Washington Naval Treaty 2.0

[miletus12]

France...



Once upon a when between 1870 and 1922, the French had to prove themselves that 1870 was a fluke, an accident of history, the French created and directly ruled a rich empire second only to the British Empire in resource base and possibly, if it had been better administered, a wealthier revenue generator.

The way that empire sprawled out, you would think the Marine National would be excited about the world ocean and would embrace the theory of sea use and denial with a passion, just when the British forgot that a navy was there to use and deny the access of the world ocean?

The French did not have a very good WWI, land or air, but especially upon the sea.



French battleship, Gaulois, around Christmas 1916.

The French tended to be technically clever and theoretically capable at sea with so many material things: steam engines, chemistry, electronics, physics and so forth, but they had two major problems; they did not understand the fundamentals of how to do things in a "practical" naval way; and they loved their theory over practice.

When you learn the wrong lessons about sea power and keep applying them, you build a navy that makes no sense and follow a naval and geophysical and geostrategic policy that make even less sense.

You try to course correct in 1922.

Maritime Strategies for the XXI Century: The Contribution of Admiral Castex, by Lars Wedin. Paris:
Nuvis, 2016. 233 pages. $30.

It is a matter of interest when an author is willing to break out some of the older volumes on maritime strategy and reexamine them in the light of current concerns, attempting to determine whether some nugget of interest has been passed over inadvertently. Lars Wedin’s Maritime Strategies for the XXI Century: The Contribution of Admiral Castex is such a work. Wedin examines the writings of French admiral Raoul Castex (1878–1968) for their applicability in creating maritime strategies for the present millennium. This is not an easy task. Castex was a voluminous writer throughout his naval career, authoring five books on strategic theory; two additional volumes of collected
articles were compiled posthumously.As a naval officer serving on escort ships during the First World War, Castex had the practical experience of observing what actually worked—above and beyond what any academician might propose. Following that conflict, Castex appreciated the opportunities that technological advances in aircraft and submarines might provide to the future naval commander. Given his lengthy naval career, wartime experience, and attentiveness to technological improvements, Castex should have been
a worthy successor to previous naval strategists such as Mahan and Corbett.

As Wedin points out, this was not always the case. The sheer immensity of Castex’s work makes it daunting for even the dedicated reader to digest. His writing style was ponderous, considering both the perspective of a practitioner and that of a theorist, without privileging either. Finally, Castex modified some of his views over the decades of authoring his volumes. Within that discourse, though, there are numerous ideas in the rough that are of interest to the modern naval strategist and policy maker.

Wedin does a credible job of bringing Castex into the new millennium, showing where Castex was on-target, as well as where his commentary does not pass the test of time. Castex was accurate on many things regarding the current character of maritime competition and
conflict. His concept of strategy was not limited exclusively to the use of military power to gain political objectives during
time of war. Attention to the naval forces, as well as the industry that built the ships and the organizations that produced the
sailors to operate them, required oversight and direction during peacetime as well. A strategy of morale was necessary to keep the population committed to the policies of the government—a highly Clausewitzian notion.

As a practitioner, Castex wrote about the notion of constraints that would prevent military commanders from taking extreme action in pursuit of mere military aims. There were always limits, both political and legal, that mitigated such excesses, particularly in peacetime.Failure of the national leadership to maintain an interest in the maritime environment in peacetime could lead to defeat in time of war. Instead, a maritime strategy that coordinated actions by industry, national military, and security forces was essential to
build the wealth and power of the state.These were still primarily wartime concerns for Castex, for both the preparation for and conduct during hostilities, but he was prescient about the growing importance of the linkages.

Yet Castex was not infallible, as Wedin illustrates. The “infrastructuration” of the ocean with new facilities to gain wealth from the sea, such as oil platforms, wind turbine farms, or ocean floor mining, portends a greater economic interest in the ocean above and beyond that of shipping flows that support the globalization of commerce.This, of course, opens up different avenues for disruption of the enemy
beyond the mere destruction of shipping that Castex had observed in World War I. Land attack from the sea, while possible, did not seem likely to succeed, perhaps owing to the poor Allied performance at Gallipoli. Subsequently, World War II showed that Castex was too pessimistic on this subject. Castex also underestimated the role of navies in operations below the threshold of armed conflict. The constraints of legal regimes, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, affect naval operations in both peace and conflict to greater degrees than Castex would have believed possible. The maritime component of strategy must now include consideration of new strategies (cyber and space) on the basis of technologies that were nascent in Castex’s lifetime.This hardly can be considered serious criticism of Castex, as the world certainly has changed since he considered the foundations of naval strategy,

French naval thought (Castex) had finally junked the simplistic ideas embodied in the Jeune Ecole, and entered into the practical world of how a navy ensures use of the sea and functioned on the world ocean. I am sure the 1922 French admirals, with their fleet badly misused in support of a bunch of naval incompetents, as politically mandated by their civilian masters, wanted to do better and differently the next time they were called to war. You usually see a lot of writing about what went wrong when you have been beaten. Castex was very much a process and lessons explained teacher. Rather ponderous and nuts and bolts in his approach, he covered what he thought the Marine National did wrong, including everything from not paying attention to convoy defense, to use of naval geography to how the French designed, built and manned their ships right down to sea-mindedness. He started from zero and tried to explain to the French naval professionals, the way Mahan has done for Americans in general, why a navy is and how it should be structured and used.        

Castex addressed the wrong audience. The admirals were eager to listen. It was the French public, especially their political elites who were the ignorant students who needed the lessons.



Why build that in 1931? Notice the AMERICAN radar? More on that 1943 change in a moment.
 
The French Marine National was of course constrained (That Castex word. M.), by other realities, such as the need for a huge land army to keep the pesky Germans and maybe the Russians away from France. Then there was the political chaos of the Slump, which had first draw of French political attention, and the natural civilian political distrust of a professional military which still thought Bonaparte was a good idea.    

Yet within those severe constraints the French admiralty did rather well on the technical side of things. They did muff a few things:
a. their sonar technology lagged.
b. their AAA defense was weak.

Yet for the resources they had and the mission they understood, they sized their fleet and arranged its disposition to serve French interests, rather than play second fiddle to another navy's dictates as they had been forced in WWI.   

I could go into detail about how the Marine National advised their WNT negotiators to resist efforts to restrict cruisers and destroyers, to manage the submarine and to emphasize the containment of battleship armament and tonnage limits for the "big two" and to maintain some kind of quantitative superiority over the Italians.  The negotiators did not understand or listen in the real history, especially to the French admirals' complaints about the fiction of "standard displacement", a rather useful to the Americans British fiction that allowed the Anglo Americans and the Japanese to build long ranged warships that neither the French nor the Italians wanted or needed or desired other naval powers to have. See MAP.

     

I mean, if that is where you expect to fight, is that not a design and constraint limit according to Castex? Your negotiators will resist small destroyer definitions and will not be too happy if your diplomats give up a demand for equivalent cruiser tonnage to the British for example. You might not be able to build that many cruisers, but you would want that option on paper, and you would want more cruisers than the ITALIANS.    



And of course you would orient to navaly protect the bulk of your empire.
 


That is called a "treaty cheater".

Oddly enough, it was built to deal with GERMANS, not the Italians.  

It was a well executed design for its purpose. Part of the problem with it, was that it lacked an important element to make it work.



The MN were building that when the Germans showed up on land. 

So... all in all, the Marine National had a rational, well-thought-out, quite Mahanic plan for construction, deployment and use of itself. Of all the navies at the 1922 WNT conference , both in the real history and this fictional timeline, I would argue the Marine National was the most rational and "practical" of the actors. It tried hard to come into conformity with reality in response to its miserable WWI experience, within "constraints" as Castex defined the term, with not only much better seagoing ships, but with a FRENCH naval doctrine and policy. 

Too bad the politicians repeated again the WWI mistake of saddling the fleet with the orders to play second fiddle to the whims of another navy again.   

The result of that political decision was that the Marine National was defeated without even being given a chance at all. It was split into two in a naval civil war. It was viciously attacked by its "supposed friends". A large part of it, self-scuttled to "keep its word" and maintain its honor. And what little that survived of it was third fiddled and parceled out among the very navies that attacked it. It ceased for a while to even have a fleet identity, hence the Americanization of the Le Fantastique in 1943.        

