ABSTRACT
Sir John Fisher, the famous First Sea Lord of the Admiralty in the early years of the century, liked to describe the army as ‘a projectile fired by the Navy’. If he meant that the best contribution the Navy could make to winning a war, as distinct from merely not losing it, was to land the army where it could defeat the enemy, he was right. For the Regular Army was the nation’s sole offensive striking force; and that remark is not in the least derogatory toward the Navy. The importance of the Royal Navy in our period is beyond challenge. One decisive defeat at sea would have been the end of an independent Britain. But still the Navy was essentially a defensive force. It could, and did, prevent French armies from landing in England. It could, and did, cut off French foreign trade, and force French women to do without silks and set French chemists to work discovering how to make sugar out of beets instead of West Indian sugar cane; but it could not overthrow Bonaparte’s empire. It also could, and did, convoy British troops to various theatres of war; but the task of counter-attack - in the colonies, in Italy, the Baltic, Spain and the Netherlands - required soldiers. The British army was, of course, never large enough to master the French singlehanded. But when used on sound strategical principles and well led in the field it contributed much to the eventual success of the allies on land. Its reputation also contributed much to the success or failure of British diplomacy.
