by John Keegan
Admiral Souchon, commanding Goeben and Breslau, had been in the Mediterranean since 1912, using Austrian Adriatic ports as his friendly bases and otherwise resupplying at Italian or Spanish ports. Early on 4 August 1914, Souchon bombarded the French North African ports of Philippeville and Bône, doing little damage but reminding Lapeyrène, the French Mediterranean commander, that he had the ability to interrupt the transport of the XIX Army Corps from Algeria to France. Souchon then made off for the Straits of Messina (where Nelson had missed Brueys’ fleet in June 1798), intending to coal. En route he encountered the main elements of the British Mediterranean fleet, the battlecruisers Indefatigable and Indomitable. Their orders were to close the Straits of Gibraltar to hostile ships, as pressing a concern to the British government in 1914 as it had been when Ireland was under threat of invasion by the Toulon Armament in 1798.
Captain Kennedy, the battlecruiser squadron commander, at once reversed course but, since Britain was not yet at war with Germany (or would not be until midnight), kept his distance. Souchon cracked on all speed and shook Kennedy off. As the British ships had made 28 knots on trials, and Goeben was limited by boiler defects to 24 or even 22 knots, that was not a creditable outcome.
It was even less creditable that, with Souchon coaling at Messina in the twenty-four hours’ grace custom allowed (what Nelson had got at Alexandria on his first visit in June 1798), the commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne, so disposed his forces as to allow Souchon a bolt hole. With a correct but over-scrupulous regard for Italian neutrality, he kept his ships away from the Strait of Messina, deploying them west of Sicily against a resumption of their interference with the French troop convoys. He recognised that Souchon might turn in the other direction, to join the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic, but counted on a subordinate squadron, Admiral Ernest Troubridge’s four armoured cruisers, currently off the west coast of Greece, to block a move in that direction; unfortunately, he passed on to Troubridge (a descendant of Nelson’s Troubridge) an Admiralty warning not to attack a “superior force.”
The Admiralty, which in this case was synonymous with its political chief, Winston Churchill, meant that Milne’s fleet should not engage the dreadnoughts of Austria or Italy, the latter a signatory of the Austro-German-Italian Triple Alliance (from which it was not yet disengaged). Milne, and so Troubridge, unfortunately took the signal to mean that they should fight shy of the Goeben, a very powerful unit in its own right. As a result, Troubridge delegated the duty of following Goeben first to the light cruiser Gloucester—which was hopelessly outgunned, though it bravely attacked all the same—then to another light cruiser, Dublin, which failed to find the Germans. Troubridge had a clear picture of Souchon’s options: he knew, from Gloucester, that Souchon was steaming towards Greece and the Aegean; he calculated, correctly, that the Germans would either continue on that course or turn tack towards the Adriatic and junction with the Austrians. Worried that his obsolete armoured cruisers might meet and be outgunned by Goeben, Troubridge called off the chase and steered away.
It was a disastrous misjudgement; the consequences were heightened by further misleading signals from the Admiralty and more bad decisions by Milne. Although on the night of 6 August he learnt that the French were now organised to prevent any attack by Souchon on the troop convoys, so freeing him to crack on all speed after the enemy, he decided to coal Indomitable in Malta. While there, he heard from the British naval attaché in Greece on 8 August that Souchon was already in the Aegean (where he, too, was coaling). That gave him the chance to make up lost ground. Almost simultaneously, however, a signal arrived from the Admiralty stating that Austria had declared war on Britain; the signal was wrong: Austria would not do so until the 12th. Milne accordingly decided that the priority was to guard the exit from the Adriatic, by which Austrian dreadnoughts could enter the Mediterranean, and turned back. A further passage of order, counter-order and misinformation from the Admiralty ensued. It was not until 9 August that Milne got clear instructions “to chase the Goeben which passed Cape Matapan [southern Greece] on the 7th steering north-east.”