    
You might NOW begin to understand this man? His name was Admiral Darlan. He drifted into the role of villain. He did not start out that way. 

=======================================================

By now, reader, you should begin to see a theme in this presentation as I try to apply a non-traditional frame of reference to the points of view of the various participants of and to the WNT, with discussion of the alternatives that each participant might have chosen. It will soon be apparent, that each of the participants in their alternatives, either lacked the  means, or the political wisdom to execute a rational program. Here, in the French case, it can be seen, that even when the service did its due diligence and tried its best; poor decisions; political decisions, as well as a few technical errors made, defeated the Marine National's best efforts. 

The bitter irony of coming closest to preparation and failing worst in war, among the WNT five, is not lost on me. Castex was right. You have to have the moral vision first before you can fix the material problems.          

[miletus12]

Here is some hot sauce. Not every navy had Dudley Pound for an excuse. Some navies were worse! 

The Armored Cruiser—Past and Present

By A. E. Sokol

November 1941 Proceedings Vol. 67/11/465

AFTER a pause of some 35 years the United States Navy is about to revive the armored cruiser as an integral part of the fleet. It therefore seems appropriate at this time to ask: What is the purpose of the armored cruiser, and what qualities should it possess to enable it to carry out this purpose in the most efficient manner? This is the more important, as the present rearmament program, in order to be fully effective in the minimum time, must make the best possible use of every ton and of every dollar available. During long periods of peace, mistakes in military preparation will eventually be detected and can be remedied before any damage is done; a faulty construction can be corrected and will form the basis of later improvement. In times of emergency, however, of threatening war and of tremendously sped-up naval construction, no such leisure and latitude are granted: every move must count or it may lead to failure. Therefore every move must be carefully considered and reconsidered before it is frozen into action; every plan must incorporate the latest available information and experience before it is allowed to go into the production line.

In order to answer the above-stated question, it will be necessary first to review the historical development of the armored cruiser, and then to discuss the present technical and strategic situation with regard to that type of war vessel.

The armored cruiser owed its existence to the need for specialization. This need, in turn, was and is based on one of the fundamental principles of warfare—as indeed, of life in general—which demands economy of effort. This principle is not, as it might seem, inconsistent with, or contradictory to, that other axiom of strategy, concentration of power, but rather its corollary; for only if minor tasks are left to minor forces is a real concentration on major problems at all possible. In naval strategy the recognition of this maxim has in all ages led to the construction of various types of fighting craft, so that for each possible assignment the smallest and least expensive ship might be available, a vessel that is just powerful enough to perform this particular duty without undue risks. This process has led to our present array of fighting ships, ranging from the powerful battleship down to the small motor- boat. Naturally, there are limits to specialization, and every warship actually represents a compromise, so far as it is usable for more than just one task, although it cannot be equipped equally well for all of them.

Thus the tendency toward specialization is itself not new, because it is the answer to a fundamental demand. Even the ship of the line was accompanied by the frigate and the corvette, ships which were smaller and less powerfully armed, but which usually made up for their lack of strength by superior speed. The duties assigned to these secondary war vessels consisted not in fighting regular ships of the line—for which they were no match—but in reconnoitering, scouting, safeguarding the fleet against surprise, protection or destruction of sea-borne trade, blockading of enemy ports, and general police service. To detach full-fledged battleships for such tasks would have meant an undue weakening of the battle line, and thus would have violated the principle of concentration of power.

In a similar way the steam-driven battleship of the nineteenth century also required supplementary vessels to help it secure and maintain sea power, to find and attack the enemy, to pursue his defeated forces, to make raids on enemy trade, and to protect its own nation’s sea routes. The cruiser was the answer to these demands, and after the Alabama's success as a commerce raider during the Civil War all nations turned their attention to this type of warship. However, even within the new class, specialization set in very soon, and different types of cruisers began to make their appearance, ranging from near-battleships down to small gunboats. In time, two fundamental types could be distinguished: a larger ship, in which strong armament and fair protection were combined with comparatively high speed; a smaller one, which sacrificed both armament and protection for speed alone. Between these two extremes, a great variety of sub-types was evolved to suit the various strategic and tactical theories of each period, or the financial and technical possibilities of each nation.

Since this discussion is interested in the genesis of only one special type, the armored cruiser, it is not necessary to follow the historical development of the cruiser class in general. In its essential qualities the armored cruiser was introduced into the building programs of naval powers about 1890. Its main characteristics were a displacement smaller than that of contemporary battleships, rather heavy armament, an armored deck and at least a partial belt protecting the vital parts of the hull, and high speed. It soon became a definite and even favored type of war vessel, and remained so for nearly 20 years.

The advantage of this type was the combination of strength, speed, and endurance. While it was cheaper than the battleship itself, it was more powerful than anything else afloat and better fitted for the minor tasks of naval warfare than the main unit of the fleet. Although it could not stand up against a battleship in good condition, it still could be used in the battle line, because its speed enabled it to make enveloping movements, pursue the weakened and retreating battle fleet of the enemy, yet avoid superior forces. Its main task, however, was to fight against other cruisers, to prevent hostile scouts from approaching the battle fleet, and help its own cruiser force to penetrate the screen of the enemy.

Thus the armored cruiser stood between the battleship and the light cruiser; able to perform the duties of both to a certain extent, because it had a fighting power approaching the former, and a speed equal to the latter. These advantages were especially attractive as long as the armored cruiser remained a comparatively inexpensive ship; that is, appreciably lower in cost than the battleship itself. They even led to a temporary over-valuation of the type toward the end of the nineteenth century, when naval strategists, under the influence of the French Admiral Aube and his “jeune école,” considered direct attack on the commerce of the enemy the surest means of defeating him. The enthusiasm of that group was contagious enough to cause a temporary pause in the building of the usual type of heavily armored and strongly protected but slow battleship. Soon, however, a more or less fixed relationship between the two classes developed and continued until about 1905.[1]

During the years 1890 to 1905 the development of the armored cruiser, like that of the contemporary battleship, was on the whole gradual and slow. But when at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 armored cruisers took their place in Togo’s battle line and satisfactorily performed the duties of battleships, a new phase in the evolution of the armored cruiser began. Originally conceived as an especially powerful scouting vessel, it now developed its fighting qualities, armament and armor, in a way that tended towards equality with the battleship, while maintaining its superior speed: a new type of warship, the battle cruiser, was born. In this ship the purely tactical or battle-line qualities were being increasingly stressed, while the strategic tasks formerly assigned to the armored cruiser were being entrusted to the light cruiser. But in order to enable the battle cruiser to take a regular place in the battle line, to compete with the battleship in hitting and resisting power, and yet maintain higher speed, it had to be enlarged until it outgrew the battleship itself. Thus becoming too expensive and valuable for the ordinary cruiser duties, it ceased to be a cruiser altogether; its development actually became a part of that of the battleship.

At the same time, however, the battleship itself, which in 1906 had made the jump to the Dreadnought type, began to show a tendency towards increased speed, while maintaining its other qualities; eventually a new class of fast battleships appeared, of which the British Queen Elizabeth was the most striking example. In time, these two varieties of fast capital ships might have blended into one class, to constitute a fast wing of the battle line. Even if operating detached from the main fleet, this new type would be meant primarily to fight down opponents of equal size and power—not combat cruisers or lighter craft.

The advantages of battle cruisers or fast battleships—fast as compared to the ordinary or prevalent contemporary type—are undeniable; a fleet that possesses a fast wing composed of these types certainly has a great tactical superiority over a fleet that does not, provided that the main battle fleet is not weakened too much by the detachment of the fast wing. But these advantages can be bought only at great cost, which, by reducing the funds available for other types, may actually result in a considerable weakening of the fleet as a whole. Thus, for instance, the size of the average armored cruiser or battle cruiser rose between 1908 and 1913 from 15,000 to 27,000 tons, while that of the battleship rose only from about 18,000 to 25,000 tons. This sudden jump in size and cost of what formerly had been an auxiliary vessel caused the loss of its previous popularity; only the largest navies could afford to follow this new trend.

