The Battles of Coronel and the Falklands, 1914 by Geoffrey Bennett

Author:Geoffrey Bennett [Bennett, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Battles, Naval, World War I
ISBN: 9781473834859
Google: VUcRBQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00ONZQ85E
Goodreads: 19157252
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Published: 2014-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

This in large part explains the Admiralty’s failings which led to Coronel.

Seriously defective though the machine was, it cannot absolve from responsibility those who were at the controls at the time. Pre-eminent, by virtue of office, was Churchill. For much of the eighteenth century and until after Trafalgar, the First Lord of the Admiralty was both a naval officer and in Parliament. Men like Anson, Hawke, Howe, St Vincent and Barham were as well qualified to conduct the affairs of the Navy in war as they were to answer for it to the nation. They combined, in effect, the offices of First Lord and First Sea Lord: before the nineteenth century the naval or professional lords were no more than their assistants (though Barham went so far as making the First the equivalent of Chief of Staff, thereby establishing the pre-eminent position which he has since occupied). The nineteenth-century ban on naval officers standing for Parliament put an end to this practice: the First Lord became a political figure; the direct control of the Navy passed into the hands of the First Naval Lord. But the very fact that Churchill had been sent to the Admiralty because Wilson had shown himself unwilling to co-operate with the War Office in planning for the expected war, and unwilling to institute the necessary reforms, was more than enough for a man of his calibre to concern himself directly with naval operations to a much greater degree than any other politician of his time. He was not leaving their conduct to the First Sea Lord.

Much that Churchill did in this sphere is not open to criticism; he alone among British statesmen of the First World War understood the advantage to Britain of a maritime strategy, notably his concept of forcing the Dardanelles which, if it had not been starved of the necessary ships and men, including competent commanders, by those who had no eyes except for the North Sea and the Western Front, if it had not been such a deplorable story of vacillation, delay and divided counsels among the Allied high commands, could so easily have succeeded, and ended the war earlier than 1918. But his methods of doing business, the constant bombardment of memoranda and minutes on every conceivable subject, the consultation with others on matters entirely within the province of the First Sea Lord, were bound to cause friction—though it was not until 1915 that he developed the objectionable habit of sending operational signals to naval authorities ‘from First Lord’ instead of ‘from Admiralty’, or of sending them ‘from Admiralty’ marked ‘First Sea Lord to see after despatch’. He was, moreover, only 40 years old; he could not always gain the support of his older colleagues in the Cabinet, though Hankey has recorded that ‘we owed a good deal in those early days to the courage and inspiration of Winston Churchill who, undaunted by difficulties and losses, set an infectious example to those of his colleagues who had given less thought than he, if indeed any thought at all, to war problems.

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