 It's an honour to be here. I am something of a groupie for the Naval War College, and I remember as a research scholar the only problem was the Admiral President had changed and for about 15 months the President always wondered what on earth I was doing because for 15 months I was able to do that most unusual of naval officer things and actually do and literally do my own thing studying the history of South and Southeast Asian navies. Now let me start with a story because it's a what I'm going to talk about is the clash of emergent communications technology and the Royal Navy but actually the Naval Cultural Command in the First World War but I want to tell a little story sort of as a metaphor because actually it's about how command doesn't work if you haven't got the idea of the tactical offensive right and this is a true story about an Admiral and the little old lady and the little old lady's mastery of the tactical offensive. Admiral Sir Charles Little was the Chief Naval Personnel and the Royal Navy in the early part of World War II. He was a Submariner not surprisingly he was six foot four and a big bloke. Now he was at Paddington Station in London without his staff to meet his wife who's coming up from the West Country and he was early and of course it being wartime with the train she was late so he's standing there he's a four-star Admiral he's in full naval uniform because it's during the war and he's six foot four so he's obviously an impressive figure. He's quite happy to be standing there by himself because nobody's disturbing him so he's just in a quiet reverie waiting sort of 10 or 15 minutes for his wife's train when suddenly he feels a sharp prod in the small of his back and an imperious voice says you there my man and he turns around and there is the quintessential little old lady. Lognets five foot high the whole bit and she looks at him and says which platform is the train to Oxford going from my man and he looks at her and looks up at the billboards and goes platform 10 man and she says good now take my bags and come come with me. Well he looks at the little old lady and it's wartime and she does have two large bags with her and there are not many porters around and he does have 10 to 15 minutes to spare and he's been well brought up so he says certainly ma'am picks up the bags and goes with her to platform 10 and as they approach the train he says which class are you traveling ma'am and she looks at him and says first of course yes ma'am and she says when they arrive at a first-class carriage he says she says now you can help help me in certainly ma'am so opens the door helps her in she says now put my bags up at the rack above yes ma'am puts the bags up he steps back and says is there anything else you need and she says oh yes could you get my steamer rug out of that bag so undoes the bag gets the rug out closes the bag spreads the rug over her knees and says no is there anything else you need and the little old lady says now yes you've done everything I asked you that's good now I must give you a tip and never goes no no no no no no that's quite a right and then she opens her bag pulls out her purse and hands six months to him she says of course I must give you a tip it's not as if you're a midshipman so now today marks for me a stage and a personal journey as a midshipman in my last year at university I embarked upon the writing of a study of the opening of the Great War at sea in the North Sea it was a book called the kingships were at sea which was published when I was qualifying as a principal warfare officer or TAO equivalent in my mid-20s now despite its mistakes I remain proud of that book but even though the analysis within it had already been profoundly affected by my sea services a junior officer including time serving the Royal Navy in the North Sea when I discovered that it was a lot more complicated than I thought my perspective has changed a lot further over more than 30 years now three things in particular have contributed to this firstly the products of an increasingly sophisticated approach to the naval history of the period before 1914 these tackle subjects critical to understanding the operational record and they're also marked by recognition of the complexity of the problems that navies faced in an era of extraordinary change and they're also based on a much more comprehensive use of the archives than was before possible the nature of history of historiography has changed because of digital photography there's no question in my mind but second over the years despite this new work I developed an uncomfortable feeling than in some areas our actual understanding was diminishing with the passing of the last veterans we moved in some ways further from such understanding than when I started writing in 1978 there've been many areas of illumination but in fact we no longer comprehend much of the way in which ships were worked and fought in 1914-18 indeed the interest in the Napoleon in the Apollo in the sorry Nelsonic era and the combination of extensive research historically informed fiction and the operation of replicas as well as continuing square rigged sail training have meant that our knowledge of what was happening on board the victory and her sisters in 1805 is greater than that for iron duke and the Grand Fleet in 1914 we could take victory a constitution to see and we would know how to sail them we know enough about the weapons technology that I reckon