Battle-Cruisers: A History 1908-48 by Ronald Bassett

Author:Ronald Bassett [Bassett, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2016-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

IV

The Ravages of Peace, the Race to Amend

Chapter Ten

The Armistice — growing lower-deck dissatisfaction — prize-money, pay and pensions — the assessment of the aircraft — the Washington Naval Treaty and the lean years of the twenties — the Invergordon Mutiny — prospects of another war

CONTRARY to the usual opinion, the war did not end in November 1918 for thousands of service personnel. In addition to the British troops and flying crews that remained on Russian territory, a considerable number of warships continued to be actively deployed in the White Sea, the Baltic, the Gulf of Finland, the Black Sea and the areas around Murmansk and Archangel, all engaged in supporting the dwindling and unreliable White Russian forces which still opposed, hopelessly, the Revolution. Like all who, when the captains, the kings and the brass bands have departed, find themselves still fighting a remote war in which nobody else seems to be interested, and for a cause for which they themselves have little sympathy, the naval forces involved were becoming increasingly discontented. Conditions were harsh; in the northerly theatres the climate was bitter, provisions were monotonously poor, mail was irregular and recreational facilities almost non-existent. It was disturbing to read in weeks-old newspapers that, within the twelve months following the Armistice, 415,000 naval personnel were to be discharged into highly paid civilian life, where there were homes fit for heroes and a chicken in every pot. Those same newspapers gave few column-inches to the ice-bound ships operating from Helsingfors, Libau and Reval. In the summer of 1919 the crew of the gunboat Cicala, ordered up the Dvina river from Archangel, refused to comply. Then a battalion of Royal Marines mutinied in Murmansk; and finally, three months later, the aircraft-carrier Vindictive[35] experienced a lower-deck revolt when, having come to Copenhagen from the Gulf of Finland to embark aircraft and stores, her shore-leave was cancelled because of bad weather.

Among warships in home ports the incidence of insubordination and sabotage increased. In October 1919, in Devonport, forty men in ships under sailing orders for Russia went absent without leave to complain to their MPs in London.

Although there was undoubtedly a keen awareness of political developments in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, there was never the slightest suggestion that British service personnel were thinking in terms of mutiny in the accepted sense of the word, far less of revolution. The protests were those of men, already war-weary, who found themselves distantly exiled in support of enterprises which were becoming progressively meaningless. Similar frustration would be experienced after the Second World War, when the armed forces, reduced to numbers even smaller than pre-war, were to be thinly stretched for uncomfortably long periods, to campaign in Palestine, Cyprus, Malaya and finally Korea.

During the two or three decades prior to 1914 the quality of lower-deck personnel had been steadily improving. In 1902, for instance, there were 373 courts-martial in a Navy of 104,724; in 1912 the number had fallen to 111 for a complement of 119,903. The armed

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