Shortly before Duncan won his victory at Camperdown, Horatio Nelson
had jumped onto the stage of history -- and jumped with both feet. At the
Battle of St. Vincent, Nelson disobeyed his commander and led the rear
division of the British fleet on a mission of its own that won the battle, and personally led the boarding parties that captured two Spanish ships, one of the largest class.
Subordinates who defied Admiral Jervis successfully can be counted on the nails of one finger, and successful boarding actions between sail of the line were rare -- in fact there had been none in the last three wars -- and the fact that Nelson was able to pull it off within the course of a single battle marked him as, if nothing else, a brilliant man of action.
Fortunately for the British, Nelson was more than that. in the next few years Nelson was to become the apothesis of the unfettered school of naval tactics. Before Nelson's appearance, battles like the Saintes and the First of June, in which five or six of the enemy fleet were captured, were considered great victories. After Nelson, nothing less than the rout and extermination of an enemy would do.
Nelson's abilities and personality are so intertwined that it is difficult to examine one without the other. Basically, Nelson was characterized by the following:
- 1. A brilliant tactical eye, able in a glance to understand an enemy's
weakness and act on that understanding.
2. A determination not only to defeat the enemy but to annihilate his force.
3. A willingness to fit tactics to circumstances rather than attempt the opposite.
4. A personal recklessness that led him into adventures such as the boarding of the Spanish ships, his ill-fated attack on the Teneriffe, and his making a conspicuous target of himself at Trafalgar.
5. An ability to communicate his tactical intentions to his subordinates such that they were able to anticipate his wishes.
It has often been stated that Nelson's tactical systems were so individual that they were not capable of being systematized. This is not true Nelson described his tactical ideas in detail in several memoranda and letters to his friends and subordinates, and demonstrated that his tactics are capable of reduction to the same sort of systematization that served so well for York and Blake. The problem was that Nelson had no more respect for his own tactical systems than he did for anyone else's -he was willing to throw his own schemes to the winds and invent new ones on the spot if it would win him the decisive victory he sought.
Briefly, Nelson's tactical ideas are reducible to two:
- 1. A renewed interest in doubling the enemy, a tactic that had fallen into disuse.
2. An attack aimed at breaking the enemy fleet into several segments, each of which can be overwhelmed in detail.
Both these concepts are apparent in Nelson's thought from the beginning of his career as a fleet commander, in 1798. During that year he was chasing up and down the Mediterranean looking for the French fleet that was transporting Bonaparte to Egypt. He presented to his officers his plan of battle if he encountered the French on the high seas.
The details have since been lost, but in broad outline the plan envisioned dividing the British into three columns, two of which would attack the French warships while the third attacked the convoy carrying Bonaparte's troops. This demonstrates that by 1798, Nelson was already working on the plan that would appear, in somewhat different form, at Trafalgar in 1805 - a plan that, with characteristic immodesty, Nelson referred to as "the Nelson touch".
Nelson lost his chance to encounter Bonaparte on the sea and instead found the French fleet at Abukir Bay, where they had anchored. The doubling of the van of the French line has been claimed as a fortunate result of the initiative of the captain who first led the British inshore of the French, but according to Captain Barry, Nelson's flag captain, Nelson had communicated his intention to double the enemy for at least two months prior to the battle. The result was that only two of the thirteen French sail of the line escaped capture or destruction.
Nelson's next major battle, at Copenhagen, was also fought against a stationary enemy, but the presence of shoal water made it impossible to double the Danes, and instead Nelson worked out a detailed plan that pit individual ships against one another at anchor, slugging it out to a victory that was necessarily hard fought and without fluid tactical refinement.
In subsequent years Nelson's ideas underwent considerable change and refinement. There are a number of sources for his ideas from the period of 1803 to his death at Trafalgar in 1805, many of them in his own words.
The principle sources for Nelson's ideas in this period are a memorandum probably distributed to his fleet off Toulon in November 1803, and another memorandum given to his fleet just before Trafalgar. Though the plans were modified throughout this period as the number of ships in Nelson's fleet changed and as Nelson tinkered with his ideas, the broad outlines of the Nelson touch are as follows.
Nelson planned to divide his fleet into three squadrons, each beginning the action parallel to one another and to the enemy (Fig. 6). Nelson himself would command the center squadron, while the weather squadron -- one-fifth of the fleet in the final version of the plan, and called "the Advanced Squadron" by Nelson, to be composed of the fastest two deckers -- would be commanded by a subordinate conversant with Nelson's methods and who Nelson could trust to carry out his plans. This plan is illustrated by a diagram Nelson drew himself in one of his memoranda.
Each squadron would be free to maneuver more or less independently, outside of central control. The leeward squadron would edge down onto the enemy, cutting off his rear and engaging it. The center column would act to support the lee squadron, make an attack somewhere else presumably farther up the line -- or join its attack to that of the lee squadron.
The advanced squadron -- the fastest ships -- were essentially to act as a mobile reserve. if necessary they could add their fire to any of the other two squadrons, but their principle function was the maneuver in such a way as to contain the enemy van while the center and lee squadrons crushed the rear. The precise method of this containment was up to the squadron commander, ranging from a feint aimed at the enemy van to direct intervention between the van and the rest of the enemy. Anything to keep the van from intervening in the destruction of the rest of the enemy fleet.
The psychological dimensions to the Nelson touch are considerable. In breaking the enemy line Nelson intended to confuse the enemy, to push him off balance. In the conventional tactics of the formal school, any pell-mell attack by squadrons would be shot to bits on the approach by a well-disciplined defensive line; but Nelson counted on the superior fighting qualities of the British ships and superior British morale to get him through this period of danger. Then, with enemy cohesion broken and the enemy engaged in melee with superior numbers, it didn't matter whether individual British ships were in danger, because as a mass the British would be overwhelming the enemy and crushing him. The enemy would be demoralized by the attack, cut off and without support.