A typical example of these conditions is furnished by the British battle-cruiser Hood, launched in 1918, which was to combine all the qualities of a regular battleship with high speed. But even though her armament and protection did not actually measure up fully to that of contemporary battleships, such as the American California class, the Hood's speed could be achieved only at a displacement of almost one third more than that of the California[2] Taking her size and power into consideration, the Hood should not even be termed a battle cruiser, but rather a fast battleship, or perhaps even superbattleship. For more than 20 years she actually remained the largest capital ship afloat.

Whether the tremendous expenditure involved in the construction of battle cruisers was justified or not is still open to question. The war of 1914 to 1918 neither definitely proved nor disproved its merits, nor, for that matter, those of the fast battleship. To be sure, the Battle of Jutland did demonstrate the ability of the battle cruiser to do service as a battleship; to hit hard, and—at least in the case of the better protected German ships of the Derfflinger class—to take severe punishment. But neither side was able to use its fast wing to bring about a victorious decision, not even to gain a marked advantage over the other. It might even be argued that the great fighting power of the battle cruisers tempted their commanders on both sides to engage in a regular battle with each other for the sake of fighting itself, thus ignoring their primary purpose as cruisers —reconnoitering. The result of this battle, however, did not justify the lack of information under which the commanders of both main fleets were kept laboring.

By 1914 the evolution of the armored cruiser properly speaking had thus practically come to a standstill. A single noteworthy attempt to revive the type was made when Lord Fisher designed his Glorious class. These ships were again considerably smaller than contemporary battleships or battle cruisers, but combined heavy armament with high speed, though their protection was poor. But although they had the general characteristics of armored cruisers, these ships were meant for a special purpose, the proposed landing operations on the coast of Pomerania. Even so, the wisdom of their design is open to doubt. Being overgunned and underprotected, they were neither fish nor fowl. Their 15- or even 18-inch battery, consisting of only 2 to 4 guns, was not enough to make them effective against battleships or land fortifications, nor against cruisers and destroyers, while their scanty armor made them extremely vulnerable against even the guns of light cruisers. Thus they lacked a proper balance of qualities, which for any other type is as necessary as it is for the battleship. Under actual war conditions they could fulfill satisfactorily neither the special duties for which they were designed nor the general tasks of an armored cruiser.

Despite its long duration and eventful history, World War I gave the armored cruiser comparatively little opportunity to prove its merits. However, an important angle of its usefulness is illustrated by the action off the Falkland Islands. It is interesting to note that in that case the oldest battle cruisers, the ones most closely resembling the older type of armored cruiser, proved themselves thoroughly capable of the task assigned to them—running down enemy cruisers and protecting commerce. The British Invincibles which caught and annihilated von Spee’s squadron were sent out on that mission for the very reason that they were the smallest vessels capable in every respect of dealing with the German cruiser force; but, and here is the point, not so powerful as to weaken the British battle fleet unduly during their absence.

In the Adriatic the appearance of the old Austrian armored cruiser St. Georg on the scene of battle sufficed to force the retreat of an allied squadron of light cruisers, thus saving the Austrian scouts from certain defeat by the superior forces of their pursuers. These examples show the armored cruiser in the role for which it was originally intended: to form a backbone for its own light cruisers, to help them disperse those of the enemy, and to protect the sea lanes against raiders.

Although such isolated instances cannot be taken as conclusive proof, they nevertheless indicate that the value of the armored cruiser or small battle cruiser was not discounted by the experience of that war. Against this inference one might cite the fact that armored cruisers, on several occasions, were easily sunk by the fire of a battleship, or by a torpedo. It must be remembered, however, that most of these ships were old and obsolete, and that the same criticism applies to the older type of battleship itself. At Jutland the old Pommern went down just as quickly as the British armored cruisers, while the more modern German battle cruisers stood up quite well under the fire of heavy guns. Valid comparisons can be made only between ships of approximately equal age and size, because of the advantages that increasing size and technical improvements give the newer and bigger ship over the older and smaller. Besides, the genuine armored cruiser was never expected to hold out long under the fire of a battleship. The question can only be, whether it fulfilled the tasks for which it was originally designed.

Even on this limited experience it is quite conceivable, and even probable, that a new type of armored cruiser would have been developed after World War I, perhaps alongside two classes of battleships, the regular and the fast type. But by limiting the number and size of battleships to be built, and by setting an upper limit of 10,- 000 tons for cruisers, the Washington Conference left no place for an intermediary type, and thus put a temporary stop to the further evolution of the armored cruiser. In its place a larger and more powerful light cruiser was developed, the so-called treaty or heavy cruiser of 10,000 tons, with 8-inch guns and rather light protection. Although it was much bigger than most of the preceding light cruisers, this new type still could not be rated as an armored cruiser; for neither did it enjoy unquestionable superiority over any other war vessel save the battleship, nor could it possibly be used in the battle line. The treaty cruiser was an artificial creation, brought into existence primarily by the restrictions imposed by the conference, and not by careful consideration of purposes and needs. It did not utilize the lessons of the war, but rather expressed the vagueness of military as well as popular thinking after the great struggle, a vagueness of which we are now- trying to rid ourselves. After several years of wide popularity, the treaty cruiser began to disappear from the building programs of the major naval powers, to give way to a new type of light cruiser, with less heavy armament but better protection; a type which frankly disclaims any ambition of being rated an armored cruiser.

The impetus for the development of what might be termed a new armored cruiser did not come from the major naval powers, but from Germany, whose Navy was strictly limited as to number and size of its ships. Faced with the problem of producing a fighting vessel of all-round efficiency on a displacement of only 10,000 tons, the Germans designed the Deutschland class, the first of which was launched in 1931 and recently renamed Lützow. Equal in size to the treaty cruisers, this ship, popularly misnamed a “pocket-battleship,” combined great fighting power and good speed with the best protection available at that tonnage. Although not equal to the best achievements in either direction, it had a striking power superior to that of any other type but the battleship; its armor was adequate for defense against the guns of cruisers; and it had enough speed to outrun or avoid the then existing battleships. Very few war vessels of that time, and only much larger ones, could hope, singlehanded, to compete successfully with the Deutschland. However, this does not mean that the new ship was an ideal type which should have been copied by other navies; for with all their skill and expenditure of money, the Germans still could not perform miracles and construct a 10,000- ton ship that was equal in every respect to others two or three times its own size. Under normal conditions, that is at a time of steady naval construction unhampered by external limitations, the Deutschland would very probably have never been conceived at all. The artificial conditions under which she was created forced her designers to attempt the impossible. Trying to give the small vessel the qualities of a battleship as well as a cruiser, they could not do full justice to either side. In order to provide the small German Navy with ships of great striking power, they gave the Deutschland 11-inch guns, which limited their number to six, in only two turrets. To insure a large radius of action, so that she might also be used as a commerce raider, they employed Diesel engines which were heavier than contemporary turbines, thus reducing the vessel’s speed. And while her heavy artillery made her superior in gun power to any single cruiser, the small number of her large guns and their slow rate of firing put the Deutschland at a disadvantage in fighting more than one ship of that type at the same time. Yet despite her 11- inch guns, she still was no real match for a battleship. Only because most of her potential adversaries in that class were old and slow did she have any chance at all. As soon as new and faster battleships were built, she lost most of her advantages, because she lacked the superior speed to make up for her deficiencies in other respects. She thus ceased to be an armored cruiser in the proper sense of the term, and should now be considered rather as a coast defense vessel. However, at the time she was built, the Deutschland represented the best compromise on the limited displacement, and she served to call attention to the striking possibilities of even a small ship. In judging her as a type, it must be remembered that her deficiencies were due not so much to mistaken conceptions on the part of her designers, as to the necessity of building a compromise and of keeping within strict limitations.[3]

