The Influence of Modern Weapons Upon Future Warfare

Mr. Chairman, Your Honour, and Gentlemen,--I take exception to one remark by the Chairman-the allusion to my eloquence. I have had no training that will enable me to make a simon-pure speech. I believe I am usually able to say what I want to say and I may add that I usually do. (Laughter) I may also add that I sometimes say things that I should not say, and consequently get into more or less trouble about once every six months. In fact, my attention has been officially called to this on a couple of occasions. (Laughter) Now, I would not have you think that I believe all the things your Chairman says about me. I have been subjected to

----------------------------------------------------------

Admiral Sims was born at Port Hope, Ontario, and educated at the United States Naval Academy from which he was graduated in 1880. He was promoted through various grades of the service until he became ReadAdmiral in 1917. During the Great War he commanded the American naval operations in European waters. After the war, he resumed the Presidency of the Naval War College, which post he retained till his retirement in October from the U.S. Service. High honours were showered upon him by the governments of Great Britain, France, Japan, Belgium and Italy.

----------------------------------------------------------

very severe gas attacks on that account. (Laughter) What I really understand by them is that you people are grateful to a proper degree for what the American Navy was able to do in helping out in the war. (Applause) As the Commander of those forces of course I come in for a certain amount of personal glory, but as my appointment to the command of the forces was really incidental and largely accidental, I do not hesitate to say that if they had been commanded by anyone of our forty admirals the results would have been the same, on account of the spirit that is in the American Navy--the spirit of co-operation with the British in any trouble they may get into. (Applause) It was not a personal opinion that I voiced in the Guildhall twelve years ago when I made that statement that caused me to be reprimanded by the President of the United States. That was the spirit of the American Navy behind the whole business, you may be sure. (Applause)

I would have you gentlemen believe that I thoroughly understand the honour of having been invited to address a body like this, and a body like the Canadian Club. I understand that you represent and are symbolic of the progress of this great country, and it is a very great honour to have the privilege of speaking to you. My difficulty in speaking is to know what you would like to know about my profession as a nautical man. I have had certain experience in that line from having spoken to American audiences, but I do not have here the same privilege I have with them, because I scold them more or less severely for not carrying out their duties as citizens in supporting their military defences, and letting us go up against every war we have ever been in as a nation with entirely unprepared forces, and consequently with dreadful sacrifices.

I think perhaps is would interest you more than anything else for me to explain as briefly as possible the importance in international relations of two implements or weapons of warfare that came out of this war-the submarine and the airplane. As a background to that, the situation in 1917, when we went into the war, was entirely desperate. America was slow in getting into the war even after she declared war against Germany, for the simple reason that on our side we did not know the facts in reference to the submarine, for they could not be told in the European Press without informing the Germans. Of course from the time we were in the war I read everything I could get my hands on about the war, but even then I find that I wrote a letter to my wife on the way over on the steamer telling her I did not think the war could last very much longer. That was the impression in the United States in official circles when I went over, but I soon afterwards learned that the submarines were destroying nearly a million tons of shipping a month. There was a certain amount of shipping required as a minimum to supply the armies and the populations of Europe with the necessary food. There was a certain excess at that time, but by dividing the million into that excess it could be shown experimentally how many months you had to go, and that was a desperate situation. It was very difficult to make that thing known on the other side. Of necessity, and to hurry up the war preparations, I told them that the British were winning except under surface, and that they would lose unless they had all possible assistance. I was supposed to be pro-British, but the Ambassador on the other side knew the situation, and was trying to do the very thing that subsequently I tried to do. Just as soon as he started that, they put him down as pro-British. They would not believe the situation was as dangerous as it was. They said, "Of course the British want every assistance, because the more assistance they get the more shipping they will save." They did not believe the situation was as dangerous as it was, and not until we got the whole British Government behind us, when we got the Ambassador to state officially what the situation was and send it through, did we convince them. You know the situation was saved; it was saved by the convoy. It seemed to me, as the commander of the relatively smaller forces coming in from the rear, that those forces should be handled in a purely military sense; that any situation outside of the purely military situation should not be considered at all; that they should be considered as a reserve coming in from the rear, and such a reserve, in military parlance, is intended to strengthen the part of the line that needs to be strengthened, to keep it from breaking.