Shades of 22 June 1798, when Nelson was misinformed by three days of the date of Bonaparte’s departure from Malta. Nelson had then, all the same, pressed forward at best possible speed. Milne, toying with the possibilities that Souchon might have doubled back to renew his attacks on the French North African ports, to enter the Adriatic, to make for Gibraltar or even to raid Alexandria and the Suez Canal, did not accelerate. As a result, Souchon enjoyed sixty trouble-free hours in the Aegean and eventually anchored in the mouth of the Dardanelles on 10 August. Milne, believing that the Dardanelles was mined against the passage of any warship, was subsequently astounded to learn that the Goeben and Breslau had been conducted by the Turks to Constantinople where, by a diplomatic device, they would become units of the Turkish navy and the agency by which the Ottoman empire was brought into the war on Germany and Austria’s side.17
By strict comparison, the management of the chase to the Nile was a superior, even if more protracted and intermittent, exercise in the use of intelligence than the pursuit of Souchon. The absence of intervention by the Admiralty, which in 1914 twice seriously misled commanders on the spot, was a positive advantage; Nelson was not bothered by London or by intermediate authorities and, though he made his own mistakes, was spared the misjudgements of others. The Admiralty of 1914, although having available to it information in quantities and of an accuracy denied to eighteenth-century governments, together with the means to communicate with subordinates almost instantaneously, by wireless, instead of at a delay of weeks by courier or sailing despatch vessel, first sent Milne an ambiguous order—to avoid contact with a superior force which deflected him from engaging Goeben when he could have done so—then wrongly informed him that Austria had entered the war, when it was not to do so for another five days, so turning his back towards the Adriatic when he should have been making best speed into the Aegean.
Milne also seems to have lacked Nelson’s ruthless ability to stick to the main issue. By 22 June 1798, when he knew of Bonaparte’s capture of Malta and departure for another destination, Nelson discounted every other consideration that had distracted him thus far—Spain? Portugal? Ireland?—and decided, correctly, that the enemy was heading for Alexandria. His reasoning was that Egypt, and beyond it India, was the object of the highest strategic value and an intention to land the army there the only explanation of the voyage of the Toulon Armament to the central Mediterranean. Milne, by contrast, after having lost the Goeben, continued to confuse his thinking with the possibilities of the Adriatic, the French troop convoys and Egypt as well as the Aegean. He was a man in a muddle which, after 22 June, Nelson never was. Nelson’s failure to find Bonaparte in Egypt the first time caused him acute anxiety but not doubt of his reasoning. Milne appears not to have thought rigorously at all.
The Nile campaign demonstrates that, to Nelson’s many other qualities, which included inspirational powers of leadership, lightning tactical verve, ruthless determination in battle, incisive strategic grasp and a revolutionary capacity for operational innovation, all combined with complete disregard for his own personal safety in any circumstances, must be added the abilities of a first-class intelligence analyst. Few dispute that Nelson was the greatest admiral who ever lived. The range and depth of his powers suggests that he would have dominated in any age.
CHAPTER THREE
Local Knowledge:
Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN in 1798 Nelson had been much mystified and often misled, at least twice to his crucial disadvantage, even though he enjoyed a superiority of force, intimately understood the geography of his theatre and was pursuing an enemy with a severely restricted choice of manoeuvre. All had come right in the end, but his victory would have been even more complete had he made identifiably different decisions on several occasions. The Mediterranean was a closed and circumscr
ibed strategic arena in which, in optimal circumstances, a fleet commander might have achieved total domination.
In 1862, in a sort of mirror image of Nelson’s Mediterranean campaign, though on land rather than at sea, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, also operating within a closed strategic arena, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, had consistently mystified and misled his enemy—his catchphrase was “always mystify and mislead”—even though usually inferior in force to the Union armies chasing him and despite severe geographical limitations on his room to manoeuvre. In 1798 Nelson had never, until the last stages of his pursuit, had quite enough intelligence. In 1862 Jackson enjoyed ample intelligence and exploited it to win a succession of victories his objective weakness should have denied him. Better information, keener anticipation and cleverer judgement combined to make Jackson’s Valley campaign a model of an active intelligence victory.