we could probably put together a crew in a couple of months you could not do that for a coal burning dreadnought like the iron duke or like the Texas was now the deficiency of understanding becomes even more apparent comparing naval history with that of land forces particularly on the Western Front army historians continue to debate but there is now a body of work which has profoundly changed our view of the land war dispel the myth of lions led by donkeys and above all conveyed the complexity of the environment and the learning curves that all concerned had to follow for the war at sea understanding of the conflict is still much less complete the third factor I'll be frank I grew up I gained insights by service around the world and increasingly responsible appointments now one insight in particular caused me to look at 1914 with different eyes I'm old enough not only to have been taught to navigate out of sight of land without artificial age such as radio beacons and satellites but to have had to do so for extended periods weeks I'm also old enough to have had to operate computerized combat systems and data links between ships and aircraft before the era of the global positioning system the truth is they didn't work very well the difference which GPS makes in maintaining a share a shared frame of reference with other units is so profound that when people talk of the recent revolution and military affairs I always think first and primarily of GPS it was comprehending just how important and just how much it changed things that this new shared certainty a position made me realize not only how difficult must have been the problems that the navigators and commanders of 1914 faced in knowing where they were and where others were in relation to them but also how vital their solutions were in determining operational success or failure so all this changed my outlook on the first world war I realized the truth of the comment in the official narrative of the battle of Jutland that determining just what did happen and why is more of the nature of a complicated complicated mosaic or or puzzle picture whose composition requires a great deal of knowledge skill and patience how much can only be known by those who tried it what it seemed important to me 30 years ago no longer appeared so significant but elements which I barely recognized in my original analysis now look fundamental to understanding what happened in 1914 I became less critical of some errors and more of others now we're inclined to consider the Fisher era as a continuum from Jackie Fisher's accession as first sea lord in 1904 but in reality the pace of development not only accelerated but became truly multi-dimensional only after about 1910 just as the great reformer went into into his first retirement we only have to look at what was happening with submarines the first diesel powered British submarine really didn't demonstrate its capability until 1910 that's the year it was first trialing wireless wireless and he started to be systematically fitted to submarines in 1912 and 1913 and by the way the Germans are not as advanced to the British except the diesels work better aircraft this is only two years before 1914 but the pressures were intensifying in the years immediately before 1914 and I believe that those involved were struggling to learn a new language of naval operations and warfare with an incomplete dictionary and very little grammar now my key argument today is that the Royal Navy of the Great War had lost to a great extent but without at first realizing the culture of the tactical offensive which had been epitomized by Nelson in person and in writing by his declaration on the eve of Trafalgar that nothing in battle is certain and that something must be left to chance now I want to explain not only what I think was some of the causes the Royal Navy's lack of aggression but also the way in which the service recovered what it had lost a recovered a recovery triumphantly and consciously demonstrated the battle of the River Plate in 1939 when three more lightly armed cruisers took on and literally neutralized the German armoured ship Admiral Graf Spade why this subject well I've often been struck by the aphorism that history may not repeat itself but it does sometimes rhyme I believe that there are rhymes between the present and a century ago rhymes which make me think that we might also be experiencing cultural and systemic changes which threaten our military effectiveness particularly our ability to manage and exploit ambiguity and uncertainty two particular rhymes of 2016 with 1916 are apparent to me one is that the ever greater reliance upon networks and the instantaneous exchange of information in what have since the end of the Cold War been largely uncontested electronic environments may have created what I call a virtual unreality and with it an expectation that higher command will always be accessible not only to give direction but to be consulted thus our people at sea complain they're being micro managed which is probably true but at the same time they are reluctant to do anything without first clearing it with their seniors they would rather ask permission than seek forgiveness the second rhyme is that our approach to workplace health and safety and to risk management or rather the process fixated procedures which seem inevitably associated with them might well be affecting to our detriment our operational outlook language