and has zeroed in on these. These cases 'See chapters... and ... by Richard T. Ackley in this volume.

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of Egypt,' Somalia: and (as yet unsuccessful) West Africa' provide good examples of how strongly focused these requirements are. The fishing fleets have a different set of requirements related to the whereabouts of fish, and they need access to local ports for fresh supplies, to carry out repairs in sheltered waters, and to be able to ferry crews in and out by air. The merchant fleet meanwhile follows the dictates of policy concerning trade, aid and arms supply. The price of access to naval base facilities will normally include the supply of arms and perhaps aid in the form of fisheries development. The three will therefore frequently coincide, but not in the expected chronological order. Meanwhile, in strategic terms the value of this infrastructure depends entirely on the political alignment of the governments in power. We are a long way from the days of Western imperial expansion, when European powers moved in to directly administer new colonial territories, or established trading posts and bases as sovereign enclaves possessing a punitive capability. Nowadays, the fact of building a port provides absolutely no guarantee that one will be able to make use of it in the future. Policies towards ocean use If we look at the behaviour of Soviet ocean-users as a manifestation of underlying policy, we notice two separate tendencies. On the one hand each user is more or less organised along military lines; each comprises a more or less disciplined body of men and women; in each case operational control rests either with the respective ministry in Moscow, or with subordinate agencies such as the naval fleet headquarters, the merchant shipping lines and the fishing fleet headquarters; and finally, all ships, military or civilian, must report their position and intended movements daily. Because of this centralised structure and

the maintenance of a world-wide shipping plot, it is easy for Moscow to take full operational control of all Soviet-flag vessels in time of crisis and to divert individual ships for special purposes. On the other hand, each ocean-user has his own distinct set of short- and long-term objectives which only overlap with the others' a t the periphery. These different objectives have evolved through quite different processes, a t quite different times, to meet quite different needs. They give no evidence of being the result of some master plan. I n strategic as well as in tactical terms, each user appears to operate his fleet (conduct his business) so as to serve his own particular purposes. Meanwhile, ocean users are in competition with each other for national resources in several sectors of the economy. And while we cannot be certain how allocations are decided, the long-term type-specialisation of shipyard facilities suggests an intra-bureaucracy bargain rather than a flexible master plan. These conclusions, drawn from the evidence of past performance, are supported by a more detailed analysis of the underlying political processes. I n a recent study of bureaucratic interests and interactions in the making of Soviet oceans policy, Terese Sulikowski concludes that the latter is not the product of a centralised agency or decisionmaking process, nor is it well coordinated. The decision-making is 'See G. S. Dragnich, 'The Soviet Union's Quest for Access to Naval Facilities in Egypt prior to the June War of 1967' in M. MccGwire. K. Booth and J. McDonnell. eds., Soviet ~ a v a lPolicy : Objectives and Constraints (New York : Praeger, 1975).
DD. 237-277.

"The Pattern of Soviet Naval Deployment in the Indian Ocean, 1968-71' in Soviet
Naval Developments pp. 425-430

'"The Evolution of Soviet Naval Policy: 1960-74' in Soviet Naval Policy, pp. 525 and 528.

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fragmented, with various. institutions commanding marginal spheres of authority, and most issues are resolved through standard operating procedures of the bureaucracy. Policies are frequently the result of bureaucratic infighting, or of institutions' independent and uncoordinated activities.'' If, then, Russia has not been working to some long-range plan in the past, it might be useful to ask whether she in fact needs a tightly coordinated oceans policy. And also to consider why it is so often assumed in the West that a master strategy exists. Russia's immediate interest in ocean resources predominantly involves fisheries and most of these lie within 200 miles of the world's coastlines. Her interests in non-living resources are mainly related to oil and gas on her own continental shelf which, under the 1958 convention, is considered a 'natural prolongation of national territory', and as such is not really part of a world-wide oceans' policy. Her interest in the resources of the 'deep seabed and ocean floor beyond the limits of national jurisdiction' is tempered by the untapped resources of these minerals within her own borders, and the heavy investment and high technology required for seabed exploitation. She does however insist on being a party to any international arrangements for allocating these resources, although her concern that the high-technology Western nations should not monopolise the benefits clashes with her traditional resistance to delegating executive power to international authorities. The fishing industry, which is an internal domestic interest, wishes to operate as close to foreign shores as possible, and is opposed to national jurisdictions being extended beyond the twelve mile Territorial Sea. The interests of the ocean science community lie in the same direction. This clashes with Russia's foreign policy objective of in-

creasing the Soviet Union's prestige and influence amongst the nations of the Developing World, since the latter are strongly committed to the concept of a 200 mile exclusive economic zone. Turning from resources to using the sea for navigation, the navy's interests lie with the fishing industry's in opposing extended national jurisdiction, but its primary concern is to ensure free transit through key international straits. This clashes with the interests of various Third World states such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Morocco. In contrast, the merchant fleet is not vitally concerned about the effects of extended jurisdiction nor about a more critical interpretation of 'innocent passage'; it comprises modern but rather traditional ships, with a few of the giant tankers which worry coastal states. In establishing her position on Law of the Sea, the Soviet Union has had to balance out these four types of national interest: domestic, defence, foreign trade and foreign policy. This done, there is a new framework within which the separate interests can be pursued. Apart from this, it is not at all clear that an 'oceans policy' as a separate component of national policy is necessary, or indeed feasible. As we have seen, interests in ocean use are extensions of those on land, although complicated by the international nature of the operating environment. Distant water fisheries serve domestic food and agriculture interests and/or foreign trade; naval deployments serve the defence of the homeland and/or foreign policy interests; merchant fleet operations serve foreign trade and/or foreign policy interests. There are established policies concerning these four national interests and in every case the 'ocean component' is only one of many.
"T. Sulikowski, 'Ocean Policy Making in the Soviet Union' in J. Hardt, ed., Soviet Oceans Development, Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., 1976.

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When Western commentators talk about the existence of a master strategy and the central coordination of all ocean activities, they are in fact usually referring only to foreign policy interests and the pursuit of international goals. The implication is that the other three interests are to a greater or less extent subordinated to the requirements of an expansionist foreign policy. However, the evidence of the Law of the Sea negotiations would argue otherwise. Russia had a great deal to gain by siding with the Group of 77 in these negotiations; she would have highlighted the intransigence of the 'traditional maritime powers' and other capitalist states, and she would have outflanked China in its bid for Third World influence. Instead, her outspoken opposition to the sweeping changes proposed to the existing ocean regime, with its emphasis on freedom of the high seas and narrow territorial waters, put her squarely in the opposing camp. She was coupled with Japan (who, like Russia, had invested heavily in expeditionary fishing fleets) as the most intransigent opponent to the economic zone; and linked with the U.S.A. and Great Britain in her insistence on free transit through straits. In other words, defence of the homeland, and the domestic interests of food and agriculture, took precedence over foreign policy goals. Only when she found herself completely isolated did Russia grudgingly adjust her position on the economic zone, and even then she continued to contest the issue through the bloc of Geographically Disadvantaged States, which includes the Ukraine and Belorossiya among its members. We have yet to see what her final position will be on the straits issue. Western insistence on the existence of a Soviet master plan stems from several sources. In large part it is prompted by the organisational structure of their civilian fleets, by the centralised operational control, and by the demonstrated

capacity to exercise that control when required. It is reinforced by mistaken assumptions about Russia's national objectives, which ignore the dominance of domestic factors in policy formulation which underrate the concern to provide an active defence of the homeland against a clearly perceived threat, and which, in the field of foreign policy, overlooks the priority given to the avoidance of general war with the West. It is based on poorly understood memories of the Pax Britannica and echoes of Mahan's historical theories. It reflects the sea's vital importance to the Western alliance, and a sense of worried resentment over growing Soviet infringement of the West's maritime monopoly.

Naval power and foreign policy In Navies in War and Peace", Gorshkov gives no indication that the Soviet Union has a coherent oceans policy." What he does talk about is sea power. However, when we read the rather brief passage he devotes to discussing the subject, we see that he treats the non-naval components perfunctorily and does not explain what contribution the merchant a n d fishing fleets make to
"A series of ten articles published in Morskoj Sbornik (Hereafter, MSb), Feb-

ruary 1972 through February 1973. '?The chapter 'Some Problems in Mastering the World Ocean" makes a reference to the CPSU programme calling for 'not only the utilisation of known resources, but also prospecting for new ones' and goes on to say that the World Ocean is becoming extremely important in this respect in view of its potential to support the 'economic might' of the Soviet Union. Gorshkov claims that a great deal of attention was paid to this subject at the 24th Party Congress and offers a truncated quotation from Brezhnev's opening report in support (MSb. February 1973, p. 15). The full statement in fact refers to a general willingness to cooperate internationally in almost every kind of activity, including for example, energy, transportation, public health, and outer space (24th Congress of the CPSU, Moscow: Novosti, 1971, p. 38).

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this c o n c e p t . ' X e starts the discussion by linking the need to strengthen the country's defence from the sea, and ends it by saying that the most important component of sea power is the navy, 'whose mission is to secure state interests on the seas and the oceans and to defend the country from possible attacks from the direction of the seas and the oceans'. To all intents and purposes, Gorshkov equates sea power with naval forces, and it is the navy which he sees as a potentially powerful instrument of state policy in peacetime. However, he also implies that Russia lacks a policy concerning the role of seapower in the nation's affairs." Even on the basis of Gorshkov's own comments,'Vt would appear that not everybody in Moscow attaches the same degree of importance as he does to the role of naval forces as an instrument of peacetime foreign policy. It is true that the use of naval units in this way increased after 1971, reflecting the original decision to place an increased emphasis on the role of a Soviet military presence. But this policy appears to have been modified in the wake of the withdrawal from Egypt. For instance, ship/days on distant deployment levelled off after 1971, and the use of naval forces for specifically political purposes levelled off in 1972173. Meanwhile, since 1973 we have the appearance in combat zones of military personnel from 'revolutionary' countries such as Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. They man Soviet weapons and equipment, and the Soviet Union's strategic logistic capability brings them to the combat zone and suvplies them in action. There is also the question of diplomatic effectiveness. For example, did the reactive deployment of a Soviet detachment during the IndoIPakistan war in December 1971 actually achieve anything? Was the force authorised to attack the U.S. carrier group if it had

launched its strike aircraft (target unknown), and who would have come out best from the encounter? Did the deployment merely highlight the relative impotence of counter-forces in these circumstances? Similarly, what purpose was served by the force which deployed to the South China Sea in response to the mining of Haiphong in May 1972, and then just hung around for a few days before returning home? In the final analysis, the question of effectiveness must depend on Russia's readiness to use force if need be. We lack the evidence to make a firm judgment on this, except to note that Soviet policy has so far tended to be cautious, she has adopted an incremental approach to new initiatives, testing Western reactions before proceeding, and in times of crisis has behaved with great circumspection. However, it must all depend on the type of interests at stake. We have ample evidence that the Soviet Union reacts vigorously to a perceived threat to the security of the homeland, reactions which have ranged from the military occupation of Czechoslovakia to the investment of vast resources in trying to provide anti-missile defence or develop a counter to Polaris. But it does not seem that the Soviet Union attaches the same type of urgent commitment to her long-range international goals. After all, the inexorable processes of history are on her side and she can afford to win some, lose some. Meanwhile, direct confrontation with the U.S.A. inevitably carries some risk of escalation to nuclear
' W S b , February 1973, pp. 18-19. T h i s is one of the eieht mints Gorshkov makes in his brid -con'clusions: MSb, February 1973, p. 24. "In a series of comments which are generally believed to have contemporary relevance, Gorshkov criticises those who failed to understand the importance to Russia of having a strong navy: Tsarists (MSb, March 1972, pp. 20, 21 ; April 1972, pp. 9, 22) and Fools (March 1972, pp. 20-21).

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22 1

war, particularly if high-value units like carriers are involved. I t therefore seems unlikely that all of Gorshkov's claims concerning the role of the navy in peacetime have been accepted. Nevertheless, naval forces do have a wide range of capabilities and will doubtless be used accordingly for political purposes. Their 'main mission' of defending Russia from attacks from the sea will, however, continue to have priority. Two points remain unclear. First, whether the Soviets are prepared to allocate shipbuilding resources to support a political role, over and above what is required for the war-related missions. And second, whether they are willing to apply naval force to achieve less than vital objectives. Meanwhile, the Angolan affair illustrates how Soviet policy can be served by her merchant fleet and air lift capability. The sea in Soviet foreign policy While it is incorrect to claim that foreign policy objectives determine Soviet oceans policy, it is true to say that Russia makes extensive use of the sea in support of Soviet foreign policy. The importance of the sea lies in the access it provides to non-adjacent areas, and Soviet foreign policy has exploited that access mainly with her merchant fleet. The shift of resources to merchant construction coincided with the general reorientation of foreign policy towards the Third World in 1955. Soviet-flag ships with their welldisciplined crews enhance the nation's prestige and influence, particularly when they make well-publicised deliveries of aid. Soviet tankers ensure the supply of countries like Cuba or North Vietnam, Soviet merchant ships deliver arms, equipment and logistic support to client states; certain classes were specially designed with large hatches and heavy derricks the shipment of heavy or bulky to types of equipment to countries with inadequate port facilities. Meanwhile the

Soviet flag can be seen in most countries of the world, and a merchant ship is still just a merchant ship, irrespective of its cargo. It has none of the political overtones inherent in a naval unit, with its warlike armament and special sovereign status. The merchant fleet is still primarily involved in trade and the business of earning foreign currency. But it plays an important role as an instrument of foreign policy. The presence in distant waters of the fishing fleet, ocean research vessels and space-related support ships is also exploited for political purposes, although to a much lesser extent. Visits by space ships foster the impression of a leading technological power. Naval hydrographic units provide a professional presence in civilian garb. And the fishing fleets' requirement for local support facilities generates considerable income ashore, although this potential influence may be cancelled out by anger at Soviet fishing operations. The fishing industry, however, makes its greatest contribution to foreign policy objectives (and foreign exchange) by the development of indigenous fishery capabilities, and the provision of aid in the form of harbour development, fishery handling and processing facilities, and management and technical assistance. The navy is also used to further foreign policy objectives, and all foreign port visits will have some form of local impact. Anne Kelly concludes that about 80% of these visits are to meet the ships' operational requirements (fresh provisions, rest and recreation, and sometimes fuel), but that the other 20% are made for overt diplomatic purposes.'" The pattern of Soviet behaviour is carefully controlled; in Third World countries the influence target is the local political and military elites, and in the
"A. M. Kelly, 'Port Visits and the "Internationalist Mission,*of the Soviet Naw,. . . chapter,,, of this volume.

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case of client states, there is direct interests to encourage the breakdown of contact with the national leadership. maritime law and order. The number of port visits rose sharply Second, in 1954 the Soviet Union in 1968, and since 1971 naval forces have shifted resources from naval to civilian been used for special operations in direct ship construction, a significant indication support of Soviet foreign policy, which of the priority attached to different divide into two main categories: reac- interests in the use of the sea. These tions to U.S. initiatives (i.e., 'countering cuts have never been restored and in imperialist aggression') and operations terms of assembly capacity, subsequent intended to 'increase Soviet prestige and capital construction has continued to influence'. The latter range from mine- favour the civilian over the naval sector sweeping and port-clearing epaations, of the shipbuilding industry. Third, the sea is nowadays not the to providing the diplomatic support of a Soviet naval presence to influence the only means of providing physical access outcome of events affecting a client to distant parts. Although it remains the most economical (and only practical) state. While the presence of Soviet naval means of shipping vast quantities of units and fishing fleets in distant waters goods and people over long distances for is exploited for political purposes, the sustained periods, and the only method requirement for shore facilities to of transporting really heavy and bulky support both types of operation itself objects, there have been tremendous acts as a determinant of Soviet foreign advances in aircraft range and payload. policy, moving the latter in directions This now allows the rapid supply of which it might otherwise not have taken, relatively large and heavy items, includand into geographical areas which are ing major types of combat equipment, to not of primary political interest. In most parts of the world. And fourth, there is a wide range of particular, the navy's requirement for access to base facilities may conflict foreign policy instruments available to with the wider objective of increasing the Soviet Union. Access, although Soviet influence in the world. Mohamed essential, is secondary. The first question Heikal has described the Egyptian reac- concerns the most appropriate type of tion to Soviet base requirements in 1967, instrument to be used in the particular diplomatic, political, when Nasser retorted 'This is just circumstances: cultural, subversive or imperialism', to Podgorny's full de- economic, military. That decided, one can then mands." Reviewing the role of the sea in Soviet select the best way of applying it, and foreign policy, there are four points to in many cases, maritime methods will be bear in mind. First, in order to use the just one of several alternatives. sea the way she does, Russia has to rely on maritime stability and the freedom of the seas. She does not have the forces (no country has) to provide protection "Mohamed Heikal, Road to Ramadan (New 1975), pp. 47-48; see for her merchant ships and fishing fleets York: Quadrangle, this general issue of the also pp. 166-167 on around the world, and it is not in her negative effects of a Soviet military presence.

The Education of Naval Officers


often fiercely rejecting any attempt to impress physics or mathematics upon him. Then, if a seaman, he has a year's drinking at the professional school during his OW Courses, before starting to earn his keep at sea. Let us go on some three or four years when we are all of one company again, in some frigate somewhere. The young Weapons Electrical officer spends most of his time sorting out the Technical Office files and up at the Captain's Table. The Marine Engineer is still tracing pipes and getting filthy dirty taking evaporators to pieces. The Pusser worries himself to drink over his Cash Account and appears at Courts Martial of Victualling Petty Officers. When the Seaman is not standing on the bridge trying to make the telephones work, he WHAT GOOD IS EDUCATION? What is required of a naval officer's is on the brow, trying to make the education? There seem to be two objec- telephones work. Everything seems a far tives achieved at different times in an cry from the rather generalised, officer's career; for the first ten years or exemplified way things were taught, and so the Navy wants a 'doer' - watch- young officers might be forgiven for keeper, aircraft controller, pilot, keeper reflecting that they learn from chastenof accounts, oily bilges man etc. - then ing experience, in a few months, more suddenly the officer turns, at lieutenant- than they learn from years of training commander rank, into a manager and establishments. If he perseveres, however, things start planner. Does our education reflect this? to look up and the young officer becomes We should look at the backgrounds of our young officers, to see what we useful. Just when he has developed his hope to build upon. There are many who niche, when his practical experience and join because they want to be in the Navy, mental dexterity make him a valued and who believe that they can do that 'doer', staff jobs become inevitable, so and still obtain a good education. Others naval education responds with . . . (wait join hoping to get away from school, for it) . . . the Staff Course. Now one and yet others join as University Degree of the aims of the Staff Course is to educate an officer to be able to act as a Entrants. desk officer in the M.O.D. Therefore The Normal Entry officer receives several years of training on entry, the one might assume that all officers who Degree Entrant somewhat less. If an go to the M.O.D. have done the Staff officer is manifestly numerate, he is Course. Not so, for that would impose packed off to Manadon to join the other posting constraints, leading to a need 'not-nice-to-know' officers. Otherwise for enough officers to meet the posting our hero plods on through Dartmouth, constraints, leading to a need for more To give readers an opportunity t o allow for personal prejudices exhibited in this article, I feel that I should give an idea of my service background. I am an R.A.N. Lieutenant Commander (C)? currently on the R.N. Staff Course and in my seventh year of intermittent service with the Royal Navy. Thus the only unusual influence in my career has been my one year Dagger Communications course a t the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS), Shrivenham. One other point to remember while reading is that throughout this article, unless stated, I shall be discussing the General List Officer. The General List is the only one for which there is anything like a simple cradle-to-grave career pattern.

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money to be spent on manpower. Therefore the Admiralty Board has decided that the less said about the Staff Course, the better, and the shorter it is, the better too. Thus the R.N. Staff Course, unlike the Army and R.A.F. ones, is not compulsory for promotion to any rank. There are other slight anomalies too, of course. An Army officer does his Staff Exams for entry to the Army Staff Course. The results of these exams, plus his previous education qualifications, earn him a place on Divisions I, 11, or I11 of the Staff Course i.e. he spends ten months, one year or three months respectively at R.M.C.S. Shrivenham before doing a year at Camberley. The R.A.F. officer must successfully complete an eighteen month correspondence course before commencing the nine month Staff Course at Bracknell. On the other hand, any naval officer, within pretty broad seniority limits, may undertake the six month R.N. Staff Course at Greenwich with only one mandatory entrance qualification: he must be available for the course. Two conclusions may be drawn from a comparison of the three Services' Staff Courses: a. Because of the absence of formal entry qualifications, the graduates of the R.N. Staff Course are of a less consistent standard than those of the other Staff Courses. b. Even if one assigns a cleverness ratio like Navy: Army: Air Force officer : : 3: 1: 2, the improvement produced in an R.N. officer by his Staff Course is significantly less than the improvement produced in the Army or R.A.F. officers by their courses, because of the shortness of the R.N. course.
Overtraining or undertraining or both? I have indicated that most of the

tasks imposed on young officers do not seem to need years of general naval education. We must remember, however, that appointers may be forced, by a lack of qualified officers of appropriate seniority, to post some young officers to quite hot seats. As a result, an officer's initial years of training try to cover almost everything which he might be called upon to do in the next ten years. (Obviously even the Navy would not expect tactics, aircraft control, submarining etc. to remain static for ten years, so it does provide objective training in those types of activity.) There are some points to consider while thinking about our overtraining of junior officers: a. The cause of the anomalous appointing is a lack of qualified officers of the right seniority. The ultimate cause of that lack is a failure by Their Lordships, either to recruit enough officers or to ensure that officers do not leave the Service in excessive numbers. b. Set against the short term benefit of being able to fill every billet (because the Schemes of Complement tend to read 'Lt Cdr or Lt or SbLt (SD) ) must be the longer term cost of having to train every SbLt (SD) or Lt of the particular specialisation, to a level sufficient to give him a sporting chance of holding down an appointment meant for a Lt Cdr. c. This leads to a discussion of the overall costs to the navv of having inadequate numbers of 'spare' officers - improper appointing, leading to turbulence, increased training costs, removal costs, morale problems etc. This is a drum which I must leave to some other Naval Review member to bang.

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Well then, if the junior officer is somewhat overtrained, what of our balding M.0.D.-man (hopefully 'psc')? Whatever branch or department he is in, he is called upon to manage or take part in programmes of equipment procurement (and sometimes development) and to formulate doctrine and policy ranging over many fields - the introduction of a simple kquipment involves, inter alia finance, manpower, training, maintenance philosophy and a reasonable idea of the future need for the equipment. One might expect from such a desk officer a considerable knowledge of management techniques and aids stock control, queuing theory, risk theory, statistics, how to employ computers etc. - as well as a very thorough knowledge of M.O.D. procurement procedures and financial controls. Alas, the six month R.N. Staff Course permits only three or four lectures on these subjects, with no practical 'schemes' to reinforce them; to do more would necessitate eliminating some other essential part of the Staff Course, so tight is its programme.

Science and the sailor One finds that the term 'fleet of the future' is used frequently when discussing various M.O.D. activities. This leads to thoughts of prediction and prediction must be based on and extend from knowledge of the present and of what is imminent. I am not referring here to what is in the pipeline for that, in M.O.D. terms, is past history; I refer to knowledge of what will be capable of achievement, whenever some particular operational requirement starts becoming hardware. We do, of course, have procedures for checking the feasibility of staff targets, but what is there to cause staff targets to be raised? Generations of M.O.D. desk officers could come and go, believing that some particular problem is insoluble and therefore never bother-

ing to state it as a staff target. I am not talking just of laser guided bombs and cruise missiles (they get brought to the desk officers' notice by TIME Magazine anyway); I am referring to things like stock control aids in ships, materials technology, computer development, food preservation, night viewing devices, communications, propellants, remotely piloted vehicles, adaptive aerial arrays and so on. Masses of literature circulated to a desk officer, about developments in what the circulating agency thinks is the desk officer's field, are of no help unless the desk officer is trained to recognise the significance of all he reads. That means trained in science and technology across a wide field. Hands up all those who have heard of 'lateral thinking'. But have you read De Bono's book' itself? He makes the point very strongly that, to apply lateral thinking to solving a problem in a particular field, one should have a good knowledge of many other fields. One may even refer to Aristotle's definition of genius as the ability to detect a metaphor, i.e. to see similarities in things or situations, not apparent to nongenuises. This suggests that problem solving in the M.O.D. may require both wide and deep knowledge of science and technology, if the Royal Navy is to avoid being confined to evolutionary development and missing opportunities for revolutionary improvements. If it is a truism that scientific knowledge is developing exponentially, ihen the corollary is that one man's general scientific awareness falls off hyperbolically as he gets out of date. Thus even the ex-Manadon desk officer, who may have been reasonably a u fait ten years ago when he joined the Fleet, is rather out of the race today. He will have kept up' to date in his own field, of course, but if he has kept up to date across the board then one might wonder if he did any useful work at all. I therefore suggest that, except for a few

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officers who do peculiar general science courses, like the Dagger Gunnery or Communications courses, most officers in the Royal Navy are sadly out of date in terms of science and technology just as they reach a period in their career when they are invited to become technological innovators. Given such advances in science, what penalties will a navy pay if it does not attempt to keep its officers up to date? Obviously it will be overtaken by revolutionary changes but, in addition, it will become geared to react to rather than initiate new developments; either industry or R & D establishments will tell that navy what it can have. Now it cannot be the Navy's role today to indulge in pure research - the techniques are too specialised - but it may be, with the development of computers, that in the future much, which now requires boffins, will be able to be investigated and developed by properly educated naval officers. On the other hand, for the next few years, the Navy must be able to involve itself in dialogue on an equal intellectual (and that means 'numerate') level with researchers - to do otherwise would put us completely in the hands of scientists and industrialists, who may be sincere and well meaning, but who have no responsibility for, and an incomplete knowledge of our needs. Thus, both now and far into the future, the Navy needs lots of scientifically aware, numerate officers - far more than it trains a t present. WHAT EDUCATION DO WE NEED? No education system can be effective if it is not going to be implemented, so as a first step to deciding which education system should be implemented for the naval officer, I suggest that we look at what will be needed to ensure that the system is implemented. (Do I hear a noise, like the uneasy shuffling of feet on the sixth floor of the M.O.D. Main Building?) The needs are, surely:

a. Enough officers to be able to educate all of them to a level appropriate to their duties. b. Directions to the appointing staff showing what educational qualifications are mandatory for each appointment. c. Directions setting sufficiently high educational qualifications for each appointment to ensure that incumbents with those qualifications could do the job required. If such commitments could be obtained (and Their Lordships equivocation about the need for Staff Courses does not give hope), it would be worthwhile to review the surveys which have been conducted of the duties and educational needs of officers. With this data one can discover what tasks officers actually perform, identify common areas (for combined training) and, most importantly, determine when officers' duties change significantly e.g, when does an officer stop 'doing' and become, predominantly a 'manager?' A wide range of short, specialised courses should be developed, to give appointers flexibility. Why not make them 'self taught' courses, conducted on computer terminals, and save money, while providing almost total flexibility of where and when to conduct the courses? After all, most of what we teach our junior officers is procedure and computers are good at that. Now let us leave the 'doer' courses and look at the 'manager' education. The first thing to be said is that the Royal Navy is odd-man-out; the Air and the General Staffs do not have specialists in the same sense as we do i.e. Executive, Supply, Weapons Electrical and Marine Engineering, although they have subspecialists, as we call them, like communicators, gunners etc. I would not care to comment on whether such basic specialisation at junior rank is advantageous - although the U.S.N.

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thinks it is not - but it seems illogical that the Royal Navy does not provide some sort of course to pull all the specialist threads together, to get its potential admirals up to a common level of knowledge, as the need for specialist skills decreases and that for managerial skills increases. Then we could make the graduates of this course interchangeable in as many jobs as possible. When the chips are really down, you shall find that there are few enough Nelsons in the whole Royal Navy; there is a good chance that one might be a Pusser, and the other a Steamy at Bath, with neither trained for sea command. Fisher used somewhat the same argument seventy years ago to try to get the Royal Navy to extend its officer recruiting to all sections of the population - why look for your Messiah only among the Pharisees? If you do not feel slightly uncomfortable yet, permit me to point out that your Navy, and mine, carefully stream-off their numerate officers to be technical officers, then equally carefully exclude them from command at sea, where it really counts.
MY SOLUTION

Without the educational data which I have already called for, all I can do is propose an idea for an educational framework. Some readers will think T am being jejeune, and all will see things which I have overlooked; all I can say is 'Write to The Naval Review, let us get these opinions and facts aired'. My solution would be to teach our cadets about being officers and about the Navy with a fairly short (15-18 months) course followed by perhaps six months specialist training. Send the young gentlemen off to sea to learn their trade, except perhaps for some from all specialisations for whom it is felt that a degree course would prove advantageous to the Navy (and let us have no nonsense - I refer to a B.Sc. or equivalent, not something 'soft' like Mayan Art or

Drama Criticism at Sussex University numeracy is the aim). At stages, indicated by the appointers' need to put a particularly qualified officer into a n appointment, officers should do their tactical courses, accountancy exams, aircraft control courses etc. At last the time would come for officers either to become 'managers' or remain 'doers' with only moderate career prospects. By 'moderate career prospects' I suggest that we might consider some amalgam of the R.A.F. Specialist Aircrew scheme with the Army ruling that officers who do not pass the Staff Course may not be promoted above Brigadier. Officers who show potential for high rank would be identified in their confidential r e ~ o r t s .Just to make certain of their ability and to reduce the time spent on course in teaching officers service writing, something akin to the R.A.F. / R. A. A.F. correspondence courses and the Army Staff Exams would be an essential pre-requisite to further education. Only after successfully completing these preliminaries would an officer undergo his maior, mid-career course, which I shall refer to as 'the new Staff Course'. Successful completion of these preliminary courses and exams appears to offer an excellent system (as opposed to the present lotterv) to enable officers of other lists to transfer to the General List. should they so wish. As a preliminary to discussing the content of the new Staff Course, I would remind you that we in the Services have an immense educational advantage over industry in that we can programme education and training to enhance careers. wherear few industrialists would he able to leave their job for further trainins - they would be luckv still to have office mace when they return to their firm. T helieve that that is the origin of society's emphasis on education and training for such a long time at the heginning of the working life. Society is

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starting to understand that the pace of change now requires everyone to go back to school at intervals, but only the Services can provide the opportunity. The Navy should not be averse, therefore, to doing much of its formal education at mid-career, when it has a good idea of an officer's potential. The new Staff Course should aim at equipdng officers of senior lieutenant to junior lieutenant-commander rank for the management tasks which they would increasingly undertake. In addition to the political and economic education imparted by the present Staff Course, the new Staff Course should cover management aids in considerable depth. An extensive scientific updating would be needed to enable the future senior officers to comprehend the nature of the problems facing the Navy and the costs and timescales of likely solutions to those problems. If an ability to write clearly was adequately proven in the preliminary courses, then the new Staff Course would be in the order of eighteen months to two years. To maintain the same general level of scientific awareness through an officer's innovative career (roughly from young lieutenant commander to early captain's rank) would need a refresher course, probably of about three to four months, for those officers whose careers seemed set to bring them again into the M.O.D. equipment development staffs. This second science course would probably be needed some five to seven years after the new Staff Course. Thus I am proposing a career pattern which looks like this: a. Enter the Navy at 18 years old (later if a University Degree Entrant). ' b. 15-18 months basic officer training. c. 6 months specialist training (if we persist with basic specialisa-

d. Short courses and sub-specialist1 PWO type training to meet careerlappointing requirements for 9-13 years (i.e. to senior Lt/Lt Cdr with 3 years seniority). e. Staff College entrance courses and exams, when officers of other lists would 'feed-in'. f. 18-24 months Staff College. g. 5-7 years staff /desk/Command appointments. h. 3 months science refresher and up-date. i. On to better things.
CONCLUSIONS

Even if the proposed career pattern is unpalatable, conclusions can be drawn which indicate that naval officers' education requires a major review: a. Too much training is done on entry because of appointing turbulence. b. Entry to the only common, major mid-career course - the Staff Course - is on the basis of an officer's availability and the absence of a recommendation to the contrary in his confidential reports. c. The only measurable result of the present Staff Course should be an improvement in an officer's ability to communicate. d. The lack of formal scientific and technological education for all naval officers will inevitably cause the Royal Navy to slip further behind in its world 'rating'. e. The superior mid-career education provided by the British Army and the R.A.F. makes it almost certain that those Services will lose fewer committeeroom battles in the M.O.D. than the R.N. will lose.