The situation of the Southern Confederacy, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, was intrinsically weak. By every material measure—population, industrial capacity, miles of rail track, to mention but a few essential indices—its capacity to wage successful war was greatly exceeded by that of the North. Of the United States’ thirty-two million people, only five million lived in the eleven seceding states (and four million blacks whom, as slaves, the Confederacy would not arm); of the country’s 30,000 miles of rail track, 22,000 ran in the Northern states; the North produced 94 per cent of the country’s manufactured goods and the vast proportion of its raw materials, including iron, steel and coal. The South was a rich region nonetheless, but it was rich in cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar, crops which brought their planters income in overseas sales and the export of which the North could and did interrupt, as soon as secession was declared, by blockading the Confederacy’s coasts.1
Had the war been a contest between economic systems alone—as Winfield Scott, Union General-in-Chief, hoped to keep it—the South would have quickly collapsed.2 The Southern people, however, were resolute in their determination to preserve “States Rights,” the legal issue over which they had declared separation, and soon showed themselves equally resolved to sustain the deprivations that economic isolation brought them. Hardy and frugal in their rural way of life, they rapidly made it clear that they would have to be beaten in battle if they were to be brought to surrender. President Abraham Lincoln was quick to grasp that, quicker than Winfield Scott. The question was, where to fight? The South might be materially weak, but it was strategically and geographically very strong. Protected on two sides by sea and ocean, it was also shut off from the rest of the United States by unsettled semi-desert to the west and by mountains to the north. Its paucity of internal communications, which in any case connected poorly with those of the North, was a positive strategic advantage. Moreover, in the great valley of the Mississippi, it enjoyed the protection of a sort of secondary internal water frontier, denying Northern armies any easy way forward into its heartland. Above all, the South’s enormous size—its eleven states covered an area as large as Europe west of Russia—was in itself a strength. Even if its outer crust could be penetrated by the Union, there still remained the difficulty of covering the vast distances inside the South between the point of entry and an objective of any value. To get from anywhere to anywhere within the Deep South was a problem in peacetime—there were few railroads, appalling or nonexistent roads, while the inland rivers were too short and usually ran the wrong way. In wartime the problem seemed designed to defy the efforts of a general of genius.
The South, on the other hand, should it choose to attack, faced no such problem. From its Virginian frontier with the Union, Washington, the Federal capital, lay only forty miles distant; not much farther lay the great city of Baltimore. Also within striking distance lay smaller but still desirable urban targets and the rich farmlands of Maryland and Pennsylvania. A successful thrust into the North would also bring menace to industrial New Jersey and perhaps even New York. The South’s strength was the widespread dispersion of its centres of population and production; the North’s weakness was the concentration of similar objectives in the Middle Atlantic coastal corridor and that corridor’s vulnerability to a Confederate offensive.
Critically, the South had a way in, the Shenandoah Valley. The dominant geographical feature of Atlantic America is the Appalachian Mountain chain, which runs roughly parallel to the coast, at diminishing distance, from Alabama to Maine. The Appalachians shut off the enormous interior of the continent from the coastal strip for hundreds of miles and had been used by the French, when they ruled Canada and what they called Louisiana, to deny the Ohio country and the Mississippi Valley to the English colonists in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia.
The defeat of the French in 1763 had opened up the trans-Appalachian wilderness to the English and thereby set in train the events that led to the division of 1861. Virginians, Carolinians and Georgians, migrating westward, had taken slavery with them into Mississippi and Tennessee. New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and New Englanders had established the Midwest as non-slave territory. Disputes over the states of the westerly borderlands had generated the constitutional conflict that resulted in the crisis of secession. Slave or free? That was the issue over the new lands opening up to settlement in the old French region of “Louisiana.” When it could not be settled by debate, the Southerners chose separation.