How her good qualities impressed others is evidenced by the fact that France immediately answered with the construction of the Dunkerque, a vessel more than twice the size of the German ship. In designing this new vessel, officially classified as a battleship, the French evidently had only the new German armored ships in mind and wished to produce a unit which would, without any shade of doubt, be superior in every respect to the Deutschland. In this they succeeded well, as was to be expected at a displacement of 26,500 tons; for their type carries an armament of eight 13-inch guns, is much better protected than the smaller vessel, and has a speed of about 30 knots as compared to the Deutschland’s 26. But the French Staff was apparently too fascinated by the German product and did not foresee, in 1931, the beginning of the new era of battleships five or six years later, nor the trend towards increased speed in the modem capital ship. They were satisfied with a speed well ahead of that of the Deutschland and of any then existing battleship, save the three British “battle cruisers,” the Hood and the two Renowns. Thus, as soon as the naval powers decided to resume the construction of battleships, and to use the full permitted displacement of 35,000 tons, the Dunkerque was automatically outdated. The larger ships quite naturally could carry still more armor, a heavier armament, and yet achieve the same speed; particularly so, since technical progress made possible more powerful engines without increasing their weight. As regular battleships, vessels of the Dunkerque class have only a small chance against a 35,000 tonner. As armored cruisers alone they might serve a useful purpose, if they were not too slow for that rating. As it is, the Dunkerque represents a confusion of thought, the mistaken policy of designing a ship with only a certain opponent in mind, instead of basing its plan on fundamental principles. The same criticism applies to the two German vessels of the Scharnhorst class, especially if the speed of only 27 knots, with which they are officially credited, is correct. If, on the other hand, they are capable of 34 knots, as indicated by unofficial reports, they may be regarded as a much better solution for a vessel of the intermediary type and come closer to being good examples of modern armored cruisers.

This discussion is not concerned with the problem of comparative size within the battleship class. It is quite natural that the later and larger vessel will always have an advantage over the older and slower ones. But since most fleets are composed of units of both kinds, new and old, the problem is the same for both sides. The case under consideration here is that of the intermediary type, the ship which is deliberately kept smaller than the average contemporary battleship, though it may be considerably larger than the ordinary cruiser of that period.

Such a ship, being smaller than the corresponding battleships, must of necessity be satisfied with a reduction in power as compared to the larger unit. Within limits, it can match its bigger sister in armament, but then it has to accept a marked reduction in armor, or speed, or both; or it can maintain the same armor protection and carry less armament at a lower speed. In either case it will be decidedly inferior to the bigger ship. Higher speed alone, enabling it to avoid battle with the stronger opponent, will, to some extent, make up for the inescapable deficiencies in other respects, even if such speed must be purchased by a further decrease in armor and armament. Yet since there is no sense in building battleships that can do little but run away when opposed by another battleship, the obvious answer is that “small battleships” have no right to existence in a first-class navy. Ships which are meant to fight the heavy units of another fleet must possess the maximum striking and staying power, together with fair speed, which are available only at the maximum displacement. The same reasoning argues against the “fast battleship”—that is one having a speed well above the average for its class at a certain time; for either artillery or armor must be sacrificed to give the ship such high speed, or it must be given greater displacement, thus starting the ball rolling again. The case of the Hood is a good illustration of the situation.[4]

If, then, the intermediary ship can serve no useful purpose as a “small battleship,” the only alternative is to design it as an armored cruiser. This conclusion leads back to the original question, What is the purpose of the armored cruiser, and what should be its characteristics? The first part of that question has been answered by the historical survey. It showed that that type of vessel was to serve as superscout and cruiser-destroyer, and that it was given a variety of tasks which were considered essential for the maintenance of sea power. One task was, however, excluded: the armored cruiser was not meant to fight a battleship in good condition. In other words, it was not, originally, conceived of as a battle cruiser or a fast battleship. Its normal prey was the cruisers of the enemy, light or heavy, while it was to engage battleships only under specially favorable conditions. It was thus given a limited but important duty, which is today fully as urgent as it ever was, and therefore the armored cruiser is still a necessary and desirable type of warship, whose revival will fill a definite need of the modem fleet.

The design of a modem edition of the armored cruiser must keep these factors in mind. It should not strive to create a small battleship, but a vessel which is thoroughly capable of handling a number of cruisers and destroyers at the same time, being superior to them in striking power, adequately protected against their guns as well as against aerial bombs, and possessing a speed about equal to that of cruisers and superior to that of battleships. It should not be expected to outshoot a battleship, nor to be able to resist the fire of the heaviest artillery. In this type Lord Fisher’s dictum that “speed is armor” is fully applicable. At the same time the ship must be as small and inexpensive as possible, so that it can be readily risked in the performance of minor duties for which the ordinary cruiser would not be powerful enough while a battleship would be too valuable.

We thus arrive at the following general characteristics which a modem armored cruiser should incorporate:

Armament. —Its guns must make it superior to any other cruiser or combination of cruisers, and should give it at least some chance in a short encounter with a battleship. That means large number and high rate of fire, rather than the largest caliber of guns. The main battery should therefore consist of at least 8 (in 4 turrets), but preferably 12 guns, of a caliber between 9 and 12 inches. The formerly popular caliber of 9.5 inch (24 cm.) might well be revived for that purpose. Naturally, a larger caliber would have its advantages, but would correspondingly increase the size of the ship. The principle should be that, within the above limits, a larger number of smaller guns is better than a reduced number of the heavier caliber. A strong secondary battery against smaller ships and aircraft would, of course, be included.

Armor. —The armor of this cruiser should protect it fully against the fire of any light or heavy cruiser, should offer reasonable chances in a fight against ships of its own class, and should safeguard it against medium bombs, at least. The best underwater protection available for a ship of that size would, of course, be indispensable. To protect the armored cruiser against the guns of a full-sized battleship would be impossible and unnecessary, as encounters with ships of that kind should be considered exceptions, not average service demands on which the design is to be based. In general, the layout of the armor might follow the same principles used in battleship construction, that is, a full belt along the entire length of the ship, with the heaviest armor over the vital parts. It seems to be more important to protect the whole length of the water line against small-caliber guns than to increase the armor in the middle.

Speed. —In general, approximately the same as that of contemporary cruisers. This speed must, however, be at least 10 per cent, and preferably 15 per cent higher than that of modem battleships. Under present conditions this would mean at least 34 or 35 knots. Such speed is technically quite possible, and would not require an excessive weight of machinery, as exemplified by the American airplane carriers of the Yorktown class.

Aircraft. —Inasmuch as the armored cruiser would often be used independently, away from the main battle force, and at times even entirely alone, adequate aviation equipment would be necessary.

Radius of action. —A major consideration in the design of the armored cruiser; at least 12,000 miles, preferably more.

Size. —Minimum size and simplicity of construction would constitute a principal requirement, since low cost—in comparison with the battleship—would be one of the main advantages of the type.

The combination of average requirements would thus result in a ship of approximately the following characteristics:

Armament: Twelve 9.5-inch, sixteen-5-inch (double purpose) guns;
Armor: 6-inch deck, 8-inch belt, 10-inch turrets;
Speed: 35 knots;
Radius of action: 15,000 miles.

These qualities could be incorporated into a ship of about 20,000 tons standard displacement, that is, approximately twice the size of the present cruisers, and half that of modem battleships. Such a ship should be perfectly able to perform all the legitimate duties of an armored cruiser. Naturally, any increase in one or all of these factors would result in a more powerful unit, but also one of greater size and higher cost. Thus, at a displacement of 30,000 tons, the ship could be given twelve 12-inch guns, a deck of 7 and a belt of 10 inches, at the same speed of 35 knots. Whether, considering the tasks for which the armored cruiser is designed, such an increase in size is warranted by the added advantages is open to question.

The exact number of armored cruisers in proportion to that of battleships or smaller cruisers would vary according to the needs of the various navies. Probably half the number of battleships would be sufficient in most cases. They could be used either in groups or squadrons, forming the backbone of the Cruiser Force of the fleet, which would also include aircraft carriers, light cruisers, and destroyers; or individually, as the mainstay of a squadron of smaller ships. They would be an ideal type for employment detached from the main fleet and far away from its bases.

It is interesting to note that rumor ascribes to Japan the construction of just such a type of vessel. The United States has laid down six units of an intermediary type, though there are no data available as to their characteristics. Germany and France already have vessels of that type, although, as stated above, they do not quite meet the requirements for an armored cruiser. It is, however, evident that the armored cruiser, being strategically and tactically necessary for a modem fleet, is a naval demand of the present day, and therefore will soon celebrate a full come-back. It is to be hoped, however, that as far as the United States Navy is concerned, it will be really and frankly an armored cruiser with all that term implies, and not a second-rate battleship.