and decision making systems are both important elements in determining and creating culture and it seems to me that much of the language and at least some of the processes that we're using these days might be creating a culture that's not risk management that is risk avoidance so as I talk I asked that you listen for these rhymes now the Royal Navy finished the Great War with a strong sense of missed opportunities Admiral Sir David Beatty sought to console the men of the Grand Fleet in the wake of the German surrender the aim might have been achieved but he ate as all eight to give them another dose of what we had attended intended for them and I've just been reading the first person account of an American naval officer who said that he just felt ashamed about the whole thing for the German Navy no matter that the British the Britain had won the war the Royal Navy had not managed to give the high-sea fleet the dose it had intended now some of that disappointment was unreasonable Nicholas Rogers spoken of the Navy's fixation contrary to all its history on the decisive battle and that it would somehow inevitably occur as the Navy should well have known the weaker high seas fleet would never rationally seek action except in the most favorable circumstances just as the Grand Fleet would never rationally allow itself to be embroiled in the killing ground of the inner Heligoland bite in which the Germans had done most of their pre-war exercises but much of the disappointment was justified time after time commanders had failed to exploit the fleeting opportunities which are the only opportunities ever offered at sea and time after time enemy forces had escaped when they might have been engaged there were several factors for this first were over simple comparisons of military strength this came about from a combination of the mathematical approach involved a much gunnery work with what could be called a war game mentality and this is a copy of a war game played on board SMS Magdeburg which was captured by the Russians with a large number of other documents when the ship ran aground of Odin's home light in 1914 but these games are based on two little real experience of the interaction of the emerging capabilities with conditions at sea ships recorded points for their weapons armor and speed and the games adjudicated according to who had the great air fighting power and theoretical resistance when in range given that they were predicted hitting rates the heavier and longer range weapons inevitably won and this method of methodology extended to exercises at sea too many was set piece closer to a chess match than the uncertainties of operating within complete information they were conducted for limited periods little consideration was given to the vagaries of visibility or surprise they were conducted at scale down speeds to save fuel the annual grand maneuvers effectively the only free play simulations still have many of these limitations if an umpire assessed that you got within range for more heavily armed opponent you were judged as out of action David Beatty experienced this in 1913 his battlecruiser was ruled as having been put out of action by an opposition squadron despite having been in sight for only a few minutes he bitterly resented the umpire's decision and if there were an element of ego as there always was with David Beatty in his contesting the ruling it is clear that Beatty recognized this approach militator against risk taking against the imagined deployment of forces and against taking a more sophisticated approach to maneuvering and the use of firepower had there been more realistic exercises which included more live firings the Royal Navy might have better understood the difference between the results of a war game and what was really going to happen at sea but that it did not reach this point was not because people were complacent or entirely misguided for the pace of technological change was so fast in the years immediately before the war that learning how to use it all was a problem arguably impossible to solve in the time available before August 1914 we also need to appreciate just how financially restricted the Royal Navy was money had to be found for the new 15 inch gun battleships and oil firing and at sea training amongst other things took a heavy hit you have only to read the intense admiralty demands for improved fuel economy in the fleet to understand this I will add as a side note that the Germans had even less money as I said almost all tactical exercises were conducted at scale down speeds this allowed the correct relative movement of ship types but was in no way preparation for the challenges of combat in such circumstances more than 50 pound sterling for heavy shell and a thousand pounds for practice torpedo and nearly as much for a practice mine both of which could all too easily be lost it should not be surprising that the true capabilities of the new weapons and thus the techniques needed to deal with them should go unexamined what was also not properly appreciated in set piece largely visually conducted exercises was the problem of radio because the full conceptual and practical difficulties associated with its use really only became apparent in the grand maneuvers and these were neither frequent law nor long enough to fully make the point to all who needed to understand it the Royal Navy was entering the era of over the horizon warfare but had yet to comprehend that