What would then have happened had the North chosen to adopt Winfield Scott’s passive Anaconda Plan, and had the South chosen to sit inside its formidable natural frontiers, challenges easy speculation. There might not have been a civil war at all. Neither eventuality occurred. The South, as James McPherson convincingly argues, was spoiling for a fight.3 The outraged North, outraged both by the challenge to the Constitution and by the South’s defiant defence of the sin of slavery, was adamant for an offensive. Inspired by the cry “On to Richmond,” the Virginian capital of the Confederacy, the North launched the manoeuvre that led to encounter and defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July 1861.
In the aftermath, the Northern leadership pondered a better way. In the west, beyond the Appalachians, local generals tried to open up a new front on the river approaches to the Mississippi. Along the coast, Union admirals began to close off the Confederates’ outlets to the wider world. In Washington, however, Lincoln and his government sought a more direct means to strike at their Confederate enemies. The way, as they recognised, was barred by a succession of water obstacles, the short rivers running off the Appalachian chain between the mountains and the Atlantic that furnished one of the South’s best strategic defences. The course of the Rappahannock, the Mattapony, the York, the James, might have been designed by a friend of slavery to frustrate the advance of Northern armies to the seat of rebellion. At twenty-mile intervals or less, river after river, each easily defensible, stood between the Union forces and the enemy capital.
A solution to the infuriating strategic difficulty was proposed in the spring of 1862 by the man who had recently become Abraham Lincoln’s favoured general, George McClellan. Convinced that a repetition of the “On to Richmond” effort by the overland route would stumble again, at one or other of the water obstacles, McClellan persuaded Lincoln to let him put the Army of the Potomac, the Union’s main force, into troopships, sail it down Chesapeake Bay from Washington and land it at the point of the Virginian Peninsula, between the York and James rivers. There he would enjoy the security of a firm base, Fortress Monroe, one of the great stone citadels of the coast-defence programme known as the Third System, and still in Union hands; from it by easy marches Richmond lay only seventy miles distant. McClellan was confident that he could make the amphibious operation work. As a junior officer marked for promotion, he had been sent in 1855 as an observer to the Anglo-French expedition to the Crimea, so had seen an amphibious operation at work with his own eyes, and had also witnessed the military use of the newly invented telegraph.4 As a railroad company executive, which he left the army to become in 1856, he had learnt
more about the telegraph as a means of control and also about bulk supply over long distances; both telegraphic control and efficient logistics were to be of central importance in the running of the Peninsula Campaign.
The arrival of the Army of the Potomac at Fortress Monroe greatly alarmed the Confederate high command. Entrenchments were hastily dug across the nose of the Peninsula, in places following the line of earthworks constructed during the British defence of Yorktown in 1781. General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia was withdrawn from the proximity of Washington, and Richmond was put into a state of defence. The Confederates were right to be alarmed, despite the temporary security these measures provided. They were greatly outnumbered on the spot, by 105,000 to 60,000 in the vicinity of Richmond, and potentially by an even larger number. Three other Northern armies hovered nearby, that of Frémont in West Virginia, that of McDowell near Washington and that of Banks in the Shenandoah Valley. If they could be brought into combination with McClellan’s, Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia would be overwhelmed and the fate of the Confederacy sealed.
There were only two points of light for the Confederacy amid the encircling gloom. The first was McClellan’s capacity for procrastination. Though objectively superior in strength to the enemy, he was constitutionally incapable of accepting the evidence, constantly petitioned Lincoln for more troops and issued frequent warnings of his inability to proceed unless reinforced. Instead of pressing forward, he hung back, professing to see dangers visible only to himself, thus conferring on his enemies opportunities to strengthen their position which they should not have been allowed. He had landed at Fortress Monroe on 22 March 1862. He then spent a month, 4 April to 4 May, besieging the weak Confederate position at Yorktown. Not until 5 May, after the Confederate garrison had withdrawn, did he advance to fight his first proper battle, at Williamsburg, and not until the 25th did he draw near to Richmond, his proper objective. He had taken over eight weeks to cover seventy miles and had inflicted no damage on the enemy at all. Joseph E. Johnston’s army stood intact and remained to be brought to battle.