The Si'kiang, or West River, of South China, a thousand miles long, is one of the great waterways of Asia. The basin of the river, particularly the last three hundred miles, is densely populated and very highly cultivated. In January 1914 I was appointed in command of Torpedo Boat 037 then serving in the Hong Kong Defence Flotilla. She was a very old ship, having been built by White's of Cowes in 1887; she was 102 feet long and displaced just over 100 tons. Her armament was one three pounder gun, a .45 maxim and two twin 14-inch torpedo tubes. The .45 maxim was an admirable weapon. Its rate of fire was slow but, unlike the .303 gun of the day, it never failed, and any junk it hit was ripped open. I tried it out on a large abandoned junk which, we had very good reason to believe, had recently had a Pirate crew. The heavy .45 bullets made a long rent along the water line putting the ship out of action for good. T.B. 037's designed speed was twenty knots, but on a full speed trial when I took her on the measured mile, she only just managed seventeen knots and that with handpicked coal and a following wind! However, old and feeble as she was, she was my first command and the apple of my eye. My ship's company consisted of one warrant officer, fifteen British ratings, five Chinese stokers and half a dozen Chinese boys to look after the lot of us, which they did very well. We had no WIT. Nearly all my British ship's company were Irish from the Devonport Barracks where the many recruits from Ireland at that time joined up. My Second-in-Command was Mr. Thomas Driscoll from Baltimore and my Coxswain, Patrick Twomey from Skibbereen. One could not wish for better shipmates. At the time I took over

command there had been a lot of trouble with Chinese pirates who had been attacking British river steamers running on the West River. These steamers were Chinese owned, but flew the British Red Ensign provided their captains were British and in possession of a master's certificate. All the rest of the crew were Chinese except the chief engineer, who was generally Portuguese o r Eurasian. The pirates, or pylongs, to give them their Chinese name, were resourceful, enterprising and bloodthirsty. They came on board a t Hong Kong as passengers. A t the embarkation wharf all male passengers were searched by the Sikh police. This would have led to the discovery of any weapons. They got over this difficulty by giving them to female confederates whom the police were not allowed to search. These women brought the pistols on board up the wide legs of their trousers and, once on board, handed them over to their pylong friends. The river steamers generally sailed about 10 o'clock a t night and a few. hours later, if there was going to be one, the attack took place a t some awkward bend in the channel where a confederate junk was waiting for the getaway. The pylongs went for the bridge and engine room, shooting anybody who resisted and, having got control of the ship, proceeded to rob the hundreds of terrified passengers of all their valuables and loot the ship of anything they could conveniently carry away. When I took over 037 in January 1914 things had got so bad that the steamer owners fortified the bridges of their ships with barbed wire and steel plates and engaged one or two guards, generally Portuguese from Macao. However, in April, the S.S. Tai'on, commanded by Captain Wethered, was attacked on her

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passage down to Hong Kong about twenty miles from the entrance to the delta. The captain and his two guards put up a stout resistance and shot several of the pirates. The rest of the gang then set fire to the ship. However, the gallant captain succeeded, with the aid of his guards and the Chinese pilot, in getting Tai'on to the entrance of the river at the village of Wong-Mun, where she anchored. News of the attack reached Hong Kong by other steamers arriving from the river and I was sent to the scene with all despatch with some British and Sikh police and a number of sinisterlooking Chinese detectives. I reached there about mid-day and found her a burnt out wreck surrounded by junks and sampans finishing off the looting. These cleared off as I approached. I went on board with a view to weighing the anchor and towing her to Hong Kong. This proved impossible as the capstan was jammed, oddly enough, with molten silver from a large box of dollars which had belonged to one of the passengers who had hidden it under the engine while he squatted on the deck nearby. So I started to cut the cable on the waterline with hacksaws. While I and my chief engine room artificer were engaged in this laborious task, a tug arrived from Hong Kong and towed Tai'on into Hong Kong harbour. She left behind her the sea covered with debris from the wreck and a large number of dead bodies. In all, about two hundred and fifty lives were lost including one European. This outrage created a considerable sensation and questions were asked about it in the House of Commons in London. After this, the British Flag steamers were sailed in convoys escorted by one of the Hong Kong Defence Flotilla's torpedo boats and dispersed to their destinations on reaching the main river. However, not only river steamers

were attacked, but several ocean going steamers proceeding up the coast to Chinese ports. They were taken into Bias Bay, just north of Hong Kong, and completely looted before being allowed to proceed on their voyage. Most of these ships were Chinese. At the end of April I got leave and went on a shooting trip to Amoy on the South China coast in one of the British Douglas Line steamers, the Hai'tan. The captain and officers were well-armed and there were available rifles for the passengers in their cabins. We had n o trouble. After the Tai'on incident, the convoys were continued and the other torpedo boats of the Defence Flotilla went on patrolling the lower reaches of the river. We could only go up as far as a place called Wuchow, 200 miles from the entrance. Our job was to patrol the main river, protect shipping and show the Flag. In addition we were under orders to give assistance, and protection if asked for, to the many missionaries established in stations along the river. These were mostly Non-Conformists of various denominations, generally American or Canadian. I had a list of these among my ship's papers. I made a point of calling on all of them, which I was under orders to do. No doubt they were very worthy people, but the results they produced in the way of converts were small and among the converts were a good many who were what were called 'Rice Christians', who got themselves baptised just to get food out of the missionaries. I remember landing one afternoon to call on a mission station belonging to a sect called 'The Seventh Day Adventists'. As I walked up the bund, I saw two white women coming towards me. They could only be from the mission, so I put on my best smile and advanced towards them. To my surprise, before I could meet up with them, they went down the side of the bund into the rice field and turned their backs on me. To them

T.B.

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naval officers, no doubt being probable see. Ashore, there were rice, bean and children of the Devil, were people to be mulberry fields cultivated and, on the avoided at all costs. I went on to the banks, fishermen operating scoop nets, mission station, gave in my card and balanced on stout stakes driven into the returned to the ship and entered in the bank. These nets were small mesh and ship's log: 'Called on Seventh Day quite big and when lowered, lay flat on Adventists' Mission, no welcome and no the bottom. After waiting an hour or refreshments.' more, the man in charge leapt to his However, there was one bright feature feet and bore down on the inshore end on the missionary scene. At a village of the pole. Up came the net with a few called Ha'king there were French small fish in it. These were put into a Fathers. The priest in charge was a bamboo basket and the fisherman recharming man, Father Damien, with lowered the net and sat down to wait. whom I made great friends, who used to This would go on all day, the man visit me on board whenever I anchored occasionally getting relief from members off his station. The mission had very of his family. little money but did pretty well with Cormorant fishing, however, was the converts, who were pleased when at most interesting to watch. The first thing Mass the Host was elevated to the sound one saw was a large bamboo hat with of Chinese gongs and bells. The colour- some large birds close to it floating ful Roman ritual appealed to them. downstream. As it got closer one could So poor were the Fathers that, in see the hat was being worn by a man up order to save oil for their bean oil lamps, to his neck in the water and holding they got up and went to bed with the on to a little raft with two or three sun. They hardly ever went home to cormorants on it. Each had a ring round France, but every Christmas their its neck. The submerged angler would society sent them out a little keg of release one of the birds which Promptly French wine. dived and soon reappeared with a fish. On my next trip I brought up a case This the angler put into a bamboo basket of a dozen Beaujolais and offered it to floating behind him and secured t o his Father Damien when he came to lunch. neck and then sent the bird off again. He was rather reluctant to take it. How- After three or four catches which were ever, the next morning before I sailed taken from him, the ring was released off up-river I sent my boy and a Chinese and the bird allowed to swallow the next stoker up to the mission with the fish he got. Unless this was done the Beaujolais. They did not bring it back. bird refused to go on. To me, a newcomer to China, the Seine nets were also used, but this magnificent scenery and teeming life on entailed someone to take the big seine the river brought great interest and net out and bring the end into the shore delight. The fast-running stream half a where several men hauled it slowly in. mile or more wide, the vivid green of Sometimes big catches were made and the young rice and mulberry with the some of the fish were quite big. mountains of Yu'nan in the distance Out in the mainstream there was a made a most picturesque scene and the continual stream of junks and steam ceaseless activities of the Chinese launches and an occasional river peasants ashore and afloat to me were steamer. Occasionally a huge raft of logs of absorbing interest. I used to sit in my came floating down. These rafts were deck chair on deck with the gun tele- very cleverly managed by men a t each scope from the three pounder and watch end, with long sweeps and sometimes a what was going on. There was a lot to steam launch to keep the raft in the

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mainstream of the river. The rafts were broken up when the delta was reached and the timber was sold. Another interesting arrival was the Fung-shui man in a steam launch. There were at that time three main religions in China: Confucianism, Bhuddism, and Taoism, but the most important thing to all the Chinese was ancestor worship. Fung-shui is the study and practice of geomancy and the world of omens and spirits. When a rich Chinese at home o r abroad died, it was at once necessary for his family to find a suitable place to bury him and it had to be somewhere near his birthplace. There were not regular graveyards in the country. That is where the Fung-shui man came in. His job was to locate a place of good omen for the burial. If he landed near where I was anchored, I watched carefully through my telescope what he was up to. He would wander about, looking carefully for good omens. He generally had in his hand a geomancer's compass. If he saw a mynah bird, a common black and white bird, flying from right to left, that was a good omen; left to right a bad omen. The way the wind blew in the rushes and bamboos was of importance; also the way the frogs croaked. An occasional croak meant one thing, continuous croaking another. Where the Fung-shui man stood was also important. The ideal position was with one foot in running water. The whole thing was a farrago of nonsense, but of great importance to millions of Chinese, anyhow at the time of which I am writing. At one of the villages I bought a geomancer's compass. I t was circular, about eighteen inches in diameter and covered with cabalistic signs and engravings and had a handle. During his research, the Fung-shui man constantly consulted it. Occasionally there were executions of captured robbers and pirates on the bank of the river near a village. On one occasion I was the unwilling witness of one of these, as it took place close to

where I was anchored. The victims, guarded by some ragged soldiers, and followed by the executioner, were led out and made to kneel down and at one stroke their heads were off. There is quite an art in cutting off a man's head. If you bring the sword straight down onto his neck you probably only knock him over. You must bring it in sharply to your stomach a t the last moment. That produces a slicing stroke and off comes the head like a pat of butter. When I was on the river I bought an executioner's sword. It was quite short, broad bladed and heavy and very sharp. We used it for chopping up coal for our galley on the Upper Deck. All the way up and down the river there were many picturesque pagodas. They were always three or five or seven storeys high and alternated between the right and left banks. Many of these pagodas were very old and one of the purposes of their existence was to control the movements of evil spirits flying up and down the river and to act as stopping and resting places in the hopes that they would not alight on somebody's house in one of the villages and produce bad luck. Besides the patrol by the torpedo boats, there were permanently stationed on the river three flat-bottomed gun boats: Moorhen, Sandpiper and Robin. They only drew about 2ft. 6in. and their propellers were in tunnels. Moorhen was quite big, 120 tons, but the other two were only 85 tons and 250 horse-power. Besides the captain, each had a doctor and was armed like my ship with a three pounder gun. When the river was in flood in the summer they could not stem the swift current and were reduced to creeping along close to the bank in the eddies and backwaters. At night they just ran their bows onto the bank and stayed put. Also patrolling the river were French, American and one German gun-boat, commanded by a Commander Langdorf with whom I

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made friends. No Chinese stokers for Von Wenkstern, made them a speech him, but a ship's company of large and and told that officer to take them to sweating Germans. When we met, I Kiao-Chau in North China, a journey used to go over to call on Langdorf, who of about 900 miles, by launch, junk or was a member of some Prussian noble on foot and join up with the German family. His cabin was decorated with forces there! ! photographs of the Kaiser and German After about two months hard and celebrities. I always felt rather small, difficult going, they got there just in time having no royal photographs myself and to surrender to the Japanese who had going to pay my visit in a sampan been besieging the place since they came propelled by a Chinese woman with a into the war a t the end of August! ! baby on her back. Ten days before the Langdorf himself, after he scuttled his 1914-18 War broke out Tsing-Tau ship, hid up in Canton for a few days was stranded up the North River, a and then came down to Hong Kong by tributary of the West River. I have a train and got away to Batavia and evenphoto of her high and dry. He had gone tually back to Germany, in a Dutch up when the river was in flood and got steamer. caught when the water fell. However, it T o return to the river: there were rose again at the end of July and he many villages along both banks but only came down and vanished into the delta three fairly large towns- Kong Mun, near Canton. The question was: what Samshui and, 180 miles upstream, would he do? There was a chance he Wu Chow where there was a British might try and slip down the Canton Consul. At all these three there were Estuary and get to the South China Commissioners of the Chinese Maritime coast - just about his limit for fuel. Customs (CMS), the Service originally Our Consul General in Canton re- started by Sir Robert Hart who, for ported on August 9th that his agents had many years, had been adviser to and in news that Langdorf was expected to do the service of the old Imperial Governjust that and we arranged a Patrol Line ment. The service was very well run all of the H.K. Defence Flotilla to try and over the country and collected a large intercept him. But of that more anon. revenue. All the top men and a large In the end, it turned out that when he proportion of the staff were European. had got down from the river he took his They were well paid. The Commissioners ship into a small and remote creek, and at Kong Mun, Samshui and Wu Chow scuttled her after throwing the eccentric had fine houses and lived in considerable snaps of his engines and ammunition style. I received much hospitality from overboard. He then assembled his them. ship's company and placing them under V. WINDHAM-QUIN the command of his First Lieutenant, ( t o be continued)

The Cruise Missile-A Concept of Operations


BACKGROUND

There is nothing new about cruise missiles. Many people still have vivid memories of the 'doodle-bug' hurtling across our skies a t the end of World War 11. Between 1942 and 1944 the Germans manufactured over 10,000 of which over 6.000 reached England. Eisenhower wrote that if they had been used six months earlier. the invasion of Europe would not have been possible. After the War, both the Americans and Russians raced t o develop the ,nissile. Possibly because of the ballistic missile's superiority, American interest in the cruise missile began t o wane in the early 1950s. The Soviets o n the other hand. with characteristic perseverance and reluctance t o discard anything, continued to develop both the ballistic and cruise variants. Despite inferior technology. they pioneered anti-ship cruise missiles transforming modern naval warfare and forcing Western Navies t o follow suit. Comparatively recently the cruise missile has become very fashionable, thanks mainly to a new American weapon called T O M A H A W K which has been heralded with the customary sales pub!icity and claims of a staggering capability. Just exactly then what is a cruise missile? What can it do? How does it compare with similar weapons? How might it be employed? What is its relevance to the U.K.?
WHAT THE CRUISE MISSILE I S AND DOES

As its name implies, a cruise missile's main characteristic is that it cruises for the majority of its flight along a nonballistic trajectory and usually has no external guidance. Mid-course corrections and a homing facility are optional features to improve terminal accuracy. If it has a recovery capability. the

missile is termed a 'drone' but in all other respects could be identical. I t is torpedo shaped with wings and control fins attached and driven by a 'one shot' rocket motor o r lightweight jet engine. Unless launched from an aircraft, it also requires a boost motor t o achieve flight. I t is of modular construction with fuel, navigation, computer control, warhead and possibly one o r more sensor compartments. This body form lends itself to minimum maintenance, good storage, easy modification when new technology demands, a high reliability and a long life. Nuclear, conventional and chemical warheads could be quickly interchanged. The N A V A H O manufactured by the Americans in the 1950s weighed 150 tons and carried a megaton warhead 5,000 miles. The P E N G U I N a Norwegian missile weighs 330kg. has a ra~arhead of 120 kg and a range of 20 kilometres. The cruise missile's potential is exemplified by the TOMAHAWK which is 18 feet long, 21 inches in diameter, weighs under 3,000 Ib. with a warhead of over 1,000 Ib. and has a range of over 2,000 miles a t a speed of Mach 0.75 a t medium level. Target coordinates can be dialled up and it can be launched from aircraft, ship, submerged submarine o r wheeled transport and can avoid defences by being programmed to fly different courses and heights including sea skim. Recent improvements in electronic miniaturisation and effectiveness-toweight ratios of warheads have enabled the missile's size to be so reduced that it has a n almost undetectable infra-red signature and 'sea-gull' radar reflectivity. With a normal inertial navigation system, it has a circular error probability (CEP) of a mile per 500 miles of flight

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With laser and terrain comparison techniques (TERCOM) or satellite updating, various terminal accuracies between a $ mile to 30 feet CEP at 2,000 miles are being claimed. Naturally both these 'pin-point' systems would be expensive to set up and in practice American controlled. TOMAHAWK costs f)m. but no new technology is required and the U.K. should be able to produce it with an inertial navigation system for less.
HOW THE CRUISE MISSILE COMPARES

WITH SIMILAR WEAPONS

Ballistic missile The ballistic missile is the obvious competitor of the cruise missile. It can be fired from a gun or be rocket propelled. Up to a range of about sixty miles, it is very similar in size and capability. It can be fitted with a variety of warheads and depends on a fast speed of flight rather than terrain screening for its invulnerability. For a range much in excess of sixty miles the size of rocket motor and missile becomes very large and costs rise disproportionately to extra range gained. At short range because it has a similar accuracy to a cruise missile with an inertial navigation system and because it is likely to be under half the price, ballistic missiles are likely to be a better bet. At long range or where a homing facility improves terminal accuracy, the cruise missile will usually be the more cost effective. Aircraft The other weapon system that can do roughly the same job as the cruise missile is the aircraft delivering weapons at short range. In making this comparison the aircraft weapon load and the type of cruise missile launcher are two big factors left out of the equation and the reader must make the necessary adjustment. The comparison assumes the aircraft releasing its weapons in the vicinity of the target.

The aircraft's success for Israel and in Vietnam and Korea where American air superiority prevailed, has tended to blur many of the aircraft's shortcomings. It is fearfully expensive to buy, to maintain, to operate, to crew and to provide all the ancillary services for it. Progressively its performance bzcomes degraded during its twenty-five years life span. The aircraft is not a quick reaction weapon. It can take time to return to base after its mission and be turned round or to have a change of role. To ensure its availability when required urgently, an aircraft may have to be held back configured in the desired role. Because of its cost, it is usually only available in limited numbers and small nations have to subject it to centralised control. Owing to organisational procedures and the inevitable communication difficulties experienced in war, the time between when the field or naval commander wants it and when he actually gets it is often far too long and a major source of irritation. The aircraft's weapon performance is often exaggerated. Weapon firing results in peacetime conditions, against familiar targets on familiar ranges are unlikely to bear much resemblance to those obtained in war over unfamiliar terrain against camouflaged, heavily protected targets defended in depth. At night and in bad weather, considerably more effort is required to operate and the aircraft's performance will usually be much reduced in comparison to its daylight capability. Co-ordinated, simultaneous multi-direction, multi-aircraft attacks which would have the best chance of defeating defences are virtually impossible in such conditions. Assuming an aircraft reaches its target, it could have less than an average 25% chance of completing its mission. Whether it would survive is also an extremely contentious issue. The advance being made in ground

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defences and missiles including electronic counter counter measures and a profusion of rapidly improving hand held weapons, perhaps laser guided, as well as air defence fighters operating with the advantage of short range and home territory, have made it questionable whether the advantage still lies with the attack aircraft. Add to this a situation over a battlefield where enemy, friendly and civilian aircraft plus missiles plus a plethora of field weapons including nuclear explosions may all be 'loose' in the same air space; further add to this the fact that most aircraft are tied to airfields which can be pre-targetted and infiltrated, it has to be accepted that the aircraft is vulnerable. A n aircraft attrition rate of 270 on the ground and over 570 per mission is not inconceivable. Despite these disadvantages, the aircraft obviously has a real place in warfare with many advantages. I t is not irreversibly committed after launch. I t can be used more than once. I t can attack more than one target and carry a heavier payload. Nevertheless if night and bad weather account for 50% o r more of a conflict, if the aircraft attrition rate is more than 570 and if sortie success rates a r e less than 25%, there must be doubt whether the aircraft by itself can always operate costeffectively. In some cases the missile may well be superior; in other cases it might be most effective if aircraft and missile were used in conjunction with each other.
HOW CRUISE MISSILES MIGHT BE USED

Now chat the capability of the cruise missile and its relationship t o similar weapons has been discussed, it is appropriate t o see how it might be used first in nuclear then in conventional operations. Nuclear operations The Strategic Deterrent must ensure

absolute certainty of eliminating the enemy when he has already carried out his mass nuclear attack with the utter devastation that would entail. Sufficient numbers of nuclear warheads of predetermined yield need to be capable of reaching a certain number of predetermined targets without fail. The aim must be to safeguard missile launchers, t o have a multiplicity of missiles and to have as many different modes of delivery as possible, remembering that all systems require a precise and sure means of control. The major powers rely primarily on submarine launched and hardened site intercontinental ballistic missiles. They are extremely effective but the cost of the launchers and the missiles is astronomic and really beyond the means of minor powers. Cruise missiles with their cheap unit cost, their variety of different concealed launchers and their versatile capability already described, offer a n attractive alternative means. Without pinpoint accuracy, cruise missiles may not be effective against hardened ballistic sites but this is not an essential requirement. Obviously the control of a system which depends partly on safety in numbers and diverse launchers will be more complex. Also what could be both a n advantage and disadvantage is that unlike ballistic missiles, there will not even be a few minutes warning of its launch. Not only will small nations with a nuclear capability be likely to favour cruise missiles for their strategic deterrent but the major powers will no doubt d o so as well on the basis that the more different methods of delivery available, the more certain its effectiveness. Strike. I n a similar manner, cruise missiles can be used for tactical strike - if necessary a t a very long range o r safely held back deep in friendly territory. The multiplicity of cruise missiles will virtually make unattainable a n

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enemy objective of destroying his opponent's strike capability as early as possible. There will be no need to devote so much effort in peace and war to maintaining aircraft at high alert states as counter to the pre-emptive strike. Cruise missiles and the threat of them will be able to do the job just as well at a greatly reduced cost.

Conventional operations Land warfare The improved effectiveness-to-weight ratio of modern warheads with a choice of mining, napalm, cluster bomb and chemical charges to some extent offsets the limited 500 kilogram allowance of a cruise missile. At the same time, hardening techniques have made it more difficult to penetrate specific high value targets. Against such measures a pinpoint terminal accuracy (which may or may not be possible with TERCOM or satellite guidance) would be required. This order of accuracy would open up all sorts of possibilities for the cruise missile. Nevertheless, in circumstances where the aircraft is disadvantaged, area targets such as marshalling yards, stores and ammunition depots, large movements of troops and armour especially at choke points and busy airfields, may well be worthwhile for missiles. By itself a 500 kg warhead may not seem very much but in numbers or in a salvo pattern, it could create a large amount of disruption and damage. By fitting a marker beacon in a cruise missile to which other missiles in the salvo would respond, a regular pattern could be laid on the target area, greatly improving destruction coverage. Such an approach may not appear to be cost effective or appeal to the purist but collateral damage almost invariably slows down enemy operations, is bad for his morale and throws confusion into his organisation. It further forces him to retain resources to meet the contingency. If

lucky, military targets will be struck into the bargain. The V1 was a much cruder and more inaccurate weapon yet it has been calculated to have been cost effective by a factor of four to one. In conditions of air superiority, the aircraft will still offer the best solution in these interdiction and suppoit roles but the cost of aircraft has become so great that it must not be committed where there is risk of its loss unless it is unavoidable. Attack planners may choose 'softer' targets, less heavily defended, if the return is that much better. They will almost certainly require ground defences to be suppressed as a prior condition of attack just as bombardment takes place before an invasion or troop assault. Defence Suppression. In this task the cruise missile could play a vital part. Ground or air launched, it could patrol over enemy lines and home on defence radars as and when the radar transmits. The missiles small reflectivity and computer memory facility would give it a good chance of destroying the radar before counter measures are possible. If fitted with a transponder, the cruise missile could act as a decoy, being made to represent electronically a certain type of aircraft and thereby seduce an enemy to fire missiles at it. A number of cruise missiles could be closely co-ordinated with aircraft movements to ensure maximum chance of success. They could be timed to arrive over the target a few seconds before the attack aircraft, saturating the ground defences. Possibly a combination of these tasks could be carried out in one sortie to make full use of the missile. In this role, air launched missiles are likely to be smaller and less costly than ground launched ones. Already the QUAIL is a decoy missile for the American bomber and the SHRIKE is an example of a short range anti-radar variant.

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Another area where the cruise missile could assist the attack aircraft is in neutralising the defending early warning o r air defence aircraft. Normally a n aircraft would be a n unsuitable target as its fast movement is unlikely t o be calculated accurately enough in the missile's programme t o bring it sufficiently close for its homing head to acquire. However this type of aircraft is usually anchored t o a geographical area and a cruise missile with a homing head optimised to the aircraft radar frequency could well be practicable, relying on its speed and undetectability characteristics. I t could be tasked t o patrol likely areas of operation o r be fired directly a t the aircraft. If it only caused the aircraft t o switch off its radar, it could well have achieved its purpose. Certainly the reverse application must be borne in mind when deciding what reliance and investment to put into such a n expensive aircraft. Reconnaissance. T h e key to all land operations and the success of offensively tasked cruise missiles lies in the accuracy and up to dateness of intelligence gained by reconnaissance. It has become fashionable, in some quarters, to believe that intelligence gained by indirect .means and information processed many hours after a n event would be acceptable by itself. This approach is considered fundamentally unsound and it is believed that the priority should be for real time information t o be relayed direct11 to and assessed by the land commander in the field so that he can have reactrd within three hours of a n event. In excess of this time, the situation could well have changed again. Of course a similar air reconnaissance facility is required but it should not be proportionately large and too many aircraft should not be employed exclusively in this role. The cruise missile drone carrying infra red line scan by night and a
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camera by day with a data link transmitting upwards via a 'WISP' remotely controlled helicopter to a field intelligence centre would be a good method of fulfilling this role. The missile drone can cover a large area a t a fast speed and detect the movements that really matter; namely large deployment of enemy and personnel in the battlefield area and behind it. Unlike the pilots in-flight report, 'seeing is believing' and information could be acted upon with certainty. A t the end of its sortie, the missile could be programmed to be recovered by parachute. If a worthwhile target is found, another reconnaissance drone could be sent to patrol the area, relaying a constant picture while other aircraft o r cruise missiles could be launched and their weapon impact observed. Further sorties could then be directed a t the target as necessary. Infra-red and data-link sensors a r e admittedly expensive, perhaps doubling the cost of a cruise missile drone but this is 'peanuts' if the information received allows the rapid reaction necessary to bring to bear limited personnel, equipment and logistics to their maximum effect. Furthermore, before hostilities have started, reconnaissance aircraft will be unable t o cross into 'enemy' territory. Not so with the cruise missile drone which is almost undetectable and easily disowned in the event of mishap. In concluding the cruise missiles application in land operations, it is fascinating to observe the interplay that could develop between aircraft and cruise missile. In the past the field commander has been on the receiving end if the aircraft does not arrive on time. Now the aircraft may be a t risk if its movements are not carefully coordinated with cruise missiles. This can only be good in giving real meaning to joint operations which are so essential for success.

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Another interesting development could be that because cruise missiles would be more plentiful than aircraft, they could be allocated more readily t o the scene of action and give the field commander immediate close support and interdiction options which previously he has had difficulty in obtaining.

Maritime warfare I t is in maritime operations that the cruise missile will continue to revolutionise warfare. Anti-Ship. T h e conventional warship is a n ideal target for the cruise missile. I t is extremely expensive in every respect - initial cost, manpower, training, support, maintenance and running costs. I t is extremely slow and made slower in rough weather. I t has an unambiguous, unconcealable, infra-red and radar signature. Its anti-missile missile defences can be easily saturated and find it difficult to cope with the sea-skim and high dive-angle cruise missile. Ship launched decoys are held in limited numbers on board and it is unlikely they will confuse for long the modern discerning and computer controlled combination active-passive homing head of the cruise missile. Against a multi-directional, multicruise-missile co-ordinated attack, surface units will be poorly placed once they are detected. All vehicles attacking ships - aircraft, submarines, o r surface vessels are likely to use the cruise missile as their weapon. Understandably there are signs of this with H A R P O O N , SEA SKUA, P E N G U I N , EXOCET and the Soviet 'K' air launched missile. Success will go to the party whose intelligence of the enemy target is best and who can fire first. In the ArabIsraeli conflict this could have been the reason why with similar forces, the Israeli fast patrol boats with G A B R I E L out-fought Egyptian S T Y X armed surface craft. With today's methods of

obtaining intelligence, both sides in a major conflict are likely t o be able to locate major fleet units before very long. If, as is suggested. the capital ship is so vulnerable, the cruise missile must have far reaching effects. First it could spell the end of slow, large cost-intensive ships such as large aircraft carriers and large fleet auxiliaries. Submarines, shore based aircraft with increased range and endurance capability and fast surface-effect ships appear much better propositions. In coastal waters, despite their present lack of sea-keeping capability, high speed surface craft and shore aircraft must be expected to assume much greater responsibilities in the future. Second, current tactics of large fleet formations and convoys which concentrate units to afford mutual protection must be suspect as whatever deception measures a r e taken to shield individual ships. it makes a n enemy's intelligence and targetting task too easy. Surface units will have to be much more dispersed and in smaller packets. Thirdly, it will become impossible to operate safely within 100 miles of an enemy coastline. Even smaller nation$ are likely to be able to obtain cruise missiles and effect highly efficient mobile coastal defences. Opposed amphibious landings appear unlikely to succeed. Small coastal nations seeking t o enforce territorial limits o r zones could d o so and embarrass nations who might a t first refuse to accept them. The traditional role of a fleet as a means of exerting pressure could well be on the way out since by advertising its presence a warship could make itself a 'sitting duck' to the cruise missile. In all these possibilities. there are complications caused by the ease with which a cruise missile attack can be made unattrihutable. In view of the missile's long range and infinitely flexihle flight path. who is to say who fired the

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missile? and where it came from? Certainly this means that the armed merchantman and fishing boat are very much back in business. Identification. It is of course no good being able to dispose of a ship if it is not the right one! I t has sometimes been difficult to identify contacts detected passively or by radar, particularly in high density areas of shipping. Warships and fast patrol boats often play on this particularly at night by taking the guise of merchantmen or fishing boats to make good their attack. Helicopters and aircraft are employed extensively, searching and 'rooting out' the enemy when they are sorely needed for other tasks. More often than not, they are forced into suicidal procedures to effect identification. A ship or aircraft launched vehicle remotely controlled in the air by aircraft or helicopter along similar lines to the reconnaissance cruise missile drone, already described, would provide a means of solving this problem and releasing aircraft for other duties. Air Defence. An enemy- aircraft that shadows surface units may also be dealt with by the cruise missile using the method described for possible employment against the airborne early warning aircraft, if no other means is available. Anti-Submarine. The cruise missile is unlikely to confer quite the same benefits in the underwater battle as in the surface one, at least for some time. Homing torpedoes can be carried by cruise missiles, giving ships or shore batteries a long range, immediate re-action antisubmarine capability. The difficulty to be overcome is to guarantee holding contact with an enemy submarine during the time the missile battery is alerted and then the flight time of the missile. At the present time such weapons (IKARA is an example) have a short time of flight and a correspondingly short range. It is possible for terminal homing corrections to be applied by a helicopter or aircraft in the contact area

to improve accuracy. If the tracking of submarines with long range sonars or other sensors could give the high degree of certainty of tracking required, then greater stand-off ranges would become possible. If this should occur, coastal anti-submarine operations would tend to be biased towards shore and airborne control rather than from ships. This could throw up considerable financial saving. But this type of specialised cruise missile acting solely as a carrier is likely to be a more expensive delivery system than an aircraft or helicopter and should only be considered where these vehicles cannot operate or conveniently be made available.
RELEVANCE TO THE UNITED KINGDOM

With all these military applications, the cruise missile is a weapon well suited to United Kingdom defence policy. In a future conflict, it would only be wise to assume traditional British complacency in peace, and that in a dispute political moves will be persevered with to the detriment of military security and advantage. Overwhelming enemy forces and armaments, adverse deployment of her troops with many preparations for war not made at the start of a war, temporarily unco-ordinated policy and aims between her allies, and unfavourable fighting terrain are all difficulties which Britain in the worst case should be ready to surmount. In principle, these deficiencies could be compensated for by ensuring superior weapons technology, superior mobility, superior flexibility and superior quickness of re-action on the battlefield, in what is bound to be a fast developing situation. The cruise missile possesses the attributes for all these requirements to be exploited. The United Kingdom, surrounded by the sea, will be well served by it against possible invasion. On the other hand, as a major warship armament, it must change surface fleet tactics and pose greater difficulties in

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protecting sea trade. On land, for example on the NATO flanks, a multiplicity of cruise missiles used intelligently could help redress imbalances and frustrate the enemy until reinforcements could be brought in. In view of her financial state, just what financial effort and emphasis Britain should put in to cruise missiles will need careful assessment. Multi-role versions which have been shown to be practicable are a prime economic necessity. It is envisaged that the best solution would be for two basic types a PENGUINISEA SKUA version for short range and a TOMAHAWK version for long range. Specialised cruise missiles such as torpedo carriers would probably have to be confined to one role. The relationship between aircraft with short range weapons, ballistic, and

cruise missiles has been dwelt on a t length because it provides the clue as to the level of investment to be made. I t has been shown that the advantages do not always lie with the aircraft. It has been shown that a ballistic missile could be more cost effective at short ranges in land operations. It has been shown that the cruise missile can perform a variety of roles cost effectively although its value in some conventional roles still needs to be quantified. This will also depend on whether pinpoint terminal accuracy can be achieved. At the present time, it would seem reasonable that of the total monies budgeted for aircraft (plus all their ancillary support), ballistic and cruise missiles, about 15% should be allocated to missiles. Of this about two thirds should be allocated to cruise missiles. I. L.