fact in full this would have serious implications the Royal Navy had what I would call a bipolar culture of command it was a by polarity perhaps at its most extreme at the beginning of the 20th century Andrew Gordon has written an extraordinary book called the rules the game examining the failures at Jutland he presents a compelling picture the way that an over controlling approach to tactics and maneuvers created a system of operating a fleet at sea which was incapable of controlling events under the actual stress of combat his thesis the conflict between what he turned the regulators who wanted to control the members of every unit all the time and the rat catches is a persuasive one but I want to take a slightly different tack for by their nature navies arguably are always schizophrenic in nature and they're going always to be schizophrenic if ships are in company then the culture is one of obedience to allow the admiral to coordinate his or her force to achieve the operational intent I would argue that this is still the case because it generally works and disobedience by subordinate in your vicinity such as Nelson's apparent disobedience to the battle of capes and Vincent in 1797 is the sort of exception that proves the rule tight control by the way is generally more effective if it has achieved by ensuring prior understanding of the admiral's intent rather than frequent signaling nevertheless I've been an admiral and if I can see you you do what I tell you but some of the problems the British would be caused by more than the tight control of formations at sea because a source of obsessive compulsive outlook extended much more widely than that it actually extended to control of everything following the flagship movements and routines was compulsory if the flagship ed bedding so did you if the flagship spread ordering so did you if the flagship declared a make and mend an afternoon off so did you this sort of thing continued for decades day after day in every fleet or squadron when assembled creating not so much what has been called a culture of senior officer veneration but one I would call a culture of the senior officer present and I think there's a distinction because this idea of presence making the difference is important because there was another part to this naval split personality if officers were detached out of visual contact before radio they were expected to use their initiative and they did just as they'd done during the Napoleonic Wars during the century the Pax Britannica such enterprise was consistently demonstrated creating an expectation summed up by the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston's declaration that if he had a problem he'd send a naval officer but the difficulty with radio in this new over-the-horizon situation was that created its own virtual unreality the term I've already mentioned in our own context a virtual unreality that a Navy which worked by the senior officer present was all too ready to immerse itself within the potential wireless to allow remote coordination of widely separated forces was appreciated almost from the first in fact a naval officer was actually as much an inventor of the wireless as Marconi just as the potential of the telegraph cable have been recognized in the 19th century the Abnerty is one of the earliest enthusiastic adopters of the use of telegraph communications before 1914 the Abnerty made heroic efforts to develop what can only be called network-enabled warfare with an Abnerty war room is the operational command center but radios had problems of range reception wavelength mutual interference and reliability while there difficulties with security the time taken to encrypt and decrypt signals and above all with a combined true and relative areas of navigation which meant that the pool of errors was often very much greater than the prevailing visibility particularly in the North Sea where the average visibility is between three and eight miles and is often less so even if you are told where the enemy was and in which direction he was heading there was no guarantee or even probability that you would find him these slides make the point particularly this one whoops concerning the fact that the two B pencil draw on the chart is often greater than the visibility there was at least partial awareness of the problems we tend in 2014 to think of communications something practically instantaneous but it was clear to most in the Navy who are working on this problem a century ago that it was not even after the invention of radio an expert in 1906 estimated that the effective speed of visual signaling rarely exceeded two and a half miles per minute think about it and was often slower the early experience of radio showed that its problems even when ciphers were not in use in other words when you're doing plain language meant that its effective speed was often not much better and sometimes very much worse and the greater the distance it does seem the greater the delay even if that relative speed is increasing further more neither the language nor the concepts for communication by radio existed this was at the root of many of the Navy's problems and why Army observers of naval maneuvers had very good reason to criticize even if they were not always sufficiently alert to the inherent differences between the services staff work particularly in logistics which is fundamentally different one senior observer noted that the