The consequence is that in violation of the national spirit in having a navy under our own flag, in our own section and under our own navy officers, it seemed to me that the only decent thing for me to do was to go loyally into the Council, reserving the right to "sass" any principle I didn't like, taking the position that in view of the experience of those men with whom I simply placed myself, in view of the experience they had in the war before we came in, that I would abide by the decision of the Council as to where my force could best be used. I took that position, and maintained it throughout the war from the Adriatic all the way to the White Sea. (Applause)

Moreover, it seemed to me that this war was so desperate and so big that there was no occasion for allowing any ordinary jealousies and frictions to arise. We therefore took means to see that those things would be promptly suppressed if they showed their noses for a minute. We violated all the regulations of the British Admiralty and Navy Departments that would tend to make friction. Now, a single example. The ordinary procedure where vessels of the opposite navy come in contact with each other in fog or bad weather-and they do have lots of that off the coast of Ireland--was for the commanders at those places to appoint Courts of Inquiry of two or three members, and as they are on opposite sides the chances are that the decisions of the Courts would be opposed to each other. That would create friction, which we did not want, so Admiral Bulley, on the coast of Ireland, proposed that we would get up a new kind of Court, which would be an international one, and it was arranged in this way: If the buoy of an American ship struck a British ship, two members of the Court should be Americans and two British, and an American would conduct the procedure, and vice versa. The consequence was that there was only one decision, and there was no chance of any conflict. (Laughter) That was imitated by all the law Lords, and in a case where there was a Court of seven members over a very serious matter, four of them being of different nationalities, Admiral Bulley, as in duty bound, reported this thing to his Admiralty, and the Admiralty did the usual thing that Admiralties do on such occasions. They didn't say anything at all; they just let it alone. They could not enforce the precedent, because a Britisher finds it very difficult to change anything that has been in the past. Out of curiosity I reported it to my own Navy Department because I wanted to see what they would say, and to my surprise they entirely approved. (Laughter)

At the time we entered the war, both British and Americans understood perfectly well that our function was as an adjunct to the army. The battle of Jutland had taken place, which I believe largely to be an accidental battle; but anyway the British chased the Germans back into port, and we knew they couldn't come out again with the great force catastrophe beyond our control, such as an earthquake that they had down in Italy recently, nothing in God's world could have saved it. You might say that America. might have furnished convoys and everything, but nothing could be done, because the German fleet would have taken airships and cut the lines of communication and you would have had to sue for peace, and you people would have been trying to learn German this month. (Applause)

The battleship cannot climb hills, but they can make it possible for an army to be sure to win. They can make it possible for all the resources of the Allies across the sea and everywhere else to be brought in to supply the army with food. What gave the people more confidence than anything else was the integrity of the Allied fleet. There are many technical details connected with it. The North Sea is nothing but a shallow pond. You dare not pass over the ground your enemy fleet has passed over because he may have laid mines all along. You can lay mines at thirty miles an hour. You do not dare to manoeuvre, for your enemies may have laid mine-fields there before, and you could not risk that fleet.

Now about the submarine as a weapon. Of all the weapons that have ever been invented it was the most wicked, and I believe in the future it is going to be the most useful, and is going to make for peace more than any implement that has ever been devised. It solved a certain problem for us. All the navies were competing with each other in power and type. They had their battle-ships, they had what they called armoured cruisers, not very heavy possibly, and not very heavily armoured or armed. Every time they got out a new one they made it stronger. Lord Fisher when he was in the Admiralty had a vision. Fisher had a great gunnery genius, Sir Percy Scott, who could make a good hit with a big gun at a range at which a little gun was no use. That meant that in our future ships the vessels should carry only big guns, and all that they could carry, and that we should increase them in displacement, etc. That was resisted by practically everybody in the British Navy, and no navy expert except Fisher and Percy Scott and De Lake and a few of us, knew what the guns could do. Along about that time Sir John Fisher got out a class of vessels which in our estimates were put down as armoured cruisers. They were going to be battle cruisers that carried the same kind of gun as a battleship. He didn't want the Germans to know about it, and they could not build them in Great Britain, and so they actually induced the Sultan of Turkey to sign a contract for 24 twelve-inch guns in due form. (Laughter and applause) The RearAdmiral, who had been in London a long time, paid no less than £14,000 in bribes for the privilege of getting the Turkish Government on those contracts. They thus stole a march on Von Tirpitz, who in his book said: "Anyway, I put it over you with those battle-cruisers." (Laughter)