[1] The typical armored cruiser before 1905 was a vessel of about 10,000-ton displacement; four 9.5-inch and twelve 6-inch guns; an armored deck of about 2.5 inches, a belt of 6 and turret armor of 6 inches; with a speed of about 21 to 22 knots. In comparison, the battleship of that time was on the average 13,000 tons; four 12-inch and twelve 6-inch guns; 3-inch deck, 10-inch belt, 11-inch turrets; speed 18 to 19 knots. The corresponding light cruiser was of about 4,000 tons; ten 5-inch guns; a deck of 2.5 inches; speed about 21 knots.
[2] Taking the total muzzle energy as the basis of comparison, the armament of the Hood stood in about a 5:6 relationship to that of the California, and approximately the same ratio applied to the armor of these two ships.
’ The Battle of the River Plate, in which the Graf Spee, sister-ship of the Deutschland, was engaged by three British cruisers, confirmed these deductions and brought out the good as well as the weak points of the German armored cruiser. While superior in gun power to all three of her opponents combined, and evidently adequately protected against their guns, the Graf Spee was handicapped by having too few guns and a slow rate of firing. Her two turrets of 11-inch guns were powerful enough for the task on hand, but they could not fight three enemies at the same time. Yet the ship was too slow to maneuver so as to be able to concentrate her fire on one of her opponents after the other. Although too much importance must not be attached to this encounter, the outcome of which was determined partly by the relative skill of the commanders involved, partly by strategic and political conditions, and not exclusively by weight of broadside and armor, it represents a good example of the situation which confronts the armored cruiser. An artillery of nine 9.5-inch or even of twelve 8-inch guns, weighing about the same as the one actually carried but having a quicker rate of fire in addition to the greater number, would have served the Graf Spee better in a simultaneous fight with more than one adversary. Yet that is exactly the situation for which the armored cruiser should be constructed.
[4] The recent tragic fate of the Hood, repeating almost exactly that of the British battle cruisers at Jutland, proves that with all her enormous size the Hood was not sufficiently protected. The old rule which American designers consistently follow, that the thickness of the belt and turret armor should be at least equal to the caliber of the main guns, is still a good guide in determining the protection of a battleship, while under modem conditions the deck would have to be at least half as thick. This was known before, and re-emphasized by the Battle of Jutland, yet in order to gain speed the Hood had to sacrifice armor. While carrying 15-inch guns, her side armor and her turrets were only 12 inches in thickness, the deck, even after the refit, only 4 inches. That was all she could carry at her speed, at the time she was built. Thus she was inadequately protected for a battleship, while her tremendous size excluded her from the cruiser class (cf. note 2).
On the other hand, the German Bismarck, evidently built in the best German tradition, withstood terrific punishment before being sunk, because offensive and defensive qualities were much better balanced in her. The new battleship’s high speed, probably equalling that of her opponent, was no detriment in her case, as it was achieved with modem and therefore much lighter machinery which did not require as high a share of the displacement as that of the older British vessel.
This again goes to prove that the “battle cruiser” or “fast” battleship suffers from an inherent defect which even increased size cannot completely overcome. In the end it is not size that counts, but the careful weighing and purposeful distribution of essential factors, together with a minute attention to all details. In this respect the American Navy, perhaps even to a higher degree than the German, seems to have chosen the proper compromise, at least for its battleships.

After reading that sheer utter incompetently stupid drivel in "Proceedings", I was flabbergasted. That somebody was stupid enough to write it, was a historical fact. That it was stupidly published, after TARANTO and BISMARCK was a historical fact. That THIS happened was a historical fact.

USS Alaska

And the expletive deleted idiots responsible, who wasted man years and national treasure, in the middle of a war, to produce that garbage (^^^) were;

Samuel Murray Robinson

and our favorite whipping boy...

Harold Rainsford Stark
  
Even back in WWI, we knew that the contents and conclusions of that above article was not correct. I mean look at all the armored cruisers stupidly SUNK, doing supposedly armor cruiser things in WWI. So... how was that absolute nonsense in steel allowed to happen?   

Well, if you refuse to believe in the airplane and the submarine, if you are stuck in a 19th century fantasy land where the modern radio and radar are simply  not an oncoming thingy thing in your world, and where majestic lines of blundering battleships line up and shoot each other in a parade fleet fashion, where you have attended the WAR COLLEGE and FLUNKED OUT, and served at sea in a billet, but never where life and death is a captain's or admiral's judgment against wind, wave, weather and an enemy you cannot see and where it was always someone else's call to make, and you are a cocktail party political admiral whose flag billets are either bureaus where to look good, you hide bad news and shuffle the papers and LIE to CONGRESS that could happen. Your alleged brief sea stints to flag up the career ladder with "sea duty" is actually you at the Honolulu cocktail circuit, with your staff actually working at sea in your absence, as you career climb up to CNO by schmoozing the right political and social contacts at parties. That does not substitute for real command at sea time, folks. 



Guess who "Broderick" was modeled after?  

And let us not forget that Stark was a war criminal.
 
Holwitt, Joel I. "Execute Against Japan", Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005, pp. 212–217 passim.

Where was that idiot in 1930? Aide to the Secretary of the Navy. Biggest MISTAKE Charles Francis Adams ever made. 

    

[miletus12]

More hot sauce.

A Study of the General Board of the U.S. Navy, 1929-1933 A Thesis Presented to the Department of History and the Faculty of the Graduate College University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts University of Nebraska at Omaha Scott T. Price April, 1989

A Study of the General Board of the U.S. Navy, 1929-1933

A Thesis
Presented to the
Department of History
and the
Faculty of the Graduate College
University of Nebraska

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
University of Nebraska at Omaha

Scott T. Price
April, 1989

You can read the thesis at the citation (205 pages worth), but if you have trouble finding it, just type "Incompetent Leadership, US Navy 1930", and then start reading.

To summarize the thesis, I can give you the following information;

1. The General Board was a semi-formal policy advice board that met as kind of a corporate board of directors for the United States Navy. The man who sneaked in the actual naval general staff under the nose of that idiot, President Woodrow Wilson, and his incompetent Navy Secretary, Josephus Daniels, was Bradley Allen Fiske, who created the post of Chief of Naval Operations and parked that staff under that office. 
2. The decade, after Fiske retired, saw the General Board try to steer the USN to the completion of the 1916 naval program which was also Fiske's legacy in the real history. You have to love Fiske. Unlike Jackie Fisher of the Royal Navy, who had no common sense or any engineering background, Fiske knew his navy's mission, its Castex' constraints, and had a shrewd idea as to what was politically possible and what was needed for a fleet "second to none". 
3. While the thesis goes into great detail, from the historical records, you can deduce that the General Board was at great loggerheads with the president and the isolationist congress. You can also see that the Navy Secretary, Charles Francis Adams III, was a reluctant implementer of the Hoover isolationist and anti-naval program. As I have written earlier, Adams was the secretary who started and pushed hard many modernization programs and efforts that would bear fruit 10 to 15 years later, but which had to be remedied because his idiot successor, Claude Swanson failed to follow through and exercise taut civilian oversight on the Bureau Chiefs who mismanaged those programs.  I suppose the only real complaint I have against Adams, the avid yachtsman, sailor and navy advocate; was that he made the bonehead mistake of recommending Harold Stark to remain as a naval aide to Claude Swanson instead of rotating that gladhander out of Washington to a lighthouse detail as the Bureau of Navigation wanted.  The only reason I could find for Adams to make that colossal mistake was that Stark had demonstrated he could schmooze Congress persons to see the Navy way from time to time. 
4. It must be brought up that Herbert Hoover was not only an isolationist, and a pacifist, but he was also a civil engineer, who thought that disarmament was a quantifiable problem that could be solved by "yardsticking" or seeking equivalence values of different ship categories by mathematical formulas. I do not know if Hoover's professors were incompetent when they taught him basic engineering principles, or if he was just that ignorant of dynamic systems analusis. To explain how the General Board reacted when Hoover pressured Adams to make them conform to this notion of yardsticking, and propose a set of yardsticks as one to be set against British and other nations' proposals for civilians to hash out as the basis of arms reduction negotiation: well, does tying down the safety valve and double banking the fires mean anything to you, reader? The members of the General Board were WELL AWARE of the side talks the British and French conducted on the sly concerning cruisers, so they could present a united anti-American front; before the proposed 1930 London Conference and the Royal Navy treachery afoot in those talks. After the admirals explained basic concepts like area search parameters and how convoys worked and why a BIG cruiser for a navy with few or no oversea bases was vital and how a BIG cruiser also could be smacked by 2 or 3 small ones, and that Franco-British calls for limitation by aggregate tonnage was not in American interests, but rather that American proposals should insist on unit characteristics so that a foreign navy could not swamp a few small Americans cruisers with sheer numbers, but rather the enemy, and they used that word "enemy" not just meaning Japan, would be forced to build to meet to the American constrained definition.  The General Board turned yardsticking on its head, to enforce absolute parity; unit for unit. Once Adams understood, he went to the mat on those principles and the 1930 Conference collapsed in mutual recriminations as the British went home in a huff. 