preparation of orders is not understood in the Navy making all allowance for the general differences inherent to the two services and what he's really trying to explain is that what the Navy had yet to do was to develop a system for coordinating remote formations in a tactical environment something with which the Army had been struggling for more than a century and from an in fact for which they'd invented the staff officer there were thus key aspects of understanding to be resolved this is really important you've got to understand this before radio all tactical reporting at sea is visual this meant that absolute positional errors didn't matter because basically what you're talking about is the horizon or a very low multiple of it what a commander was interested in is what the enemy bore and in what direction the enemy was steaming because that gave you a course to close you could approximate everything else out and it's still true at sea if you could see a ship it's actually bearing and bearing movement that really matters you sort of got the range implicit a remote report required not only more precision and the greater the distance the more important precision was and just to get you back to that problem and navigation a very experienced World War one navigator who'd been navigating a squadron of the Grand Fleet for basically the whole war said he never knew where he was within five miles after eight hours okay and by the way just reading the captain of the Milius's enthusiastic report of the navigation by stars that his ensigns were doing with the merchant Marine cadets I was quite struck by the fact that he was saying I was within four miles but also the report required much more information because all your scout has to tell you there enemy bears this steering that that's enough the first British radio format for an enemy contact report did not include either the enemy or the reporting unit's position because conceptually it just hadn't worked through so the concept furthermore the concept and the practice of having a tactical plot in other words where all the movements are placed down so that you can actually make decisions in near real time took years to work out the British do seem to have invented at first I get the impression the American Navy by the way was about 12 months behind the Germans don't seem to have ever got it but it took a long time to get something that worked in terms of giving information to the fleet commander for remote tact tactical decision-making by the way my view is it didn't really work until we got GPS but that's another story but the virtual unreality came in the fact that many commanders began to behave as though their remote senior officer always knew more than they did sometimes in direct contradiction of what they themselves were seeing during the grand maneuvers there were multiple instances of officers failing to act on their own initiative because they thought that higher authority somehow knew more than they did too many were in short in the culture of the senior officer present so the fleet was in for a shock when the war began now the deficiencies for this combination of reasons became rapidly apparent in 1914 the most notorious incident was when rear Admiral Trubidge commanding the Mediterranean arm and cruiser squadron decided not to engage the battlecruiser Gerben and her consort the light cruiser Breslau because he believed them a superior force due to the battlecruiser's higher speed and heavier gun gun armament he had ambiguous instructions but was finally persuaded by the advice of his flag captain the gunnery specialist convinced that the Gerben will be able to pick off the weaker and slower British ships one by one given the disastrous losses of British armored cruisers at Jutland two years later he had a point but it's also true the Trubidge could have divided his forces he was between Gobern and where Gobern wanted to be in Turkey put them either side of Gobern's intended track and forced the German to turn away and divide her firework trying to keep out of range he also had a light cruiser and two destroyers in company as well now any kind of severe damage to the Gobern even a very heavy British loss would nullified her strategic value might well have meant the Turkey never entered the war think about that as a strategic consequence of a tactical decision but what isn't generally known by the way is that one of the destroyer captains was Lieutenant Commander by the name of Andrew Brown Cunningham I have a view that this incident marked him for life he can't talk about it in his memoirs he gives it one line but you read the line and you get a sense this is not a happy person about what happened now his decision caused outrage in the service at Trubidge's decision he was court-martialed but acquitted which caused further outrage the former First-Sea Lord Prince Louie Battenberg summed up the feelings of many complaining of that amazing court-martial which laid down that a British officer was justified in declining action unless in overwhelming superiority so as to ensure that I shall suffer the minimum damage shades of Nelson ironically the tragedy of Coronel in October 1914 at which the armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth were destroyed by a superior German force may have in part come about because the Admiral Christopher Craddock thought he had no alternative but to engage in the light of Trubidge's failure but incidents