The Normandy Landings-6 June 1944


After the experience o f the landings in the Mediterranean it was decided that elderly commanders given a fourth stripe did not have enough stamina t o hold the post o f naval officer in charge ( N . O . I . C . ) o f a landing beach and the edict went forth that such were t o be replaced. 1 - UP TO D-DAY I was Commander of H.M.S. Ramillies and was preparing her for her bombardment role in the Normandy landings when a signal was received which said that Commander Dolphin may be required for a very important appomtment, decision would be made within ten days. The days went by and at midday on the ninth day a signal was received to say that I was to report to the Admiralty forthwith.

At the Admiralty I was promoted to Acting Captain and appointed as Captain GG3. That is to say, I was to command the 3rd Group of 'G' Force, and after the assault I was to land as N.O.I.C. Gold Area. I was to report to the H.Q. a t Weymouth. When I arrived there I was met by the Chief of Staff 'G' Force Robertshaw, who was in my term. I said to him that all I knew about amphibious warfare was that - landing craft are flat-bottomed and throw their anchors over the stern - how had I come to be chosen for the job? He said that he had attended the meeting at which the choice had been made and he had never heard reputations torn to pieces so much and that I was the sucker who came out of the

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As soon as I could I paddled off into the New Forest and with great difficulty found the colonel. Our liaison had started.

bag! He told me, also, that the H.Q. had moved to the Southampton area and my H.Q. was H.M.S. Mastodon at Exbury House, which belonged to Lord Rothschild. We left Weymouth next morning and I duly arrived a t Exbury House to find that the captain of the Mastodon was Caspar Swinley, whom I knew well. So now I had to settle down to learn what I could about amphibious operations and, although I did not know this a t the time, I had only three weeks in which to do it. I soon met my staff officer operations (S.O.O.), Lieutenant Commander Fox - a most efficient officer who had been in the amphibious line of business from the start (thank goodness! ). He started to teach me, and told me that we had a staff of about forty - three R.N., a few R.N.R., and the remainder R.N.V.R. So next morning at 0800 we had a staff meeting and as far as I could make out nobody seemed to know what he had to do. Can you imagine my feelings! So Fox, mostly, and I gave them jobs to do during the day and they reported on them at the staff meeting next morning. A few officers were late for the meeting the first day, but never again! It was quite by chance that we found out that we were responsible for the waterproofing of all vehicles in the assault and first part of the build-up. It was to be carried out by the Army, but we would have to make the arrangements. I put three excellent R.N.R. officers on to this. I have forgotten to say anything about my predecessor (a nice old gentleman! ). think because whatever he might have said did not strike any bells with me. He had not even met his Army opposite number, a lieutenant-colonel, who Was the sub-area ~ ~ m m a n d e r ! He and I would have to work very much together on the beaches. He would have to tell us what the Army wanted us to land.

Much to learn and to do On arrival a t Exbury House I had had to put on khaki uniform - blouse, trousers and boots, which I had not worn since I was a cadet, and which I found most uncomfortable to start with. My day started at 0700 and finished at 0200 next day. I had a lot to learn in a short time. I had under my command (the figures are very rough) forty L.C.1.L.s. (landing craft, infantry, large); these were to land the two reserve brigades of the 54th Division. In addition there were numbers of L.C.I.S., (landing craft, infantry); L.C.M. (landing craft, motorised); and about 200 barges including L.B.E. (land-' ing barge, engineering), L.B.C. (landing barge, cooking) and L.B.L. (landing barge, electrical). When I saw some of the barges I drew attention to what I considered to be their insufficient anchoring arrangements (I was to be proved right during the storm). I was gradually finding out about things. Apparently the original plan for OVERLORD was to assault on a two division front. but when Montgomery took over he insisted that it should be on a three division front. So the 'G' Naval Force was collected to land the 54th Division on the Gold beaches. Captain GG3's task was to lead over the L.C.1.L.s with the Reserve Brigades and land them when ordered. Some pre-D-Day incidents The Army asked to be landed d r ~ - ~ h o d , during the and 1 was detailed to carry out experiments. I ordered a squadron of L.C.I.(S), and one of L.C.M., to rendezvous at a certain place and time so that we could see whether it was practicable to transfer infantry from the deeper draught (L.C.L.(S) to

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the shallow draft L.C.M. This effort was going to be witnessed by V.1.P.s of both the Army and the Navy. Everybody arrived except the L.C.M.s which were three quarters of an hour late. When I asked the C.O. of the L.C.M. Squadron why he was late he said 'There was not enough water over the bar'! ! I hope his mother loved him! On another occasion I ordered by signal a squadron of L.C.M. to carry out some duty and they did not do it. When I asked the C.O. of the squadron why, he replied 'I didn't think you meant that signal, Sir'! ! This made we wonder what sort of a Harry Tate circus I had joined. About ten days after I had taken over there was a big meeting at Fort Southwick (H.Q. for OVERLORD), when the V.1.P.s gathered to hear the head men of the landing forces say what they were going to do . Forces 'S' and 'J' went first and then came 'G' Force Commodore 'G', then G G l , GG2 and finally GG3, little me. I got up and said that I was 'responsible for the safe and timely arrival' of the Reserve Brigades of the 54th Division (oddly enough when I received the orders for operation Neptune they opened with these identical words), and described one or two experiments that we were carrying out. What an experience - talk about flutters in the pinny! Our gallant allies Next came the briefing. The main briefing was held in Southampton, and afterwards the various groups held theirs. I held mine with the captains of the L.C.I.L.s, which were to carry the troops, and the C.0.s of the small escorting force. The L.C.I.L. captains were mostly American. What experience they had had been in the Mediterranean, where there is no tide. So when briefing them I said: 'When we steam over to the Far Shore there will be a force of tide hitting us at right angles, so that you

must steam on a line of bearing (all same crab) otherwise you will be carried out of the swept channel.' They said to me 'Don't rightly understand that, Cap.'. I then drew a tidal diagram to try to explain what they must do, but received the same answer. How on earth was I to make these captains realise the importance of steaming on a line of bearing? Well, I thought, the only thing for it is a gimmick. I said to them 'You can try my navigator, but if you don't learn to steam on a line of bearing you will be swept out of the channel and be blown up on a mine - so I had better say goodbye to you now'. - 'Goodbye, Cap., pleased to have met you'. I went round saying goodbye and then they piped up: 'Sure Cap., there must be something in this'. I said: 'believe me there is, and there is another thing - ask me any questions you like now but don't make me signals on the way over and wake up the enemy because I am going to have two marksmen aft in my flagship with orders in writing to shoot at any light they see - do you understand that? 'Yes, Cap.', etc. I had attended the last exercise just after I joined. I was on board GG2's H.Q. Assault Ship and had been horrified by the amount of signalling that went on. Rhino ferries These monstrosities were large flat pontoons powered by two outboard motors and the idea was that they were to marry up with the L.S.T.s and land half the tank load at a time because the L.S.T.s were on no account to beach. It was thought that if they did they would break their backs I carried out an exercise in the Solent in which we were successful in marrying up these two craft - a very ham-handed affair. But the experience helped me to make a vital decision about these craft, on D + 1, of which more later.

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LANDINGS-6JUNE 1944 afternoon of 5 June and by 'we' I mean: the two Reserve Brigade commanders, the Sub-Area Commander (my 'oppo'), myself and our operational staffs. The passage over to Far Shore was uneventful. There were NO signals and my L.C.1.L.s steamed on a line of bearing as required. The lesson had been learnt! The assault went in at first light (about 0600?) and we arrived with the Reserve Brigade at about 0659 (?), in exactly the right place and one minute early. The two squadrons of L.C.I.L. milled round (that is to say, they 'followed father' in a circle, one squadron each side of Albrighton). When I received the signal to land the Reserve Brigades I was able to direct them to their exact landing places. The first part of my job was completed. 11-N.O.I.C. GOLD AREA Once the Reserve Brigades had been put ashore I put on my other 'hat' of N.O.I.C. Gold, and the Sub-Area Commander and I, plus our own operational staffs landed - but not dry-shod! There were two- to three-foot waves. The time was about 0830, and it was half-tide. There was a bit of sniping going on, but the main thing was the beach obstacles. These were iron posts driven into the sand, with land mines secured to the top of them. The demolition parties were busy blowing them up as the beach had to be cleared by the next high tide, when the build-up was to start. I found that the Naval and Army beach groups were already ashore and getting organised. My car was not phased-in until D+2, so I had to walk. In my H.Q. staff I had included two Royal Marines, one as batman and one as car driver. These two spent D-Day digging a slit trench for me in the soft sand above H.W. mark, and fairly close to the lateral road, which itself was widened by three times in the course of the day.

Intelligence My brother-in-law, Commander W. M. Dickinson, was in charge of the Intelligence Section (H.Q. at Oxford) which supplied all the information about the conditions we were to find on the beaches and also oblique photographs of the beaches showing the features above the H.W. mark e.g. houses, churches etc., etc. We found these to be quite excellent and when we arrived off the Gold beaches we could pin-point our position. Under this heading I might mention my Padre - he could talk and write French and I put him in charge of our News Sheet, which I called 'The Golden Nugget'. He did this very well; it gave local information and the off-loading figures of interest to the various parties working the beaches. He also wrote me a speech in French which I delivered to the assembled .multitude on 'Le Quatorze Juillet', Bastille Day . . . . but I anticipate. Ceremonial parade then D-Day I thought that the men I was responsible for should see who was in command of them. So I staged a parade in one of the big transit sheds in Southampton Docks. There must have been about 2,000 on parade, British, American, Canadian and French. Don't forget I was responsible for all the 'G' Force craft other than the actual assault ships and their landing craft. It took some time to inspect the men, with a band playing suitable music. Then we had a religious service, conducted by our Padre. After that I got up on the dais and gave a pep speech! ! ! Now we come to D-Day, which was postponed for twenty-four hours owing to bad weather. H.M.S. Albrighton was my H.Q. Ship (I had told her captain that he had to produce the ship at the right place and time, and that I did not want to be brought into the problems of the passage over). We embarked in the

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While this was going on we (the H.Q. staff) went on a 'recce' to select an operational H.Q. The Gold beaches were gently shelving and at low tide must have been nearly a mile wide. Above H.W. mark the land rose gently and there was a most convenient twostoried house, which provided a perfect view of the beaches, about a quarter of a mile up this hill. We took it over. The first floor was made the communications centre and manned by the signalmen. The ground floor became the conference room, and we made the cellar into the operations centre, presided over by Fox (S.O.O.). This cellar had been used by the Germans as the control centre for their guns (I saw these later, a bit further inland). We named the cellar 'Fingal's Cave'. Our Air Force had blown the roof off the house, so we covered it with a tarpaulin. Soon we had a flagstaff with a large White Ensign flying, set up in front of the house, on a grass plot which we surrounded with stones painted white - er voila! Le QUARTERDECK! I spent D-Day walking along the beaches, where of course there was tremendous activity. 'How,' I thought, 'could I make men who were already moving FAST go FASTER?'. The only thing was another gimmick. If I found an officer or man not moving as fast as I thought he could or ought to be I would go up to him, point my finger a t him and say: 'There's a thousand volts at the end of this finger and if I touch you Lord 'elp you! - Now get cracking!' I was very soon nicknamed 'Voltage', in the Gold Area, which incidentally took in Arromanches and Port-en-Bassin. In my walk I went up the cliff towards Arromanches and came across a shallow trench filled with mortars loaded with live shell, all ready to lob on to the assault troops - they had been electrically wired up but, luckily

for us, the French Resistance had cut the connection. By about 0200 on D 1 I was beginning to feel a bit tired so I got into my slit trench; but I had not been there more than about five minutes when some heavy vehicle rumbled past on the lateral road and next minute the sides of the slit trench collapsed and I was nearly smothered in sand. I thought it safer, then, to carry on walking.

The great decision At about 0600 (still on D + 1 ) twenty L.S.T.s, each carrying about thirty tanks, arrived off the Gold beaches, and at once began unloading the tanks into the Rhino ferries which they had towed across with them, and sending the ferries to the beaches to land the tanks. The tide was ebbing and as the beach was gently shelving, by the time the first batch of tanks had been disembarked the Rhinos had been left hard and fast ashore. So, there was half this tank brigade still afloat in the L.S.T.S. What was to be done? I told Fox to tell the L.S.T.s to beach, and in n o time, looking to seaward, I could see these twenty enormous vessels rushing towards the beaches. It will be remembered that I had been told that L.S.T.s were on no account to beach. It occurred to me that I ought to have got permission before ordering them to do so. I therefore made an urgent signal to my Commodore 'G' (afloat), saying that I considered it essential, in the circumstances, that the L.S.T.s should beach, and requested permission for this. Even as the L.S.T.s touched the beaches back came the reply 'Approved'. This was just as well. Had the reply been negative, nothing could have stopped the L.S.T.s - they were already hard aground and busy unloading their tanks on to the sands. After this it became the policy to beach L.S.T.S. But I must say that I had flutters in the pinny as the tide flooded and the vessels became

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'Half ahead standard' and conned the ship with 'Right ten' etc. On arrival off Port-en Bassin we called an L.C.M. alongside and landed in it, to find that the N.O.I.C., whom I knew well (I The build-up forget his name now, but I saw him The build-up had now started and it years later in Malta, where he had gone was a great sight looking down on the to live) had just arrived and was beaches to see masses of different land- busy organising things. After a chat, ing craft a t all times of day and night; therefore, Fox and I returned to our also small coasters, which would dry out American L.C.T., drove it back and at about half-tide and be unloaded. anchored it in more or less the same place Things were going very well and the as we found it, then went down to find Army was moving towards Caen. In the Captain, who was in his cabin readfact, things were happening so fast that ing. We said goodbye and thanked him. my recollection of the dates of various 'You're welcome, Cap.', he said, and incidents can only be approximate. with that we went ashore and I reported I do remember that it was on D + 2 to Vian that all was well at Port-enthat I received a signal from the C-in-C Bassin. A futile exercise, the whole Assault Area, Admiral Vian, telling me thing. to go and investigate what was happenAbout 5000 yards inland from our ing at Port-en-Bassin, the 'port' (a little H.Q. were three villas. I got my batman fishing village, actually), which was the to rig up a room on the ground floor of terminal for PLUTO (Pipe Line Under one of them, with my camp bed, a box the Ocean). This was to enable petrol to for a table, and a field telephone to my be piped from the south of England to Operational H.Q., so that in an emerfuel our fighting vehicles and equipment. gency I could be there in a matter of Apparently the N.O.I.C. had not yet minutes. I did not see why I should not reported. be as comfortable as possible. My I took Fox and we went out and opposite number, the lieut-colonel, lived boarded an L.S.T. We chose an in his car and a slit trench. Why, I American one because we knew that cannot think, because the fighting was they would have plenty of food and well inland and as we had command of stores! Once aboard I asked the Captain the air we were little worried by enemy if he would take us to Port-en-Bassin. aircraft. 'Sure, Cap.', he replied, 'the ship is I remember one night early on yours. Take her where you like.' I may coming from my villa to the H.Q. I say that we had found him in his vest tripped over something and found that and pants, in his cabin, shaving. I then it was a guy supporting a small tent said: 'I alter course by ordering "Right pitched plumb in the gangway (so to ten etc.", and "Standard ahead" for speak). I discovered that the tent engine speed. Is that correct?' He belonged to a V.I.P. press man. It was replied: 'That's right, Cap.', and we moved pretty damn quick - mostly by never saw him again until we said good- my epithets. bye - when he was still in his cabin! About D + 3 I was looking out to So we went up to the bridge and I seaward and there I saw a mass of ships ordered 'Up anchor! ', while Fox got out and weird-looking structures (I had seen the chart and laid off a course, carefully some of these things in the Southampton avoiding the rocks off Arromanches. area before leaving) and they approachWhen the anchor was weighed I ordered ed Arromanches - of course this was

water-borne. First one managed to haul off successfully, then another, and finally they all got away safely, to my infinite relief.

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the start of the Mulberry Harbour, which was to contain a Gooseberry Harbour, for the protection of small landing craft. Mulberry consisted of a breakwater of old merchant ships sunk in a halfcircle and to seaward of these were bombard-ons - huge w ~ o d e n rollers which were to break the force of the waves. Then the jetties started to arrive. These were large pontoons secured together, with big legs at each end which were lowered down to the sea-bed to anchor the pontoons, rather like our North Sea oil-rigs. These pontoons were connected to the shore by three roadways, also on pontoons; one for OFF, one for ON, and a centre one for all car traffic. All this seemed to happen, and be in use, in a matter of a few days, so the volume of men, materials and stores landed increased very rapidly. It was about D+5, 1 think, that a ship arrived off my beaches loaded with Coca Cola; and a few days later there came another, this one with clotheswashing machines. I said 'Tell them to turn right and go down the coast a few miles to the American beaches. By now my car had been phased in, and so 1 was mobile and could get about quickly. One day the H.Q. Staff of the Corps to which 34 Div. belonged came through. An extremely rude and truculent brigadier started easing off a t me that we were not doing our stuff, or words to that effect. I got my Commodore 'G' and his Chief of Staff ashore and together we fixed the brigadier. However he did have his Sub-Area Commander replaced by, I must admit, a much more efficient officer. Around D + 7 two Royal Marine Groups put up a tented camp at either end of the beaches, capable of accommodating 500 people each, with a large mess tent, and a smaller one for the officers. These camps were used for.

units in transit, and for beach parties. Our food, of course, came out of tins, mostly dehydrated and on the whole very good and nourishing. Soup and ready made tea were in tins with a methylated gadget in the bottom which, once lighted heated the contents - dead cunning! By now PLUTO had been working for some time, so the need for landing petrol was minimal. The Mulberry jetty could take quite large vessels alongside. The volume of traffic, men, materials, ammunition, tanks etc. landing across the Gold beaches was high and satisfactory. At any rate I got no hasteners. By the way, the Americans sank their Mulberry in too deep water and drowned the lot - so n.b.g. The storm This was a near disaster. I think that it was about D+10 when, near noon, the barometer fell fast, and up came the wind and sea. I immediately ordered all craft anchored off my beaches to take shelter in the Gooseberry and any craft that hadn't time to comply to 'claw' to seaward and anchor well off. Some of the barges had to do this, plus a few landing craft. Well! Well! Well! My goodness it did blow and in no time the barges started dragging their anchors and getting stranded on the beaches. Then some of the landing craft. My, what a mess! The Americans, when the storm broke, ordered their craft to beach, so had the whole lot stranded. I did manage to save most of mine. The next day a large rescue party of engineers and craftsmen arrived from England to salvage the craft that were cast ashore. Unfortunately it was H.W. spring tides. However, most of my craft were fairly easily salvaged, except for one L.C.T., quite a large craft, which had stranded at H.W., so we had to wait until the next H.W. springs. When that day arrived we secured to her by

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longer required; so control was transferred to the Flag Officer, British Assault Area (F.O.B.A. A.), whose H.Q. was established a t Courseuilles, a small port and town in the Juno Area. The Commodore 'J' was G. N. Oliver, with whom I had served, and was to do so again later in three more ranks captain, commodore and rear-admiral. Every afternoon I had to drive over to FOBAA's H.Q. for a conference no names, no pack drill - which I found a complete waste of time. I had by this time had my car fitted with a White Ensign on a staff on the bonnet so that there should be no doubt as to who was inside.

chain a tank that had been waterproofed. The tide rose, and when it reached the moment of high water I gave the order for the tank to start heaving. Slowly the L.C.T. started to move and suddenly I thought 'My goodness, supposing we can't stop the L.C.T. and it drags the tank under water! ' To my intense relief, however, the chain parted, and all was well. DUKWS - amphibious craft, with a propeller to drive them at sea, and wheels for use on land - could carry a load of one ton, and did tremendous work landing stores, during the storm, from merchant ships anchored off Arromanches.

Consolidation The days were passing by; the unloading was going well and the Army was advancing, when the 54th Division got held up outside Caen and I can remember so vividly the Air Force bombing of Caen. It was a perfect summer's day, cloudless and sunny. I heard a noise of aircraft and when I looked up the sky was filled with Flying Fortresses, moving, as it seemed, quite slowly. Then a little later came the booming of the bombardment, and, not so long after, the aircraft returning overhead. One of them had been hit and crashed off our beaches. The rescue was carried out very quickly and efficiently. I shall never forget the sight of the sky above us completely filled with aircraft. I believe that 1,000 were used. Caen was flat! The 54th Division moved on. Now about this time a Commander was sent to join my staff. As paper-work had started I put him in charge of my H.Q., which was now a t Meuraine, a small town about ten miles inland. He commandeered part of a house and set up his office, which I had to visit from time to time, to sign this and that. Everything was going smoothly and the Naval Control of the beaches was no

Comfort I thought that it was time that we (the officers) made ourselves more comfortable. The Army seemed to think that they should not be comfortable. However, they did ask if they could use our mess tent. Inland from the left flank of Gold beaches was a small village called La Riviere. There we found a nice small house which Colonel Harper of No. 9 Beach Group told me had housed the prostitutes. So I took the head girl's quarters - a very nice bedroom (of course) - the bed had a very soft mattress; on the same floor was another room, which I used as a day cabin. Nearby there was an estaminet, which we took over as our officers' mess. As you might say 'A good set-up' - trust the sailor to fix it. When I wanted a really good meal I used to get into a jeep and drive on board an American L.S.T. dried out on the beach. I would go up to see the Captain, who would give me a wonderful meal of steak and apple-jack; and when I went back to my jeep to go ashore I found a sack full of tins of fruit and all sorts of things. Much earlier on I had been given a very soft mattress for my

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camp bed, and a fur-lined waterproofed coat that I have to this day. There was one great snag which we found on the first day which, oddly enough, Intelligence had not warned us about. That was a patch of soft clay which ran nearly the whole length of the beaches. It was about twenty feet wide and any vehicle getting into this was bogged down, so that we had to lay metal meshed track across the clay at various places to make 'exits' from the beaches.

much chocolate - there must have been over a ton. It all went off extremely well, and afterwards I entertained the 'Maires' to sherry. By now the days were moving past and the organisation was working well, so my tempo, anyway, was slowing down, and I was enjoying life - well housed, well fed, and adequately lubricated!

Le Quatorze Juillet For Bastille Day I staged a really big 'do'. There was a large meadow at Meuraine and there we put up two flag poles, one for the Union Jack and one for the Tricouleur. I asked everyone in the Area to give up one day's ration of chocolate. H.M.S. Frobisher, which was anchored in the Mulberry Harbour. with N.O.I.C. Arromanches on board, provided a guard and band, and also supplied great masses of sandwiches and cakes. Then we put up posters in all the villages. telling them about the arrangements for the Ceremonial Parade and Party (I have one of these posters still - in my loo). Transport was sent round to collect the villagers, and to take them hack, but they were advised to bring their own drinking glasses. Came the great day, and when I arrived with the Sub-Area Commander. the field was simply crammed with people. In company with the senior 'Maire' we inspected the Guard and then mounted a dais. The 'Maire' made his s~eech.and I replied in French (thanks to the Padre). After that the Royal Marines put on their inimitable show of drill and marching. Then everyone pot down to eating and drinking (I think it was only tea! ). and there were games for the children. I have never seen so

Murder One day the Provost Marshal came to me and said would I preside at a Court to decide whether there was sufficient evidence in a case of alleged murder for it to be forwarded for trial in the Civil Court. Apparently three Royal Marines had gone up to the front line, and only two had come back. The Court was duly convened in a tent and the proceedings started. The witnesses were for the most part French, and I had an interpreter, but I could understand a certain amount of French. A very grisly story was unfolded and I decided that there was sufficient evidence for the case to go forward. The things you are asked to do! The usefulness of the beaches was diminishing because the Mulberry Harbour and PLUTO were competing with the Army's requirements. So at the end of July the order came to close down the beaches. We had a monumental party at our estaminet in La Riviere, and off we went home. Actually, I went before the others as I had been appointed Commander of the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. I had to take off my fourth stripe! After a week's leave I went to the R.N.C. for the final week of the summer term, to get the lie of the land. although I knew it all pretty well, having been a Term Officer.

The Nautical Institute- R.N. Involvement


The Nautical Institute, now five years old, is growing fast. The need for such an organisation has been borne out by the fact that, within three years of its inception, the Nautical Institute had a c h i e v e d advisory status to H.M.G. and had been recognised by the Admiralty Board. The Constitution of the Institute states that 'the object of the Nautical Institute shall be to promote and co-ordinate in the public interest the development of nautical science in all it's branches.' This was to be achieved firstly by encouraging and promoting a high standard of qualification, competence and knowledge among those in control of seagoing craft; secondly, by facilitating the exchange and publication of information and ideas on nautical science, to encourage research therein and to publish the results thereof; thirdly, by establishing and maintaining appropriate educational and professional standards of membership; fourthly, by co-operating with Government Departments and other bodies concerned with statutory and other qualifications, and with universities and other authorities in the furtherance of education and training in nautical science and training; and, finally, by encouraging the formation of branches and professional groups in different areas. R.N. and M.N. minds meet Thus the Nautical Institute was concerned not as a trade union; nor as competing with Trinity House, The Honourable Company of Master Mariners, the Merchant Navy and Airline Officers Association, the Royal Institute of Navigation or any similar organisation. Its most valuable asset for the serving naval officer was to be, and is, to bring the Royal Navy face to face with the Merchant Navy at all levels, an association which has been sadly neglected in the R.N. as Captain Malins pointed out in this journal (N.R. January 1973, p.39) when bringing the formation of the Nautical Institute to the attention o members. With this in mind, and in f an attempt to disprove the commonly held belief that with R.N. moored in Portsmouth and the M.N. in Southampton 'never the twain should meet', the Solent Branch of the Nautical Institute was founded on 24 July 1974, as reported also in this journal (N.R. October 1974, p.364) with a naval chairman (a Rear-Admiral) and a committee consisting of three R.N. officers, four R.N.R. List 1 officers, two R.F.A. officers, four M.N. officers, two Admiralty civilian officers, a Nautical College officer and an Army (seagoing) officer. This mixture alone was rich enough but as the membership almost doubled from 120 in July 1974 to 230 in May 1976 the R.N. members gained an enormous amount of useful knowledge and, incidentally, made some very firm friendships with a complete cross section of maritime experts. There is no answer to the person who asks 'what's in it for me?'; but those whose opening remarks are more akin to 'What can I do for the Institute?' will be encouraged to attend meetings as guests and to survey the scene before committing themselves to an annual subscription of 10 (tax deductible) rising to 15 next year. Down to business It was decided early on that the Solent Branch should 'cut it's teeth' on subjects of joint R.N. and M.N. interest. To this end bi-monthly meetings were arranged in a variety of establishments in the Solent area to discuss the following topics: Bridge Design, the Offshore Tapestry, Fire and Damage Control and,

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finally, Advanced Navigational Systems. These meetings throughout the first year were addressed by a variety of speakers ranging from Naval Architects, British Shipping Federation (now the General Council of British Shipping) officers, an Ergonomicist, Royal and Merchant Naval officers, oilmen, Hydrographers, our own members and, last but by no means least, the Editor of The Naval Review, who has since become a member of the Institute. These first meetings were held in the Southampton School of Navigation at Warsash, in H.M.S. Vernon in Portsmouth and in H.M.S. Wessex in Southampton in a deliberate attempt to make known the very existence of the newly-formed Solent Branch by moving around its parish, which is nominally Brighton to Weymouth via Winchester, to draw attention to itself and in an attempt to recruit new members, which is a specific Branch aim laid down in the Institute Constitution. Likewise, in an attempt to capitalise on the recent creation of a new branch and to aid local recruiting, a branch P.R.O. was appointed early on and, since January 1975, every meeting has been reported not only in the house magazine Safety at Sea International but also in the Portsmouth and Southampton newspapers, Radio Solent and most importantly, Lloyd's List - the latter always within days rather than weeks and with an immediate international circulation which has made the Solent Branch really well known. Several of these reports were also often sent to the Ministry of Defence (Navy).

