Sea Warfare
()
About this ebook
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and its sequel, as well as Captains Courageous. He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.
Read more from Rudyard Kipling
Kim Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kim Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classic Children's Stories (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Jungle Book: Level 1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Christmas Library: 250+ Essential Christmas Novels, Poems, Carols, Short Stories...by 100+ Authors Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just So Stories: Level 1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/520 Eternal Masterpieces Of Children Stories (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlain Tales from the Hills Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Short Stories Of Rudyard Kipling: "He travels the fastest who travels alone." Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSomething Of Myself: For My Friends Known And Unknown Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Victorian Mystery Megapack: 27 Classic Mystery Tales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling: All novels, short stories, letters and poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClassic Starts®: The Jungle Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Christmas Stories: 120+ Authors, 250+ Magical Christmas Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Sea Warfare
Related ebooks
Sea Warfare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Fringes of the Fleet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSea Warfare (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Down Under with the Prince Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPirates and Piracy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the Days of the Tall Ships Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Shellback's Progress: In the Nineteenth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Saga Of San Demetrio Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dardanelles: Colour Sketches From Gallipoli Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWilliam Dampier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDaring Deeds of Famous Pirates: True stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsS.B.S. - The Special Boat Squadron: A History Of Britains Elite Forces Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Mighty Hood: The Battleship that Challenged the Bismarck Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fleets Behind the Fleet: The Work of the Merchant Seamen and Fishermen in the War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Navy Everywhere Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Best Pirate Stories Ever Told Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Bart Roberts: The Greatest Pirate of Them All Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPath of the Storm Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Lion At Sea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5THE SEA - Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril & Heroism: The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat Short Works of Herman Melville Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMerchantmen-at-arms : the British merchants' service in the war Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBritain's Naval Power, Volume 2 (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): From Trafalgar to the Present Time Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTo Cuba and Back (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Vacation Voyage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLondon to Ladysmith via Pretoria Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWindjammers and Sea Tramps Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Jolly Roger: A Story of Sea Heroes and Pirates Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWindjammers and Sea Tramps Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
History For You
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Secret History of the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Grief Observed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know: Secrets, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, and Absurdities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Library Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5SAS Survival Handbook, Third Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Sea Warfare
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Sea Warfare - Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Sea Warfare
EAN 8596547329534
DigiCat, 2022
Contact: [email protected]
Table of Contents
THE AUXILIARIES
I
THE AUXILIARIES
II
SUBMARINES
I
SUBMARINES
II
PATROLS
I
PATROLS
II
TALES OF THE TRADE
(1916)
THE TRADE
I
SOME WORK IN THE BALTIC
II
BUSINESS IN THE SEA OF MARMARA
III
RAVAGES AND REPAIRS
DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND
(1916)
I
STORIES OF THE BATTLE
II
THE NIGHT HUNT
III
THE MEANING OF JOSS
IV
THE MINDS OF MEN
THE NEUTRAL
THE AUXILIARIES
I
Table of Contents
The Navy is very old and very wise. Much of her wisdom is on record and available for reference; but more of it works in the unconscious blood of those who serve her. She has a thousand years of experience, and can find precedent or parallel for any situation that the force of the weather or the malice of the King's enemies may bring about.
The main principles of sea-warfare hold good throughout all ages, and, so far as the Navy has been allowed to put out her strength, these principles have been applied over all the seas of the world. For matters of detail the Navy, to whom all days are alike, has simply returned to the practice and resurrected the spirit of old days.
In the late French wars, a merchant sailing out of a Channel port might in a few hours find himself laid by the heels and under way for a French prison. His Majesty's ships of the Line, and even the big frigates, took little part in policing the waters for him, unless he were in convoy. The sloops, cutters, gun-brigs, and local craft of all kinds were supposed to look after that, while the Line was busy elsewhere. So the merchants passed resolutions against the inadequate protection afforded to the trade, and the narrow seas were full of single-ship actions; mail-packets, West Country brigs, and fat East Indiamen fighting, for their own hulls and cargo, anything that the watchful French ports sent against them; the sloops and cutters bearing a hand if they happened to be within reach.
The Oldest Navy
It was a brutal age, ministered to by hard-fisted men, and we had put it a hundred decent years behind us when—it all comes back again! To-day there are no prisons for the crews of merchantmen, but they can go to the bottom by mine and torpedo even more quickly than their ancestors were run into Le Havre. The submarine takes the place of the privateer; the Line, as in the old wars, is occupied, bombarding and blockading, elsewhere, but the sea-borne traffic must continue, and that is being looked after by the lineal descendants of the crews of the long extinct cutters and sloops and gun-brigs. The hour struck, and they reappeared, to the tune of fifty thousand odd men in more than two thousand ships, of which I have seen a few hundred. Words of command may have changed a little, the tools are certainly more complex, but the spirit of the new crews who come to the old job is utterly unchanged. It is the same fierce, hard-living, heavy-handed, very cunning service out of which the Navy as we know it to-day was born. It is called indifferently the Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet. It is chiefly composed of fishermen, but it takes in every one who may have maritime tastes—from retired admirals to the sons of the sea-cook. It exists for the benefit of the traffic and the annoyance of the enemy. Its doings are recorded by flags stuck into charts; its casualties are buried in obscure corners of the newspapers. The Grand Fleet knows it slightly; the restless light cruisers who chaperon it from the background are more intimate; the destroyers working off unlighted coasts over unmarked shoals come, as you might say, in direct contact with it; the submarine alternately praises and—since one periscope is very like another—curses its activities; but the steady procession of traffic in home waters, liner and tramp, six every sixty minutes, blesses it altogether.