in the North Sea only confirmed the problem in late 1914 the Germans send two light cruisers to attack the British destroyer patrols one the Strahlsund came into contact with the first destroyer flotilla lead by the light cruiser Fearless the jet the destroyers recognized the German for what she was a light cruiser but the British flotilla commander in the Fearless mistook Strahlsund for the much more powerful armoured cruiser York and turned his force away to search for heavy support the destroyers who had identified the Strahlsund were furious the navigator one noted and I quote him that they were virtually throwing things at the Fearless and protested and what the diaries called a tirade of signals but their flotilla commander would still have been mistaken in withdrawing even if the ship were the York he had a whole destroyer flotilla with them by making a multi-pronged dash at the German he would have rapidly created a situation beyond the slower single units capacity to control as it was his recognition that the ship was not the York came too late and the Strahlsund which ironically was made deeply suspicious by the immediacy of the British withdrawal that she was being led into a trap made her escape to such tactical failures must be added the failures of the virtual unreality during the Scarborough raid of December 1914 when the German battlecruisers bombarded British ports a mistakenly addressed signal from David Beatty caused his light cruiser Commodore William Goddner a good enough shown here with his flagship the Southampton to break off action with German light cruisers and withdraw to find the flagship line this was a completely mistaken decision he may have believed that's what he'd been told to do but he had only informed Beatty by this point that he was in contact with one enemy ship by the time he received the order to withdraw he was fighting three and if you're fighting three German light cruisers you're fighting the main scouting force of the enemy's battle cruiser formation this fact should have made it blindingly clear that Beatty signal could not have been made with a full understanding of the situation and therefore should not have been obeyed the British forces lost contact with the Germans in the worsening conditions there was only one fleeting opportunity when in the midst of squalls and mist HMS Orion flagship of the second division of the second battle squadron cited a German light cruiser but the rear admiral concerns to Robert Arbuthnot refused his flag captain's plea to open fire with the response no not until the vice admiral signals open fire the fact that the flagship the King George the fifth could not see the enemy at this point in what was pretty poor visibility made this restraint equally mistaken I don't propose to discuss the 1916 battler Jutland in detail my concern is not with the overall policy of the Grand Fleet's commander Admiral Jellica in being cautious with his battle line even if this became the center of much of the later debate but amidst all the controversies it is clear that there was also a practical universal unease about clear failures of reporting of initiative and aggression during the night when the Germans pass through the rear elements of the Grand Fleet and made their escape whether or not the way that he led and trained the Grand Fleet was a factor my view that it is Jellica himself was busy it was bitterly disappointed by the lack of enterprise displayed by a number of admirals and ship captains a disappointment with that was part of his later admonition against the virtual unreality as he said never think that the CNC sees what you see now those problems were really summed up by an officer who's a captain in 1918 who wrote the Royal Navy in the First World War had an insufficient insistence on the imperative need of really coming to grips so what happened after 1918 well it's true much to say there was an immediate revolution but the sense one gains of in is of increasingly well coordinated efforts to improve which gained momentum as the 1920s gave way to the 30s this was partly possible because of a generally well managed naval staff but the increasing influence of officers who had direct experience their seniors failures was very important and I think such experience matters I have to say reading and looking at all this although a lot of the people I'm going to talk about did extraordinary things in very high command positions in the war it may be the most important contribution you can make as a combat veteran is training up the people who are going to be the junior ones next time around what certainly would have helped I think was that there was a much clearer understanding of the British Empire's strategic situation its global commitments and thus the Navy's role to site Nicholas Roger again it resulted in a recognition that Britain had few if any unsatisfied requirements and that the strategic defensive was its natural approach but being on the strategic defensive does not mean you don't have to take the tactical offensive now there are a number of other strands of effort a vital element was the selection of officers for senior seagoing rank the reductions of peace gave the Admiralty a priceless advantage by comparison with expansion the pre-war era it could be highly selective the weight given to prove an initiative was clearly considerable and the advantage this gave to former submariners and destroyer captains was