Importance of R.N.1M.N. liaison After providing a fairly strong R.N. lead to the Solent branch for the first year it was put to the membership at the first AGM, having been formulated by the predominantly M.N. committee, that the primary aim of the branch should be to 'foster R.N.1M.N. liaison'. This was agreed unanimously, again by

a large majority of M.N. personnel, and has been approved by the Nautical Institute Council and Secretariat who like each branch to develop and advance its own particular characteristics and interests. Three other major decisions were taken a t this initial AGM with R.N. implications; firstly, it was decided to make the Southampton School of Navigation at Warsash the permanent home of the Solent Branch after the nomadic existence of the first year (an ideal situation midway between Portsmouth and Southampton); secondly, it was decided to hold monthly meetings - the formal programme of bi-monthly presentations and discussions were to continue but would be interspersed with more informal meetings at a suitable local pub, in an attempt to get members together with their wives, if possible, in a 'run-ashore' atmosphere; finally it was decided to run the branch with a chairman and two vice-chairmen, the chair to alternate between the R.N. and M.N.; the vice-chairmen to be one seagoing and one ashore and for any one of these three always to be a senior R.N. officer. The initial vice chairmen were the Director of the School of Navigation at Warsash and the Sea Staff Captain of the Southampton Master Mariners. With the retirement of the first (R.N.) chairman, who has moved on to an overseas appointment and who is now one of the Institute's vice-presidents, the new Solent Branch Chairman is the Warsash School Director; one of the vice-chairman is a List 1 R.N.R. Lieutenant Commander who is a master with the Panocean Company and also an Institute Council member, while the other vice chairman's position awaits a suitable R.N. nomination. It is noteworthy that the pre-dominantly M.N. committee and membership are happy to leave this position unfilled until there is a suitable R.N. officer available rather than fill it with a caretaker M.N. officer. As can be seen, therefore, the Solent

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Branch has enjoyed a constructive and purposeful first year's existence and has had its aim and methods confirmed at its first AGM, which was another PR exercise in that it was followed by a cocktail party to which local MPs, mayors and other VIPs were invited. The MPs said they would come but were then detained by their respective 'whips'. However, most local VIPs did come, headed by Sir Alec and Lady Rose. Notwithstanding the fact that the branch now has its permanent home, at Warsash, it was agreed to go out and around the parish if a particular meeting warranted it; thus 'Health Hazards at Sea' were discussed at the Institute of Naval Medicine a t Alverstoke and 'Naval Control of Shipping' at H.M.S. Vernon. In this second year joint meetings were held with sister organisations in the area; firstly, with the Joint Southern Branch of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects and the Institute of Marine Engineers, when the subject was 'The Technical History of the Cape Mail Service'; secondly with the Royal Institute of Navigation, when two ship masters discussed the problems of 'Navigating and Handling Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs)'. Both these joint events are to be repeated in next year's programme and offer the R.N. officers further opportunities of meeting people of other maritime disciplines and discussing subjects of mutual interest and concern. Joint R.N.1M.N. training One of the more searching meetings of 1975 concerned 'Joint R.N. /M.N. Training' when the presenters were the Director of the Southampton School of Navigation and the Staff Officer Training (Warfare) from the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Naval Home Command. The first speaker started the presentation by stating that the R.N. and M.N. should not look at each other critically but rather investigate their

early training - which encourages compatability, tolerance and leadership for any co-operation. As well as becoming familiar with their respective equipments, they must be trained in self-sufficiency (fire-fighting and survival for example). Much local training liaison goes on between Warsash and the schools in Portsmouth, particularly the Pheonix NBCD School, the R.N. Survival and the faculties of the School of Maritime Operations. Future liaison is likely to consider such subjects as ship stability and management. Joint training establishments were not considered worthwhile due to totally differing priorities and methods of operation i.e. warfare as opposed to cargo carrying1 handling. Perhaps more M.N. officers should join the R.N.R. and more R.N. officers should take passage in M.N. ships. (As a direct result of this suggestion, sub-lieutenants under training in the Portsmouth schools now carry out evening and weekend liaison voyages with Sealink's Isle of Wight and cross channel ferry services). It was also suggested that the M.N. might consider R.N. methods of, firstly, employing officers ashore between sea jobs and, secondly, giving refresher courses at regular intervals. The R.N. speaker reiterated the importance of Warsash's working links with certain Portsmouth schools and suggested that more liaison could be achieved on the subjects of lifesaving equipment, seaboats, replenishment at sea, technical training and the employment of divers. He pointed out that the R.N. placed considerable emphasis upon their 0.O.W.s becoming familiar with the propulsion systems of their future ships by putting them below whilst under training and by training Engineer officers on the bridge so that they might appreciate the problems involved in station keeping, screening convoys and replenishment. Finally, the R.N. method of Objective Training was described, i.e. identifying what work had

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to be done, setting it out in objective terms, determining the conditions under which it has to be done and defining the standards which have to be achieved under training and at sea, thus avoiding unnecessary teaching and concentrating only on things worth spending money on, for example, by rejecting the obsolescent in order to avoid needless and expensive extensions to training. Such a system also enables the training staff to assess, during training, whether the men are going to be able to match up to the demands made on them when they go to sea. Subsequently, the following suggestions evolved during the discussion period: a. Could the R.N.'s leadership schools assist in the training of M.N. senior ratings as they do already for certain fishing industry companies? b. More young R.N. officers should go to sea with the M.N., possibly whilst standing by their ships building and refitting, in order to practise ocean navigation and pilotage and to make them more aware of M.N. capabilities. c. Perhaps the M.N. should recruit more ex-R.N. ratings. The details of this meeting have been described fully in order to give some idea of the depth at which subjects are dealt with at Nautical Institute branch meetings and also to show what sort of considerations and recommendations come out of such a meeting, all of which are reported to the Nautical Institute Council for action and to the MOD(N) for information. Another benefit that has accrued from this increased R.N.1M.N. liaison is that the new edition of the Admiralty Seamanship Manuals will, for the first time, have contributions from the Merchant Navy. At the beginning of this year the Solent Branch committee compiled and circulated a questionnaire to the total Nautical Institute membership (almost

3,000) on the 'Provision and Training for Use of Breathing Apparatus' as a result of follow-up action taken after a branch meeting which had identified certain shortcomings amounting to a serious inadequacy in some ships. How many R.N. boarding officers know what to expect when they arrive in a merchant ship to fight a fire? Whether they know little or much, the findings of the Solent Branch investigation will help make their task easier next time and is a subject to which all R.N. officers should be giving thought. How many of them know the minimum legal breathing apparatus requirements for 4,000 ton cargo vessels and for passenger vessels? (Membership of the Nautical Institute may have led to their learning that the answers are 'three' and 'one per 100 feet' respectively! ) Encouragement to join the Nautical Institute It is for these and many other reasons that all seamen officers have been directed, by DCI(RN) S74/76 to consider membership of the Nautical Institute in a similar manner that all Engineer officers are encouraged to join their respective Institutes. It is undoubtedly a good method of keeping up to date and broadening one's professional interests and, judging by the experience of those of us who have enjoyed the first two years of the Solent Branch, R.N. officers have been well received in this predominantly M.N. organisation. Full membership (MNI) is restricted to those who hold British Foreign-going Master's Certificates or are Lieutenant Commanders or above. Associate Membership (AMNI) is open to those who hold British Second Mate's Certificate or R.N. Bridge Watchkeeping and Ocean Navigation Certificates. Further details are available from the Nautical Institute, Alderman's House,

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Alderman's Lane, London, EC2M 3UU. Apart from the Solent Branch, there are branches at Plymouth (SW), Liverpool

(NW) Tyneside (NE), Humberside and London. M. J. M. PLUMRIDOE

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In May 1827 the Duke of Clarence (later William IV, the Sailor King) became 'The Lord High Admiral'; but it was not a happy experiment and was terminated fifteen months later. For the remainder of the century 'Our Commissioners for Executing the Office of High Admiral' were in charge with 'the full power and authority to do everything which belongs to the Office of our High Admiral as well in touching those things which concern our Navy and Shipping'. The result of their efforts has been summed up by that great historian Professor Marder in the following words: 'The British Navy, at the end of the nineteenth century, though numerically a very imposing force was, in certain respects, a drowsy, inefficient, moth-eaten organism'. It was certainly not for want of advice by those who saw what was happening. I hope the present incumbent of Pepys' great office will not take it amiss if I record here some of that advice in the shape of snippets of evidence which I submitted to the Mansergh Committee under the title Plus ca change, plus c'est la rntrne chose in response to their request for views from serving officers. (Unfortunately only the rough draft is still with me, so the sources are not as fully recorded as I could wish. In 1954 however when I submitted them all these remarks or extracts from speeches were about 60-70 years old.): For years the Admiralty has been advised and entreated to deal with the engineering question in a broad, liberal and impartial spirit. But in the words of Mr. Dugdale they have 'by arrogant and egotistical opposition succeeded in making one of our most honourable and important professions the most unpopular in the whole Navy'. Mr. D. B. Morison. We have arrived at the present stage of dissatisfaction and difficulty through a long series of administrative compromises between the force of sentiment and tradition on the one hand and the force of facts produced by the progress of mechanical science, on the other. Sir John Colomb M.P. But futile indeed will be the most brilliant tactics, if the floating mechanisms fail in the hour of trial. Professor Weighton. It is necessary that Engineer Officers should exhibit to their men an example of courage and coolness for the preservation of discipline, and the ensuring of prompt attention and obedience to orders. But it becomes difficult to exhibit these necessary qualities if the spirit of these officers is crushed by the continual repression and nonrecognition of those in authority. Mr. Bedbrook, R.N. Chief Inspector of Machinery.

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It would be absolutely suicidal for any of our large steamship companies to send their vessels to sea with such a large proportion of their engine room complements as inexperienced and youthful as are the engineer complements of our newly commissioned men o' war. And certainly this unsatisfactory condition of affairs gives much force to the assertion that these things could not happen if the engineer branch of the Navy had adequate and authoritative representation upon the Admiralty Board. Ernest Gearing. The engine rooms of our ships are already under-officered and the number of ships is increasing out of all proportion to the number of engineer officers. Unless the Service is made more attractive we cannot be expected, as Headmasters, to send our best and most promising pupils to go through a long course of training for this Service. If the Admiralty have to be content with inferior men and to resort to temporary expedients it will be at the expense of the efficiency of the Navy and the safety of the Empire. (Report of the Annual ~ e e t i n g of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters, 1901) When I came on this next quotation (in 1954) I was particularly interested because I was able to extract, from a report I had submitted to DNT (in 1947) the statement made to me by the Headmaster of Clifton when I was peddling the Electrical Branch round the public schools. By 1954 Mr. Hallward had become Vice Chancellor of Nottingham but he kindly allowed me to repeat his remarks of seven years before made to Admiral Mansergh: You ask about engineers? To these I concede you give one of the

best technological educations in the country. But, after the age of forty, you deny all of them any chance of fulfilling themselves and, as a result you have a frustrated and embittered crowd of men itching to leave the Navy. I'll never dissuade a boy who is set on the Navy, but I would never encourage the waverer (This last sentence was made in the context of the new electrical entry, who were to go to Cambridge.) The proposed transfer of the hydraulic, electric and torpedo machinery to executive officers on account of the shortage of engineer officers and men is a step fraught with great danger. Memorandum, North East Coast Institution. The proposed transfer, in our Navy, of the machinery associated with guns, shot hoists, and torpedo firing, to Gunnery Lieutenants will be disastrous to the efficient upkeep of these details as well as their ultimate use. Mr. W. C. Borrowman. What would a MAJOR of Infantry say if he had to appear before an Artillery CAPTAIN to punish or reward his men. Mr. Westgarth (Presumably the founder of the present great firm of Richardson Westgarth) I am of the opinion that a better plan would be to adopt a system of common entry for deck and engineer officers. And for the first two years to submit them all to the same course of training at a Royal Naval University. Afterwards, by selective methods, allowing them to

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specialise in the various branches of engineering and deck duties.' Mr. Rollo Appleyard (Author's Note: A remarkable similarity here to the Murray Scheme, but it took sixty years! ) Speed is as great a factor in naval efficiency as is the armament. D. S. Bigge, 1902 (Author's Note: Cf. 'Mobility is one of the prime military assets.' Fleet Admiral King U.S.N. 1944 Report to Congress). There were many other such quotations but perhaps three more will suffice to suggest the general trend: In spite of all fictions to the contrary, the engineering personnel are combatants. They either sink or swim with the ship and their participation in the sinking process is attended by trials of morale of a very severe and exceptional character. Mr. Bremner The intense nervous strain, created by the realisation of the grave though unknown dangers to which they are being subjected, is unaccompanied by the inspiriting (sic) excitement of battle, which so greatly enhances the power of human endurance. Under these conditions strict discipline, cool judgement and an intimate knowledge of the vast maze of mechanism are essential to the successful performance of the necessary duties. D. B. Morison We are therefore of the opinion that engineer officers should in future be classed with the military or executive branch of the profession, among those who would not, on any occasion, succeed to com-

mand (of ships). Admiral Sir Astley Cooper Key's Committee, 1876 Although with this and much more behind him Fisher had clear ideas of what the Royal Navy needed his 'speed of advance' once he became Second Sea Lord must still amaze anyone with experience of today's bureaucracy. Professor Ruddock Mackay's Fisher of Kilverstone is another valuable book, and in it there is a vivid description of Fisher's eruption (no other word really describes the event) into the Admiralty. Professor Mackay allows Fisher's own words to describe his arrival on 10 June 1902 and goes on to quote: At ten minutes to twelve I said 'how d'ye do' to Lord Selborne. At five minutes to twelve he gave me practically carte blanche, and at twelve I was read in at the Board, and five minutes after, I commenced operations in my room at the Admiralty in sending the first pages to the printer of the preamble to the new schemes of training. entry, etc. . . . Finally as Professor Mackay writes: The first instalment was entitled 'A Brief Summary of Reasons and Proposals for altering the present System of Entry and Training of the Officers and Men of the Navy' and it emerged from the printing press on 2 July. It would be wrong, however, for posterity not to acknowledge the help and constructive counsel which Fisher received from the then Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, who was also to become, in a few years, another great reforming Second Sea Lord. And it is interesting to speculate on the conversations which must have occurred between these two on the subject of engineers. As Fisher's Private Secretary mentions:

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The year 1903 witnessed an activity at the Admiralty which had never before occurred in times of peace. Reform after reform connected with the personnel of the Navy was brought about by Sir John Fisher with bewildering rapidity. Engineer officers were given semi-executives titles; commissioned rank was opened to that most deserving class of warrant officers; warrant rank was instituted for stokers through the new grade of mechanician; and an establishment for boy artificers was started to supply the Navy with engine room artificers . . . and from this time onward fighting efficiency afloat became the aim and object of every ship. And all this was carried a stage further by Prince Louis when later he introduced the title of Mate (E) for those promoted from the Lower Deck. a title which was changed to Sub-Lieut. (E) only as the writer of this article was going to sea. But to revert to the Officer Structure. Let us start with Fisher's own words: Take now the submarines. They began by diving headfirst to go below water: and in the beginning some stuck their noses in the mud and never came up again, and in the shallow waters of the North Sea this limited the dimension of the submarine. But now there's no more diving. A lunatic hit by accident on the idea of sinking the ship horizontally; so there's no more bother about the metricentric (sic) problems, and all the vagaries of stabilities. No limit to size. This sort of consideration brought into one's mind that a great 'Education' was wanted; and that we wanted 'Machinery Education' both with officers and men; and also that the education should be the education of common sense. My.

full idea of Osborne was, alas, emasculated by the schoolmasters of the Nation; but it is yet going to spread. As sure as I am now dictating to you, the practical way of teaching is 'Explanation, followed by Execution'. Have a lecture on optics in the morning; make a telescope in the afternoon. Tell the boys in the morning about a mariner's compass and the use of a chart: and in the afternoon go out and navigate a ship. (Author's Note: I remember this type of regime being enthusiastically endorsed by the late Professor Sir Willis Jackson FRS, one of the pillars of the Murray Committee). Fisher's next criterion however would not be so favourably received today, and rightly: Similarly, with the selection of boys for the Navy I didn't want any examination whatsoever, except the boy and his parents being 'vetted' and then an interview with the boy to examine his personality (his soul, in fact). It must not be thought that in Fisher's requirement for the parents to be 'vetted' there was any snobbish motive. In a letter to Lord Esher in 1910 he wrote: . . . . this Democratic Country won't stand 99% at least of her naval officers being drawn from the 'Upper Ten'. It's amazing to me that anyone should persuade himself that an aristocratic Service can be maintained in a Democratic State. It is of interest to recall, in the context of how successful the present Admiralty Interview Board has been in this context, Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne's comment after spending a week in a frigate off Iceland: 'Half the Wardroom' he wrote, 'were from Dartmouth and half from the Lower Deck but it was not possible to tell which half

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was which. Only in the Petty Officer's Mess was there a distinct list to starboard.' T o conclude Fisher's criteria: We must not have an article in the Navy stuffed by patent cramming schoolmasters like a Strasburg goose. A goose's liver is not the desideratum in the candidate. The desideratum is can we put into him the four attributes of Nelson: 1. Self Reliance (If you don't believe in yourself no-one else will). 2. Fearlessness of Responsibility (If you shiver on the brink you'll catch cold and possibly not take the plunge). 3. Fertility of Resource (If the traces break, don't give it up, get some string). 4. Power of Initiative (Disobey orders). So far we have looked briefly at Fisher's thinking but we should not neglect the mazing adaptability of the other members of the Board of Admiralty with Lord Walter Kerr in the lead who, initially at least, must have viewed Fisher's scheme with very considerable misgiving. The introduction to Command 1385: Memorandum dealing with the Entry, Training and Employment o f Officers and Men o f the Royal Navy puts the problem succinctly: Now the highest type of Naval Officer is that wherein great professional knowledge is added to force of character . . . . The strength which its unity gives the Service can hardly be overestimated, yet in respect of this matter a strangely anomalous condition of affairs exists. The Executive, the Engineer, and the Marine Officers are all necessary for the efficiency of the Fleet; they all have to serve side by side throughout their career; their unity of sentiment is essential to the welfare of the Navy; yet they all

enter the Service under different regulations, and they have nothing in common in their early training. The result is that the Executive Officer, unless he is a gunnery or torpedo specialist has been taught but a limited amount of engineering, although the ship in which he serves is one huge box of engines; that the Engineering Officer has never had any training in executive duties; that from lack of early sea training the Marine Officer is compelled, sorely against his will, to remain comparatively idle on board ship. . ." The answer, as the Admiralty saw it was as follows (from the same memorandum): 1. All Officers for the Executive and Engineer branches of the Navy and for the Royal Marines shall enter the Service as Naval Cadets under exactly the same conditions between the ages of 12 and 13 (instead of 14+-154). 2. That these Cadets shall all be trained on exactly the same system until they have passed the rank of Sub-Lieutenant between the ages of 19 and 20. 3. That at about the age of 20 these Sub-Lieutenants shall be distributed between the three branches of the Service which are essential to the fighting efficiency of the Fleet - the Executive, the Engineer and the Marine. The result aimed at is, to a certain point, community of knowledge and lifelong community of sentiment. . . . I t was not long, however, before the idea of common training for Royal Marines, with the other fighting branches, was found to be impracticable. But the gut point, and one which bedevilled the scheme for many years was whether or not Engineers and Executives, at some stage, or up to some stage, or always, if they had been

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trained under the new scheme, should be interchangeable as regards their posts and particularly as regards command of ships. Fisher had no doubts a t all that they should be. In a letter to James Thursfield dated 22 January 1902 and quoted by Professor Marder Fisher writes: None of them outside clearly comprehend that all are going to be educated as Engineer Officers from their first entry, and that this inevitably leads to ALL being Engineer Officers and to 'Tria Juncta in Uno'. The third element were the Royal Marines of course. There will be no three branches, and as you yourself have most concisely pointed out, the Lieut (E) will go on as Commander and Captain etc. just as the Lieut (G) and the Lieut (T) and the Lieut (N) mount up the ladder. A few special officers will go in for higher engineering and electrical positions in the Dockyards and Admiralty, but, as has been well observed, we only want a Faraday and a George Stephenson about every two or three years. Lord Selborne, some fifteen months later was more delphic when he made his personal feelings plain in the House of Commons - and in doing so he was only echoing what he had said in a letter to The Times five months before. In the debate he had this to say: Are the Officers who have taken the Engineer branch to be interchangeable with the Executive branch? As the scheme now stands they will not be interchangeable. . . . If it had been decided that they were to be interchangeable, and the Cadets had come into the College on that understanding, no Board of Admiralty could have gone back on that decision. . . . Nevertheless I fully believe and hope that they will be made interchangeable, and that

Engineers as a special branch will disappear altogether. . . . In this letter to The Times which preceded the above statement Lord Selborne had been much clearer: . . . The point could not be left doubtful. Either there will be interchangeability hereafter between the three branches, or there will not. Either an Engineer Officer, for instance, will be able to rise to the command of a ship or squadron, or he will not. These are questions which time and experience alone can answer, and the Board, in framing the present scheme, had to be prepared for either event. . . . The announcement made that the division will be definite and final can apply only to the principles by which the present Board must be guided . . . and leaves a future Board free to relax the role if it thinks fit. . . Fisher was not one to give up and in the ensuing years, as opportunity or as some decision appeared imminent which seemed likely to rule out 'interchangeability' altogether, he returned to the attack. And each time the answer was 'wait and see'. For instance Lord Tweedmouth, then First Lord, wrote to Fisher in 1906: I am quite prepared to give the new scheme, as a whole, a fair trial, to adopt the policy of waiting and watching, but I do think that the system of interchangeability requires special watching. I don't want to commit myself or my successors to a final and irrevocable decision before I or they have some experience to found it upon. In a debate in the same year when Fisher, as usual, was trying a little 'stage managing' he wrote to Lord Cawdor (Tweedmouth's predecessor and a firm Fisher ally) setting forth the precise lines that opponents of his schemes would follow and enclosing no less than

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five detailed 'Briefs' to assist Lord vital and which many of those recently Cawdor in formulating his speeches in entered saw as the inevitable future defence of Fisher's ideas. His final shape of their careers. Not for the first remark is perhaps also worth noting as time in the Navy's history, or the last, another example of Plus Fa change; plus the forces of reaction mounted a relentc'est la mgme chose: less opposition against which Fisher I regret to say Tweedmouth and could only rail. As he did in the followCo. are getting lukewarm, but I will ing trenchant terms: There will be immense oppositell you more when I see you. tion. There always is! Bows and Politics seem a very warping thing arrows died hard in the Navy, so when Trades Unions and Labour did masts and sails; water tube Members come on the scene. Fisher did not get it all his own way boilers were going to boil our and despite the support of Prince Louis stokers! Salt beef has gone, and the Service is going to the devil! snuff and others he failed almost totally to shift naval opinion towards a twentieth boxes were made out of it. Boarding century meritocracy as the best basis for pikes have only just left us. Greek the Navy's officer corps. is dead, but alas, Latin still lives! as the shore going schoolmasters Professor Ruddock Mackay quotes a apparently can't teach anything else Memorandum on 'State Education in the Navy' from Fisher's Papers which and we must have some test for boys entering the Navy; but they is also more briefly referred to in learn it no more after entry, which Fisher's own volume Records. Part of it gives Lord Goschen sleepless runs as follows: nights! In other words (unless things are The opposition was simply changed) the Officers of the Navy prodigious to Lord Kelvin's will be drawn exclusively from the compass and sounding machine, well-to-do classes, or, as some perhaps the two greatest because critics will put it, from the aristothe most lifesaving, of human cratic classes . . . . under the old inventions. A distinguished Adsystem many engineer cadets were miral, when First Sea Lord, objectof quite humble extraction, but ed to torpedoes because there were even this outlet or safety valve for none when he came to sea, and to democratic sentiment is now midshipmen having baths, because closed. . . . The democratic sentihe never washed! Yes! the Bow ment will gradually acquire such and Arrow party are still with us. . . force that it will wreck the present They can't bear the Dreadnought system in the long run if it is not . . . she is too fast and they hate given an outlet . . . . there are not big guns. They'll hate Heaven, more than 1,500,000 people in all probably, because there is no more from whom officers from the Navy sea there, and they won't like all the can be taken. . . . The remainder of harps playing the same tune. the population is 41,500,000 and of Fancy! Complete Interchangethese no single one can ever hope ability and Admiral Lambton and to become an officer in the Navy. a Lieutenant (E) exchanging harps! But it was not to be and try as hard It will be Hell! as he could Fisher never opened up the Even though this Paper was marked Navy on the basis he wished and he never got the firm decision on 'Inter- 'Strictly Private and Secret' what a changeability' which he regarded as refreshing savour it has compared to

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the constipated effusions which result today from the dreary and tight constraints of Staff College verbiage. And so those boys born in the last decade of the XIXth century, or that small proportion who went to preparatory schools, who wished to join the Royal Navy as officers, were offered a rather different career than heretofore, were subjected to a new pattern of training and, many of them, became inculcated with a new outlook and quite a new spirit. All were to 'be of a company' and all, in Fisher's words later to Churchill, were to be 'young men in high commands who will think in submarines and 13+-inch guns! ' No specific pledge as to 'Interchangeability' had been given to those who aspired to be Engineers but they all held fast to the paragraph in the Admiralty Memorandum launching the new scheme which read as follows: . . . Engineer Officers will wear the same uniform and bear the same titles and rank, e.g., Sub-Lieut (E), Lieut (E), Commander (E), Captain (E), and Rear-Admiral (E). The Engineer Branch will receive extra pay, and, although it is proposed to make the division into the various Branches definite and final, every endeavour will be made to provide those who enter the Engineer branch with opportunities equal to those of the Executive branch including the same opportunity of rising to Flag Rank. As Professor Mackay writes, 'The end of the final sentence suggested that there might be interchangeability after all, at least for some Engineers.' And, he continues: 'Fisher would have retained interchangeability for Commanders (E) and above and had the following comment typed on a copy of the Memorandum in 1906: It was the original intention and was the only sound basis, to have complete interchangeability, but in

deference to a strongly expressed desire not to fetter unduly future Boards, the separation into three branches was reluctantly acquiesced in. . . .' As the war clouds gathered therefore the Royal Navy had become the storm centre of politics. This was a position it had occupied before, but what was new was that it had become the storm centre not only of informed, but of popular politics. The great Jubilee Review in 1887, Mahan's studies of sea power, the growing sea power of Russia and the Franco-Russian Alliance, in the Far East the expansion of the Japanese Navy and nearer at home the German Emperor's plans for a large Navy, and two or three great naval correspondents, all these, one after the other, laid a train of powder t o an explosion which Fisher's enthusiasm and drive were so effectively to trigger. Personnel changes. the steam turbine, the water tube boiler, nickel chrome steel for armour and armour-piercing shells, the diesel engine, automatic quick firing guns, torpedoes, aircraft, airships, submarines, gunnery controls, wireless, the use of oil fuel instead of coal, even the possibility of gas turbines, did not escape Fisher's thoughts. As he wrote to Sir Charles Parsons (concerning a far sighted Vickers proposal in 1912 for a 'pocket battle-ship' of the type produced by Germany in the thirties): Vickers are absolutely confident they can produce a 25-knot Dreadnought . . . capable of going round the earth without refuelling. Oram (Engineer in Chief) and the Admiralty are timorous - of course they are. They were timorous with the water tube boiler! They were timorous a t the turbine going into the Dreadnought! . . . . They strain at the gnat of perfection and swallow the camel 'of the unready'. What breaks my heart is that you can't see your way to associate the

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turbine with the principle o f internal combustion. Isn't there some metal to stand the heat? Dr. Beilby will invent it for you. Can't you experiment? As the Navy was the storm centre of politics so Engineers and engineering formed a separate storm centre in the Navy. For the young (E) officers it was a time to live. They were military, they were executive, above all they were going to be Engineers and all the vast possibilities of the industrial revolution were going to be utilised for the good of the Royal Navy, or so they believed, for Admiral Fisher had told them so. War was in the air. Time was short. As the first of the new (E) officers went to sea the old and famous Royal Naval Engineering College at Keyham was closed (in 1910) and the 'Engineer Officer' Entry which had served the Navy so well, ceased. The debt the Navy owed them has never been fully acknowledged. It was a debt not only for the gift of their patience and loyalty to the Service in the face, often, of contempt and denigration, but also for their legacy of superlative professional skill which they bequeathed, ungrudingly, to the new (E) officers whose status ashore o r afloat they had never been permitted to approach. Fisher knew this and when he returned to the Admiralty in the autumn of 1914 he took immediate steps to rectify the curious situation, as far as he could. At the time senior officers of the old Engineering Branch were still regarded as civilians and wore purple between their stripes and had no executive curl; and the same went for their juniors who had recently graduated from Keyham. But, working with these senior and junior 'Engineers', were the young (E) officers with, as yet, little engineering experience but military, executive (and therefore appearing before their engineering seniors in the Navy List) status and without the purple stripe. Such a Gilbertian situation had

to be quickly rectified and it was. On Christmas Eve 1914 the Admiralty announced that from 1 January 1915 officers of the Engineering Branch would be deemed 'military'. They were allowed to wear the executive curl on their cuffs and the senior officers oak leaves on their caps. They retained the purple (unlike the (E) Officers who did not wear it) and they were of course ineligible to succeed to the command of H.M. Ships. Indeed the Order in Council reiterated that they were subject to the authority of any officer in charge of the executive duties of the ship or acting as Officer of the Watch, of whatever seniority such officer might be. Because of their lack of seniority during World War I the question as to whether the (E) officer would succeed to command was hardly tested. I know of only one well authenticated case where with the commanding officer of a submarine sick the Engineer Officer, a Lieutenant (E), succeeded to command until his commanding officer returned to duty. However the Lieutenant (E) was not called on to take the submarine out on patrol. There was little doubt though, amongst the (E) specialists, that it was seniority and not specialisation that would decide such an issue. I shall mention, very briefly, the other branches - the Paymasters, the Doctors and the Instructor Branch in the next instalment. They all. in fact shipped the executive curl a little later in 1918 but retained (as the old Engineers did the purple) their white, crimson and blue strips between the gold stripes on their cuff. In this article, although a multiplicity of quotations does not make for easy reading, I have thought it best to tell the story of the Engineers up to the end of World War I in the language of the time. Most of the changes which Fisher wrought in officer/personnel matters were too late greatly to affect the course of World War I at sea;

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whereas, in all probability the institution of the Artificer Training, of the Mechanician and of the Mate (E) did much to enhance the morale of the men on whom a tremendous burden was to fall. The (E) Scheme, as we shall see, faltered and was nearly destroyed by reaction twenty years after it was instituted. It was saved by the loyalty of a few of those Lieutenants (E) who served in the Grand Fleet and elsewhere, between 1914 and 1918. And, after World War 11, they and a number of their contemporaries in the Executive branch (as I have already mentioned) .rebuilt it from the rubble of the twenties. Meanwhile it was really the 'old type Engineers' who by their efforts kept the World War I Fleet at sea. The (E) Branch in World War 11, as I shall mention, got their thanks from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons. The 'old type engineers' received their accolade from Jellicoe in words, which, curiobsly, I read for the first time on the wall of Admiral Rickover's office in the (old) Main Navy Building in Washington D.C. They come from Jellicoe's dispatch after Jutland and they run as follows:

I have given details of the work of the various ships during action. I t must never be forgotten, however, that the prelude to action is the work of the engine room department, and that during action the officers and men of the department perform their most important duties without the incentive which a knowledge of the course of the action gives to those on deck. The qualities of discipline and endurance are taxed to the utmost under these conditions, and they were, as always, most fully maintained throughout the operations under review. Many ships attained speeds that had never before been reached, thus showing very very clearly their high states of steaming efficiency. Failures in material were conspicuous by their absence, and many instances are reported of magnificent work on the part of the engine room departments of injured ships. . . . I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant, J. R. Jellicoe. Admiral, Commander in Chief. (to be continued)

Lours LE BAILLY

The Admiralty, Bombs and Battleships


Recently, Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane wrote of the ancient controversy about the Bomb and the Battleship: Lord Fisher, as early as 1920, with remarkable prescience, had said of the battleship 'Scrap the lot', but successive Boards were wedded to the big ship and the big gun and n o amount of evidence obtained from trials caused them to alter their opinion, mainly because of the specious argument that in war the attacking aircraft would be shot down before they could deliver their weapons. Yet any sober calculation could have shown that what happened off Singapore, o r to the majority of surface vessels sunk by aircraft in the war was inevitable.' This is an abbreviated version of a familiar argument the main contention of which is that, when the First World War was over, the battleship was a n obsolete, or at best obsolescent, weapon. Instead of realising this, however, successive Boards of Admiralty consistently underrated the threat from the air and neglected the provision of A.A. guns and adequate a m o u r protection against air attack even for the main ships of the Fleet. A careless inattention to the needs and potentialities of naval aviation compounded the error with the result that by 1939 the Navy was critically deficient in many areas for the conditions it would have to face in the coming war. Dramatic blunders and disasters such as the Battle of Crete and the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse followed inexorably. Until equipped to face the unexpected potency of air attack, the Navy proved much more circumscribed and much less successful in its operations than its leaders had expected. The case is that these errors were avoidable, but that their commission was entirely typical of the men responsible. In fact, the argument is extended to encompass the contention that this failure to appreciate the potential impact of airpower on naval operations was merely just another example of the inescapable conservatism of the military mind: 'I . . . came to realise that to most admirals the respective value of battleships and aircraft was not basically a technological issue, but more in the nature of a spiritual issue. They cherished the battlefleet with a religious fervour, as an article of belief defying all scientific examination.' In point of fact, of course, 'a scientific habit of thought is the least thing that military education and training have fostered. Perhaps that is an unalterable condition for the services might hardly survive if they parted company with sentiment if the bulk of their members detached themselves from the loyalties which are incompatible with the single-minded loyalty to truth that science demands." Alrpower ancillary Of course there is something in all this." The Admiralty were indeed on the unimaginative side in their appreciation of the relative importance of battleships and aircraft in the naval operations of the future. As late as June 1939, for example, the Naval Staff believed that the speed of German ships would mean that: 'Our battleships would have to co-operate with aircraft carriers in hopes that the enemy's speed could be reduced as a result of a torpedo aircraft 'Air Chief Marshal Sir Raloh Cochrane G.B.E., R.A.F. (Rtd). Letter to J.R.U.S.I., June 1976. 'Quoted in A. Marder, From the DardanT h e issue will be more thoroughly explored in my chapter in B. Mcl Ranft: Technical
elles t o Oran, O.U.P., 1974, p. 85.

