GERMANY'S GREAT BLUNDER.

Taihape Daily Times, 14 February 1918, Page 7

GERMANY'S GREAT BLUNDER.

In Sir Frederick Pollock’s criticism of Germany and the war shows how, with all the careful calcinations made years before, Germany made too light of the power of England. Speaking of British sca-power Sir Frederick says: “Looking back on the opening act of the present war, it is clear, at once, that the most decisive and, for Germany, the most far-reaching and shattering incident, was the fiist effort of British sea-power. By a stroke of either supreme good luck or of supreme warlike genius—or both—the British fleet was mobilised, and was actually placed in its vital war stations two days before war was declared. What was the effect of this? “German sea-power,” says Mr. Pollen “perished off the outer seas as effectually as if every surface ship had been incontinently sunk. There was not a day’s delay in our using the Channel exactly as if no enemy were afloat Within an hour of the declaration of war being known no German ship abroad cleared for a German port, nor did any ships in a German port clear for the open sea. The defeat was suffered without a blow offered in defence, and, for the purposes of trade and transport, it Avas an instantaneous as it was final.” The swiftness and certainty with which the British fleet seized all the stragetic sea-points, and the effect of that incident on the whole landscape, of the war, were for the German leaders on astonishment, Here was an event which threw their whole plan of the Avar out of gear! No arrangement provided for it. No forecast they made took it in. It became effective in almost the first hour after war Avas declared, and for . Germany itself, it was an overwhelming surprise. There is no other war. in secular history AA’hich began with a stroke so unexpected, so sudden and so instantly effective. And it Avas the Avar experts— Avho had been for years planning this Avar, elaborating every detail, and Avho had chosen the very moment at Avhich to strike, — avlio were, in this way, overtaken, by a fatal surprise from which Germany has never since recovered, And this surprise—to complete the story—was one to the action of the one nation in Europe which Germany believed Avould be too dull to foresee, and too slow to do anything; and which, as a result, would count for a more cipher in the arithmetic of the struggle. The only excuse which can be made for this fatal and tragical blunder on the part of the Avar experts of Germany is that they were pre-occupied in their great scheme of organising victory in terms of land warfare —the lightning-like stroke on Paris, the hurried and enforced peace with Franco, the SAving-baek on Eussia. But all this, as events have shOAvn Avas what may bo called one-eyed generalship; and a strategy Avhich is semiblind deserves defeat. Germany might have met England on the sea, with some chance, not of victory, but of inflicting such losses on the British fleet as would have temporarily lowered its fighting efficiency. Then Germany could have let loose on the Avidc oceans of the world her swift cruisers to harry our merchant-ships.