When the time came for the assault upon Zeebrugge the value of these painstaking preparations was made evident. The attack was made from sea and air alike. Out in the North Sea the great British battleships steamed in as near the coast as the shallowness of the water would permit. From the forward deck of each rose grandly a seaplane until the air was darkened by their wings, and they looked like a monstrous flock of the gulls which passengers on ocean-going liners watch wheeling and soaring around the ship as it ploughs its way through the ocean. These gulls though were birds of prey. They were planes of the larger type, biplanes or triplanes carrying two men, usually equipped with two motors and heavily laden with high explosive bombs. As they made their way toward the land they were accompanied by a fleet of light draft monitors especially built for this service, each mounting two heavy guns and able to manoeuvre in shallow water. With them advanced a swarm of swift, low-lying, dark-painted destroyers ready to watch out for enemy torpedo boats or submarines. They mounted anti-aircraft guns too and were prepared to defend the monitors against assaults from the heavens above as well as from the sinister attack of the underwater boats. Up from the land base at Nieuport came a great fleet of airplanes to co-operate with their naval brethren. Soon upon the German works, sheltering squadrons of the sinister undersea boats, there rained a hell of exploding projectiles from sea and sky. Every gunner had absolute knowledge of the precise position and range of the target to which he was assigned. The great guns of the monitors roared steadily and their twelve and fourteen-inch projectiles rent in pieces the bomb proofs of the Germans, driving the Boches to cover and reducing their works to mere heaps of battered concrete. Back and forth above flew seaplanes and airplanes, giving battle to the aircraft which the Germans sent up in the forlorn hope of heading off that attack and dropping their bombs on points carefully mapped long in advance. It is true that the aim of the aviators was necessarily inaccurate. That is the chief weakness of a bombardment from the sky. But what was lacking in individual accuracy was made up by the numbers of the bombing craft. One might miss a lock or a shelter, but twenty concentrating their fire on the same target could not all fail. This has become the accepted principle of aërial offensive warfare. The inaccuracy of the individual must be corrected by the multiplication of the number of the assailants.
The attack on Zeebrugge was wholly successful. Though the Germans assiduously strove to conceal the damage done, the later observations of the ruined port by British airmen left no doubt that as a submarine base it had been put out of commission for months to come. The success of the attack led to serious discussion, in which a determination has not yet been reached, of the feasibility of a similar assault upon Heligoland, Kiel, or Cuxhaven, the three great naval bases in which the German fleet has lurked in avoidance of battle with the British fleet. Many able naval strategists declared that it was time for the British to abandon the policy of a mere blockade and carry out the somewhat rash promise made by Winston Churchill when First Lord of the Admiralty, to "dig the rats out of their holes." Such an attack it was urged should be made mainly from the air, as the land batteries and sunken mines made the waters adjacent to these harbours almost impassable to attacking ships. Rear-Admiral Fiske, of the United States Navy, strongly urging such an attack, wrote in an open letter:
The German Naval General Staff realizes the value of concentration of power and mobility in as large units as possible. The torpedo plane embodies a greater concentration of power and mobility than does any other mechanism. For its cost, the torpedo plane is the most powerful and mobile weapon which exists at the present day.
An attack by allied torpedo planes, armed with guns to defend themselves from fighting airplanes, would be a powerful menace to the German fleet and, if made in sufficient numbers, would give the Allies such unrestricted command of the North Sea, even of the shallow parts near the German coast, that German submarines would be prevented from coming from a German port, the submarine menace abolished, and all chance of German success wiped out.
I beg also to point out that an inspection of the map of Europe shows that in the air raids over land the strategical advantage lies with Germany, because her most important towns, like Berlin, are farther inland than the most important towns of the Allies, like London, so that aëroplanes of the Allies, in order to reach Berlin, would have to fly over greater distances, while exposed to the fire of other aëroplanes, than do aëroplanes of the Germans in going to London for raids on naval vessels.