Change and British Naval Policy 18601939, Hodder and Stoughton, June 1977.

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attack and the raiders then brought to action by the battleship." Airpower at sea, in short, was thought to be essentially ancillary in function and, in the words of the Admiralty's Postwar Questions Committee nearly twenty years before: 'The battleship retains her old predominant position.'Vcepticism about the potential of airpower largely derived from low expectations of the striking power of the aircraft that battleships were likely to encounter and from high expectations of the efficiency of naval anti-aircraft gunnery. In March 1931 the Commander-inChief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Chatfield, commented: 'My own recent experience of the Air Arm makes me hesitate to subscribe to any policy that increases the strength of the air arm a t the direct expense of less ambitious weapons. . . . The battle between the aircraft and the antiaircraft gun is at present unsolved. My personal view trends strongly in the direction that attack of ships at sea by aircraft will be unremunerative in a few years. '' The fact that someone, as able as Chatfield was universally acknowledged to be, entertained such doubts as to the future potential of airpower a t sea should alert us to the possible existence of another side to the 'Bomb and Battleship' issue. In point of fact the evidence at the time was nothing like as clear as the Admiralty's critics claimed it was then and since. This becomes apparent when, for example, the bombing trials conducted by the British and American navies in the 1920s are examined closely. The American trials Air enthusiasts found in these trials a most potent weapon in their campaign against the battleship. Especially useful were the American trials of 1921 when General Billy Mitchell's First Provisional Air Brigade bombed a number of German warships in an aerial spectacular which culminated in the sinking

of the battleship Ostfriesland. Mitchell and like-minded adherents on both sides of the Atlantic drew some far-reaching conclusions from these dramatic events which, they argued, showed that major warships could not operate in the presence of hostile air forces. Mitchell himself suggested that one such attack against the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet would have put it out of action. In fact, any naval force venturing into the range of land-based airpower would do so at its peril. It followed, therefore, that properly organised air forces could take over the naval role of defending the homeland against seaborne invasion. Doubts were cast, effectively, not only on the future value of the battleship but also on the prestige of the Service of which it was the supreme expression. Although not all of them went as far as this, a good many sympathisers in this country (including Rear Admiral Sir Murray F. Sueter) drew similar conclusions from the American trials. Scepticism about the future of the battleship reached a pitch which both angered and alarmed the Admiralty. Accordingly, in 1936, the C.I.D. set up the 'Vulnerability of Capital Ships' (VCS) Committee under Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, to investigate the matter, and, perhaps, to settle it once and for all. Before the VCS the Admiralty launched a counter attack on air enthusiasts and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Chatfield completely demolished Sueter's contention that the Ostfriesland tests had proved that battleships were too vulnerable to air attack to retain their strategic utility. Chatfield claimed that Sueter's version of the
'304th Mtg., Chiefs of Staff Sub-committee, 20 June 1939, Cab. 53/11, P.R.O. "Final Report of P.W.Q.C., 27 Mar. 1920, Adm. 118586. P.R.O. 'Letter 'to Admty,- 29 Mar. 1931, Adm. 11612792, P.R.O.

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Ostfriesland evidence was 'substantially untrue, misrepresenting and misleading.' He repeated the familiar argument that the ship was old, at anchor, unprotected and bombed with very large bombs from very low heights. He pointed out that the final decisive attack came after two days of continuous bombing which had already done the ship a great deal of cumulative damage. On top of all this, insufficient attention had been paid to the fact that the vessel was not even watertight when the whole trial series of bombings had begun. Of course, there was evidence the other way too. As Admiral W. F. Fullam, U.S.N., observed: 'There is nothing so difficult to sink as a naval hulk. A naval vessel with its boilers, engines and steering gear in operation, and with its magazines filled, its guns in use, with torpedoes in place, depth charges in position, the gun crews at their station will be far more easily destroyed than a hulk lying dead in the water with no explosives aboard. Why, anybody can know that." The Ostfriesland trials, in fact, provided a body of evidence that was open to various interpretations. The problem was still not solved. The evidence the test provided for a general condemnation of the battleship was, in truth, subject to so many qualifications, that the case was probably not worth making at that stage.

of the 'Near Miss Bomb.' In the Ostfriesland test much had been made of the so-called 'water hammer effect' of light case bombs exploding in the water close alongside the ship. In fact, the British naval attache wrote: 'The effects of the 2,0001b. bombs bursting alongside the Ostfriesland and some of the 1,0001b. bombs under Frankfurt were so immediate and overwhelming as to render it immaterial whether these ships were possessed of "water-tight integrity" or not.'' Subsequent British tests, however, established that this danger was much exaggerated. Bombs had actually to be dropped so close to the side of the ship, to be effective, that it seemed a much better idea to aim at the ship with heavy case bombs instead. Surprisingly, in view of their previous enthusiastic espousal of this form of attack, the Air Ministry largely agreed. The Superintendent of the Air Ministry Laboratory, for example, wrote: 'we now know that, whatever may be the case as regards ships now in existence, it is possible so to construct new ships as to free them from the risk of being sunk by near misses, or even as I conclude by torpedoes in contact.'" Caution of R.A.F. and Admiralty In fact, the Air Ministry went much further even than this in admitting that the various tests and trials of the interwar period did ifideed provide persuasive evidence of the inherent resilience of the modern battleship. At the VCS, the Air Ministry accepted the Admiralty's technical case without demur. The Chairman asked the Chief of the Air Staff: 'I gather that . . -. you are not prepared to say, and as far as you know your service would not be prepared to say, that the time has yet come when 'Quoted in R. Hough: The Hunting o f Force Z , New English Library, 1963, p. 32. 'Quoted in A. Boyle: Trenchard, Collins,
1962, p. 473.

British trials Nearly all parties to the dispute accepted the necessity for further trials, though some of them (like General Mitchell) saw their value primarily in terms of finally convincing the dunderheads opposed to them of the error of their ways. Both the American and British Navies conducted more much less publicised tests to explore the various aspects of the case. One series, for example, was held in this country to investigate the threat

9Minute, I. 6 Oct. 1924, Air 51178, P.R.O.

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the power of the air attack is such as to to the anti-aircraft armament? The make it possible to dispense with the strategic value of a particular vessel in battleship?' The reply was: 'Not at the a hypothetical war clearly depended, at present time. I think that would least in part, on the relationship between probably be the general view. What it the time it could reliably spend on would be in ten years' time (i.e. 1946) station and the time it would have to spend in dockyard hands having its is a very hard thing to forecast.'" For their part, the Admiralty were damage repaired afterwards. How many also significantly less extreme than their enemy aircraft needed to be taken into critics - and, indeed, their supporters account? What was their range - their - sometimes imagined them to be. At payload - the effectiveness of their the VCS, Chatfield was at pains to show weapons? How many could you expect that the Navy did not claim that battle- to shoot down? ships, even modern ones, could not be The elements of an equation like this sunk by aircraft. 'The Sailor does not contained a variety of variables which pretend', he said, 'and never has, that could be manipulated into an apparently any ship can be built that is not infinite series of permutations, all of vulnerable. If ships were not vulnerable which seemed to yield reasonable, but there would never be any naval possibly quite diverse, solutions to the victories.' He stressed that the Ad- problem. In fact, once the protagonists miralty did not say: 'We are never left the firm ground of declaring that going to be hit by aircraft, because we the battleship would always - or would know we shall be hit, but we must try never - be disabled by air attack, they to hit the enemy's battleships with our were forced to wade through a morass aircraft more frequently and more of 'ifs,' 'buts,' and 'maybes' where simple solutions were a complete efficiently than they hit ours."' chimaera. The real issue This argument admitted the possibility Untestable propositions The situation was made a good deal of an air threat to battleships that needed to be taken seriously by naval worse by the fact that, beyand a certain commanders - and it shows the level of ambiguous generality, a good Admiralty taking a stance rather more many propositions were found to be not moderate than the one with which they so much untested but untestable in are often credited. It also helps establish peacetime. The many difficulties enthat the real point at issue was not countered in the assessment of the naval anti-aircraft whether bombs could sink battleships effectiveness of but was rather the extent to which the gunnery illustrates this problem. The air menace would interfere with the Admiralty are often accused - rightly battleship's ability to execute its tradi- - of having an exaggerated faith in tional tasks. This was a matter of A.A. which resulted in a corresponding degree and not one of simple absolutes. neglect of the naval fighter, an inA realistic attempt to deal with this sufficient regard to the general dangers question would inevitably involve of air attack and, paradoxically, in grappling with some very difficult considerable failures, in the A.A. armaquestions such as the extent t o which -ment itself. The interwar period shows, the exigencies of defence would limit the battleship's offensive power. How much "VCS 9th Mtg, 9 July 1936, Cab 161147. weight and space devoted to the main P . Q . 0 . 3rd and 4th Mtgs of 6 April and "VCS armament would need to be switched 4 May 1936, ibid.

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however, that much of their difficulty controlled target aircraft. Such expectaderived from the fact that the inform- tions quickly proved to be a delusion for ation they required to make sensible both sides in the debate disputed not, decisions was often shown to be either this time, whether the lessons of the irrelevant, ambiguous or necessarily test were relevant, but what in fact they unavai1,able. actually signified. Normally, the Fleet shot such targets down quite quickly but what did this prove? The Air Assessing A.A. Gunnery In the early 1920s, the Navy em- Ministry argued that it proved very barked on an extensive campaign to little, not least because modern aircraft increase the quantity and quality of the could fly three times faster than the Fleet's A.A. gunnery. By the end of the target allegedly representing them. The decade this resulted in the production Admiralty countered this with the of some important new weapons, notably observation that the Queen Bee was the multiple pom-pom gun and various actually far smaller than such aircraft control systems for high angle guns. By - which would in any case have to slow and large, the Admiralty had great hopes down very considerably in order to bomb of these new developments in materi6l accurately. And so the arguing went on. - so much so in fact that they claimed Although it is clear, in retrospect, that that the problem of naval A.A. gunnery the Admiralty were indeed being had now been revolutionised. Sig- excessively optimistic in their claims, the nificantly this rendered the main store ambiguity of contemporary evidence of accumulated information on A.A. explains, even if it does not excuse, their gunnery - the experience of the recent misapprehensions. war - largely irrelevant in the The matter was rendered even more Admiralty's eyes. Uncertainty was also complicated by the appearance of that were important compounded by the fact that their propositions proposition could not be tested ade- elements of the case but were nonethequately until the guns, the controls and less inherently untestable. The Admiralty something they could shoot at realistic- increasingly argued that their intention ally were actually produced. For a was not so much to shoot down indivariety of reasons, which included a vidual aircraft but rather to break up certain lack of co-operation on the part the formations normally considered of the Air Ministry, this was not until essential for accurate bombing - or, the early 1930s. Only then could the alternatively, to drive attacking aircraft protagonists hope to move beyond the to heights or distances where accurate level of conjecture that inevitably bombing was impossible. So, even if it resulted from the absence of information did not shoot them down, naval A.A. which was clearly relevant and, ideally, gunnery would put the airmen off their aim - and that was good enough. The definitive. Of course there had been many Air Ministry contested this view. 'I do firings against smokebursts, sleeves and not think,' one witness told the VCS, gliders in the 1920s but it was universally 'that any responsible pilot would be recognised that the conditions of these prevented from taking accurate aim tests were so far removed from opera- within the limits of the instruments he tional realities that few reliable deduc- has by any anti-aircraft gunfire I can tions could be drawn from them. Much actually conceive of at the present was therefore expected from experi- time."' ments involving the 'Fairey Queen' and "Air Commodore J. A. Chamier to VCS, its successor the 'Queen Bee' remotely 6th Mtg. of 27 May 1936, ibid.

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Much of the trouble lay in the fact that issues like the moral effect of antiaircraft gunnery (as indicated, for example, by bombing accuracy) could not be assessed by any form of simulation. The Battleship versus the Bomb with such issues problem was ~ p l e t e and they all had to await the final verdict of war. 'In peacetime', as Chatfield noted, 'conflicting ideas prevail because your weapons cannot be properly tested under fire."'Vince the battleship was a weapon of great and established value, the burden of proof would obviously lie on those who sought fundamental change. For this reason, unavoidable uncertainty quite naturally tended to confirm the technological status quo.

Naval aircraft T o a certain extent, also, the Admiralty's attitude to the battleship reflected a low estimate of the striking potential of naval aircraft - an estimate that was undeniably much lower than that which prevailed in the Japanese and American Navies. A look at some of the reasons for the clearly inferior performance of British naval aircraft, however, shows that it is wrong simply to attribute this scepticism to the blind conservatism of the Admiralty. It is, for example, a commonplace that British naval aircraft (and therefore British naval aviation) suffered because of the Admiralty's increasing preference for multipurpose aircraft which, by reason of the variety of their intended functions, found it difficult to meet the standards of foreign specialist types. British naval aircraft tended to be multipurpose because savage economic constraints and the frequently unsympathetic attitude of the Air Ministry emasculated the Admiralty's air expansion schemes and greatly limited the number of aircraft the Fleet could carry. Because not many aircraft were available the temptation was to make each type as individually versatile as possible. The

Admiralty were as aware of the dangers of this policy as anyone. 'It seems to me,' wrote Backhouse (then Controller), 'that if we continue to provide in one aircraft for every possible duty we shall merely defeat our own object of getting a type which is of real utility at sea, and having regard to what we want them to do and what they are likely to meet in the way of enemy aircraft."' The view that multi-purpose aircraft could not hope to match the performance of specialist aircraft proved quite correct, but it was felt that low numbers more or less obliged the Navy to accept them. I n this and in many other ways, the system of Dual Control (under which the Fleet Air Arm was jointly administered by the Admiralty and the Air Ministry) and economic stringency conspired to produce an environment unfavourable to the creation of a naval air arm of sufficient strength to shake the Admiralty's faith in the continued primacy of the battleship.

The Admiralty maligned? The Battleship versus the Bomb issue seems, in retrospect, a good deal less cefiain than the Admiralty's critics often claimed it was, then and since. In the light of contemporary circumstances, the Navy's 'guestimate' was a reasonable one - especially in view of the fact that it was adversely affected by things over which the Admiralty had little or no control. In short, the Admiralty's performance in this area is usually underrated. This doubtless reflects the fact that it is the Progressives - those who advocate decisive change - or their biographers, who tend to write the books! In a very real sense, also, time is on their side. Lord Fisher's call of
'"Address to the Officers of the Atlantic Fleet, 4th Sep. 1929, Chatfield MSS. CHT/2/I, N.M.M. quoted by permission of the Trustees. "Minute, 4 Sep. 1931, Adm. 11612792, P.R.O.

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1920 to 'Scrap the lot!' was almost bound to be right - sooner or later. The fact that a policy may have been largely correct twenty years on does not, however, necessarily mean it was correct originally. In January 1919 the Director of Naval Construction wrote a letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty: 'There is probably more scope for developing original naval design by making our ships submersible than by adhering wholly to surface craft. The great increase in the power and range of guns, and the ever increasing menace of attack from the air, make it absolutely necessary to aim more and more at the protection of our warships from plunging shot and heavy bombs. This means making decks very thick, a form of protection which is most difficult and costly to arrange. It immediately becomes clear that probably the faculty of

being able to submerge at will may be the best method of protection from these attacks."' The fact that even as steadfast a supporter of the battleship as Sir Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt was evidently prepared to see it become submersible implies a willingness to contemplate revolutionary change and a considerably less doctrinaire attitude of mind than is often attributed to the Admiralty by its critics. Such evidence encourages one to conclude that the Navy of the interwar period was only a little more conservative about technical change in the shape of aircraft at sea than large military organisations ought to be or can expect to be in the conditions of their time.
-

'5Letter of 1 lth Jan. 1919, d'Eyncourt MSS, N . M . M . , Quoted by permission of the Trustees.

With 'ABC' in the Med-I1


Memoirs of an R.N.V.R. Officer On 24 April we sailed, in company with the cruiser Orion wearing the flag of Vice Admiral, Light Forces, and the destroyers Havock and Hasty, to evacuate troops from the Greek mainland. We reached the little port of Megara the next night and each ship took off about five hundred Australians. This being about three times the number of our ship's company, the upper deck was crammed with passengers and we looked rather like the Margate Belle on August Bank Holiday. We had no opposition, which was fortunate, as there was a confusion of boats, varying from landing craft to whalers, ferrying the soldiers from the beach and searching for their own ships in the dark. The area had been heavily attacked during daylight and when a landing craft quietly sank alongside us after discharging a batch of soldiers her cheerful crew explained that she had been damaged by a near miss earlier in the day. I managed to rescue her sextant and used it for the rest of the war. We landed our passengers at Suda Bay, in Crete, where we saw the cruiser York lying beached and half sub-

merged after being damaged by a oneman torpedo contrivance two or three weeks earlier. Our Australians were very cheerful and were confident that with anything like equal numbers they would have held the Germans. The Greeks, they said, remained warmly friendly to the last, even when they realised that the British were going and leaving them to their fate. At Suda we also heard that the Pennland and the Ulster Prince, two large and important evacuation troopships, had just been sunk. We left Suda Bay in company with Hasty as soon as the troops were clear and proceeded north again. As we approached the cliffs of Milos we found a large merchant ship lying stopped, with a slight list to starboard but otherwise showing no sign of damage. A little way off some lifeboats were sighted making towards Crete under sail and Hasty rounded these up while we investigated the ship. After boarding her with a salvage party Number One (Terry Herrick) reported that there appeared to be nothing wrong; in fact the dynamos were still running. A cup of tea was standing on the captain's table and a glass of whisky on the chief engineer's. The crew was thereupon put back on board and told to take the ship to Suda Bay, their lifeboats being set adrift to prevent any further hasty action on their part. Apparently after some near misses from a bombing attack the cargo had shifted and caused a list, which was assumed, without proper evidence, to be due to underwater damage. We continued northwards through the Aegean and shortly afterwards two aircraft were spotted as they started to dive on us out of the sun, but were driven off by our gunfire without dropping their bombs. This was one of the very few occasions, at any rate at that period, when the Luftwaffe failed to press home an attack.

That night we spent patrolling in the gulf of Petali while the L.S.I. Glengyle took off troops from the shore. Before dawn we were steaming to the south again, having joined another evacuation ship from nearby with its escort of destroyers and the anti-aircraft cruiser Coventry. Despite numerous alarms, which kept us continuously a t action stations, the Luftwaffe did not find us until that afternoon, when we were not far north of Suda. Our group escaped an attack without damage but we saw a convoy a few miles away lose a large two-funnelled merchant ship. A hurried visit to Suda Bay for fuel, and then we were off again through the Kithera channel with the cruisers Perth and Phoebe and several more destroyers to evacuate troops and refugees from Kalamata, which lies a t the top of one of the gulfs formed by the three fingers of land thrusting south from the Peloponnese. We entered the gulf a t dusk. It was very quiet and peaceful in the sunset and I felt disgruntled a t being still a t action stations. 'I bet,' I complained; 'there isn't a German within a hundred miles of us.' A t these incautious words a pandemonium of gunfire and heavy explosions broke out in Kalamata, which was now close enough for the breakwater and houses to be seen. We backed and filled for some time in the vicinity but it was apparently not feasible to go further in (the official publication 'Mediterranean Fleet' says that the approaches were mined, and the enemy could certainly be seen fighting in the town), so we turned round and left that particular party to its fate, feeling very bad about it. Some of them managed to get out and were picked up by Hero that night, while others got away to islands and were rescued later. Next morning, 28 April, we were cruising to the west of Crete, kept constantly a t action stations by one 'red' warning after another, but with few

real attacks. Late in the day we returned to join a large convoy off Suda Bay bound for Egypt, going east of Crete by the Kaso Strait. About midnight, as we were passing through the Strait, we heard firing from the other side of the screen, where two destroyers reported that they were engaged with E-boats. We stared hard into the night and suddenly somebody saw an E-boat, stopped, nearly right ahead and very close. There was no time to get the director on to the target, and the captain leaned over the front of the bridge, pointing, and shouted, ' "B" gun! Shoot the - - - - - - - ,! "B" gun opened fire with a blinding flash and simultaneously the 0.5 inch machine guns joined the fun. We heard the E-boat's engines start with a roar and by the time we could see again after the gun flash there was only a white streak of a wake and a noise like an aeroplane fading into the blackness. Our sister ship Defender and ourselves were detached next morning, with part of the convoy, for Port Said, which we reached on 1 May. After two days rest there we left suddenly one night and next day steamed between coral reefs into the natural harbour of Mersa Matruh on the desert coast between Alexandria and Tobruk. Inside the coral reefs we found a lagoon, with a deep water channel close to the shore, leading to an inner lagoon. The shallow part of the lagoon was shimmering with brilliant peacock blues and greens and the sand all round was dazzling white. The unique feature of Mersa Matruh is the very steep-to nature of this sandy beach, which enables a destroyer to come in so close that a short brow can be put across to the shore. Defender came alongside us and the two ships embarked six hundred Australian soldiers and some stores. Despite an air raid we slipped ashore for a really exceptional bathe. The warm clear water and steep white sand make Mersa
9

Matruh as perfect a spot for bathing as any, I imagine, in the world. Sailing again in the afternoon we reached Tobruk soon after midnight to find heavy artillery fire in progress. We exchanged our Diggers for a party of the Royal Armoured Corps who were going back for new tanks and, leaving again before daylight, we reached Alexandria the same evening in time for an air raid. Decoy had now been running hard since the beginning of the war, following eight years in China without a thorough refit, and she was getting rather tired. On arrival this time we went alongside the destroyer depot ship Woolwich for several engine room defects to be taken in hand and had no less than ten welcome days in harbour. Jervis was in a t the same time and in her wardroom I heard first-hand accounts of Matapan and of the highly successful night action off Sfax when a whole Italian convoy and its escort were annihilated. There were some remarkable aerial photographs of wrecks (including our only casualty, the destroyer Mohawk) lying submerged in water so clear that they seemed to be on dry land.
Crete is invaded After a brief trip to Port Said with Glengyle we set off on 18 May with a strong squadron, including the battleships Warspite and Valiant, for Crete. For three days we all steamed up and down to the west of the island, being attacked from time to time by aircraft. The cruiser Orion was hit and slightly damaged but on the whole the attacks were exhausting rather than serious, taking us to frequent action stations. The expected invasion of Crete had started and each night a striking force of cruisers and destroyers (in which we were never lucky enough to be included) slipped into the Aegean hunting for enemy convoys, several of which were totally destroyed. The sea-borne invasion

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of Crete was very largely, if not completely, checked by these forays. On one of these days we had the unusual experience of seeing a n apparent direct hit on an aircraft by a six inch shell. I was watching the aircraft as it came in when suddenly there was a puff of smoke and it simply disappeared. Air attacks began at dawn on 22 May at an increased tempo. About midday a signal asking for support was received from the squadron under Rear Admiral King which was returning towards the Kithera channel after the previous night's successful convoy-hunting in the Aegean. Our Battle Squadron thereupon turned eastwards and steamed towards Kithera. As we proceeded the air attacks ceased but a lone shadower, well out of range, dogged us ominously, close under the cliffs of the mainland to the north. In the early afternoon we entered the narrows. The destroyer screen extended across the whole width of the channel so that the free manoeuvring of the squadron was considerably hampered. We were so placed on the screen that we were about abeam of the leading battleship, the Warspite, and I happened to be watching her when suddenly two Messerschmitts appeared from high out of the blue diving on to her from right ahead. At the same moment they were spotted from Warspite and the barrage crashed out, but we saw a stick of bombs leave each plane as it dived through the pom-pom bursts. I remember shouting to the Captain 'They've got her, sir! ' and his shouting back, 'I think they'll miss.' But one a t least did not, and there was a cloud of smoke, followed by masses of white steam which almost hid the ship. She turned out of line, and we all thought she was badly damaged, but in a short time the smoke cleared away and she showed no visible signs of serious trouble. No sooner had this excitement died down than a caique was seen, making for land, on the starboard

wing. The destroyer Greyhound, the wing ship, went to investigate and found the caique full of German soldiers. She promptly sank it by gunfire, but immediately afterwards half a dozen dive bombers plunged a t her. We saw her after magazine explode with a flash and a high column of smoke and sl:e quickly sank. At this point our squadron turned back to the westward and made for the open sea, under continuous heavy air attack of every kind. The second battleship, Valiant, was hit and so was the cruiser Ajax, but neither was badly damaged. The destroyer G r i f f i n , next to us on the screen, had casualties from machine-gunning, but again our luck held. My recollections of this part of the day are confused, but I do remember clearly a stick of bombs from a high level bomber which we watched all the way down until they sent up spouts of water at the very spot where we should have been, so we all fervently believed, but for the Captain's evasive manoeuvring. Just before dusk a flotilla of destroyers appeared steaming a t full speed from the west. It was the Fifth Flotilla under Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten (as he then was) in Kelly, which with Kashmir, was destined only to survive her introduction to the Mediterranean Fleet by some thirty-six hours. My only immediate reaction to their arrival was one of relief that they would draw away some of the aircraft which were making things so hot for us. By this time most of Admiral King's hard-pressed squadron, including the cruisers Naiad and Carlisle, both damaged, had joined us. As darkness came down and concealed us from the Luftwaffe, giving us hope of a quiet night and a sleep between watches, a signal arrived ordering Hero and ourselves to proceed to an obscure cove on the south coast of Crete to embark Important Personages. These turned out to be the King of Greece and

THE MED-I1

the British Minister, with their entourages. We reached the entrance of the narrow bay soon after midnight. It was a pitch dark night and the whaler was lowered and sent off, under Number One, to make contact with the invisible shore. After the boat had disappeared into the night the Captain and Dicky Dixon, our Navigator, decided that we might prudently go a little further in, which we did, steaming dead slow. After a time we heard a muffled hail, a boat appeared and we had made our rendezvous. The royal party, which included as well as the King, Prince Peter of Greece, the Prime Minister, the British Naval Attache and other distinguished but weary looking personages, came on board Decoy, while Sir Michael Palairet, the British Minister, with Lady Palairet (the only woman in the party) and his staff went to Hero. We also took the small bodyguard of New Zealand infantry, under Second Lieutenant Ryan, who had escorted the King across Crete. The actual embarkation was enlivened by a fierce and excited argument between the boatman who had brought off our passengers and a Greek official. This was firmly believed by the whole ship's company to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer haggling over the fare. During the embarkation of the passengers we had quite forgotten Number One and his whaler, which we had passed and left far astern when we steamed up the bay. They now appeared, exhausted and very indignant at pulling the boat some miles after us. At about 0400 we crept cautiously out again and set a course for Alexandria, feeling we had had quite a day, and depressed by the news which we picked up from signals of the loss of the cruisers Gloucesrer and Fiji, which had stayed behind with two destroyers to rescue survivors from the Greyhound.

After a short sleep I went to breakfast in the wardroom and found it full of Greeks in some sort of uniform. Supposing them to be army officers, probably of high rank, I made them all sit down with me and saw that they had the best service and food which our stewards could provide. There was one English civilian whom I could not quite place but with whom I had a most interesting talk. My guests all seemed extraordinarily gratified by these attentions and I went on the forenoon watch feeling I had done the right thing. We had a delightfully quiet afternoon, with the sky remaining clear and empty. The King spent some time on the bridge and was very charming and friendly. I wondered why the King seemed to have no headgear except a steel helmet, and asked Ryan, the New Zealand officer, if he knew. He said that indeed he did, for he had during their journey personally snatched off and thrown down a mountain-side the too conspicuous red-banded staff officer's cap which the King refused to take off, not wishing to give any appearance of concealment. At lunch I had a surprise. On sitting down I noticed a perfect army of stewards going round the table with dishes. Looking at them closely I recognised my breakfast companions: they were the King's household servants, who were now quite at home helping our Maltese with the meal. My English friend, who was now hob-nobbing with the Petty Officer Steward in the pantry, turned out to be the King's valet. By this time we had rejoined the battle squadron, with which we continued until dusk, when we went on at full speed and reached Alexandria at midnight. An impressive reception committee of dignitaries, British, Greek and Egyptian, was on the quay to meet us and the King went ashore after shaking hands with all the officers and thanking the Captain for his safe journey. We

wondered whether we should each have some exotic Greek medal pinned to his breast; eventually the Captain got the Order of the Phoenix. We finally secured to our buoy a t 0400 (29 May) after three hard days and nights, during which none of us had more than a few hours sleep. But we were not to have much chance to make up arrears. By breakfast time we were embarking commando troops for Crete and an hour or two later sailed in company with three other destroyers, Isis, Hero and Kimberley. As we went up the Great Pass, the narrow approach channel to Alexandria harbour, we passed the damaged Kipling of the Fifth Flotilla coming in, considerably down by the bows, and crowded with survivors from Kelly and Kashmir which had been sunk the previous morning. Lord Louis Mountbatten was on the bridge and we piped him as we went by. The weather, which had been embarrassingly clear and calm so far throughout these operations, now became kind to us. A haze came down which hid us from reconnoitring aircraft and enabled us to reach Crete without incident. Unfortunately the weather then deteriorated too far, for it blew so hard that we were unable to land our troops and had to go back to Alexandria, which we reached after dark on the 25th, passing the Queen Elizabeth. Barham, and Indomitable, with their destroyer screen, going north. Our commandos (who included, surprisingly, some tough-looking Spanish soldiers of fortune) eventually reached Crete in another ship but I believe very few escaped in the evacuation. Once again we were not long in harbour before we were required for further operations, and next day we sailed to join the sauadron we had passed as we came in. However i t was to be a short trip. Before we reached the rendezvous we had intercepted signals which told of Formidable and the Tribal destroyer Nubian being damaged by

bombing and when we came up with the squadron we found we were to escort the carrier back to Alexandria. She had a huge hole in the bows through which one could see daylight on the other side of the ship. Nubian had lost her whole stern abaft the superstructure, but her propellers still revolved somehow and she reached home under her own steam. We got back early on 27 May to learn of the loss of the destroyer Juno, whose Number One was Walter Starkie, until recently the Commander-in-Chief's Flag Lieutenant and the first officer I had met on arriving in Alexandria early in 1940. He had not long before been married. By now our mounting losses (for there was nobody who was not saddened by news of good friends gone) were having a depressing effect, which was increased by the lack of rest and particularly of sleep. Our chief subject of conversation was air support, o r rather the lack of it, and people began to ask how much longer we should be called upon to operate in waters over which the Luftwaffe's dive bombers roamed quite unopposed. We knew, really, that if air protection had been available we should have had every plane of it, but it was difficult to be logical when the sky over one's head filled with wave after wave of enemy planes coming in as they pleased. It proved altogether too difficult for the simple sailor, who was unfortunately inclined to ventilate his resentment by assaulting the Royal Air Force ashore. After bringing Formidable back we had nearly twenty hours rest, and then were off again, soon after dawn on the 28th, on an operation which it was clear was not going to be exactly a pleasure cruise, for we were bound for the north coast of Crete and would pass the narrow Kaso strait in daylight, o r a t best in half light, both ways. We were an impressive squadron as we set out; the cruisers Orion (wearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Rawlings), Ajax, and Dido, with the destroyers Jackal,

