THE DARDANELLES.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1920, Page 6

THE DARDANELLES.

"LIONS LED BY ASSES." I LORD FISHER STOOD ALONE. A "MAN OF COURAGE AND IMAGINATION." (From Otago Daily Times Correspondent). London, Oct. 23. Lord Fisher's thesis is that England is ftn island, and in his "Memoires" he says '. that he was determined on pursuing a maritime policy in the war—which meant he would have landed a military force on Germany's Baltic shores, striking at the very heart of Prussia and Prussianism. With that end in view he prepared a programme of 612 new'ships. He objected to the Dardanelles operations from the,first, because the scheme was unsound, and because it endangered his great project; but he was anxious to remain at the Admiralty in order to push through his programme. He backed up Mr. Churchill until he resigned. "He had courage and imagination; he was a wannai!" In opposing the attack on the Dardanelles, Lord Fisher tells us that he stood alone, among Ministers as well as among experts. He urges that the expert is the adviser, and not the dictator; the ultimate responsibility in peace, as in war, rests with the Ministers in accordance with the principles of a constitutional Government. At anyrate, he was one against many. When, on May 14, 1915, Mr. Churchill drafted orders for further naval reinforcements for the Dardanelles, a course to which the First Sea Lord would not assent, Lord Fisher left, the Admiralty. He had threatened to resign lief ore; now he did resign, and dramatically,. as is his wont.

THE VEIL'LIFTED. Why did Lord Fisher resign his position as First Sea Lord? What part did he have in the inception and prosecution of the Dardanelles campaign? In the course of what he describes as his "peripatetic dictation," he lifts the veil from this groat adventure, referring, in parenthesis, to Zeebrugge:— "Now, if anyone "thinks that in this chapter they are going to see sport ana that I am going to trounce Mr. Winston Churchill and abuse Mr. Asquith, anfl put it all on poor Kitchener, they are woefully mistaken. ' It was a miasma like the invisible, scentless, poisonous—deadly poisonous—gas with which my friend Brock, of imperishable memory and Victoria Cross bravery, wickedly massacred at Zeebrugge, was going (in unison with a plan I had) to polish off ; not alone every human soul in Heligoland and its surrounding fleet, sheltered under its guns from the Grand Fleet, but every rabbit. Brook was lost to us in the massacre of Zeebrugge—lost uselessly; for no such folly was ever devised by fools as such an operation as that of Zeebrugge, divorced from military cooperation on land.

, "What were the bravest of the brave massacred for? Was it glory? Is the British Navy a young navy requiring glory? When 25 per cent, of ouv officers were killed a few days since, sinking two Bolshevik battleships, etc., and heroic on their own element, the sea, we all thank God, as wo should do, that Nelson, looking down on us in Trafalgar Square, feels his spirit is still with us. •But for sailors to go on shore and attack forts, which Nelson said no sailor but a lunatic would do, without those on shore of the military persuasion fo keep what you have stormed, is not only silly, hut it's murder, and it's criminal. "Also, by the time Zeebrugga was attacked the German submarine had got far beyond a fighting radius that required this base near the English coast. As Dean Inge says: "We must hope that in the Paradise of brave men the knowledge is mercifully hid from them that they died in vain." Again, this is a digression, but such must be the nature of this book when speaking > rotundo and from the fulness of a disgusted heart, that such lions should be led by such asses."

STAFFS AND WAR PLANS. Lord Fisher has sometime been criticised because he opposed the development of a great War Staff at the Admiralty. "Lord Haldane, with his 'art of clear thinking,'" he tells us, "elaborated the Imperial War Staff to its present magnificent dimensions," and he adds that "if any man wants a thing advertised, let him take it over there to tha Secret Department." He confesses that Arthur Wilson and myself, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, knew the naval plan of war." He then discusses current ideas with reference to a Naval War Staff.

"The vulgar error of Lord Haldane and others, who are always tjalking about 'clear thinking" and suchlike twaddle, is that they do not realise that the Army is so absolutely different from the Navy. Every condition in them both is different. The Navy is always at war, because it is always fighting winds and waves and fog. The Navy is ready for an instant blow; it has nothing to do with strategic railways, lines of communication, or bridging rivers, or crossing mountains, or the time of the year when the Balkans may be snowed under and mountain passes' may be impassable. No; the ocean is limitless and unobstructed; and the Fleet, each ship manned, gunned, provisioned, and fuelled, ready to fight within five minutes. The Army not only has to mobilise, but —thank God! this being an island—it has to be carried somewhere by the Navy, no matter where it acts." NELSON SLIGHTED. In Lord Fisher's opinion, "the mischief to the Navy is that our very ablest naval officers, both old and young, get attracted by the brainy work and \v the shore-going appointment," and he adds, "the land is a shocking bad training ground for the sea." His view is that "so far as the Navy is concerned, the tendency of these 'thinking establishments' on shore is to convert splendid sea officers into very iudifforent clerks." Later on in the book Lord Fisher's mind switches back to Nelson, and he agrees with Lord Roschery that "Nelson beins slighted has led to his greater appreciation."