Milne’s focal area strategy was not for public consumption: any offensive trade protection strategy implied that the British merchant fleet would face heavy losses early in a war. After a few months the enemy raiding force would have been destroyed, and losses would cease. That is what happened to the German cruiser force intended to destroy British commerce during the early months of the First World War. Things later went badly wrong because the anti-raider strategy, so little discussed prewar, was ineffective against U-boats, which could not easily be hunted down. The economics driving the strategy – that there were too few ships for effective escort – explains the Admiralty’s attempt to revive hunting in 1939, when it thought that the advent of Asdic had made the earlier strategy viable again. In each case the key failure was not to understand that a primary requirement, the ability of a cruiser or other ship on station to detect a raider at a distance and kill it, had been lost. The US Navy revived offensive anti-raider strategy when it sought to deal with Soviet nuclear submarines during the Cold War; again, there was little prospect of building enough escorts of sufficient capability. Moreover, a convoy too lightly escorted became a tasty meal for a raider. That had become evident during the Napoleonic Wars, and the unpleasant experiences of such convoys were cited during the 1878 hearings of the Carnarvon Commission on colonial defence and on protecting British seaborne trade.
The Doterel class sloop Espiegle rearmed with ten 5in Mk III breech-loading guns in shields, four of them (in shields) on VC and six (on the broadside) on VB mountings. The Mariner class were similar but slightly larger, completed with breech-loading guns (eight 5in). They displaced 970 tons. Two ships of that class (Mariner and Racer) participated in the 1885 fleet exercise, proving that they were far too slow (rated at 11.5kts on 850 IHP) to work with a battle fleet. The Mariners were laid down as gun-vessels, but reclassified as sloops on 26 November 1884, while under construction.
It did not help that the Royal Navy’s rivals did not have to match its numbers. For example, the Royal Navy squadrons deployed in the Far East had to deal with a Russian threat to trade mounted from Vladivostok. A Russian raider might appear anywhere in the area, so any of the deployed squadrons there had, at least in theory, to be able to counter the most powerful of the potential raiders. British numbers were set by the number of places that had to be covered. It did not take large numbers of potential Russian (or, for that matter, French) raiders to force up the size of the ships the Royal Navy had to deploy in the Far East, hence the cost of the Royal Navy.
The number of vulnerable focal areas increased as the French and the Russians gained bases outside the area the Royal Navy could expect to dominate. Just before the turn of the century the French seem to have been particularly keenly aware that building limited numbers of armoured cruisers would place intolerable financial burdens on the Royal Navy. By that time a big armoured cruiser cost about as much as a battleship, so a Royal Navy forced to build a large number of such ships (to cover the focal areas) would be building, in effect, two battle fleets. It was time to find a new way to handle the problem. Admiral Sir John Fisher seems to have seen the way: use intelligence to find the enemy cruisers, and build overwhelmingly powerful large fast cruisers to run them down. That was a key rationale of the battlecruisers which Fisher hoped would replace armoured cruisers.
Conversely, it was argued that by stationing powerful cruisers at focal areas, the Royal Navy would be forcing enemies to limit their attacks on trade to their most powerful cruisers, and in that way much reducing the scale of the attack.10
When he became First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher rethought trade protection.11 He again rejected convoy, partly because an entire convoy could be lost if its escorts were overwhelmed. It would be impossible to keep formation of a convoy secret, and the mass of smoke it produced by day (and the lights it would have to show at night) would attract attack. Probably the worst problem was that there were just not enough cruisers to escort convoys and to do ‘the far more effective work of hunting down the enemy’s commerce destroyers’. It seemed that most of the large number of merchant ships, each proceeding unpredictably, would escape a small number of enemy raiders.
Recent analysis had shown that even famous raiders of the past, such as CSS Alabama, had not been very productive. A US analysis conducted after the Civil War showed that Confederate raiders had destroyed only about 5 per cent of the Union merchant fleet; another 32 per cent had been lost as shipowners fled to neutral flags. The latter loss proved permanent due to onerous post-war taxes rather than to anything the Confederates had accomplished directly. Alabama herself had accounted for about three ships each month of her raiding lifetime.
The Royal Navy was increasingly arguing that the main defence of trade was control of the sea, to be gained by seeking out and destroying the enemy’s fleet. There had to be a fallback defence of trade to deal with enemy cruisers escaping from the British fleet, but it should be be minimized because the needs of the fleet came first.
For the moment, Fisher retained the focal area strategy. It was affordable, in terms of numbers of cruisers required and in terms of coal and wear and tear on the ships. It made concentration of force (when needed) practicable. Given a squadron operating in a focal area, the officer in command could readily react to information. Merchant ships under threat would know where to run. As pointed out above, Fisher soon became interested in an alternative to focal areas, using fast cruisers to run down raiders based on intelligence – a strategy which became possible with radio. This strategy in turn helped engender the battlecruiser, as a replacement for armoured cruisers.
Naval Presence
With its rise as the centre of world finance, the City of London became an important element of the British economy and hence a factor in policy-making. It did not speak with any single voice, but in effect it demanded that successive British Governments understand that they had a vital interest in keeping the peace abroad so that international trade, and British traders in particular, could flourish. That role was not too different from what is sometimes now called the vital peacetime mission of ‘maintaining good order at sea’. In practice the Royal Navy had to maintain cruiser squadrons on foreign stations. Such squadrons were not necessarily a means of protecting trade. Rather, they were a way of maintaining what would now be called presence. For example, when the Peruvian ironclad Huascar mutinied and became piratical in 1877, she was hunted down and disarmed by the local British squadron headed by HMS Shah – which fired the first self-propelled torpedo to be used in action against the ironclad (it missed).
Shah was not defending British colonies, but rather the British-centred trading system which kept Britain alive. The City was in effect the centre of an informal empire defined by trade. Unlike the formal empire, it was not generally garrisoned by the small British professional army, and it did not figure in formal defence arrangements. In effect the City could and did apply pressure to maintain the naval presence which protected the British traders abroad and which reassured the governments of the informal empire when they favoured policies which helped international trade – which usually meant trade financed by the City. Whether Britain should have a formal empire at all was a matter of intense debate in mid-century, but the informal empire was not, and could not, be debated at all. It was the informal