276

WITH 'ABC' IN THE MEGII

Hereward, Hotspur, Kimberley, Imperial, and ourselves. About tea time the Junkers duly materialised, dropping out of the clear sky, and kept our guns hot until last light when the evening finished with an ineffective attack by Italian torpedo bombers from Kaso, by then close on our starboard hand. Ajux had been hit earlier in the afternoon and had turned back and Imperial had been damaged by a near miss. We reached Heraklion after dark and we destroyers felt our way into the little harbour, leaving the cruisers outside. There was a mass of soldiers on the quay - a mixed bag this time - and we crammed every man we could on board, working in the usual conditions of murky darkness. An Army Officer assured me that the Germans had already reached the town and were actually just across the harbour. I hardly credited this, but it did discourage the slightest showing of lights. On getting out to sea again we went alongside one of the cruisers and transferred a number of soldiers to her, the other destroyers doing the same. All this had taken more time than had been allowed for and we left Heraklion very much behind schedule. We were further delayed by the necessity for abandoning and sinking the unlucky Imperial, whose steering gear finally jammed as a result of her near miss. I t was accordingly broad daylight when we reached the Kaso strait again and heard the lookouts' familiar warning, 'Aircraft in sight, right in the sun! ' This time they knew we were coming and group after group of crooked-winged Stukas came in and the aircraft peeled off one after the other, each on its own target. As soon as one committed itself every eye in the target ship was glued to it and every weapon that could bear was concentrated on it as it screamed down. In Decoy however, our concentrated High Angle fire was at this time derisory. Our main armament had a

maximum elevation of 35" and apart from these we had one 3-inch gun, laid and trained by eye, two quite useless 0.5 inch multiple machine guns, and one captured 20-millimetre Italian Breda which was much our most effective weapon. Our best defence was evasion and at the crucial moment when the aircraft was fairly committed to its dive the Captain would ring full ahead and order the wheel hard over. Then one watched the bombs (usually one large and two small) as they sped downwards and tried to estimate where they would land. The Stukas (J.u.87~)were varied with J.U.88s and when it had dropped its bombs each plane raked the ship with gunfire. Next on the screen to us was Hereward, and in the very first attack a bomb hit her between the bridge and forward funnel. She stopped, only a mile or two from the Italian island of Kaso, and we had to leave her to her fate. She sank soon afterwards, but most of her ship's company got ashore and were taken prisoner. After this my recollections of the events of that forenoon are made upof disconnected incidents. I remember a Stuka diving so low on to Orion that it seemed almost to lay its bomb on one of the forward turrets before it plunged straight into the sea just ahead of the ship. Dido was hit in much the same spot and two out of her three forward turrets were put out of action, the guns sticking up drunkenly at all angles. The Orion was hit again by a bomb which exploded in the mess decks crowded with soldiers and produced clouds of white smoke from her funnel. But we in Decoy were too occupied attending to our own troubles to see much of what was going on elsewhere. One stick of four bombs landed on the sea right ahead of us without exploding. As we passed over their puddles, congratulating ourselves on being missed again, there was a dull explosion and the ship gave a lurch and a shudder. On

the bridge we thought a bomb had struck aft but looking astern we could see nothing and Number One from the quarter deck reported all well. The only explanation which we could see was that the bombs placed ahead of us were of a delayed action type, on the principle of the depth charge, and that they had exploded under water as we passed over them. I then saw (I was officer of the watch at action stations) that we were losing bearing rapidly on the next ship, and was about to speak to the engine room when Chief arrived on the bridge, looking worried, and told the Captain that the explosion had broken the feet of the turbines but that he hoped to be able to keep going though we might break down and stop at any moment. With Hereward's fate in our minds this was not encouraging news, but the engine room staff did not let us down and somehow we kept on. Unfortunately the speed of the squadron was reduced by this, as Admiral Rawlings would not leave us. After the second hit on Orion the squadron was still further slowed down. We had another unpleasant moment when the aircraft flew past low and raked us from stern to bow with explosive bullets. Two of these hit the deck close to me and I clearly saw them explode. Afterwards we picked up small spindle shaped objects of very hard steel, about an inch long, which we took to be their core. In this attack the captain of our 3-inch high angle gun was killed. Another bullet hit the cartridge which was lying on the tray of "B" gun, just forward of the bridge, and caused a flash but no serious explosion. The gun's crew escaped with burns. One less serious incident occurred when a very near miss just beside the bridge sent up a huge column of water over our heads. It seemed to hang there for an appreciable space of time, and after one glance I grabbed the Captain

and dived with him into the chart table recess, where we lay with our stomachs on the chart and our legs sticking out behind. The water came down with a crash and filled the bridge to a depth of about a foot and when the Captain and I emerged everybody else was half drowned and looking most unhappy. At about 1300, when we entered the extreme range of our own fighters, the attacks stopped, and we were able to relax after twenty hours continuously a t action stations and about six hours under more or less constant attack. We reached Alexandria that evening and all of us had great difficulty in keeping awake during supper. Next morning we were surprised to hear from the unlucky officer of the day that there had been a heavy air raid in the night. We had all slept too soundly to be disturbed even by the pandemonium of gunfire from the ships close round us. That day the Australian cruiser Perth and the destroyer Kelvin both came in damaged. Perth was the last of our cruisers left undamaged apart from the small "C" class cruisers used as anti-aircraft ships. The following day we heard that one of the latter, Calcutta, had been sunk between Alexandria and Tobruk. I t was announced that our repairs would take two or three weeks, so that was the end of Crete for us. We settled down to a most welcome rest, at long notice for steam and with plenty of shore leave, starting the ball rolling with a party on board to celebrate the D.S.C. just awarded to Terry Herrick, our Number One. He and I also extended our acquaintance with Hellenic royalty a t a tea party on board the Wells's boat Betha when Princess Alexandra of Greece (later the wife of King Peter of Jugo-Slavia) and her mother Princess Aspasia were the other guests. (to be continued) A.G.P.

Don't Go Up The Rigging Jack -They've Taken It Away!-I


This title seeks to question whether changes in the personnel field are being made quickly enough to reflect the changes in ships that result from the headlong advance of technology. I t would be hardly surprising if personnel changes didn't keep up as a new piece of equipment can be fitted throughout the Fleet in a few years, while it takes decades for a change in the manpower field to work its way through the personnel cycle. This is most obvious in the case of the officer corps where, for instance, it takes thirty years or more for the effect of a new scheme of entry training to manifest itself in the flag list. There has been no shortage of talent ready and willing to predict the best structure and training needed for the wardroom since the Second World War, in fact, at one stage in the 1960s it looked as if Dartmouth had gone into a perpetual state of reorganisation: However, there has been no major change in the ratings branch structure for thirty years. Some will argue that it is a good thing that something has survived major reorganisation, in a Service that has had its fair share of changes. My contention is that there are indications that the way we man our ships needs a fundamental reappraisal and the aim of this article is to propose how this should be done. First, I will dispose of the somewhat fatuous statement in the title, which was intended as little more than an advertisement for what follows. Why do we still call the rate of most of the men in the major branch of the Navy 'Seamen' a title which reflects the ability of their predecessors in the days of sail to propel the ship by climbing the rigging and handling the sails? 'Tradition my boy', I can hear a chorus of cries coming from the elder members of this magazine. Well tradition is all right in its place but should and must be discarded immediately progress is imperilled. If the title Seaman is popular with senior members of the Service there are strong indications that its continued use has been a major factor in preventing men of sufficient talent being attracted into the Seaman or Operations Branch in recent years; but this is a relatively minor point because names can easily be changed, let us look at the more fundamental issues. It is a not unusual attitude when the country's economic state is discussed in Naval circles (and many others) for our present ills to be ascribed largely to the intransigence of the Trade Unions, and their alleged insistence on overmanning and rigid demarcation of tasks between the various trades. This, it is said, has led to low productivity and high manufacturing costs, thus making the country's products uncompetitive abroad. Whilst not disagreeing with this premise, I suggest that before castigating the Unions too thoroughly, we in the Navy look very closely at our own organisation, because I think we can be accused of the very same sins ourselves. Overmanning In days gone by when manpower was cheap and pay and living conditions in ships frugal, the Navy got used to overmanning itself. In the sailing era a generously sized crew at the start of a voyage was a good insurance against the expected ravages of disease and enemy action during the prolonged periods that ships could be away from their home ports. However, a few dozen men too many in those days had no great effect

on the Navy's overheads as training was carried out using that supposedly most modern of concepts, namely 'on the job training'. This was so thoroughly applied that there were no training establishments whatsoever! . While a little overmanning in the past could be classed as a prudent precaution, it is now a fault which has a multiplying effect in reducing the number of ships that can be put to sea for a given size of Naval vote, making itself felt in pay and allowances, married quarters, victualling and clothing expenses and the size of training establishments. With over half the Naval vote going to personnel, this is serious enough in itself but is not the most important effect. Even the most cursory comparison between Russian warships and our own of similar size shows that the Russian ships are far more heavily armed and faster. When asked to explain this anomaly the Constructors' main defence is that the complement and accommodation standards for a ship are approved by the Naval Staff and that given these immutables it is only possible to fit a relatively modest armament into it. Information on the precise complement of Russian ships is hard to obtain but there is little doubt that the living conditions considered by the Russians as being acceptable for their conscript sailors would be very spartan by R.N. standards, and unacceptable on the grounds that it would be unlikely that men could be recruited and more important, retained voluntarily to serve in such conditions against the attractions of the free labour market. One solution to the problem would be to reintroduce conscription, but the political possibility of doing this is a t present so remote that it is not worth further consideration. So if our accommodation standards are to remain relatively lavish the only avenue to follow in order to reduce the amount of space in our ships devoted to personnel,

is to reduce the complement. So complement reduction (like motherhood) is a good thing. Where is this great body of unnecessary people who are alleged to be onboard our ships? I believe this will become clear shortly.

Demarcation One of the reasons that our ships' complements are so large at present is that in some respects the Navy is just as parochial as the Unions in the way different branches make a black art out of their own particular skill while rejecting others as being beneath their dignity. The complementing process itself is a separate matter for each branch with little trade off between them to allow for the fact that some are busy in harbour and others a t sea. While the Operations Branch is complemented on the numbers required to operate the ship's weapons and sensors in two watches and the Marine Engineering Department on the three watch cruising requirement; the Weapons Electrical complement is based on the harbour maintenance needs and is underemployed at sea. With more flexibly trained men great savings are possible but branch constraints and jealousies prevent this at present. One of the problems is that the branches themselves tend to become the major repository for loyalties as a man normally stays in one branch throughout his service, while moving from ship to ship frequently. These branch loyalties are fostered by the fact that the Shore Establishments, where a man returns for training between ships, are mainly one branch Establishments. Whilst this is to some extent both inevitable and desirable, a t times branch interests eclipse those of the Service as a whole and a 'what's good for the XXX branch is good for the Navy' syndrome appears. The Seaman subspecialist schools were guilty of this very parochialism before the PWO era. Hence the relatively

modest change in training required to take account of the faster pace of warfare became a revolutionary one, entailing the virtual dismemberment of the subspecialist schools. It is my contention that within the next decade a similar coup de grrice needs to be administered to the rigid barriers which insulate the main branches of the Navy if the greatest saving in manpower and, therefore, the most efficient use of defence funds is to be made.

Too many chiefs So the proposition is that we are putting more men than we really need into our ships. In an open forum I would expect a t this point to hear another chorus of opposition, this time from that overworked and underpaid breed of men - the First Lieutenants. One can almost hear the words - 'It's all very well for him, he's spent his sea-time in ancient warships which had plenty of spare hands. He should try being Jimmy of an Amazon'. Well, I admit that I have not served in a Type 2 1, which has considerably less men than older classes of frigate, but I can understand the problems of running these ships. I would suggest, however, that the problem is not that there are too few men in them but that too many of those who are there are excused any of the more mundane housekeeping and ship husbandry work because they are of too high a rate. While I do not have access to the precise figures, I would say that during the last thirty years the proportion of an average ships' company who are senior rates has roughly doubled, changing from about one sixth to one third in the latest ships. Technical Officers will now leap to their feet to explain how very advanced all the new equipment is, and how only senior rates have the expertise to look after it. This may be the case under the present scheme of things, but a ratio of one 'supervisor' to two working hands is

patently ridiculous and must point the need for a reappraisal of the present rate structure. There are other pointers to the fact that the balance between the supervisor and supervised is wrong. Hardy chestnuts in any discussion on senior rates are the following complaints: a. Senior rates are not given responsibility (Of course they aren't, there are too many of them). b. The standard of leadership in senior rates, particularly technical ones, is poor (of course it is, there aren't enough real opportunities for leadership within the close confines of a ship which has too many senior rates in it). c. Too much drinking takes place in senior rates' messes (Too many of them do not have enough to do for a large proportion of the time). I suggest that all these peripheral problems would be eased if not solved by reducing the number of senior rates in ships and thereby giving those who remain worthwhile jobs. With increased automation the need for semi-skilled, low intelligence, operators progressively reduces. If the rate/ skill level remains frozen at the present level, most junior rates will soon be put into ships for housekeeping tasks only, rather than for operational or maintenance ones. The start of this trend was the introduction of communal parties in large ships some years ago. These comprise men complemented into the ship solely for domestic duties. Frigates now have these parties and with the present structure they can only increase, and every man so complemented represents a man too many in the ship who can be eliminated by a less top heavy structure. An historical example may serve to show that skill/rate levels are not immutable. In the sailing ship era, in general, the only section of a ship's complement who were educated were the

officers, who had to be able to read and write in order to study and practice navigation. If the skill/rate level then in force had not changed and an elementary education sufficed to become an officer, we would now have ships complemented entirely with officers! What has happened, of course, is that with the increase of technology a similar increase has been required in the skill level and education of ships' companies and the requirement for attaining officer and senior rate status has become more and more stringent. The time has now come for a further tightening of the requirement so that some jobs at present done by CPOs are done by POs, some done by POs are done by Leading Hands, etc. The aim being to reduce the present great overbearing of senior rates, and thereby increase the number of working hands so as to do away with the need to put extra men in the ships purely for communal duties. Users and maintainers Another area where I consider a fundamental re-examination is required is the present split in the operations field between users and maintainers. This is a hardy annual and flat statements of dissatisfaction with the present situation are clearly an inadequate basis for change. Let us look at the historical background to the present division of labour between the branches. In the days of sail when the only power available in a ship was either wind power or human muscle, the size of a ship's complement was dictated by the number of men required to work the ship under sail and man its guns in action. The predominant requirement for these men was skill in seamanship, which was largely a physical ability to work aloft in all weathers. However, the many seamen in a ship were supplemented by a small number of artisans such as shipwrights, sailmakers and coopers who

possessed special skills to repair and maintain its fabric when away from the dockyard. These special skills were rewarded by possession of the petty officer rate. With the coming of mechanical power the engineering branch appeared. Initially this also consisted largely of manual workers to stoke the boilers. However, it was quickly realised that if the engines were to be relied upon i t would be necessary to have men capable of repairing them when far from shore assistance. This led to the birth of the engineering artificer, a breed of man who has served the Navy well ever since. I t should be noted that the engineering branch has carried out both user and maintainer functions simultaneously throughout its existence and that all rates are watchkeepers. The advent of mechanical power also made possible more complex and powerful guns and while these still required large numbers of men to man them they also needed their own breed of skilled maintainer - the ordnance artificer. In this work they were assisted by specially trained Seamen. The different weapon operating and maintenance skills needed by the latter were denoted by specialist qualifications (SQs). Initially only a small proportion of Seamen required these and they were not needed to advance to senior rate. When the masts and yards finally disappeared and the Seamen's 'ship propelling' task was surrendered to the engineers, the branch's pride in its former skill was expressed by an inordinate preoccupation with boats and boating. This has survived to the present day and it is still difficult to conduct a rational discussion in some circles on, say, the seaboat, without arousing primaeval emotions! With the invention of the torpedo as a rival weapon to the gun and the introduction of electrical power at about the same time the seaman torpedoman

was created and given responsibility for both, a task he performed satisfactorily throughout both World Wars. The increasing complexity of weapons and the advent of sensors other than the eyeball led to a greater proportion of seamen being required to obtain SQs and eventually these became a prerequisite for substantive advancement. However, throughout, the Seaman retained responsibility for the routine maintenance of his equipment and it was only the more complex maintenance and repair work that called for the intervention of the more highly skilled artificer. The invention of radar and its introduction into the Fleet during the Second World War was dealt with as far as manning is concerned by a new breed of 'radar' rating. These were mostly intelligent 'hostilities only' men who made the most of being associated with this latest wonder of science to excuse themselves from the more mundane activities of ship life whenever possible. The expression 'Not me Chief, I'm radar! ' originated in those days and is still current in the service. At the end of the war these men mostly disappeared to civilian life precipitating a shortage which was one of the reasons for a manpower study which gave birth to the Electrical Branch. I t will be apparent already that I consider this decision to have been a mistaken one; however, it is easy to be wise thirty years after the event. At that time the advance of technology had reached the stage where weapons and sensors were still manpower intensive, complicated and unreliable. Whilst not being party to the deliberations of the founders of the Electrical Branch, I imagine that it was argued that it would be wasteful and difficult to train all the men required to operate the new range of equipment to be maintainers also. Hence the split into 'users' and 'maintainers' which has continued to the present day. Both

branches concerned have changed their names - the Seamen into Operations and the Electrical into Weapons Electrical. Minor blurrings of the division have taken place with some WE rates now manning operator billets in action and some Seamen regaining their maintenance function as Armourers, but the split cannot be fully healed as long as there are two branches. In the meantime technology has advanced another step. The large weapon crews of the Second World War have been greatly reduced in size by automation. Whilst there are still some relics of the past in service the next generation of weapons will require virtually no crews. Sensors still require relatively large numbers of operators as do communications but it is only a matter of time before these systems also can function with far fewer men, but the nub is that these men will all need to be intelligent. How have the two halves of the 1947 split fared? The infant Electrical Branch has increased and prospered; in the best traditions of their 'Radar' predecessors they have firmly entrenched themselves in the clinical fastnesses of their equipment spaces, allegedly engaged in an endless round of maintenance, emerging as little as possible to take part in the general work of the ship. With every new black box to come aboard there has been an increase in the team of 'greeny' acolytes of ever increasing seniority. They now make up between one quarter and one third of the total ship's company and half the senior rates. They carry out very few watchkeeping duties on the pretext that all must be instantly available to repair their equipment if it should break down. Well, it's nice work if you can get it, but, it is also a great waste to make so little use of these talented men a t sea. What of the Seaman half of the split? This has fared not nearly so well. The decision to deprive the branch of its maintenance function was an unpopular

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one a t the time and eventually this loss of any chance to acquire a trade for use in civilian life diminished the branch's attractions to potential recruits. This is largely because parents now advise their sons to go into a branch with a trade. As a result there has been a steady decline in the quality of man recruited to the operations branch which has only been reversed recently by the sharp rise in unemployment. Shortly after the 1947 split SQs became compulsory on entry and later the left and right arm were required to be kept in step to achieve advancement. These moves reffected the fact that the operating or specialist qualification part of the Seaman's job had now become the more important and skilled part of it. Seamanship standards are only maintained with difficulty as skills such as boat ha~dling are now less often used because ship, normally berth alongside. Unfortunately, although their maintenance role has gone and the opportunities for practising their seamanship prowess have decreased, there has been no change in the Seaman's age old and unglamorous role of keeping the ship clean inside and out. This task has borne increasingly heavily on them as their numbers have declined. Junior rates from other departments now share the inside cleaning to some extent but as most external ship husbandry has to be done in harbour when other departments are busy so the Seamen work unaided on this. With their glamorous weapon operating task limited to a very small proportion of their time compared with that spent on the drudgery of internal domestics and external ship husbandry, the branch has a 'mop and bucket' image which has been a prime cause of a very high 'disenchantment' rate. In 1970 a prolonged look at the whole question of the division of labour between the two branches took place under the general heading of the User/

Maintainer study. This started from the entirely laudable premise that the maintainer of an equipment was the best man to operate it. However, while quite willing to take over the operating function of the seaman in certain areas, the Weapons Electrical branch was entirely unwilling to take on the housekeeping ones that would accrue if the seaman was drafted without relief. The proposal was that there should be a new breed of 'second class citizens' called General Duties Ratings who would be added back into complement for this purpose. Happily nothing came of the Genera1 Duties Rate proposals and in the end the only operating tasks taken over by the WEs were those on the underwater weapons and the new generation of guns. Whilst this may sound a great step forward, unfortunately, it is precisely in this area that the requirement for men is fast disappearing. In echelon with the User/Maintainer study another team looked into the future of the Seamen and Communications Branches. From the gloomy summary in the previous paragraphs it will be apparent that they had quite a lot of food for thought! The proposals that emerged were for the creation of the Operations Branch by merging the two Branches. As with any debate on matters intimately concerning large numbers of people, a lot of tribal emotion was generated. The traditionalists were unhappy that the Seaman branch, which was our only direct link in the personnel field with the era of the Service's supreme achievements, should be altered at all. The radicals on the other hand wanted to try and give the new branch an entirely new image so that it stood some chance of attracting the quality and quantity of men required in the future. In the event the inevitable compromise emerged, this went some way to making the Seaman half of the new branch more manage-

able by abolishing SQs altogether and dictating a man's rate by his 'operating' skill. This entailed the 2nd Class SQ becoming the Leading Hand and resulted in a requirement for more Leading Hands and a man therefore achieved

this rate earlier. This was done deliberately in order to try to induce more men into the service.

(to be continued) D. B. MANSERGH

Correspondence
SARTOR RESARTUS Sir,-I would like to set the record straight with respect to the remarks made by OBDURATE January's Naval in Review concerning staff training at Greenwich since it is evident that he does not realize that the course was completely restructured in 1973. The 're-tailored' course was objectively designed to give selected officers training in staff duties and the higher educational background considered necessary for command and middle level staff appointments in today's Navy. Cutting its length from a year to six and a half months demanded a careful look at the syllabus and, although there is still a wide and multi-national intake, it is aimed specifically a t General List lieutenant commanders in the thirty to thirty-five age group who have a good chance of promotion. It is based on a close analysis of the skills required in four target appointments: a. Staff officer on the staff of a naval C.-in-C. or flag officer. b. Desk officer in the MOD(N). c. Commanding officer of a frigate. d. Head of department in a large ship o r shore establishment. To enable two complete courses to be run each year students spend their first twenty days working on a package of individual studies which, after a short central briefing, they take away to complete on their own. These studies include wide ranging geopolitical and defence orientated reading together with a popular revision of English grammar, style and the rules of Service writing. Thus OBDURATE'S 'clerking' is sensibly complete before students come together for the main course. Time at Greenwich is then divided broadly into three study areas. First, Defence Philosophy (25%) investigates international influences on national interests, social and economic constraints on defence and the threat. This leads naturally into The Service Environment (5500) which embraces the organization of NATO and of the other Services as well as detailed naval studies. Important topics such as public attitudes to defence, leadership and human relations come under close scrutiny and provide lively forums for discussion. In Staff Skills (20%) an understanding of computer applications and modern management techniques is acquired, but the requirement for an officer to express himself clearly, concisely and persuasively, both verbally and on paper, is considered more important than ever, and receives continued attention throughout the course. Time and the requirement to meet an assessed need for eighty staff trained Commanders a year preclude running the course on university lines. Every opportunity is taken however to give students the chance to question conventional wisdom. Each of over 100

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lectures, most of which are given by eminent outside speakers, has 40% of its time devoted to students questions and comments. Lectures are reinforced by syndicate discussions, seminars and team or individual presentations on subjects which encourage the voicing of opinion. Many of the written schemes provide considerable scope for original ideas and the criticism of established practice. It is not by chance that the major writing exercise is colloquially known as 'The Soapbox'. Towards the end of the course students are invited to write their own Defence Policy and design a Navy for the future to support it. It will be for someone else to comment on the remarks OBDURATE makes about H.M.S. Dryad, suffice it for me to say that the work done by SMOPS is held in high regard at Greenwich and together, under the watchful eye of C.-in-C. Naval Home Command, duplication of programme is avoided. Thus tactics form no part of the teaching a t Greenwich, but it is quite wrong to suppose that the Staff Course lacks any sea flavour. Many of the lectures and group schemes are directed at the seagoing target appointments. In these, as in all the work, a searching feed back system keeps the system up to the mark. Besides inviting the critiques of current students, graduates of the College, and those for whom they work, are asked to assess the value and content of the Course one year after completing it. Over one third of these feedback reports come from sea. The courage and tenacity of World War I1 heroes are much admired at the Staff Course and often feature in Student's papers. It is significant too that the record of Warburton-Lee was equally good at Narvik and on the Staff Course; Luce, also mentioned by OBDURATE, others equally famous, and served here on the Directing Staff. Only the acid test will decide if today's young officers would be found wanting in war.

There seems no reason to believe that they would acquit themselves any less bravely than their forbears. The Staff Course is a professionally relevant and most important step to a career officer of today's Navy. At Greenwich, the Course is regularly updated and planned to be both intensive and challenging and in the best traditions of staff work careful consideration is always given to any constructive criticism. One of the lessons rammed home to students is that before they burst into print they must do their homework - perhaps this letter will go some way towards helping OBDURATE with his. DAVIDMACEY, Director, R.N. Staff College.

A-A FIRE CONTROL 'BETWEEN THE WARS' Sir,-Captain Roskill's letter in the April issue entitled 'A.A. Fire Control between the wars' struck a chord with me and no doubt with other readers who once wrestled with the HACS and FKC goniographic fire control systems with which most of the fleet was equipped from the 30s to the 50s. These predictors calculated deflections on the assumption that the target was flying at a steady speed and at a constant altitude and that the angle of sight (above the horizon) exceeded ten degrees. The use by the opposition in World War I1 of dive and torpedo bombers which refused to comply with these rules was distinctly unsporting. Connoisseurs of naval archaeology will recollect the final flowering of these systems towards the end of the war; the endless modifications, the paper strips stuck to most of the dials, the 'cruciform stick' (to be manufactured by ship's staff) with which an operator was to stimulate the erection of the scheme B stabiliser and the proliferation of Heath Robinson add-on tachymetric aids, each with its exotic set of initials, the

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G.R.U.B., the G.R.U.D.O.U., the N.R.S. 2.G. and the S.E.D.C. The 1942 Battle class destroyers were originally complemented for no less than seven men in the director and thirteen perspiring sailors in the T.S., a compartment which one Senior Officer aptly described as 'a museum of DNO's lost hopes'. It was a gratifying surprise and also a considerable organisational feat when any shots went in the right direction. One can only speculate on what might have happened if the decision to go for a tachymetric system had been taken in the late 20s, but possibly things might not have turned out all that differently. The only highly successful tachymetric system for the larger calibres of AA gun to see service afloat in numbers in World War I1 was the American Mark 37 Director system. This was developed by the Bell telephone Company and arrived just in time to equip the vast expansion of the U.S.N. in 1942 and 1943. Germany, Italy, Japan, France and, of course, ourselves had nothing to match it. It was for its day a very advanced and well engineered mechanical system designed as a whole round a n accurate stabiliser and must have cost a great deal to develop and to produce. Two sets were fitted in the A.A. Cruiser H.M.S. Delhi in, I think, 1942 and impressed all who saw her shoot. The further R.N. buy for the 1943 Battles, Eagle, Ark Royal and Vanguard, missed the war. I think informed engineering opinion would support my belief (and evidently Captain Roskill inclines to this view) that British industry would not have been able to produce a system of similar sophistication to the Mk 37, get the bugs out of it and produce it in the quantity required to equip the fleet when they needed it from about 1940 onwards, even if the necessary resources had been diverted to such a project. Another condition of success would have been a staff requirement of the right sort at the right

time. A glimpse in 1947 of the prototype L.R.S. I . , the first British tachymetric system, subsequently scrapped, makes the writer doubt whether this condition would have been met. Furthermore a tachymetric solution to deflections would not in itself have solved all the problems of shooting down aircraft. Firstly the inaccuracies of powder burning and time mechanical fuzes made lethality low in any case until proximity fuzes (again American produced) became available late in the war. Secondly many ship casualties to air attack were caused by the aircraft who, by luck or good judgement, made his attack unfired at, by surprise, through cloud or out of the sun or because defences were saturated by too many attackers; gun direction by high definition radar helped but not until late in the war. Thirdly, there were the unfortunate fleet destroyers whose 4.7 inch guns did not elevate sufficiently to engage the Stuka dive bomber. More effective A.A. fire would certainly have increased enemy aircraft casualties, saved some ships, raise the Fleet's morale (not that this ever faltered) and reduced the level of exasperation among gunnery officers. The reputation of the latter for ill humour may owe much to A.A. fire control. However, when one considers the war at sea one doubts if the course of whole campaigns would have been altered. Norway and Crete would still have been lost. Malta was kept going despite our losses; the strength of the attacks on Repulse and Prince o f Wales and those which caused the other losses in the Indian Ocean and Pacific would probably still have ensured those Japanese successes. The fact of the matter is that aviation technology had reached the point in 1940 when surface ships had become intrinsically vulnerable to well-conducted air attack, as they still are today.

