The Dover Patrol

The Dover Patrol was a game which used, as I recall, a squared board to represent the English Channel on which the German High Seas Fleet (of the first world war) provided the baddies and the Royal Navy provided the goodies, represented by cardboard markers placed on the board in such a way that your opponent knew you had a piece at a particular place but did not know what it was. You got to know if you moved one of your markers to the same place, so challenging the opposing marker.

Having now finished the first volume of the two volume work by Admiral Sir Reginald Hugh Spencer Bacon mentioned on 7th April, I now know that the Dover Patrol was the name for the naval command responsible for keeping the English Channel British (there being plenty of Welsh, Scots and Irish in the navy, not to mention the Cornish). A heavy responsibility given the huge amount of traffic entering London Docks from the Channel, needed to service the population at large, and the huge amount of cross Channel traffic, needed to service the allied armies in France and Belgium. Hundreds of ships a day, ships which were all too vulnerable to attack by mine, torpedo & gun fire from submarine, motor launch & destroyers.

Not only is the story now largely forgotten, its success sometimes meant that the army command of the day forget the difficulties and risks involved in their clamour for more cross Channel traffic. It took, for example, six transports doing two return trips every day, day in day out, to support the requirement that every British soldier in France and Belgium should have one home leave a year, something regarded as very important for morale; a number which had to be maintained in the face of all  kinds of other requirements.

The admiral, according to Wikipedia, was very good at the technical side of his work but was not very good with people, with the result that he was rather abruptly relieved of his command towards the end of 1917. Perhaps Volume II will throw a bit more light on that; Volume I just lets some of his understandable bitterness show through. The upside is a lot of fascinating stuff about, for example, long range gunfire and the construction of twenty mile long barrages made of mine festooned nets. Firing large guns from a moving platform at small targets - like lock gates or gun emplacements - from a range of perhaps 20,000 yards was a tricky business, depending inter alia on pressure changes in the upper atmosphere en-route, at a time when there was no sat-nav to tell you from exactly where your guns were firing from. There was the complication that some of the German coastal batteries had the rather greater range of 30,000 yards and the amusement of planting large tripods in the sea, from which spotters reported the fall of shells from much further out.

A rather different sort of technical tit-bit was the fact that slack water is not the same thing as low tide. A tide might well still be running when the sea is at its lowest point. It took me a while to work out why this might be so. A royal tit-bit were the special arrangements made for the safe carriage of royal and other important persons across the channel.

Different again, was the difficulty we had in providing the Dover Patrol with enough ships and men. We were stretched to breaking point by the twin requirements of keeping a massive fleet at Scapa Flow in case the Germans wanted to have a proper battle and of keeping a massive number of ships scattered around the globe to make sure that Britannia continued to rule those waves, as well as those of the Channel.

The admiral makes the interesting point early on in the book that command of the seas depends crucially on being prepared to lose ships. You had to be prepared to fight to maintain command and the Germans did not win this particular battle because they were too protective of their ships and lacked proper aggressive spirit. He put this down to the German navy being rather young and dominated by army instinct & habit. He seems fairly sure that a talented and aggressive admiral on the German side could have done massive damage to our traffic - but, luckily for us, such an admiral did not appear.

This particular example of the book appears to have been presented in 1919 by a friend or relation to someone who had served in the Patrol. A book which comes with a lot of photographs, diagrams and (fold out) maps, and which must have been, I imagine, an expensive production in its time. Even if the producers missed the trick of having the maps fold out far enough that you can read the text and the map at the same time.

It would be interesting to read an account of how all this translated into the rather different circumstances of the second world war. Guessing first that by the time of that war a lot more of our regular merchant traffic had been routed away from London into Liverpool & Glasgow and second that for most of that war we did not have a field army to support on the Continent. On the other hand, the Germans had the whole of the east coast, rather than just the northern part of it. There must be some interest as Amazon sell the original book, various reprints and the board game. Plus some other books with the same sort of title. Maybe I will start perusing the usually large military history sections in second hand and remainder shops. In any event, I shall report on Volume II in due course.