Undoubtedly the submarine is formidable because it is impossible when it is several miles away to see where it is going to strike you. If they came against America, we would not know whether it was Boston or New York or Hampton Roads or further down south, or the Panama Canal, and there would be no use putting a single line out if it was not strong enough to get the information, and if you did put out a single line the other fellow would have torn it to pieces. All the power of all the navies of the world that have ever been or ever will be, could not chase the submarine a single mile away from where you put it, simply because it has the peculiar faculty of invisibility. If you take a big ship miles away you can see the conning towers, but the submarine can go down and if he doesn't get torpedoed as he is going by, he can easily escape. If submarines are in the neighbourhood, a ship has to keep a zigzag course at full speed and cannot go very far. Submarines can steam all round the world. We have them now that can go 2,500 miles. We had a case of one travelling that distance, and we offered him the ordinary courtesies if he wanted to get back, but he said he didn't want anything although he had travelled 4,000 miles one way and was going 4,000 miles back. During the war, Great Britain and the British Navy would have been very glad to blockade the Germans in their own port, right down in the Heligoland Bight, if it had not been for the submarines. It was tried frequently, but it would not work, the losses were too severe. You cannot send down cruisers against them, and you cannot expose your whole fleet to torpedo attack. The fleet can only stay away a short distance from its bases because battleships have not a large basis of action when they are going at full speed. The consequence was that it was absolutely impracticable to delegate those vessels in the Heligoland Bight, although you could delegate them in the North Sea.

The whole lesson is, that never again will a fleet proceed against another country if it has no submarines. If it has a reasonable number of submarines it will be impossible for a fleet to go at high speed all the way across, for it cannot operate at a distance. Any nation that is reasonably protected by submarine is safe against aggression of any other nation, no matter how great that nation may be on the surface of the sea. That is the fundamental lesson that comes out of this war. On the other hand, take a nation like the United States that has made itself safe from attack by the use of submarines. That nation is also prevented from attack for the same reason. You can send a fleet over to the other fellow's coast and take a few mines and so on, but you cannot attack him in a simon-pure way with a body of ships greater than the enemy has. Never again will you read in history about seizing the enemy's port and establishing yourself and proceeding to attack him in a military sense.

Now, the airplane performs the same function to a limited degree. As I have said, the submarine has a great radius of action, it can operate wherever it pleases. Moreover, if you are at war with a relatively small nation, and you have a great commerce that goes all over the ocean, that fellow can work against your commerce without violating the laws of commerce in the slightest degree. All that makes for the peace of the world. People go to war because they think they can win, they think they won't be seriously hurt; but they will not go to war with the submarines when they know it will be attended by the danger I have explained.

The airplane is much the same thing as the submarine except that its radius of action is much smaller. The war airplanes were toys compared with what we have now, and the latter are toys compared with what we are going to have. The airplane is the most astonishing implement of warfare that has ever been invented within the radius of its action. Our army had a good deal of experience in bombing with airplanes. Our navy believed they could not hit a real ship. Navy officers are the most conservative people in the world. They never believe anything at all, and the same is pretty nearly true of military men. All you have to do is to slaughter them to make them understand anything. (Laughter) Our navy people failed to believe that airplanes could destroy them. The army asked for a ship, and the navy gave them a ship, and they destroyed it. The navy then replied: "But you can't destroy a modern ship." Fortunately we had an opportunity to try with a vessel from Germany, and the airplane went out 100 miles from shore and bombed her with light bombs up to 500 lbs., and they tried bombs on her up to 2,000 lbs., containing 1,000 lbs. high explosives,-about three times the amount they use in the ordinary discharge that was used in the war, and she was shattered in twenty minutes, and they never actually hit the hull of the vessel, they struck the water and went down a certain depth and then exploded, and the concussion brought pressure against the plates of 1,200 pounds to the square inch and drove in the sides. It will do the same for any battleship that ever can be built.

The lesson is this, that no nation having on its coast more airplanes than the enemy can bring to bear against it from large ships will ever be successfully attacked. A great fleet might come over to take America, but ten airplane carriers with five or six airplanes on board, and 2,000 or 3,000 airplanes on our coast concentrated in a few ports would soon sweep the 500 or 600 planes out of the air, and by that time they would control the air over the fleet or over any troops they might land.

The airplane even eliminates the element of time. They might land an army of 500,000 men, but as long as you have airplanes you can drive their army force down completely, and control the air over their army, and you can destroy it at your leisure. You could send excursion trains there so that people could go and see it done. (Laughter) That is what the airplane means.

It is my conviction that no capital ship, so-called, will ever be built again. Out of national pride those that are laid down and partially completed will be finished. They will make them as safe as they can, but I do not think they will be able to do anything. Perhaps I will die before that prophesy will be justified. If you consider the battleship met alone at sea by the airplane carrier, say with fifty or sixty planes on board, not heavily armoured or heavily gunned; the weight being put into speed so that she makes thirty-five knots, the battleship cannot meet the airplanes, because the airplanes could get out of range of the guns on the ship, and the planes could drop bombs on the battleship, whose fate would be absolutely sealed. Moreover, if there were four or five battleships, one airplane carrier could do the same thing and. destroy them all, one after the other, and no escape would be possible. To be sure, they have an anti-airplane gun, but experience in the war showed how ineffective they were. The airplane has instruments of precision, and they can bring down their game by closely calculating the distance. The anti-airplane gun is practically negligent, and I do not believe that these things will ever be built again.