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Reverting once more to the 1930s, if the decision had been taken to put a lot of resources into an attempt to develop a tachymetric fire control system, one wonders where these resources would have come from? From those devoted to radar development, or the asdic, or from the escort or aircraft carrier building programmes? Being wise well after the event, perhaps it was just as well that things went the way they did.
NAVO

Sir,-Some years before a tachymetric system was envisaged for use at sea, a very simple system of control was devised, and tested in action, as early as the summer of 1919. At that time I was a 'snottie' serving in H.M.S. Vortigern, in the Baltic, and based on Bjorko Sound, on the north coast of the Gulf of Finland. Rear Admiral Walter Cowan was in command. The south coast of the Gulf was covered by a destroyer, with orders to patrol Kaporia Bay and to support the Estonians and White Russians in the advance on St. Petersberg. Kaporia Bay was only about twentyfive miles west of Kronstadt and it was known that a Bolshie bomber, 'Ivan the Terrible', usually made a sortie over the bay during the afternoon watch. It was probably the 'Jimmy's Union' who devised the control system for the discomforture of 'Ivan'; it was dependent on the good guesswork of the H. A. Control Officer. In Vortigern, the 'Number One' was the Control Officer (a well-known forceful character, later to become a P.T. specialist of renown rather than a Gunnery Officer). His duties were to estimate the height of the aircraft to the nearest 1,000 feet, and decide the appropriate deflections. The predictor was a trajectory chart on a wooden board with a piece of string pinned to the origin. The Predicter was the writer, and by stretching the string to the gun elevation and a ruler along

the height ordered, he could shout a fuze-setting. The time-fuzed shells were pre-set in groups of about six, and the R.U. lockers chalked up with their respective settings. The H.A. gun was the 3-inch Q.F., 20 cwt., with a modern fuze-curve sight, capable of a rate of fire of at least 15 rdslmin. It had a high M.V. and was an ear-splitter. When on the Kaporia Bay patrol it was customary to relax in the afternoons, anchor at short stay with steam on the capstan, and await the sighting of 'Ivan'. On the occasion I recollect, he was early. The control team and gun's crew closed-up, and with some such order as '6,000 feet. Up five degrees. Get on with it! ', the action commenced. Meanwhile the ship was getting under weigh. After about twelve rounds, and at a gun elevation of sixty degrees, the bursts were obviously over but passing close. 'Ivan' made a very pronounced wobble and we thought we had scored a hit. However this was not so, but 'Ivan' scored a very far miss, the bomb exploding on the water about 1,000 yards ahead of the ship. I have never seen an enemy aircraft so clearly embarrassed. During Subs Courses, about a year later, I learnt that the string ruler predictor was already obsolete and had been replaced by the Holland Fuze Indicator. After that big stride, progress in A.A. fire control seems to have lagged. I suggest that, however sound the advice of scientists and of naval experts, it is the technical ability to translate this advice into hardware, by the armament firms, which determines progress. In the 1920s this technical ability, or incentive to acquire it, did not exist. M. W. STL. SEARLE ADMINISTRATION IN THE FLEET Sir,-As a Seaman Officer may I ask the following questions? Is our naval administration healthy? Is our naval secretarial organisation's tail wagging the seagoing dog? Is the Secretarial Branch in need

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of re-shaping to meet the needs of the Fleet in the 1980s? The questions could go on, but although not of strategic importance, the subject of Administration deserves closer examination and validation. This is especially so if we are to be seen to be more efficient. My aim in this article is to provoke discussion of an aspect of Administration - one of the Principles of War, which only occasionally get discussed. I t would not be unreasonable to state that paperwork has doubled over the two decades. Paperwork, that is, in written orders and instructions, and paperwork that is called for by way of correspondence. As the years go by, a set of orders deemed suitable for a Fleet/Flotilla/Squadron etc. has been added to in various ways and is now double in size. A typical example are the Fleet Administration and General Orders (FLAGOs). The Fleet now possesses a tome measuring 16" x 9" x 3" thick, weighing just on 81bs. It has 450 pages. Its forerunner in the Western Fleet was of quarto size and no more than 1" thick. I cannot believe that today's peacetime naval administrative orders are really that much more complicated or necessary than those of the past. The FOST Sea Training Work Up Guide (STWG) too has doubled in size and content since its initial beginnings in the early 1960s. In addition to FLAGOs and STWG, one can add a string of other publications on the administration, technical and operational side. All have proliferated over the years. One questions whether they are necessary; invariably the answer will be yes. But I contend that their content must be capable of being reduced. I suspect that new sections have been added because in some ways it appears the Fleet will be more efficient as a result. The efficiency curve may be going up, but not, I submit, in proportion to the volume of paperwork. Turning next to correspondence, I do

feel that we write far more letters than are really necessary. No doubt the Communications Officers will complain when one violates the maxim 'don't send a signal if a letter will do'. But I believe the secretarial staffs in ships are overloaded with a mass of trivia that has to go by letter. Why do we always have to confirm in writing arrangements made by telephone? Do not we trust the spoken word any longer? In addition to trivial matters, the requirement for reports, returns and formal submissions all seem to have been dramatically increased over the past decade or so. Few naval personnel use modern office machines such as dictaphones. There are few (if any) naval writers at sea who could be used as proper secretaries and produce typed work from dictating machines. In the commercial world outside there are precious few organisations which rely on long hand - written draft letters to be fed through the 'system' before despatch. The consequent time and effort taken by busy officers in producing long hand correspondence can only be to the detriment of the service as an efficient organisation, as a whole. A combination of modern secretarial practices, and the need for less written routine work will go a long way to making the administrative load less of a handicap for hard pressed officers at sea. We are all guilty of the proliferation of paperwork in an effort to ensure that the administration runs smoothly. There is a limit to what is necessary. There is a limit to the amount that can be absorbed. Once a standard has been set and accepted, it can be extremely hard to question it quantitively. But I do believe there is a danger that if the gargantuan amount of paperwork continues in the way it has done, our naval sons will have an intolerably boring life in the latter half of this century. Perhaps the Supply and Secretarial branch could play a bigger part in help-

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ing to check the increase in paperwork. They may have made a rod for their backs by not moving into the dictaphone era and training officers and other administrators to be able to use them. The extra burden of training writers to be shorthand typists as well as ordinary typists would have been great, but the failure to do so before now is a missed opportunity. For not only would the seagoing Navy's throughput of correspondence have been easier and speedier, but also the writers would have gained an extra skill to stand them in good stead for the secretarial and commercial world outside when they leave the service. Having discussed these two important items I think it follows that, if one can reduce the administrative load from those in authority, the time so gained could be more profitably used in their prime job. In the case of a Commanding Officer, he could devote more time to his operational commitments - especially in harbour. Coming down the ladder to the Seamen Officers in ships, I think it would be an interesting survey to find out how much of their everyday life (both at sea and in harbour) is engaged in administration and trivia. I believe well over 50%. How many of us Warfare Officers have actualy sat down even once a quarter and read The Fighting Instructions for instance, and discussed the burning issues of the day, as a matter of course and without the aim of having to forward comments because a report is called for? Very few, I would submit. How many individual submissions have been put forward by any officer on Warfare topics on a voluntary basis in recent years? Very few, I would submit. There may be reasons why not, but I believe the real reason is that they have not managed to find the time to do so. They have been bogged down with trivia. It is so infuriating to be asked to contribute a

worthwhile comment or proposed amendment in panic time. Crisis management rears its head all too often. The Senior Ratings in the Navy can take a lot more administrative responsibility off the shoulders of the officers. With the establishment of the Fleet Chief Petty Officer, a number of ships and establishments found it difficult to give him a worthwhile task initially. The time is ripe to exploit our Senior Ratings much more than a t present, so that they take on the burden of routine tasks and the little finer points in administration that, for too long, have bedevilled the management above. Officers must be given more time to think/plan/manage/organise on a wider scale and let the day to day arrangements occur as planned with a minimum of administrative fuss, and less direct officer worry. Having expressed some initial thoughts on administration within the Navy, let me conclude by way of a summary on where I believe the Navy should go to make life a lot easier for officers in the future: a. All written orders and instructions should be thoroughly scrutinised for details which are superfluous or written elsewhere. The aim must be to reduce content where possible. Some require major surgery. b. The Secretarial organisation must obtain, and the Fleet must train in a wider use of, dictating machines to cut down paperwork and speed up that which is necessary. c. The use of the telephone, which is extensive, should not require follow-up written confirmation of ordinary and simple arrangements. d. Officers should give Senior Ratings more responsibility within the administration organisation. HENSIO

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TO RESILVERING A.F.O. 1/56 and in my opinion anomalous 'WE Sir,-Triggered by recent articles on Seaman') never get their hands healthily AFO 1/56 and by 'To Re-Silvering The dirty with weapon maintenance and Mirror' I wonder whether a brief des- cleaning. Outside defence or action cription of the state of the seaman stations they therefore tend to become branch in this modern ship would be unskilled manual and watchkeeping useful? The trends are disquieting, and labour around the ship, a daunting and I know that they are being earnestly de-motivating task which becomes more considered at Staff level, but I hope that so as seaman complements fall, divide what follows will sharpen the perspec- responsibilities how you may. In this tive on at least the AFO 1/56 discus- ship there are more WE personnel than sions. seamen, and (here we descend to the In R.W.'s 'To Re-Silvering The subjective) their tasking, ADQUALS, Mirror' (which I was interested to see slotting into complement, and Presank without trace except for one Joining Training seem more rigorously responding letter) there were a couple defined and applied. As for discipline, of telling lines about '. . . the officer . . . the high number of senior ratings and unable to carry out correctly the high T2 selection scoring probably simplest of drill tasks, for example to contributes to their observed very low extract some basic information from the proportionate contribution to the ship's computer which had been stored there punishment statistics. The same goes to carefully just for the command's use'. a lesser extent for the ME branch. Turning now to officers. We have This rang a sharp bell, as part of the theme here is the engineering expertise come a long way since the bowler-hatted of seamen. engineer was detested for his workingIn this ship, which has a centralised class accent and his smuts on the teak computer controlling all major weapon planking, but maybe the recent interest systems, the roles played by the seamen in AFO 1/56 and the figures deployed in have simultaneously become degraded your pages by SNIPE indicate that we and more difficult to master. All these have not gone far enough. Perhaps, as major weapons, including two GW was argued pretty cogently by SNIPE, we systems, are manned and fired exclu- make too much of the spiritual benison sively by Weapons Electrical ratings, of 'command'. What makes the fledgling leaving seamen to operate the faithful seaman commanding officer so special? 20 mm Oerlikon guns. Seamen man the He has had some useful and wellOperations Room picture compilation tailored courses, he has had perhaps a and weapon direction and control dis- little ship-handling practice, and a career plays as well as the sonars, but there is a of watching closely his previous complausible case that even gun/missile manding officers against the day when controllers' positions should be WE he himself will be doing it. But as I manned, especially when considering have indicated above he is being culcomputer controlled fault diagnosis and tivated from an increasingly small, and rectification procedures. The best use of, technically unqualified, seed - bed. for example, a highly complex SAM Perhaps his last exercise in mansystem with very flexible radars (also management was as a Divisional Officer WE manned) requires a controller with for about fourteen men; perhaps as an deep systems knowledge. This is begin- Executive Officer if he was lucky. ning to press hard on the CPO/PO/ Digressing towards the Executive Officer Leading Seaman (Missileman) capability. for a moment, even he these days finds Seaman ratings (except for the very few the Second-in-Command label harder to

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emphasise among technical Heads of Department who increasingly report direct to the Captain - even, for example, for the cleanliness of departmentally allocated spaces. The formal task description of the Executive Officers' duties is becoming very weaselworded with much talk of 'overall coordination', and he can very easily spend his day thinking about bathrooms and heads instead of operational effectiveness. The second senior seaman on board must guard against meeting numbers of technical ratings only at the defaulters' table, where in any case a comprehensive understanding of their technical employment and therefore of their world view is essential to justice. Otherwise the image of the seaman second-in-command presented to large numbers of the ship's company declines to two facets - an overblown masterat-arms and a nit-picking housewife. Who are the best leaders? We are all aware that leadership style requires to be bent to suit circumstances - and in a technical environment committee and co-operative techniques should take the place of charisma on many occasions. The standard of leadership shown by middle management technical officers in my opinion is of a very high order based on the firm bed-rock of professional expertise. I wish I felt that the young seamen officers were as stable. The conclusion must be that there is nothing special about the leadership capability of the seaman specialist which automatically guarantees successful performance at command level in this technical environment. What's to do, then? Structural changes require to be well staffed and I do not presume to offer any such longterm solutions. Some form of softening of at least the Seaman/WE interface seems to be the line to take, and in any case the beneficial re-organisation towards the Operations Branch recently achieved requires settling time. There is

an encouraging increase in the number of seaman officers with some type of technical degree, but it is in the actual ship and with the specific hardware fitted that the problem lies. Even Manadon degrees require an Application Course. If I may humbly support Admiral Le Bailly 'all officers should undergo what we might call a course of liberal engineering studies' and this should be reinforced by some pretty well-organised on-the-job education. Submarine seamen officers have an enviable reputation for 'knowing their systems'; of course they should not have this reputation, it should be normal for all seamen. Remember the 'Sailor' TV programme and John Winton's perceptive review in your pages? And the young graduate officer under training (treated rather too sympathetically by John Winton, I thought) who 'would have liked to debate matters more' and whose 'frustration was real'? He was bored (and showed it) when shown round the main switchboard. Golly gosh, he should have been taken and shaken and made to be passionately interested in switchboards with appropriate line diagrams by suppertime or else. That incident is perhaps a microcosm of what I'm getting at. So, to conclude, I suggest one of the short term palliatives to stem the tide flowing against the seaman branch is that a better understanding of ship systems by seaman officers be imposed in a structured manner; because of equipment diversity and in the interests of containing shore training time this should be done afloat in the ship of the moment. The seaman operator must be able to recognise malfunction and point to the defective sub-system; he must be able to educate his ratings on the job; and he can only operate effectively with a sound technical understanding of his ship and it's equipment. Additionally he must prepare himself to be able to provide 'user' inputs to surprisingly nittygritty Naval Staff hardware decisions,

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and to support MOD(PE) development obtain place the Navy in a rather better projects. Otherwise the seaman will position than J .A. Howard seems to become ineffective in these important believe. It is of course difficult to make direct areas ashore as well as less than admircomparisons, as the terms of service of able (admiral-able?) afloat. the various officer entries to the three TARTARUS Services are not identical, but if one considers the Navy's General List GRADUATE OFFICERS I N THE Officers and the other two Services SERVICES Sir,-A letter in your January edition, Regular and Special Regular Commisunder the heading 'The Art of Course sion Officers the percentages of Computing' may have given a mislead- graduates among all those officers entering impression to some readers of the ing each of the three Services last year, relative strengths of the graduate after initial training, were approxiofficers of the Royal Navy as compared mately: R.N. 80% with those of the other two Services. Army 40% When one uses the term 'graduate R.A.F. 43% officers' one must be careful to specify exactly what graduates one is consider- and it would seem to me that the Navy's ing: and J. A. Howards' letter was University schemes are not therefore surely referring only to the very small doing at all badly! H. G. STEWART Direct Graduate Entry, who go to University as civilians, with no thought of joining the Services, and then at the DECOY BROACHES TO end of their degree courses cast around Sir,-In his article 'With A.B.C. in the for what they might do in life and so Med: ' in the last issue of N.R., A.G.P. decide to try a Service career; if at any mentions that H.M.S. Decoy had suffered time prior to graduation any of these weather damage just before he joined men had decided to seek a career as a her. How this came about was unusual naval officer they could have applied to and may be worth recounting. become late joining University CadetIt arose in fact from broaching-to, my ship Entry Officers. sole experience of this in a ship, as The Royal Navy has never sought opposed to a boat. Not only was this large numbers of Direct Graduate Entry in the placid and sunny Med: . but in Officers, as it is a very uncertain source what might be supposed to be a reasonof supply, depending so much on the ably sheltered corner of it, namely the economic situation of the country and Aegean some fifty or sixty miles south the consequent availability of civilian of Athens. A strong northerly gale was jobs for graduates in the particular areas blowing and had raised a really very of their degree studies: and it is obvious- steep sea, quite surprisingly so for that ly easier for the land-based Services to area. We were coming south by ourhave a worthwhile presence and make selves with the wind and sea almost an impact a t inland Universities than it right astern. is for the Navy. Decoy had been told to hurry and the However, the real comparison be- Captain had been increasing speed step tween graduate officer numbers is surely by step to see how fast we could go that which compares the total numbers, whilst retaining reasonable steering or percentages, of graduate to non- control. At eighteen knots the ship was graduate officers and I venture to suggest yawing heavily but manageable. It was that the figures I have been able to apparent that another knot or two would

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find us going a t the same speed as the wave crests with possible loss of control. We thought that a substantial increase of speed might take us 'through the barrier' and decided to try twenty-three knots. It didn't work. A large wave came from fine on the port quarter and away we went. A yaw to port started and the helmsman applied more and more starboard wheel but we ended up turning 120 degrees to port with the rudder hard-a-starboard. In the process the ship heeled quite alarmingly to starboard and lay there for five to ten seconds, though it seemed like minutes. I had grabbed the bridge screen on the port side and found myself hanging by my hands with my feet clear of the deck. One wondered if the ship could ever get up again but the predominant sensation was the depressing sound down inside the ship of cracks, thuds and shattering crockery, plainly heard on the bridge above the noise of the elements. The clinometer in the engine room was said to have indicated about sixty degrees of heel, which is roughly compatible with the right-angled triangle formed by the bridge deck and screen and me stretched out as an involuntary and frightened hypoteneuse. Well, Decoy did right herself and we resumed our course at moderate speed. Everything had been thoroughly secured for sea but numerous lockers, racks, shelves, etc. had broken adrift bodily and been damaged and various contents had escaped. In particular I remember the Wardroom table, only recently made for us in Malta. It was bolted to the deck but, at the angle we reached, the top proved too much for the legs, which broke. Much lashing and wedging had to be done to restrain things for the rest of the voyage. No major damage was suffered but the disarray inside the ship took quite a little time and effort to rectify. Hence the confusion which greeted A.G.P. when he joined us. J. P. DIXON

LOOK TO YOUR MOAT Sir,-To an outsider, our defences seem to be oriented to a land war in Europe. The Russians must have made a close study of the two German wars and seen how, starting with only a few submarines, they twice nearly brought us to our knees. The Russians already have one hundred. Might they not opt for a sitzkrieg in Europe and a war at sea? Its object would be to cut off all American reinforcements and our overseas supplies. If they themselves were not menaced would our allies come to our aid? Would Norway and Denmark be able or willing to close the Baltic? Could our present Navy defend our shipping and our North Sea oil and gas? Japan was not defeated by two atomic bombs. The devastation in Tokio was far worse. Her ships sunk, her armies marooned, invasion was not necessary. She was faced with starvation or surrender. The same could happen here. JOHN GARLAND NAME DROPPING? Sir,-A friend wrote to congratulate me on my article 'Wake up Ethelred'. I had to admit the author was another R.D.F. But this brings up a point on which I was shot down some years ago. I would like to have another go. Could we not encourage contributors to give their proper names unless they have a particular reason to keep anonymous? A junior officer who wants to be rude about 'The Establishment' may well wish to hide his identity. But surely most of us don't and I think it is most useful to know if an article - for example - on 'Maritime Strategy' is by an active admiral-in-the-know, an ancient retired officer-with-a-theory or a go-ahead undergraduate-flying-a-kite. A further point. Could we not have a complete list of members. Then, even if contributors modestly only give their initials we could have a chance to look

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up and speculate who wants to wake up and many people say it was a classic of Ethelred! its kind. I would very much like to hear R. D. FRANKS from anybody who took part, or who has any special knowledge of the action, THE SINKING OF T H E H A G U R O or indeed who has any comments to Sir,-I have been asked to write a book on the sinking of the Japanese heavy make. JOHN WINTON cruiser Haguro by the 26th Destroyer Flotilla off Penang on 15/16 May 1945, Bryn Clwyd, and the events leading up to it. It was Llandyrnog, the last major gun and torpedo action Denbigh, of the Royal Navy in World War Two, Clwyd LL16 4HP

REVIEW S-I: Naval Periodicals


MARINE RUNDSCHAU not a great success for the Germans as The first three editions of Marine they also lost at least one submarine Rundschau in its new-look 1977 format (U585) and possibly a second (U702), have contained fewer articles on Soviet both of which probably ran into mines. naval expansion than the last editions There is also an article by of 1976. Now that the excitement over the Geoffrey Jukes on the problem of debut of the Kiev has died down more obsolescence in the Soviet fleet, pointing space has been dedicated to articles of out that differences in the building wider interest. January's number con- programmes of the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. tains four historical articles, two of will result in a relative depletion of which deal with German efforts to Soviet maritime effectiveness in the combine air, surface and sub-surface 1980s. Whereas the U.S.A. is currently units in an attempt to destroy convoy at a very low ebb in the number of hulls PQ13 to Murmansk. After a surface available, her present building proengagement in which the cruiser gramme will produce a modern and Trinidad sank a German destroyer, highly effective fighting force in the fourteen of the original nineteen ships 1980s, a t a time when the Soviets will reached Murmansk in safety (three were have to pay off a large number of ships sunk soon after their arrival by bomb- built in the 1950s. Their present building ing). In the bad weather conditions rate is insufficient to maintain the which prevailed Trinidad's radar proved present order of battle and the author to be invaluable. She was able to open considers that the balance of maritime fire at the leading German destroyer at power will shift in favour of the U.S.A. 3,500 yards when the latter thought she in the 1980s. This opinion is naturally was pursuing a D / F intercept from a contentious at a time when the merchant ship. Unfortunately Trinidad media have at last made the relative was hit by one of her own torpedoeswhich weakness of the West a newsworthy ran rogue and was sunk six weeks later item. The article also supports the view by enemy bombing when heading for an that modern Soviet naval expansion and American dockyard. The operation was its attendant emphasis on ASW in

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particular is an attempt to combat the ever-increasing range of the American submarine-launched deterrent. Olaf Preuschaft has written an interesting article on the problems caused by the seemingly unending succession of technological improvements in the armed forces today. The nightmare situation where humans become totally subservient to machines is possibly not so far off after all. While machines continue to improve in capability, the average intelligence quota of the population does not change. Considerable effort must therefore be devoted in the future to ensuring that the labour market is anticipated and training schedules arranged so that sufficient qualified operators/technicians are available; that requirements and tasks exceeding man's physical and mental capabilities are transferred to the machine; and that improvements be made only in areas which can be handled by the average operator. Editions 2/77 and 3/77 contained two articles on naval exhibitions - the Italian Naval exhibition in Genoa and the French Naval exhibition at Le Bourget. Both articles stressed the interdependence of government and commercial shipbuilders in modern warship and armament design. The Italians presented a wide range of small vessels from the Lupo class frigate downwards including hydrofoils, one of which carries an ASW helicopter. All these different designs adhere to the priorities laid down by the Italian Navy for their future ships: compactness; speed; all-weather capability; and multirole facility. The French, on the other hand, presented three commercial versions of D.T.C.N. (Direction Technique des Constructions Navales) designed frigates, all capable of speeds in excess of thirty knots. The surface to air CROTALE weapon system was on show although there are apparently doubts as to its effectiveness and much research

had obviously been conducted into electronically passive fire-control sensors such as infra-red search and laserranging equipments. There were also articles on the U.S.S. Virginia, the first of her class of four nuclear powered cruisers (formerly 'frigates') and the new German multipurpose frigate design, the F122. Despite apparent lack of cohesion within NATO on frigate standardisation the F122 is based on the Dutch Kortenaer class 'platform'. The F122 will carry two helicopters for ASW, recce and datalink requirements. The Westland Lynx was considered unsuitable and a final decision will have to await American trials on the LAMPS 111. The F122 will also be armed with ASW torpedoes, Harpoon, Sea Sparrow and an OTOMELARA dual purpose gun. Two shipyard groups have been working on the design and costing of the project and building is expected before the end of the year. Finally there is in the March edition a thorough examination of the r61e and capabilities of the Soviet Naval Air Force. The author is Norman Polmar, the American editor of Ships and Aircraft o f the U.S. Navy. He stresses the close co-operation between the Soviet Navy and the S.N.A.F., particularly with regard to reconnaissance, longrange target indication and eventual linked airborne and surface/subsurface attack. He also predicts a building programme of up to twenty units of the Kiev class and underlines the potential danger of the introduction of the Backfire into the S.N.A.F. Marine Rundschau's new format is pleasing to the eye, with a colour photograph on the front cover and A4 sized pages, and what is more each article is accompanied by a prCcis in English. All in all a very interesting and balanced set of articles for the first quarter of 1977. P.J.F.E.

REVIEW S-I1 BOOKS


DRY GINGER: THE BIOGRAPHY OF ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET SIR MICHAEL LE FANU, GCB DSC by RICHARD BAKER (W. H. Allen-5.00) 'Dry Ginger' - the nickname Michael Le Fanu gave himself when he was First Sea Lord at the time the sailor's daily tot of rum was abolished in 1970 - was what is known in the business as a charmer. He could, if he wished, charm birds down out of trees. He had the happy knack of saying what people wanted to hear in the way that they most wanted to hear it. He was well aware of his own power, and he could have been tempted to misuse it, to his own destruction. But, as Richard Baker's honest biography reveals, beneath the charm there was a most formidable character: a very shrewd, calculating, ambitious and able man. Michael Le Fanu loved walking, and Shakespeare, and unlikely quotations, and composing witty extempore verse to meet any occasion, and dressing up, and going to see for himself. He was master of the throwaway line. He remembered a man's name, and the date of his birthday. His public life was graced with many acts of private considerateness. But besides all the larking about, there was a record of solid achievement. Circumstances meant that he reached the very top of his profession (as First Sea Lord, he once told the Daily Telegraph: 'I am not a Lord, I don't go to sea often enough, but I am First') without ever commanding a large fleet in action, but this was an accident of timing. He was an outstanding Gunnery Officer in Aurora with Force K in the Mediterranean, and British liaison officer to Admiral Spruance and later to Halsey, a job he did surpassingly well. He could take a large ship like Eagle by the scruff of the neck and make her good. As Controller, he shouldered the tremendous task of introducing Polaris, with modern business methods, into the Navy. As C-in-C Middle East, he faced a situation of infinite political complexity. Not just Aden, with local difficulties like the enthusiastic soldiering of Mad Mitch of the Argylls, but simultaneous problems connected with the Beira Patrol and the Six-Day War in Sinai. Yet he consistently had all nines on his forms S1206. His promotion ever accelerated. He was marked for the top by such as Bruce Fraser. He had God's thumb-print on him. I myself, unfortunately, only met Michael Le Fanu once. He very kindly gave me lunch and an interview, all about his experiences with Spruance and Halsey in the Pacific. I provided Mr. Baker with a transcript of the interview tape, from which 1 see he has quoted - and here I must register a major criticism. Mr. Baker sells his own research short. He has obviously put a good deal of hard leg-work into his book. Lady Le Fanu made available her husband's papers, and Mr. Baker has also consulted and corresponded with all manner of people, from ex-ABs in Aurora to a colonel who took a do-ityourself resettlement course in bricklaying with Michael Le Fanu after he left the Navy. One would like to know more about whose letters, recollections, newspaper cuttings, interviews, diaries were used, what dates they were, are they still available, and if so, where? This criticism is really meant as a compliment. Mr. Baker's book is a good enough piece of social and historical

research to warrant a more scholarly sources has stimulated the interest of presentation. All he gives is a short financial and commercial enterprises to the extent that a realisation is dawning select bibliography. Michael Le Fanu died of leukemia in that knowledge of the seabed is now of 1970, when he was on the brink of fundamental importance. Even in the becoming Chief of the Defence Staff. I defence world, with the belated realisafound the description of the onset of his tion that the submarine had superseded final illness and his death very moving. the all-big-gun capital ship, an interest is He was a remarkable man, and Mr. beginning to grow in the Hydrographic Baker has made a really worthwhile Department, the solid foundations of attempt to describe him and his times. which were laid by Beaufort between the years 1829 and 1855. This small I enjoyed it all very much. JOHNWINTON- department, traditionally starved of resources, ships, men and money is in BEAUFORT OF THE ADMIRALTY: fact the basic 'tool' upon which sea power and maritime strength are based. THE LIFE OF SIR FRANCIS BEAUFORT 1774-1857 Nevertheless Britain has continued to lead the world in this art, and can still by ALFREDFRIENDLY do so, if politicians and those in (Hutchinson - 7.50) A biography of this great sailor is long authority have the imagination and overdue, but now this book is here it is vision to acquire, before it is too late, likely to remain as a standard work. It the necessary determination. Again is thoroughly documented and widely the need for leadership! Beaufort himself is probably best and deeply researched. The list of sources at the end of the book alone known to the public as the originator of the Beaufort scale for judging the shows that it is no superficial work. It is curious how, until a scientific force of the wind, which he first designed awakening occurred in recent years, the in 1806, and which with only minor pioneering seamen who charted the modifications holds good today. But this coasts of the world received scant biography is not solely about the Hydrohistorical recognition and, for that graphic Department; it is a detailed matter, practical reward for their mag- study of the life of a very unusual naval nificent feats of seamanship and en- officer, indeed a very unusual man, and durance. Many of their charts are still the book offers much more of interest the basis of the modern editions. Even than just hydrography. It is revealing of the Boards of Admiralty in the last the social and moral life of his age, of century did little to further the efforts of the appalling conditions at sea, and Franklin, Beaufort, Fitzroy, Belcher and shews Beaufort's career to be one of their kind, as Admiral Day brings out so dedication to his main aim. It tells of clearly in his history of the Admiralty his struggles, of alternating periods of Hydrographic Service 1795-1919. A further example is in Chambers' despair and triumph, almost invariable Biographical Dictionary, where the only penury, poor health, frequent frustramention of the great Vancouver is the tion and constant conflict with higher laconic entry: 'George (c. 1758-98), authority, not on behalf of himself but British naval captain, visited Vancouver of the officers and men which he had the honour to lead. At times maybe, Island in 1792'.! ! It may be that, as ever, commerce has like Hamlet's lady 'he doth protest too again taken a hand. The development much, methinks'. The reader of this of off-shore oilfields and mineral re- book must judge, but, if your reviewer

may say so, he will find it full of very interesting reading, and may find, as the French say, that Plus Ga change, plus c'est la mgme chose. Descended from a French aristocratic strain of Huguenots, who had settled in Ireland, Beaufort was born on 27 May 1774, the fourth child and second son of a family of seven children. Mr. Friendly devotes a good deal of space to the happy and united character of this closely knit family, and shows what a large part heredity played in the character of Francis. His father Daniel is described as: 'a tiny man, but endowed with endless ebullience and activity; he was architect, topographer, geographer, tireless traveller and diarist, gentleman farmer and bon-viveur as well as cleric, which last occupation seemed to occupy only the lesser part of his interest'. Here, also, is an interesting reflection on the ecclesiastical habits of the times. Mr. Friendly writes: 'So close was Francis to his father and so large a part did the father play in the son's life that Daniel's character and history deserve more than passing attention'. . . 'One thing that the father was not, was a competent man of business. Easy-going or indifferent, he neglected his own affairs to the point of being in debt for most of his life . . . His outstandingly wise decision was his choice of a wife, Mary Waller, co-heiress of a well-off county family in County Meath. Both were twenty-eight when they married; she became a paragon of a parson's wife.' A relative, Louisa Beaufort, writing in 1801, says that a t the age of five Francis has 'manifested the most decided preference for the sea . . . and persisted in choosing a naval life . . . he was instinctively impelled to make such a choice; for it was formed and disclosed long before he had ever seen salt water o r could have conceived the nature of a ship'.