The advanced squadron was another element of the plan aimed at disturbing enemy equilibrium. Their function was flexible and mobile, and the enemy would never know where they would strike. The advanced squadron was to throw the enemy so thoroughly off balance that by the time the squadron committed itself to the fight the enemy would be unable to recover.
There was another version of the Nelson touch aimed at an attack from leeward, somewhat different. Here there is no containing movement the squadrons are to attack simultaneously at three points on the enemy line, overwhelming the rear and center. The van would be dealt with later, by any British ships still in condition to engage.
The Nelson touch is sophisticated in the extreme, and confused generations of naval officers, including many who had served at Trafalgar. This confusion was aided by the fact that Nelson used a somewhat different plan at Trafalgar, and Nelson-worshipping historians, such as James, tried with considerable vigor and sarcasm to demonstrate that the Trafalgar plan and the Nelson touch were actually the same.
Throughout the evolution of the Nelson touch, Nelson also considered another variation of the plan using two columns only, in which the weather column would serve the containing function of the advanced squadron as well as its original function of supporting the attack delivered by the lee squadron.
To meet the specific conditions of the battle of Trafalgar, Nelson
improvised another plan, with which the Nelson touch has often been
confused. At Trafalgar Nelson figured himself to be in a situation similar
to that of Duncan at Camperdown - he felt he had to strike the enemy
before they could escape into Cadiz. He also probably wanted to take
advantage of the fact that the allied fleet was disorganized after a series
of maneuvers. The modifications to his own plan demonstrated at
Trafalgar are accountable to Nelson's sense of haste.
To begin with, his advanced squadron of eight ships had been disorganized during the previous days by some being used on picket duty, while others had been assigned temporarily to the other squadrons. Rather than take the time to reform the advanced squadron, Nelson chose to attack in two columns.
Nelson did not bother to form his squadrons parallel to the enemy or approach them along a gradual line as in his original plan, but instead decided to attack pell-mell at a very steep angle. This ensured a swift commitment to the attack but meant that the lead ships, his own Victory among them, would be severely handled on the approach (Fig. 7).
Nelson was able to take these risks because he knew that the quality of his enemy was poor - the British fleet had spent years at sea and in all weathers, and were drilled to perfection by officers who understood their work; while the Allied fleet had little sea experience and was led by officers who had neither the trust of their governments nor each other.
Hasty though Nelson's attack was, it was not devoid of sophistication. On the approach, Nelson led his own (weather) column on a curve off to larboard before turning downwind to strike the enemy line in its approximate center. This movement was a feint directed at the enemy van, and had as its effect the pinning of the enemy van - apprehensive of attack, the commander of the French van made no attempt to support the rest of the fleet. The feint was a psychological masterstroke.
But Nelson died at Trafalgar, and the debate over the Nelson touch, precisely what it meant and what it intended, began at once. Within af ew years it has resulted in the creation of another formal school of tactics -- a monster composed of exactly those elements of which Nelson wished to free naval thought.
THE CANONIZATION OF NELSON
Within a few years the alleged "lessons of Trafalgar" had been learned by all concerned -- including a few lessons that Nelson almost certainly never intended. In July of 1807 the Russian Admiral Senyavin, using tactics directly inspired by Nelson's at Trafalgar and demonstrating that Nelson's work was appreciated outside of Western Europe, smashed a Turkish squadron off Mount Athos, capturing or destroying 4 out of 10 enemy sail of the line. If the remaining Turks hadn't been saved by a change of wind, he would have got them all.
Even the French got into the act. At the Battle of Lissa in 1811, the French Commodore Dubourdieu formed his six frigates into two Nelsonian columns and came charging down from windward in order to attack four British under Captain Hoste. The attack in this case was unsuccessful and therein lies a moral.
The extreme tactical 'and psychological sophistication of the Nelson touch, without the presence of Nelson to explain it, was simply beyond the abilities of most officers to grasp. instead of the series of attacks and feints subtly timed to break the enemy's balance, to cut off and overwhelm part of the enemy fleet while containing the rest, the "lessons of Trafalgar" had, in the minds of his less astute successors, boiled down to the notion that Nelson's methods consisted of an organization of independent squadrons, a heedless attack in two columns straight downwind, then a grand melee. The careful timing of the attacks, the ability of the squadrons to support one another - not to mention the whole principle of containing one part of the enemy by maneuver while overwhelming the rest - had been lost.
By the time the maneuvers were enshrined in the signal book of 1816, even these lessons were imperfectly learned. The 1816 signal book ordered the attack in two rigid lines, followed by each line hauling into the wind and sailing parallel to the enemy, moving toward the van - in effect an attack aimed at the van and center as opposed to the rear and center, and far more difficult to bring off than the latter! Nelson's enshrinement as a naval martyr, whose victory at Trafalgar was considered the pattern for all future endeavor, and whose beliefs and methods were not to be questioned, had resulted in the loss of the flexibility and use of initiative which Nelson had so clearly desired.
A History of Sailing Tactics in the Age of Fighting Sail Part III
A History of Sailing Tactics in the Age of Fighting Sail Part II
- Battle of Toulon and Minorca
Additional Instructions, Anson, and Hawke
Morogues, Villehuet, and Ushant
Signal Reform
DeGrasse and Suffern
A History of Sailing Tactics in the Age of Fighting Sail Part I
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