It was all very unfortunate, because any rightly organized system of inquiry, investigation, and experiment, would have dissipated this atmosphere of mystery once and for all. When new inventions are made that affect the processes of industry, it is not the men who go about talking of their “untold possibilities,” their “incalculable” effects, and their “immeasurable” results, that get the commercial advantage of their development. It is those who take immediate steps to investigate the limits of their action and the precise scope of their operations who turn new discoveries to account. To talk as if the performance of guns, torpedoes, submarines, and aircraft were beyond human calculation, was really a confession of incompetence. The application to these things of the principles of inquiry universally employed in other fields was always perfectly simple, and had it been employed we should not have begun the war with wondering what we could do, but knowing precisely what we ought to do. It was want of preparation in these matters that was undoubtedly one of the deciding factors in tying us down both to defensive strategy and to defensive tactics. Once grasp what are the possibilities open to the enemy’s armed forces; once realize the scope the mine and torpedo possess; once analyze their influence both on strategy and on tactics, with the new problems that they create both for cruising force and for naval artillery in action, and it becomes exceedingly clear what it is that your own fleet must be prepared to do. Had these things been realized at any time between 1911 and 1914, should we have had our own naval bases unprotected against submarine attack? Should we have been without any organization for using mines offensively against the enemy? Still more, should we have been practically without any means whatever of preventing the enemy using mines against us? We should have had a fleet composed of different units, organized, trained, and equipped in a very different way. CHAPTER VI THE ACTIONS The naval operations suggested and described in the following chapters are the surprise attack that Germany did _not_ deliver, the destruction of _Koenigsberg_, the capture of _Emden_, Cradock’s heroic self-sacrifice off Coronel, the destruction of Von Spee’s squadron off the Falkland Islands, the affair of the Heligoland Bight, the pursuit of Von Hipper across the Dogger Bank, the battle of Jutland, and finally, the operations carried out against Zeebrügge and Ostend in the fourth year of the war. I have not in these chapters followed strict chronological order, but have arranged them so as to present the problems of sea fighting as they arise in a crescendo of interest and complexity.