obvious the promotions to flag rank bear this out those device admiral on the active list between 34 and 36 show it happened of 15 officers nine had been awarded the distinguished service order the nearest American equivalent as the Navy cross of these three had earned it in submarine command and three in destroyers rear admirals of the same seniority tell a similar story four submarin and four destroyed DSOs out of a total of 28 officers 12 of whom had the award now this age group I will admit is particularly significant because it's worth noting that a 32 year old lieutenant commander in 1914 could be a 42 year old captain in 24 and a 52 year old rear admiral in 1934 and this age group included Andrew Cunningham James Somerville Bertram Ramsey and Max Horton to name only four no matter how brilliant the specialist officer nor how significant their staff or ship service all were placed under a microscope the key testing ground seems to be in big ship command let me emphasize that much more was expected than demonstrated extreme bravery people such as Gordon Campbell who was the Q ship the mystery ship guy World War One who had a Victoria Cross and two distinguished service orders did not get promoted to Admiral on the active list the desire to improve the officer call was not confined to its upper levels an important stream of activity was improving the initiative and self-reliance of junior officers through changes in the regime of education and training and a very good book based in his thesis been published by surgeon rear admiral Mike Farquas and Roberts quite recently another factor was the realization that the Royal Navy would not necessarily enjoy technological superiority of its opponents even with an ever-thickening veil of secrecy it became apparent that the Japanese were spending large amounts to modernize their battle fleet more than the British could afford it was already clear that the Americans were doing so this place to premium on identifying tactics which would minimize British disadvantages and was why not just because the experience of Jutland the British spent so much time between the wars improving their night fighting techniques the creation of a tactical school was a key innovation this by the way is the Australian floor and I thought you'd be pleased to see there's an American officer it established a much better balance between calculations of hit probabilities and the development of tactics which would confuse the enemy and create opportunities for well-handled forces smoke screens adaptive formations and evasive maneuvering with just a few of the techniques there was a healthy dialogue including the regular progress a publication of progress in tactics with the results of exercises and trials to be fair the interwar Navy had the priceless advantage of time which had not been available before 1914 but there was a sophistication which had not been present before risk taking in battle tactics was accompanied by a willingness to take physical risks with ships and I believe this was vital officers such as Chatfield William Fisher Cunningham and Somerville all contributed and the wider attitude being engendered was summed up by Admiral Fisher's response to Captain Philip Vines Frank admission of fault in a birthing accident Vine who became an admiral of the fleet in later years said I was told to be more careful in future but the commander-in-chief added a paragraph in the sense that it liked the manner of the confession because Vine had said it was my fault Fisher himself put his money where his mouth was by forcing a night action by the Mediterranean fleet on the home fleet during the 1934 maneuvers and when you're bringing battleships in the dark within 2,000 yards of each other in formation at high speed in bad weather you're taking some risks Andrew Cunningham was not alone when he made his assertions after a collision between two of his destroyers that broken eggs were inevitable in making an omelette this insistence on seizing the moment was not only applied to exercises during the Spanish Civil War the Italians secretly supported the nationalist fascist cause by dispatching submarines to attack shipping their efforts were not very accurate they were certainly less than discriminating in 1937 when one attacked the destroyer Havoc the captain's signal for instructions his apparently less than aggressive response was immediately addressed by the flag officer who was running the operation Admiral Somerville since Havoc had not immediately retaliated Somerville ordered the destroyer to pursue the hunt with the utmost energy and try to make up your outstanding lack of initiative now I've been an admiral I've sent this sort of signal quite often you send it Dell text commanding officer only special cipher with the idea that the only person apart from the actual you know in fact the captain's had to break it himself he's the only person who will read it we'll know that's completely untrue that in fact if you send a signal like this it will be round the fleet in a nanosecond and it's like for British shooting Admiral Bing as Voltaire said to you know to encourage the others you get the message out in my view Somerville is sending a message now they didn't catch the submarine but the captain personally must have got the message he was in destroyers for most of World War two and finished it with a distinguished service order and a second award and a distinguished service cross