5. The Japanese were bemused. They thought they would be blamed for the shambles. They did not have to do an expletive-deleted thing. The Anglo-Americans torpedoed each other and the Japanese negotiators just laughed. As for the Italians and the French, once the French thought the British were about to sell them down the Thames for an adjusted American proposed deal, they backed out and the Italians, true to Mussolini's own brand of stupidity, but remembering the singular principle of "whatever the French do and get, we do and get, too." , also backed away from the Geneva talks. 
           
After that fiasco, it was the Great Depression that was the Great Limitation mechanism. 
                

 

[miletus12]

Let me quote a pertinent section from the previous cited thesis...

Nevertheless, the General Board still considered Britain as a possible adversary and studied the Royal Navy closely. The Board noted that Britain's naval policy, not unlike the "Second to None" policy advocated by the Board, was the "One Power Standard," a modification of the old "Two Power Standard" adopted in 1889. The "One Power Standard" was formally adopted in 1921 as the "Basis of Imperial Defense" and included the statement that the "utmost we can hope for in the near future is to possess a fleet as large as that of any other single power." It remained in effect until 1936, the time of the expiration of the Washington and London Naval Treaties.10

In May, 1929, Admiral W.W. Fisher, the British deputy Chief of Naval Staff, circulated a. comprehensive "Summary of Admiralty Policy." It began by restating the "One Power Standard" and defined it by stating: "the maintenance of such strength as will ensure adequate security for British

--77--


territory, together with freedom of sea passage to and from all parts of the empire." He did not consider war with the U.S. a possibility, but noted the growing Japanese naval strength in the Pacific and as such "war in the Far East must form the general basis on which preparations are made." He recommended that preparations include the development of Singapore as a naval base with sufficient oil reserves to sustain the fleet, to be completed by 1937. He also recommended that the Admiralty obtain approval for the "steady and continuous" construction of replacements within the terms of the Washington Treaty, including the laying down of a minimum of three cruisers per year.11

The British, in fact, seemed to resent the anglophobia exhibited by the U.S. Navy. On the eve of the London Conference, Vice Admiral E.A. Taylor, RN, stated that it was America's "firm intention" in the event of any future conflict "to trade as she pleased with any country in the world." As such, "she could only do that with a sufficient naval force at her disposal.12 Although Admiral Taylor was partially correct in his assessment of the U.S. Navy's views, the primary benefit of "twisting the lions tail" was in getting more appropriations from a sometimes unwilling Congress. The Royal Navy was a visible target and as long as the British fleet was larger than the U.S. fleet, U.S. naval officials would point to that fact to get funding for more warships.

--78--


Because Hoover disagreed with the General Board's views on cruisers and the threat posed by Great Britain, his nomination of Pratt was a wise move. The British Admirals respected Pratt and felt they could get along with the Admiral.13 Yet the Board did not agree with Hoover's choice, as Pratt's views were well known among naval circles and in-order to counter Pratt's influence, the Board began a campaign to have Rear Admiral Hilary p. Jones recalled from retirement, restored to his rank of admiral, and made part of the advisory staff of the U.S. delegation to London. The Board also attempted to have its Chairman, RADM A.T. Long, included as an advisor to the U.S. delegation. The State Department approved both requests. However, Pratt still headed the advisory staff.14 The State Department, however, did not allow the Board to prepare a report outlining the U.S. positions as it had for the Geneva Conference. Undersecretary of State Cotton noted that the Board's Geneva guidelines were too rigid and thus inhibited any possible agreement, and Stimson and Hoover concurred. 15

The Board was not to be left out completely in the cold. In order to avoid criticism by naval experts that the delegates knew nothing of naval affairs, Stimson, who headed the U.S. delegation, asked the Board to coach him on some of the technical questions that were sure to be brought up at the conference. Stimson met with each member

--79--


of the General Board and heard the admiral's opinions on the requirements of the U.S. Navy.

Each admiral supported the Board's opinion concerning the merits of the large eight-inch gun cruisers and stated that the U.S. required a minimum of twenty-one of these warships. RADM J.M. Reeves specified the Board's reasons for advocating the eight-inch gun cruiser over the six-inch gun cruiser by noting that the eight-inch gun's range "is overwhelmingly superior" to the six-inch gun and as such was better suited for the protection of the battle line. It could beat back enemy cruiser or destroyer attacks at a greater distance due to its heavier main battery, and thereby limit the damage such enemy attacks could inflict on the U.S. battle line. He concluded by stating that the U.S. Navy could not, due to treaty restrictions and limited funding, "build special types of vessels for all special functions," and the U.S. delegates should therefore follow the Board s recommendation.16Admiral Jackson stated that "it has been the historical policy of the United States to carry more guns and larger guns on ships of a given size than the navies of other powers." He reminded Stimson that "this had been true even at the time of the War in 1812 and had been generally followed out since."17

Stimson also questioned each admiral on the development of naval aviation and its effect on the

--80--


organization of the fleet. The Board members all expressed similar opinions regarding the relative merits of naval aviation. CNO Hughes, the oldest officer interviewed, noted with pride that in experiments in 1922-1923 "no ship had been sunk by a direct hit from an airplane." As for battleships, Hughes said that they had so "enlarged their anti-aircraft batteries" that he "felt no "fear whatever "of airplane attack."18

The Chairman of the General Board, RADM Andrew T. Long, noted that U.S. naval vessels "are well protected against attack by aircraft." He believed that the primary use of aircraft by the fleet was in spotting fire and in reconnaissance. Aircraft were only "secondarily useful for bomb dropping and strafing, " and Long said that he would not feel "at all alarmed" in a battleship that was under attack by aircraft, as their anti-aircraft defense and armor plating was strong enough to resist any aircraft attack.19

RADM Hough believed that the airplane was a useful adjunct to the fleet, but did not believe that naval aviation would "revolutionize the make-up of the fleet" any more than the torpedo had done. He said that the experiments with bombing attacks by aircraft on ships to date had been directed against unmoving and unarmed hulks with no compartmentation and therefore he did not consider the experiments accurate reflections of a ships capability to

--81--


resist such attacks. Hough regarded the aircraft carrier as a useful addition to the battle fleet in that it would protect the battle line against attack from the aircraft of an enemy s carriers.20

RADM J.V. Chase stated that he did not believe aircraft were a menace to battleships and were only a "slight danger" to cruisers. He said that he thought the smaller aircraft carriers of around 14,000 tons now under development were "roost useful," although he said that it was necessary to reduce the number of types of aircraft on a single carrier at present for "convenience in arranging and launching them.21

RADM Jackson believed that since 1924 the defensive efforts against aircraft had surpassed their offensive menace. He noted that at the time the Rodney was built in Great Britain, the "aircraft menace was at its height," and as such the Rodney had been planned to carry a large number of airplanes on its rear deck. Since its completion, he continued, that space had been altered to mount guns, "thus indicating the ideas of the British Navy on this subject."22

All of the above mentioned Board members shared the common conception that naval aviation was a useful adjunct to the fleet in a supporting role. Aircraft launched from warships or carriers would act as scouts for the fleet and would also spot the fleet's long range fire. Aircraft carriers would protect the U.S. battleships against enemy

--82--


aircraft attack and also attack the enemy's aircraft carriers. They all believed that a battleship had little to fear from aircraft attacks because of advances in anti-aircraft weapons, armor protection and compartmentation. Overall, every officer believed that carriers should remain as a permanent addition to the fleet.