Now, in any collection of men who are fathers or brothers of boys that went into the war I always like to say something about what those boys did. Boys from the American colleges were sent to me sometimes with a little intensive training, sometimes not, and I found that we could not get very much use out of them, in a military sense. I put the matter up to the Commander of the destroyers, giving each of them three or four of these young men, and it was entirely up to them what they did with them. To my intense surprise I found them instructing those young men at the end of three or four months in their duties alongside of experienced officers that were willing to entrust those boys with complete command of a destroyer in the presence of submarines in conducting convoys. That is what the trained or partially trained man means in war. That is what you do with him. There is nothing more valuable, in fact. The difference between them and the broad-shouldered husky young fellow that comes in off the farm is absolutely fundamental. We are extremely grateful for what those young boys did. They did a still more remarkable thing. Out of 300 odd special designs we built boats of 110 feet in length and 60 tons' burden, and not four percent of the people on board those boats had ever been to sea before. They had a period of intensive training on the American side, and they went across the ocean in February and did excellent service all the way through, and accounted for a number of submarines. (Applause)

Now, you understand perfectly well, how we cooperated with the British. Not only that, but we became, at least so far as the American and British were concerned, a sort of mutual admiration society. Moreover, the expressions of absolute confidence that were shown were numerous and remarkable. It is sometimes useful to show how far we have come, because we did not always regard each other that way. Of course we did not serve with the British without noticing several peculiarities. (Laughter) We noticed their conservatism, that sometimes seemed to be excessive. They liked to do things because they had always done them. In a booklet I wrote after the war I related a little incident that happened at the table of Admiral Bulley. He was in command at Queenstown. He had a number of our young officers at lunch with him one day, as he was very fond of doing, for he liked those young men, and after lunch he went to one of the officers, who said

"Admiral, how is it you get an orange and eat it after lunch instead of before lunch, as we do on the other side?" One of the young officers said, "I know," and Admiral Bulley said, "Why do I do it?" and the officer said, "Because that is what William the Conqueror used to do." (Great laughter) That tickled the Admiral very much indeed, and I used it against them repeatedly during the rest of the war. Whenever we would say we thought it would be better to change the method when they were doing something and do it some other way. "Well, you know, that is the way William-the Conqueror did." (Laughter)

Of course the Americans and the British criticised each other to a certain extent for various peculiarities in their manners, as is only natural. In fact I do not think that either of our manners, as far as concerned the higher policy, is equal to that of the European continental nations. However, I saw a skit the other day which purported to describe the attitude of an American and an Englishman on a certain occasion. It said that the Englishman walks into the drawing-room as if he owned it, and the American walks in as if he didn't give a damn who owned it. (Laughter) One reason we liked the British was because of our admiration not only of the military man but the entire population, for they were good sports, and they stood the gaff in a remarkable way. It was an astonishing thing to me to see, as I did on one occasion, a lady who gave a dinner to a list of five or six officers who were coming home on leave from the front. She was in full dress with all her jewels to cheer things up for her remaining boy. She had lost all of her four sons, but she didn't wear the badge of mourning, and did not wear crepe.

We have always known that the Britisher was a good sport. I will tell you a story that will illustrate that. On one occasion one of our ships came into Gibraltar port, where the curfew tolls at half-past nine. The officers went on shore for a little relaxation. As usual they were getting it all right, and they were not disposed to obey the police at nine-thirty-five by getting in off the streets and keeping quiet. They finally overcame the patience of the captain of the police about two o'clock in the morning, by turning a hack upside down so that they could spin the wheels around, (laughter) and the captain of the police then arrested them and put them in the lockup. They allowed that they were not going to stay there. They were told, "There is nobody that can get you out but the magistrate." So they sent their cards up to the magistrate and at three o'clock in the morning the good old man came down and said to the captain of the police "What is this row about?" and the captain of police told a perfectly straightforward and honest story about the circumstances, and the magistrate pointed his finger at the captain of the police and said

"Now, let this be a warning; the next time you interfere with the pleasures of gentlemen, I will have you fired off the force!" (Great laughter)

I thank you very deeply and very sincerely for your kind attention. (Loud and continued applause)

HIS HONOUR LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR COCKSHUTT expressed the thanks and appreciation of the Club to Admiral Sims for his brilliant address.