and a second award now there were misdirections whatever benefits of games for ship spirit whoops and for individual fitness and alertness their excessive claims about the relationship between sport and fighting instincts and perhaps too much effort devoted to competitive intership sport as opposed to encouraging healthy group activity safety did sometimes still exert too strong an influence night operations by submarines were almost non-existent and restrictions on their interaction with surface forces created tactical unreality but to be fair the consequences of any submarine accident were likely to be much greater than all but the most serious of surface encounters and in fact the British lost quite a number of submarines to accident between the wars I also don't claim there was unanimity on the subject of command and control it is quite clear that there was a fissure over the management of fleets and the role of fleet staffs much commentary particularly in relation to the celebrated falling out between Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse the commander in chief and then rear Admiral Bertrand Ramsey his chief of staff has been given to the problem of overcentralization within staffs and the commanders who attempted to do too much themselves but an equal problem arguably one that has dogged the Royal Navy incessantly in the years since and which still bedevils other navies and I won't name any names was that of overcentralization into staffs and the misemployment of such staffs and uncreated work particularly that of minding the individual business of worked up ships rather than thinking about operations and war however by 1939 the Royal Navy had successfully learned most of the lessons needed to achieve effective remote coordination of operations at sea and take the tactical offensive I want to recognize here Admiral Sir Dudley Pound who commanded the Mediterranean between 1936 and 1939 and went on to be first sea Lord Pound has his faults of over control and overcentralization but I think his reputation has been diminished unfairly by the difficulties he faced in dealing with Winston Churchill who repeatedly demonstrated in 1940 and after that although he had been the cause of some of the problems in 1914 he had not learnt the same lessons of operational command Pound himself had been determined to instill a culture of enterprise for him the unforgivable sin a naval officer could commit was a failure to make a decision and act even Philip Byron of Altmark fame commented on Pound's leaning towards dangerous maneuvers with head-on close-quarter approaches and line of bearing intersections of columns by an emphasize the pound ordered these maneuvers to be executed before it was possible to calculate a solution captains just had to make a judgment and trust to be able to adjust the situation as it evolved pound was desperately anxious that commanders at sea would not hesitate to make such judgments and this was his way of ensuring it thus when three British cruisers under Commodore Henry Howard encountered the graph spay off the river plate in October 1939 the British had set the conditions for the encounter Howard had considered and gamed imaginatively the problem and knew what to do like Waterloo it was a damn nice thing the nearest-run thing you've ever seen in your life not everything went well for the British the Exeter was very nearly sunk and the Ajax and Achilles likely to lucky to escape relatively unharmed but the graph space suffered critical damage and was driven into harbour from which you'd only emerge to be scuttled one small but significant subtext is the Admiral Pound monitoring events from Whitehall and company with Churchill had to devote much effort to restrain his political master from sending directive signals on this occasion he was successful in the wake of the action Pound wrote to Howard to praise him for his achievement and to declare that he had set the standard for the war to come a matter which he felt was a great importance and indeed there are other letters between the four stars in operational command saying exactly the same thing Pound emphasized not only that Howard had acted correctly but that he would have been right to engage the graph spay even if his entire force was sunk in doing so Howard himself believed that the battle had indeed succeeded in restoring the balance and he was also conscious of this if you look at his papers but what is equally to the point so did the rest of the Navy so let me finish with an Australian element in the Mediterranean 1940 Captain John Collins one of the first graduates the Royal Australian Naval College and a product of service and training in both the RAN and the Royal Navy decided on his own initiative to reposition his ship the Australian light cruiser Sydney by nearly 100 miles keeping radio silence to maintain surprise the result was the rescue of a group of embattled British destroyers and the destruction of the Italian light cruiser Bartolomeo Collione it's the exchange with Admiral Cunningham the fleet commander after Sydney got back to harbour that's significant on both sides when asked what made him move as he did by the commander-in-chief Collins jokingly replied providence guided me sir to which Cunningham said well in future you can continue to take your orders from Providence so I think the balance had been restored the question I put is how well balanced are we today thank you very much