Since this most Christian war includes laying mines in the fairways of traffic, and since these mines may be laid at any time by German submarines especially built for the work, or by neutral ships, all fairways must be swept continuously day and night. When a nest of mines is reported, traffic must be hung up or deviated till it is cleared out. When traffic comes up Channel it must be examined for contraband and other things; and the examining tugs lie out in a blaze of lights to remind ships of this. Months ago, when the war was young, the tugs did not know what to look for specially. Now they do. All this mine-searching and reporting and sweeping, plus the direction and examination of the traffic, plus the laying of our own ever-shifting mine-fields, is part of the Trawler Fleet's work, because the Navy-as-we-knew-it is busy elsewhere. And there is always the enemy submarine with a price on her head, whom the Trawler Fleet hunts and traps with zeal and joy. Add to this, that there are boats, fishing for real fish, to be protected in their work at sea or chased off dangerous areas whither, because they are strictly forbidden to go, they naturally repair, and you will begin to get some idea of what the Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet does.
The Ships and the Men
Now, imagine the acreage of several dock-basins crammed, gunwale to gunwale, with brown and umber and ochre and rust-red steam-trawlers, tugs, harbour-boats, and yachts once clean and respectable, now dirty and happy. Throw in fish-steamers, surprise-packets of unknown lines and indescribable junks, sampans, lorchas, catamarans, and General Service stink-pontoons filled with indescribable apparatus, manned by men no dozen of whom seem to talk the same dialect or wear the same clothes. The mustard-coloured jersey who is cleaning a six-pounder on a Hull boat clips his words between his teeth and would be happier in Gaelic. The whitish singlet and grey trousers held up by what is obviously his soldier brother's spare regimental belt is pure Lowestoft. The complete blue-serge-and-soot suit passing a wire down a hatch is Glasgow as far as you can hear him, which is a fair distance, because he wants something done to the other end of the wire, and the flat-faced boy who should be attending to it hails from the remoter Hebrides, and is looking at a girl on the dock-edge. The bow-legged man in the ulster and green-worsted comforter is a warm Grimsby skipper, worth several thousands. He and his crew, who are mostly his own relations, keep themselves to themselves, and save their money. The pirate with the red beard, barking over the rail at a friend with gold earrings, comes from Skye. The friend is West Country. The noticeably insignificant man with the soft and deprecating eye is skipper and part-owner of the big slashing Iceland trawler on which he droops like a flower. She is built to almost Western Ocean lines, carries a little boat-deck aft with tremendous stanchions, has a nose cocked high against ice and sweeping seas, and resembles a hawk-moth at rest. The small, sniffing man is reported to be a holy terror at sea.
Hunters and Fishers
The child in the Pullman-car uniform just going ashore is a wireless operator, aged nineteen. He is attached to a flagship at least 120 feet long, under an admiral aged twenty-five, who was, till the other day, third mate of a North Atlantic tramp, but who now leads a squadron of six trawlers to hunt submarines. The principle is simple enough. Its application depends on circumstances and surroundings. One class of German submarines meant for murder off the coasts may use a winding and rabbit-like track between shoals where the choice of water is limited. Their career is rarely long, but, while it lasts, moderately exciting. Others, told off for deep-sea assassinations, are attended to quite quietly and without any excitement at all. Others, again, work the inside of the North Sea, making no distinction between neutrals and Allied ships. These carry guns, and since their work keeps them a good deal on the surface, the Trawler Fleet, as we know, engages them there—the submarine firing, sinking, and rising again in unexpected quarters; the trawler firing, dodging, and trying to ram. The trawlers are strongly built, and can stand a great deal of punishment. Yet again, other German submarines hang about the skirts of fishing-fleets and fire into the brown of them. When the war was young this gave splendidly frightful
results, but for some reason or other the game is not as popular as it used to be.
Lastly, there are German submarines who perish by ways so curious and inexplicable that one could almost credit the whispered idea (it must come from the Scotch skippers) that the ghosts of the women they drowned pilot them to destruction. But what form these shadows take—whether of The Lusitania Ladies,
or humbler stewardesses and hospital nurses—and what lights or sounds the thing fancies it sees or hears before it is blotted out, no man will ever know. The main fact is that the work is being done. Whether it was necessary or politic to re-awaken by violence every sporting instinct of a sea-going people is a question which the enemy may have to consider later on.
Dawn off the Foreland—the young flood making
Jumbled and short and steep—
Black in the hollows and bright where it's breaking—
Awkward water to sweep.
"Mines reported in the