Two men Stimson interviewed were not members of the Board and they did not share the Board's opinion regarding naval aviation. The first was RADM Moffett, the Chief of "the Bureau of Aeronautics, who disagreed with the General Board's view that the battle fleet was virtually impregnable against air attack. Moffett told Stimson that each year the naval aviation program made significant advances, and the current advance was perfecting the dive bomb attack against captital ships.23

Stimson inquired if Moffett believed these types of attacks would make the battleship obsolete. Moffett stated, that the battleship could not become obsolete so long as other navies retained that type, but that if battleships should be allowed to drop out through obsolescence, "that would offer the greatest possibility of saving possible in naval limitation." Moffett shrewdly noted that he "would not wish to take responsibility" for a complete abolition of battleships because upon the outbreak of a war "it might be found essential to have these central rallying points for fleet manoeuvres." 24

--83--

Concerning aircraft and their effect on naval development, Moffett said the airplane contributed range to the "possibilities" of fleet action, as a ship within a radius of 300 miles from any aircraft carrier was within range of horizontal bombers carrying 1,000 pound bombs and dive-bombers carrying two 500 pound bombs, "which means that any fleet well equipped with aircraft carriers could entirely prevent any other fleet from getting within gun range." Here Moffet subtly stated his contention that the days of the Mahanian concept that the battleships were the Navy's primary fighting force would soon change. Moffett was careful not to alienate the Board by pressing his point, because he realized that it would take time for such a change to come about. Moffett did not want to jeopardize his work to date, that is, getting the Navy to construct more carriers and continue to develop naval aviation, and so supported the Board's recommendation concerning the heavy cruisers.25

Assistant Secretary for Aeronautics, David S. Ingalls, in an interview with Stimson, did not hold back on his opinion as to the relative merits of naval aviation.

Ingalls stated that he considered one aircraft carrier to be "the match for five cruisers." He pointed out the "great value of the diving attack of aircraft on ships" that could not "effectively be met in any way," and that even the newest anti-aircraft guns could not be mounted in

--84--

sufficient number on ships to "withstand the simultaneous attack by bombing and torpedo planes in large numbers."26 Although Stimson noted the differing opinions regarding the merits of naval aviation, it was clear that the Board members staunchly believed that the U.S. required, at a minimum, twenty-one eight-inch gun cruisers.

Stimson, as mentioned earlier, headed the official delegates, who included Ambassador Dawes, Adams, Senator David A. Reed (Foreign Relations Committee), Senator Joseph T. Robinson (Senate minority leader), the Ambassador to Belgium, Hugh S. Gibson, and Dwight W. Morrow, the Ambassador to Mexico and a close confidant of Hoover. The naval advisors included Admirals Pratt, Jones, RADMs Long and Moffett. In announcing the members of the U.S. delegation. Hoover noted the ongoing Senate investigation of William Shearer, a representative of armament manufacturers charged with attempting to cause the failure of the Geneva Conference. Hoover said that he would not permit such an event to happen in London.27

Now you can see for yourself, reader, where I got the basis for the fictional 1922 Washington Nmval Treaty? The Americans were indeed divided among themselves about the cruiser question, Moffett did indeed want aircraft carriers, and there was a well grounded and historical enmity between the American and British admiralties. 

When I do speculate, there is history behind that speculation. 

Miletus.
 

[miletus12]

From Scientific American:

Rank of the United States Among the Naval Powers
Our Present Standing Threatened by the Lack of Colliers and Other Auxiliaries
By T. M. Potts on December 9, 1911


THE question has been very often asked of late as to how the United States Navy ranks among the naval powers. Ordinarily, this question is answered by giving a tabulated statement of the effective war tonnage of the various nations and establishing their rank with one another in accordance with the amount of their displacement. This answer is accepted by most laymen as being conclusive; but to naval officers and students of naval affairs it Is far from being so. To naval officers two questions naturally arise: What constitutes Naval Strength? How is Naval Strength measured? Therefore, in attempting to fix the rank of the United States Navy with reference to that of. other powers, consideration must be given-not only to battleships, but to all the various types of vessels which go to make up an efficient, well balanced fleet-to the Merchant Marine upon which a nation must draw in time of war for certain types of ships, and lastly to personnel, active and in reserve, all of which go to make up a well-organized navy and measure its strength. Fleets are created and maintained for offensive operations, and while often spoken of as the mobile defense of a country, the defense lies in the fleets’ ability to assume operations against an enemy's fleet, or against the coast or territory of an enemy. The table below shows the composition of the fleets of England, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan, and includes vessels which will probably be in commission, or ready for commission on January 1st, 1912. The launching of the first all-big-gun battleship, the Dreadnought in England in 1906, completely revolutionized modern battleship construction-so far as offensive power is concerned. The question of an all-big-gun ship had often been discussed and elaborated upon by other nations, but the English were the first to put these ideas to a practical use. All-big-gun battleships constitute a distinct type, and all ships launched since that year have been spoken of as dreadnoughts. The building of this ship placed the navies of all powers upon an entirely different status from that which they had previously occupied; for the “Dreadnought” completely eclipsed in offensive power all ships previously built. Earlier ships, however, so long as they are employed in the active service of navies, cannot be considered as absolutely obsolete at the present writing, but in a few years, as the number of dreadnoughts increases, they will undoubtedly be relegated to the second line. Another type of warship, commonly known as the battleship-cruiser, has developed within the last five years and bids fair to be an important factor in all future naval engagements.

The first of these ships was launched by England and called the “Invincible,” so that the term Invincible is now considered to represent a distinct type of a battleship. In analyzing the composition of the various fleets of the world, fighting or capital ships, as they are now termed, may be divided into three distinct classes, pre-dreadnoughts, or ships that were built or laid down prior to 1906, dreadnoughts, or all-big-gun-ships, and Invincibles. Battleship-cruisers, with a very high speed, carry a smaller number of heavy guns, of the same caliber as those of modern battleships, and their protection has been somewhat reduced. They must, however, be considered as capital ships. The table Shows that, the total warship tonnage of Great Britain is considerably more than double that of any other nation, and, therefore, entitles Great Britain to the position of first in the rank Df naval powers. When we come to consider the naval strength of other powers, we find a difference of only about 15,000 tons in the warship tonnage of Germany and the United States, a difference which a layman would probably consider a negligible quantity, or in other words, that these two countries were practically on the same footing. The character of the vessels which make up the fleets of Germany and the United States will, however, be carefully considered by those who wish to determine the exact standing of the two fleets. The German battleship fleet will, on January 1st, 1912, consist of seven dreadnoughts, twenty-one pre-dreadnoughts and two battleship-crnisers, a total of thirty capital ships, as opposed to thirty-one capital ships in the United States Navy, composed of six dreadnoughts and 25 pre-dreadnoughts, so that numerically, the fleets will be practically equal. 'hen we come, however, to consider the actual fighting value of the units which make up the two fleets we find that, ship for ship, the United States vessels are decidedly superior to those built at a corresponding period in Germany. especially in offensive power. The ten vessels of the “Kaiser” and “Wittelsbach” types carry a main battery of only four 9.4-inch guns, while the ten following vessels of the “Braunschwe g” and “Deutschland” types carry only four ll-inch guns in the main battery; as opposed to these, all the battleships of the United States carry main batteries of four 12-inch, or four 13-inch guns, supplemented in all except the six vessels of the “Maine” and “Illinois” types of intermediate batteries of from four to eight 8-inch guns. France will have only twenty-one pre-dreadnoughts ready for service on the first of January, 1912, while Japan will have but thirteen; although the latter nation will on that date have two of the battleship-cruiser type. Of the thirteen battleships which comprise the fleet of Japan, the “Fuji” is practically obsolete; five are reconstructed and repaired vessels captured in the late war and two are coast defense vessel type_ The batteries of the two vessels of the “Satsuma” class-4-12 inch and 12-10 inch guns-are so powerful, however,- that these vessels should properly be considered dreadnoughts, and the two vessels of the “Kawachi” type carry batteries considerably more powerful than other pre-dreadnoughts of the same period of building. The comparison, therefore, between these four countries as to their battle fleets, is decidedly in favor of the United States, and it may be contended that so far as the strength of the battleship fleet is concerned that the United States is decidedly superior to that of either France, Germany, Japan, or any other nation. Considering the geographical and political conditions in the United States, students are pretty generally of the opinion that, in the event of future hostilities between this country and any other nation, the United States will have to carry on an offensive warfare; In other words, will he compelled to take the initiative and to carry on warfare far removed from our coasts or naval bases. This leads up to 2 consideration of the number and. character of the vessels which make up an efficient, well balanced feet for offensive operations, such as torpedo destroyers, scouts, repair ships, fuel ships, ammunition ships, hospital ships, transports, supply ships and minelaying vessels-all of which are essential adjuncts of a fleet.