And so it was that, for the sum of a hundred guineas, Francis was placed in 1788 as Captain's Servant, that is apprentice; on board Vansittart, an East Indiaman on the China trade, commanded by Lestock Wilson, whose daughter Alicia he was destined to marry twenty-five years later. Wilson was an excellent commander and an able and dedicated surveyor, who set the highest standards. Any young officer or seaman is fortunate who finds himself with such a man as his first captain. The young Francis early shewed his compulsive love of surveying, (and, as all surveyors know, what a compulsive art it is), for, while in Vansittart, at the age of fifteen, he observed the geographical position of Batavia to within one mile of its correct position, and at least two miles more accurately than M. de Mohr the astronomer at the observatory. This ship was wrecked, and on return to Ireland in 1790, 'very much grown', he obtained a berth in the Royal Navy, in the 38-gun frigate Latona, a fifth-rate commanded by Captain Albermarle Bertie. Later, in Aquilon, he took part in the action of 'The Glorious First of June', and while serving in Phaeton he distinguished himself in cutting out a Spanish polacre, but suffered nineteen wounds in the process. In consequence he was not fit for sea service for some years and we find him writing to his brother '. . . aged thirty-two and no employment, no wife, no shilling, and no hope'; no doubt written in one of his not infrequent moods of depression. It is not possible, nor is it the purpose of this review, to chronicle this remarkable man's life, but rather to encourage and stimulate the reader to get the book and read it himself. He will be well rewarded. In 1829 Beaufort, as a captain at the age of fifty-five, was appointed Hydrographer of the Navy. The account

of the events of this tremendous period MANAGEMENT IN THE ARMED makes stirring and often sad reading, for FORCES certain limitations in Beaufort's characby JOHN DOWNEY ter made him frequently persona non (McGraw-Hill- 5.50) grata with his naval masters, and he This is an interesting book on a contronever attained flag rank. He was, how- versial subject of importance to us all. ever, made a 'yellow admiral'. In brief, the authors argue that although In 1848 Beaufort was gazetted as a most appointments are to managerial Knight of the Bath, a n honour of which type posts training is primarily orientathe wrote in his diary: 'of the many ed towards combat operations. Also unexpected events in my life whether of under fire is the related question of how good or evil this has been the most un- we manage our armed forces. The key looked for and I can truly say the most argument is that whereas well under half of our defence manpower has a uncoveted'. In March 1854, on account of age, combat role (only 13% in the R.A.F.) failing eyesight, hearing and memory, he the overall organisation is still based on offered his retirement, but due to the operational principles rather than mandeclaration of the Crimean war he was agerial ones. Air Vice Marshal Downey has been persuaded to stay until he was relieved assisted by well qualified experts from by Washington in 1855. Beaufort much appreciated the many all three Services including Vice Admiral scientific honours belatedly showered Eberle who is well-known to most upon him; he was not only a Fellow of members as a modern and farsighted the Royal Society, but also a Fellow of officer. Thus the pedigree of this short the Geographical Society, the Astro- and well-researched book is beyond nomical, the Geological, and other reproach added to which the author generously acknowledges help and advice societies. During his tenure of the office of from a range of other knowledgeable Hydrographer he was the inspiration people. Missing from the list is Professor behind the systematic examination of Laurence Martin whose recent book the coasts of the United Kingdom, the The Management o f Defence* covers surveying of waters in Canada, Nova much the same field from the viewpoint Scotia, the West Indies, New Zealand, of Whitehall decision makers and lays the Greek Archipelago, South America, bare some of the shortcomings of our the West coast of Mexico and California, present organisation as well as discussing China and Borneo, and the raising of the possible changes. Most of the book is occupied with a British Hydrographic Office to a far clear description of how the armed higher level than any similar institution forces of the United Kingdom are manelsewhere. aged to-day as well as two interesting Surely that is Beaufort's best lead-in chapters tracing how the system memorial. evolved historically. NATO might have The author of the book, Alfred been better covered in three respects: Friendly, a former managing editor of procurement, planning and operations, the Washington Post and a winner of the and the increasing political influence Pulitzer Prize, has done a great service which NATO is acquiring. Slowly, too to our country and to the Royal Navy. slowly, the Western allies are moving Let us say 'thank you' to him by reading from interoperable forces to joint his book. *Laurence Martin, The Management of GODFREY FRENCH Defence; MacMillan, London 1976.

procurement so as to reap the advantages of large scale production. Another aspect of procurement is that European M.0.D.s are increasingly quoting NATO requirements to justify new units/ systems to reluctant political paymasters. Also, NATO has been influential in inhibiting defence cuts by certain nations or recommending changes in proposed cuts so that the least harm is done to the alliance as a whole. Interspersed throughout, and of importance to the authors' main theme are: the decreasing proportion of combat forces; the increasing civilianisation of support activities; and the changing role of the armed forces from combat to defence by deterrence. Add to this the fact that the majority of uniformed personnel lead increasingly civilian type lives working alongside defence civilians and the case is made that we should update our system of service management to meet the needs of the times and the future. Such a system would require 'new look' managers (in uniform) trained to run the increasingly complex defence organisation. There follows an excellent short chapter stressing the value and continuing need for leadership, which, if good, is flexible and changes its form to meet current needs. And so one arrives a t the final thirty pages (of this 220 page book) where the main themes are rediscussed in a final chapter entitled 'From craft to science'. No very clear solution emerges except the need for change. The authors contend that if action is not taken the armed forces could lose what hold they now retain of defence policy, procurement and other support activities and be narrowed down to a combat arm with little real say either on its employment or its equipment. There are many apt quotations in the book so let me end with one from its last chapter which summarises the

authors' views in John Downey's clear and staccato style: Combat itself has always been a matter of organisation and management. But combat is the last resort of modern defence and if it occurs it is a sign of failure. Modern defence is a branch of politics which applies the fruits of science and technology. To train officers narrowly in the application of last resort must surely now be seen as something of an admission of failure: it denies them their full part in the primary aims of defence and in the mobilization of all its means. To base the organization of the system as a whole on the principles which apply to combat is to make four-fifths of it comply with the one-fifth of last resort. The four-fifths are concerned with politics and science and must work consultatively and analytically. The one-fifth applies the results and must undoubtedly answer to the diktat of one commander. The commander must be the undisputed king of all he surveys, but his kingdom comes to him from afar. SPENCER DRUMMOND

COMPUTERS IN THE NAVY Edited by J. A. N. PROKOP, Captain, S.C., U.S. Navy (Naval Institute Press) The Editor is to be congratulated upon drawing together in one book so many distinct threads from the tangled skein of Automatic Data Processing in the U.S. Navy. This extensive field is well covered in fifteen articles, some by naval officers and those who make key policy decisions about naval ADP, and others by those with special interest in particular applications such as weapons systems, ship design and medical support. The reader need not worry about brushing up his

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mathematics for the subject is hardly mentioned and on this count it is, perhaps, a pity that the editor, who is in fact the Director of the Automatic Data Processing Equipment (ADPE) Selection Office, chooses to use the word computer in the title. For the general reader the articles about Computer Management will have most appeal. These describe the administrative hurdles which must be cleared on the long track to acquiring ADPE, and go some way to explain why it can take ten months to two years just to select a computer system. The reason why procurement is so hedged in by regulations is explained and the bureaucratic organisation responsible for computer acquisition is described in detail. The uninitiated may be taken aback by this complexity. To some extent, it has been set up in response to a Federal Law intended to ensure fair competition amongst a multiplicity of manufacturers. Indeed a very similar organisation exists in the U.K. with, if anything, an extra finger in the pie (M.O.D. Management Computers, for the cognoscenti), though H. M. Government favours single tender action with the sole home manufacturer, I.C.L. Jn an excellent first article Rear Admiral Frank S. Haak sets a theme which runs through the whole book when he says that the U.S. Navy has rediscovered a fundamental truth: in the computer age, people are the vital key to success, and to ensure that the full potential of extensive automation is achieved, it is necessary for managers and users to become increasingly involved. This is particularly necessary in decisions regarding procurement of systems for the production of 'better' management information. In the past ten years while U.S. Naval manpower has declined by 26% the ratio of cost of computer software (related to personnel costs) to hardware has risen to 3: 1 and is predicted to

exceed 8: 1 by 1980. The case for firm management of Navy ADP by naval officers is clearly made, so it is disconcerting to read in the Editor's introduction, that of the 14,000 people in Naval ADP the 550 officers have 'a strong potential for leverage'. I wonder what Admiral Rickover would say to that! Most of the articles which follow are written by specialists and, aware of the expert's enthusiasm for his subject the non-specialist should be circumspect in his approach. Here are some of the pitfalls. Dr. Paul Oliver justifies the use of computer monitoring by citing one success in a government establishment and' two successes in a survey of twentyone commercial installations, sixteen of whom were not using it. Another view is that on balance, monitoring is not commercially worthwhile. In his introduction to the subject of Compiler evaluation, the Editor discusses portability (the ability to run a program on a different installation) as a fact of life, but it is well known that tailoring programs to run on a new machine generally involves a lot of programmer and analyst effort. In an article on Tactical Systems, Commander John D. Cooper U.S.N. demonstrates the sort of faith that can move mountains when he says the multi-national version of the Link-1 1 ship-to-ship computer link would be operating within NATO by the time of publication of this book. Two lieutenants base their fire control scenario on the AEGIS system which is undergoing trials. Historically fire control systems remain under trial for some time: seven years is not unusual. More typical in U.S. Navy ships are fire control systems of World War I1 design. The realism which comes from experience with ADP is to be found elsewhere. A survey of Navy Command and Control Applications contains: 'Tests showed calculation routines were too slow'; and 'Because rules for threat evalua-

tion are constantly changing, programs must be constructed so that they can be modified.' Dr. Oliver, again, says of compilers, '. . . there may not be a compiler which completely conforms to the COBOL standard'. On computer security, a formidable subject, Ms. Denna J. Dragunas asserts: 'We will likely never have a 100 per cent secure computer system. . . .' Captain Grace Hopper, the U.S. Navy's foremost pioneer in computer development, examines the trend towards mini-computers and makes it clear that this is the way ahead. One wonders why it has taken so long to find this out, when the U.S. Navy has already developed for ships systems with a different computer to perform different functions. Why, too, is the U.S. Navy still pursuing its plan to establish a consolidated computer service at seven largescale bureaux? Why is the R.N. on the same path to bureau computing, and why too, in the Type 42, is there only one computer to perform a multiplicity of functions? Perhaps the answer to these and similar questions may be found in a quotation from the Vice-President of Grumman Data Systems: 'The information organisation has become a management 'No Man's Land' of brightly coloured, expensive machines, expensive staff, foreign languages and continuing frustration. Everything costs more, is never on time, and the credibility gap is growing.' To those R.N. Officers who often put the question: 'With so many diverse problems and in a welter of conflicting viewpoints, how can the uneducated manager be confident that the experts are on the right track?' this book gives the plain answer that he cannot. He must get himself educated and then take charge. What better than to start here? C. P. E. BROWN

THE HELICOPTER - HISTORY, PILOTING AND HOW IT FLIES by JOHNFAY (David & Charles-4.95) The problem is that despite the success of the Helicopter Education and Love Programme (HELP) there are still a few people in the Royal Navy who have resisted indoctrination. I therefore presume that the main reason why I have been asked to review John Fay's book is either to investigate the possibility of enforcing it on this misguided minority, or otherwise to encourage and strengthen the converted. T h e Helicopter. History, Piloting and H o w it Flies is a book written mainly for the person who thinks he may be interested in helicopters but has little or no knowledge of the subject. It is a revamped version of the author's original book which was first published in 1954 and its main strength is that it neatly fills an area which is not covered by any other British author. The task of convincing an enquiring mind on why a helicopter flies, let alone why its rotors flap to equality while dragging under the influence of Hooke's Joint Effect, has never been easy. John Fay's book lays out the Principles of Flight simply and the enthusiastic novice should gain a clear and fundamental knowledge from it. I fear that despite the Royal Aeronautical Society's reference to the 'extremely good illustrations', some potential readers may be put off by the wholesome young gentleman flying a cut-away Dragonfly in his doublebreasted suit. Although the basic principles of helicopters may not have changed very much in recent years, other than by the dominance of the gas turbine power unit, it is a shame that a few parts of the text remain dated. As the title promises, the book gives some elementary guidelines about flying the helicopter. It also explains that the absence of speed when taking off and

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landing makes the helicopter passenger tions, sabotage, clandestine attacks on feel 'safer than his aeroplane counter- troops and individuals, political aspects part'. In practice I have found that the and insurrection. It contains over 300 tortured expression and white knuckles, small-print pages of fact or reasoned often present on hardened fixed-wing argument, devoid of emotion or sensapilots, are a direct result of this lack of tion, but very fully documented with speed on the approach. In contrast to references to most of the increasing the main body of the book, the new number of English and European books section on the history of the helicopter now appearing on these subjects so that will prove enlightening to everyone with the reader is free to explore further at an interest in flying. Paradoxically this will. Two of the voluminous footnotes part is well supported by new diagrams are the only references to the author's of old aircraft. personal part in the struggle - one The Service pilot will benefit from the recording his horror, on capture, at the historical section but he requires, and production of his cheque book, inhas, a more comprehensive reference advertently left in his battle-dress; and book in the R.A.F. publication A P 3456 the other his pride at the escape rate in (Principles of Flight). A ship's captain his camp necessitating more guards than struggling to understand his helicopter prisoners. Contrary to what some believe, hard flight may be interested in the book, core resisters were by no means all especially as John Fay explains why flying a helicopter is hard work and communists. Priests, railway clerks (in makes pilots tired. The author's real particular with access to rail movetarget is the keen potential aviator; in ments), doctors with unimpeded access particular proud fathers would do well to patients, professionals, prostitutes and booksellers were among the most to pay 4.95 for this good fundamental prominent. The chapter on 'Who book to kindle or arouse their sons' Resisted' gives a fascinating insight into enthusiasm. COLINde MOWBRAY the qualities needed for success; among the less obvious are listed originality, complete inconspicuousness, observance RESISTANCE and memory for detail, a sixth sense for European Resistance to Nazism impending danger, tenacity, patience to 1940-45 endure endless waiting - and luck, not by M. R. D. FOOT forgetting 5,000 or more Gestapo (Eyre Methuen- 6.95) money often waiting as reward for inThis book comes from the pen of a formation leading to the arrest of an professor of modern history who is not agent. only an academic but whose wartime The gatheling of operational and service in Brittany in the SOE (Special Operations Executive - formed in 1940 technical intelligence is not the main to coordinate all action by subversion theme of this book, but rather, having and sabotage against the enemy over- laboriously pin-pointed the enemy's Achilles heel, the consideration of how seas) earned him the Croix de Guerre and qualified him to write the official the greatest damage could be achieved history of the SOE in France. It is by resistance movements. The author hardly surprising therefore that he has raises the intriguing argument which produced a serious and very absorbing could be advanced for selective and work covering the broad canvas of every expert sabotage in preference to wholetype of opposition to the Nazi regime in sale bombing, which with a few very Europe - intelligence, escape organisanotable exceptions (such as the raids on

the Ruhr dam and on cefiain Gestapo H/Qs), can only have acted as a somewhat blunt (though temfying and devastating) instrument. For example, the bombing of the vital ball-bearing plant at Suhweinfurt, with a great outpouring of effort, bomb load and life, merely resulted in the working of double shifts to keep abreast of the damage. Similar saturation of railway marshalling yards took place; but untold longerterm mischief could be caused by one single determined railway clerk changing over the Wehrmacht rail-truck route cards, with the result that vital U-boat battery acid reached steel works in Bohemia, and truck-loads of womens' undies went to fighter airfields. One really knowledgeable technician could immobilise a complete telephone network by changing over bundles of junction-box connections. Clearly, he argues, there is a need for military and economic historians to assess the roles of sabotage versus bombing. He quotes a 1969 cost of 250,000 for training a single R.A.F. operational pilot; could destruction by missile be an even more costly business? The author dwells briefly on some of the lesser known tools of sabotage produced by the SOE: abrasive grease guaranteed to wreck any decent bearing, exploding pencils, explosive cowpats and even an explosive dead rat. The macabre imagination of the SOE 'dirty tricks' department was endless. There is an absorbing chapter on technicalities: the fifteen documents which every citizen in Vichy France had to carry; how to carry a message rolled in a cigarette; the use of passwords and inverted replies ('Come' meant 'The Germans are here'); radio techniques; cyphers; parachute drops; various weapons; and the organisation of SOE at 64 Baker St. under General Gubbins. The section on escape and evasion make gripping reading, with just enough narrative on individual efforts to illus-

trate the appalling difficulties and the temble penalties for failure, particularly for civilian agents or for those sheltering the escapees. As well as the vast network of escape routes (so well covered in Airey Neave's Saturday at M I 9 ) there were the incredible 'loners', such as the private with no French who walked from Dunkirk to the Juras, often with maps lifted from telephone boxes; but as these sometimes (unknown to him) had east at the top instead of north his course was apt to be erratic. The prize for enterprise Foot awards to an SOE agent named Harry Peukv6, who having already escaped over the Pyrenees on crutches, after re-entry was again wounded, captured and escaped, this time from Buchenwald. Unfortunately he bumped into two Belgian SS who demanded his papers and proposed to shoot him: He reminded them - bhis was April 1945 - that they would shortly be in Allied hands. Then, they said, let's change clothes. All three started to undress. Peuleve picked up one of their pistols, and took them both prisoner. Over 33,500 British and American servicemen (including our own Naval Review Editor) returned to Allied territory, of whom two-thirds had escaped and the remainder (largely aircrew who had been shot down) evaded. This indeed was a superb achievement, not only in 'saving' valuable manpower (especially aircrew and submariners), and in keeping thousands of enemy on their toes, bult in the tremendous booet in morale to all taking part when an escape succeeded. The last half of the book covers, country by country throughout Europe, the forms which resistance took subversions and subterfuges, raids and reprisals, politics and partisans, communications and collaboration. Norway, Albania, Yugoslavia, and particularly Poland, where collaboration was un-

invincible, strength in moral terms. known ('no Quislings and no Petuin'), It gave back to people in the were the countries which caused the occupied counitries the self-respect Nazis most trouble. The section on that they had lost at the moment U.S.S.R. mentions in passing: of occupation. . . . There is a Dutch Stalin . . . had an early career as a saying worth recall: 'Only dead bank robber, after he had given up fishes float down the stream, live being trained as a priest, and having ones swim against it'. had some training in the elements of clandestinity from Lenin himHere is a textbook which no serious student of military warfare should omit self. . . . to read: which those who value the and: To this day, one of the two ways of clandestine services of so many unsung joining that self-perpetuating heroes, British and Allied, and even oligarcthy, the Red Army officer those who just enjoy a good spy story, cops, is to be the son or grandson will read with great interest. Truth can of a partisan. The other is to be the indeed be stranger than fiction. JAN AYLEN son of an officer. Four-fifths of the Red Army's original officer corps 'The Naval Review, April 1975, p. 185. had held the Tsar's comm~ission. Professor Foot has some pertilnent 'Ibid, p. 188. things to say about 'Ultra' and $he THE RUSSIAN NAVY Enigma machine: 'AU the textbooks on Myth and Reality the history of this war need of course by ERICMORRIS to be rewritten in the light of our (Hamish Hamilton-5.95) knowledge, such as it is, of 'Ultra'.' He does not appelar altogether to share in In this brief study of Soviet sea power Rmkill's castigation1 of Winterbotham's Eric Morris, who is a Senior Lecturer in The Ultra Secret, disclosures on which the Department of War Studies and had already been made by the French International Affairs a t the R.M.A. General Gustave Bertrand's book Sandhurst, reaches some debatable conEnigma, and later by the head of the clusions and offers a somewhat contromain body of Enigma 1.O.s at Bletchley: versial view at least to those whose The problem of the relative value minds are wedded to a more rigid dogma of spies and 'Ultra' reports remains on this topical and important subject. one of grealt technical interest and The myth which the author attempts not import, and it is much to be hoped altogether convincingly to explode is that a serious study of it has been that the Soviet Navy has an offensive made in secret; or will be made world-wide mission to further Russian before all the material for it goes interests and support her political aims down the maw of the secret in peace and to mount an attack on western navies and shipping, whether in shredding machines. Perhaps we can hope to know some- the North Atlantic or elsewhere. On thing more when the Briltish Intelligence any outbreak of conventional hostilities, effort as a whole is covered in the 'The Russians', he claims, 'are not Government Military History series to interested in command of the sea along the lines of the thesis expounded by whioh Roskill refers'. Concluding, the real material results Mahan and the western naval thinkers'. of resistance may have been compara- Mr. Morris considers that the Soviet Union is not spending any more on its tively small, but: . . . it had titanic, as it turned out navy than is necessary to ensure the

security of the state. Despite its growth in the past decade the reality is that the long term mission of the Soviet navy is home defence and that it poses no real threat to the West having been built up primarily as a reaction to the successive post-war phases of U.S. and Nato naval developments, in so far as these represented a threat to the security of the Russian state. The basic argument in support of this thesis is that the Soviet navy is 'constrained' in its expression of sea power by the realities of the present strategic balance between the two super-powers; by the geographical limitations from which it suffers; and by fear of western reaction to any attempt to interfere with shipping movements or to apply sea power with other forms of pressure. Its primary task is that of strategic deterrence 'to ensure the credibility and operational viability of the ballistic missile submarines.' (Mr. Morris's fondness for the jargon which characterises so much of current defence literature does not add to the enjoyment of his book). This means guaranteeing access for Soviet SSBNs to their launching areas and disrupting Western ASW measures in areas sensitive to Russian requirements. T o support this somewhat narrow interpretation of Soviet naval intentions the author plays down the likelihood of a more traditional display of sea power by the Russians and in doing so his views run counter to those of many of Nato's maritime commanders. For example, Mr. Morris maintains that: 'it would require a major conflict in the central front to be waged for a minimum of ninety days before the resources of western powers would need revitalising through the convoying of merchant ships.' But in his address to the Military Committee of the North Atlantic Assembly last year Admiral Kidd, Supreme Commander Atlantic, said that 'for reasons of sheer volume the great

bulk of equipment, weapons, ammunition and other initial supplies, plus the follow-up resupply pipeline, must be delivered (from U.S.A. to Europe) by sea, a total of some 9500 of the weapons and ammunition needed.' Early reinforcement is therefore essential to minimise the serious losses which will be caused by the Soviet submarine fleet after war has been declared. At a time when Britain's defence spending may be in sight of an upturn in response to President Carter's request for an increase in European defence budgets there is need for a balanced and objective study of modern sea power and the Soviet use of it even if only to guide any public discussion over the allocation of resources between a maritime strategy for Britain and her continental commitment new style, in the shape of our contribution to the Central Front. Unfortunately, Mr. Morris has failed to fill this need. Come in the Richmond of the eighties; Britain has need of you. M. G. CHICHESTER

NAVAL BATIZES OF WORLD WAR n


by GEOFFREY BENNETT (Batsford-5.50) Happy is the author who can contribute more than one volume to a publisher's series. Captain Bennett, who has already written accounts of Coronel and the Falklands, Jutland and the River Plate, now follows his Naval Battles o f World War I with a companion b k on naval actions of the Second World War. It is very well done. The detailed narrative is enlivened by quotations from eyewitnesses, illustrated by thirty-nine well-chosen photographs (two of which are reproduced on the jacket) and twenty-three maps and diagrams of admirable clarity, and supported by forty-eight tabular statements of ships and aircraft concerned in particular operations, and an index divided under

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headings of Actions, Personalities and Ships. The author has made no attempt to provide a bibliography because, as he says, it would require a volume to itself if comprehensive and would involve an invidious task if select. The main account of the battles is introduced by three chapters, over sixty pages in all, setting the scene first by describing the consequences of the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and the Washington and London treaties of 1922 and 1930, then by summarising the strengths of the major belligerents in 1939 and their building programmes of the war years, and finally by reviewing technical progress in the design, armament and equipment of ships and aircraft between 1919 and 1945. Encouraged by the author's methods I made my own table of the causes of the actions he describes so well. I found that only three - River Plate, Bismarck and Convoys (many battles) - were caused by the classic need to defend trade. All the rest - Narvik, Matapan, Midway, Coral Sea, Guadalcanal (seven battles), Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf (four battles) - owed their occurrence to attempts by one side or the other to interfere with the seaborne support of enemy military operations. But whether attacking or defending, and whether the target was merchant shipping, military convoys or invasion forces, the basic factor was always the same: the overall need to use the sea for one's own purposes and to deny its use to the enemy. What is interesting is that in almost every case the mere fact that a battle took place served to save the target, or a fair proportion of it, from destruction. An exception was the night action off Guadalcanal in November 1942 when only 2,000 Japanese troops out of a planned reinforcement of 11,000 succeeded in landing on the disputed island. The example of the fate of convoy PQ17, only touched on in these pages, remains

the permanent and awful reminder of what is likely to occur when there are no forces to give battle in defence of a tempting target. Captain Bennett is absolutely impartial in his distribution of praise and blame, as firm in his criticism of error as he is generous in his praise of boldness, forethought and training. Much went wrong in all the warring navies, but most of them profited from their mistakes. The poor Italians had little opportunity to do so, yet eighteen months after Matapan an Australian-American force was surprised by the Japanese at night in the approaches to Guadalcanal with its turrets trained fore and aft, and suffered casualties comparable with those of the Italians. And three and a half years after the British had made a hash of the Norwegian campaign by failure to institute sensible command and control arrangements, the Americans could not bring themselves to adopt unified command of naval forces when the advances of Nimitz from the east and MacArthur from the south-east met for the assault in Leyte Gulf. 'No one knew how to make one of these two successful commanders subordinate to the other,' says the author. This need is precisely what political control of the armed forces is supposed to supply. Moreover it should have been easier in the United States, where the President is also the Commander-in-Chief. No doubt any attempt to impose unified command would have led to recrimination and some strongly worded signals of protest, but it could and should have been done. In the event the day was saved by the skilful and resolute handling of three American escort carrier groups and their aircraft. There is much else to which I should like to draw attention in this masterly description and analysis. I must content myself with just one warning: 'The maritime nations of the Free World would do well to remember the defeats

suffered by the US Navy in 1941-42 - echoes fills me with delight. To one who and "the reasons why".' The reasons, in was weaned from Dartmouth in 1931 the a nutshell, are firstly that a peace-loving description of the great mutinies of the administrative indemocracy tends to produce amateur 1797 and chickendither and fighting seamen condemned to learn competence, their profession in the hard school of heartedness are a tragic caricature of war, and secondly the dreadful tendency what we now know went on at Invertowards complacency and a superiority gordon. complex. As a n example of the latter As I think the author does, I have fault there is none more telling than always revered Admiral Sir William this quotation, here given in a footnote, James. Of all the addresses by old, and from a document of the British Joint not so old, codgers listened to patiently Planning Staff dated 1 January 1941: through ten years of speech days and 'The Japanese have never fought against similar occasions, forty or so years ago, a first-class Power in the air and we have only one such address remains today in no reason to believe that their operations the very forefront of my mind. I heard would be any more effective than those his talk entitled 'The Golden Moment' of the Italians.' British Army recruiting at Dartmouth and a few weeks later posters nowadays exhort our youth to when I joined his flagship H.M.S. Hood, 'join the professionals.' The Royal Navy I heard it again. Part of what Admiral and its Reserves cannot afford to be James said then went into Old Oak, anything less. and Professor Parkinson quotes some of T. P. AUBREY the best of it. What was new to me, but may not be to others better educated, was the BRITANNIA RULES common sense constantly exercised by by S. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON King George 111 in naval matters. (Weidenfeld and Nicholson-5.95) When a great historian devotes himself Further resemblance to the good sense to analysing and recording a few years and influence of another George after of one particular aspect of history much Invergordon. can be expected; and in this case no-one It may not be generally known that in the Report o f the Commission on could be disappointed. Britannia Rules deals with the classic Fuel and Oil 1913 the second paragraph age of our naval story in no wishy-washy (from recollection) records the instant sentimental way, but in a manner which reinforcement that would accrue to the brings out the people and the problems British Fleet by its ability to remain and of naval war and naval administration fuel at sea rather than be deprived of in both peace and war. Earthy people the 25% constantly coaling in harbour. and earthy problems, most of them; and This was forgotten by our XXth Century in almost every page there are echoes of Navy until the Americans taught us our naval and national problems today. once more in the Pacific that (to quote The 'Anonymous Critic' of the Fleet Admiral King): 'Mobility is the Government whose tract ended with prime military asset'. But St. Vincent these words 'And I look for the reduc- knew this elementary truth and, as tion of taxes till the resurrection of the Professor Parkinson writes: 'Under St. dead and 1 hope for better government Vincent nearly all repairs were to be in the world to come. Amen.' would I done at sea with the aid of a storeship think find an echo in most of our hearts. and any captain lingering in harbour And the subtle way in which Professor was called upon to explain what had Parkinson constantly brings out these detained him.' And then he speaks of

Dr. Baird who managed, through proper diet for the 28,000 seamen and marines, to have only sixteen men in the hospital ship, after a prolonged period a t sea. And 150 years later some of us had to peddle Scotch around the U.S. Fleet to procure salt tablets for our stokers and engineers dying of heat stroke, so bad were our medical services. As a description of the Nelsonic attributes to which we should all aspire, I have never read anything better or more pungent than the author's paragraph on page 124. This at least should be compulsory reading for all those who hope to be officers in the Fleet. Too often, in the past, and especially after a long period of peace we have forgotten the Nelson tradition. Something to be lived up to but never, never, just to be lived on. Apart from being readable in the extreme and therefore a book which can be wholly enjoyed, Professor Parkinson's story carries a lesson for all those who, today, bear the heavy responsibility for keeping the Fleet at sea. In his last paragraph the author incites someone to tell the naval story of the last seventy years of the XIXth Century. How I hope that he will do it himself. L. LE BAILLY
THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR by GEOFFREY BENNETT (Batsford-5.95) It is difficult to believe that anything new can be written about Trafalgar and yet Captain Bennett has managed it. I suppose it is a measure of the greatness of the Battle and not least of those who fought in it and who prepared the Fleet, that research, of the painstaking type which Captain Bennett has undertaken, will go on unearthing new and fascinating aspects of its greatness. I recall that ten years ago it was still one of the duties of the Commander, British Navy Staff, in Washington D.C.

and some of his Staff to give a series of lectures on the Trafalgar Campaign to the U.S. Army Staff College a t Fort Leavenworth. And what a help to us in this annual task Captain Bennett's book would have been. The particulars of the Fleet and the details of design of the different classes of ship are given with a clarity which I have not seen equalled and these will be of great use and interest not only to scholars but also to those in the future who are interested in one of Britain's, and the Navy's greatest moments. The author brings out the superiority of French ship design and also infers how the superlative training and morale (the St. Vincent/Nelson heritage) not for the first or last time in our Navy, overcame the materiel deficiencies. The book has its humorous anecdotes too and I only wish that when a recent C.-in-C. Home Fleet burnt up the ether with a signal forbidding me to take the Mayoress of Monterey by H. M. Ship from San Francisco to her home town (by day) I had been able to tell him that the Elephant's first broadside at Copenhagen had produced a premature birth on board, and that no such event need be feared on this occasion. I venture to differ from Captain Bennett on one small and unimportant detail as to how the Trafalgar Dispatch was received in the Admiralty. Viscount Cilcennin's account suggests that the drama unfolded as follows and not quite as Captain Bennett records it in Chapter 12: Into the Board Room at one o'clock in the morning on November 6th burst Lieutenant Lepenotiere, his uniform splashed with the mud of his travels. Mr. Marsden, the Secretary of the Admiralty, had just completed his night's work and had lit his candle to guide him to bed. 'Sir', cried Lepenotiere, 'we have gained a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson'. 'The effect thus

authors will be encouraged to pursue the vagaries of naval uniform a bit further. The opportunities are vast. When was the last occasion that all officers had to wear Full Dress of Trafalgar style on board H.M. ships? I guess the 1937 Review. When did the Board of Admiralty throw away their uniform and don morning dress for all official functions; and who put them back into uniform? I guess Chatfield. Who was the first admiral (in a triService post) who wore a woolly sweater and shoulder straps, as a habit, in peace time? What was the truth of the Mountbatten 'Convertible' Full Dress/ Mess Dress/Frock Coat, p r o u d 1y exhibited by Gieves after the war? The Beatty reefer; the small officer's cap; what were their histories? UNIFORMS AT TRAFALGAR And what of the sailor, and all the by JOHNFABB and JACKCASSIN-SCOTT different uniforms that he has worn? (Batsford London-4.50 (Casebound); Who knows? Perhaps my Full Dress 2.50 (Lilmp) ) purchased at such vast expense may yet In his Lees-Knowles Lectures in 1962 be worn; and my cocked hat too, on a General Sir John Hackett had this to say: more prestigious occasion than kicking The movement of the military off at the annual village 'Girls v. Boys' away from the civil has now in Football match. general been reversed. They have This excellent little book, which deals come closer together. Military skills almost definitively with the various are less exclusively specialist. The national uniforms at Trafalgar, makes miiltary community lives less apart. one hope most sincerely that the authors Uniforms are less worn in civilian will carry their researches further. And society. The working clothes of a not least to the present day when the general in the field are very like rather Ruritanian aspect now affected those of a machine minder, though by the Admiralty Board and the Council he still has something rather more Members of the other two Services, on grand to put by for special occa- official occasions, creates considerable sions. All soldiers like to put on and sometimes ribald, comment. pretty clothes now and then, but I L. LE BAILLY would prefer not to pursue the topic of dressing up too far, here, when I DIVISION OFFICER'S GUIDE am the guest in an ancient by Captain J. V. NOELJr. U.S. Navy university. (Ret'd) As it is with the Army so to some and extent with the Navy. And we have Commander F. S. BASSETT U.S. Navy sadly neglected the history of our uni(Patrick Stephens-6.10) forms. So this small, well illustrated and Changing customs over the past five delightful book is much to be com- years and a renewed emphasis being mended. Indeed one hopes that the placed on the moral and human aspects

produced on me', Mr. Marsden used afterwards to relate, 'it is not my purpose to describe. Lord Barham had retired to rest, as had the domestics, and it was not until after some research that I could discover the room in which he slept. Drawing aside the curtains with a candle in my hand, I woke the old man from a sound slumber. He showed no symptom of alarm but calmly asked "What news, Mr. Marsden? ".' But this is a book in which all students of naval history in general, and of the Trafalgar Campaign in particular, will delight. Much is new. All is beautifully set down. L. LE BAILLY

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of naval leadership are reflected in the seventh edition of Division Officer's Guide written for the United States Navy. The Guide aims to show divisional officers and petty officers how best to understand, motivate and inspire their men. The introduction emphasises the many and varied duties that a sea-going officer has to master and stresses that complete and effective participation by all leaders is not automatic; it takes planning, organisation, knowledge and skill. The authors outline a suggested typical day for a typical division officer in a guided missile frigate: 'Breakfast over by 0700 to give time before Quarters at 0740 to organise your day and read your message traffic.' This would make a number of R.N. Officers sit up. The capabilities and needs of the sailor are covered in some detail and the problems of young men, in particular drugs and alcohol, are also discussed. Chapters on organisation, administration and training follow, giving the junior officer a good insight into his responsibilities in these fields. I t would appear that our U.S. counterpart takes a more active role in the selection of duties and in the training process, which in the R.N. are more centrally controlled. I also get the feeling that his 'closer contact' enables a greater identification with his division than is possible with our present system. The actual training programme appears to be under the division officer's direct control and the chapter lists many

publications to which he will need t o refer from time to time. If you get confused with our BR system, try BUPERSMAN, TRANSMAN, NAVPERS, SECNAVINST and DODINST for the information you require. Discipline, how to carry out inspections, maintenance of equipment and the importance of Damage Control are also covered and two new chapters have been included for the first time: one on 'Counciling, Human Goals, Welfare' and the other on 'Correspondence', with examples of the different types in current use. And to conclude there is a rough guide for the division officer to estimate his measure of success. Whereas our Divisional Handbook deals in part with leadership and management of men, it is really a book of reference concerned with specific subjects, such as advancement, engagements and drafting. The Division Officer's Guide, on the other hand, provides a summary of what should be accomplished by division officers in the leadership and management of men. It is a well produced and readable book which offers sound advice to the young and inexperienced officer. It is pitched at a low level and much of it is commonsense and obvious. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the importance of the obvious and I think there may be something to be gained if we slipped a 'useful hints' chapter into our own Divisional Handbook. P.I.F.B.

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