Days to Remember: The British Empire in the Great WarBuchan, John
History
Days to Remember: The British Empire in the Great War
Buchan, John
World War, 1914-1918
It was clear that Admiral Scheer had no intention of further fighting.
He had a zeppelin out scouting, and admits that she reported to him the
position of the British fleet. But he was in no condition to move. He
had inflicted on us a loss of three battle-cruisers, three armoured
cruisers, and eight destroyers; while of his own ships one battleship,
one battle-cruiser, four light cruisers, and five destroyers had been
sunk. But his effective force had been diminished out of all proportion
to ours; his battle-cruisers were in no condition to fight; he had
discovered that the whole squadron of pre-dreadnoughts were unable to
lie in a modern line of battle, while six of the remaining fifteen were
unfit to be anywhere but in dock; of his eleven light cruisers ten had
been hit, and four of them sunk. He had, in short, no fleet to make a
fight with; whereas Admiral Jellicoe had available twenty-six powerful
battleships, all but four of them untouched, six battle-cruisers out of
nine, and all his light forces, except three cruisers sunk and three
hard hit.
More fatal still, then and for ever, was the injury to the moral stamina
and tradition of the German fleet. In that one day they passed from the
militant to the mutinous state of mind, and their commander knew it. As
Captain Persius wrote afterwards in the _Berliner Tageblatt_: "The
losses sustained by our fleet were enormous, in spite of the fact that
luck was on our side; and on June 1, 1916, it was clear to every one of
intelligence that this fight would be, and must be, the only one to take
place. Those in authority have often admitted this openly." The Kaiser
did his best to shout our victory down, and he was seconded, though more
feebly, by German admirals who knew better. But the High Sea Fleet had
failed completely to challenge the control of the sea, and henceforth
degenerated towards the final surrender.
*CHAPTER XXVI.*
*THE BRITISH SUBMARINE SERVICE.*
The war record of the British submarine service is unique; the
difficulties and dangers which our men faced and overcame were such as
no other navy has attempted. The patrol of the shallow Belgian coast
and the hunting down of U-boats was a very different task from
torpedoing merchant vessels or hospital ships without warning; and the
campaigns in the Marmora and the Baltic were conducted under conditions
which had no parallel elsewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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