Torpedo Destroyers. It is considered by students of naval operations that at least four torpedo destroyers are necessary for the defense of each battleship. The rapid development of the automobile torpedo and its increased range render it practically impossible to defend, a fleet by means of illumination or the use of searchlights, as the torpedo has now reached a range beyond which, even under the most favorable conditions, the searchlight is of doubtful value. We must, therefore, depend, for the protection of our battleship fleet, if operating upon an enemy's coast or in proximity to its battleship fleet, upon torpedo destroyers, scouts and other outlying vessels, thrown out as a shield for the protection of the battleships. An examination of the table shows that on January first, 1912, England will have two hundred and five torpedo destroyers, Germany one hundred and seven, France seventy·two, Japan fifty·nine, while the United States wiII possess but thirty·six. This shows that the United States is woefully deficient in torpedo destroyers, as the estimated number for the protection of a fleet composed of sixteen vessels is sixty-four, and therefore, so far as this element of strength is concerned, the United States ranks below Great Britain, Germany, France and Japan.

Scouts . The scout is the eye of the fleet, and no matter whether our fleet is operating on the defensive along our own coasts or on the offensive on an enemy's coast, information as to the movement of the enemy is a most important factor in conducting naval operations. The scout is in no sense of the word a fighting vessel, and its principal characteristics should be speed; ability to steam at high speed in all weathers and ability to keep the sea for long periods without replenishing its fuel supply. While the introduction of wireless outfits on board modern ships is of the greatest possible value, interference with the successful transmission of a message from a scout to the main body of the fleet Is not difficult of accomplishment, and in order to convey important information to the Commander·in·Chief of a fleet, it may be necessary for the vessel obtaining such information to communicate with the fleet by visual signals. While the scout also forms part of the outposts of a fleet for its defense against surprise and against torpedo attack, its principal function is discovering the whereabouts of the enemy's feet, keeping in touch with and successfully transmitting information as to its movements-to its own feet. The United States Navy possesses but three vessels of this important type, and furthermore, its Merchant Marine does not furnish a single vessel which is in all respects adapted for scouting purposes. Few, if any, of our merchant vessels are capable of reaching a speed of more than twenty·one knots, and when it is considered that the modern scout has a speed of at least twenty·six knots, it is clearly seen how in- adequate our merchant ships are for scouting purposes. As against the three vessels of this special type, England possesses twenty·three, with nine building, Germany ten, with six building, and Japan four, with three building; therefore, so far as this type of vessel is concerned, the United States Navy is decidedly inferior to those of England, Germany and Japan. On the other hand, these three countries possesses in their Merchant Marine a large number of vessels, which in a very short time can be converted into efficient scouts.

Fuel and Ammunition. One of the most important things to he considered in the operations of an offensive fleet is the problem of supplying fuel and ammunition. Battleships whose fuel or ammunition supply has been reduced or exhausted cannot be considered very formidable. Ar-rangements must be made for the furnishing of fuel to our battleships at stated intervals, either through colIiers built for this purpose by the Government or else through vessels bought qr chartered for the purpose. The United States Navy possesses today twenty colliers fit for service, but a large percentage of these vessels has such a small cargo-carrying capacity as to be of little value to the fleet. England, Germany and Japan possess few, if any, regular naval colliers, but each of these countries possess a very large Merchant Marine, from which colIiers, supply vessels and other auxiliaries will be drawn in the event of hostilities. We possess no such marine, and to-day there are but very few vessels flying the American flag which are at all suitable for naval purposes In any character. Unless, therefore, something is done to (Continue4 on poge 532.)

This article was originally published with the title "Rank of the United States Among the Naval Powers" in Scientific American 105, 24, 522-523 (December 1911)

doi:10.1038/scientificamerican12091911-522

Quoted chart.



The thing you should take away from that article, is that long before Charles Evans Hughes or Henry Stinsom screwed up the USN at the disarmament conferences of 1922 and 1930, American professional naval officers understood, that it was not battleships or even aircraft carriers that determined naval power. It was the fleet trains and the general purpose ships. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the more oil tankers a fleet had, the larger % of its combat forces it could deploy to use the world ocean farther from its home ports and naval bases. 

If you take away nothing else from this fictional history, then understand this fact. For every warship or naval aircraft, you need THREE supply vessels to keep her at sea. The American navy can currently keep about 100 warships at sea as a presence. 

The only case where this is not true is with submarines. Those vessels from the very start of their history back in 1898 were designed to be self-contained sortie units and pure sea denial weapon systems. It took the the Americans about fifty years to figure that one out. The Germans thought they knew it, but dramatically demonstrated through misuse inj botgh world wars that they did not comprehend what a submarine was or how it was supposed to be used. 

Today, there still is a belief that submarines would be used as "clean weapons" to strictly kill warships, because of treaties, bui that is about as false in fact as the claim that there is such a thing as a clean "air campaign", when it is demonstrable, that in the year 2023, the Americans, who conduct an ongoing air campaign against "terrorists" have little or no compunction about bystanders being assassinated along wioth the latest candidate "terrorist leader" of the drone strike of the month club.       

If you want to know the 1930 naval logic, among the best professional submariners in the Big Five; it could be summarized by the sour cynical observation that submarine warfare, if properly executed, would consist primarily of hiding from destroyers and aircraft while pouncing on any freighter detected within a blockade area that came within a submarine's reach. Note that dictim; "any freighter".   

In the era of the airplane, the submarine was and is the only blockade weapon that works as a sea denier. Unless you count the mine?

[miletus12]

A Study of the General Board of the U.S. Navy, 1929-1933 A Thesis Presented to the Department of History and the Faculty of the Graduate College University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts University of Nebraska at Omaha Scott T. Price April, 1989

CHAPTER FIVE

NAVAL BUILDUP OR REDUCTION?

After Hoover signed the London Naval Treaty, the General Board began to prepare plans to build up the Navy to the maximum Treaty limits. Ignoring the Federal Government's fiscal difficulties, the Board insisted that a buildup was necessary because the Treaty limits were far above the current U.S. warship levels. The Board's efforts were in direct opposition to President Hoover's promotion of the Treaty as a means of cutting naval spending.1 This chapter will examine the Board's efforts from 1930 through 1932 to prepare building programs in light of the terms of the London Naval Treaty, President Hoover's intentions, changes in the Navy's organization, and the increasing fiscal difficulties brought about by the Depression.

The Board members therefore chose to believe that the Treaty mandated building up the U.S. Navy to the Treaty limits. When Hoover signed the Treaty in July, 1930, the U.S. Navy was 153,698 tons below the maximum tonnage permitted. By contrast, the Imperial Japanese Navy was only 5728. tons below. The Navy League was careful to note this difference between the two fleets in its letters to the public, press editors, and congressional representatives in

--108--


support or a naval buildup as advocated by the Board.2

Little change occurred in the membership of the General Board during 1930, except for RADM Mark Bristol's promotion to the Chairmanship of the Executive Committee of the Board to replace the retired RADM Long, and the replacement of Captain R.L. Ghormley by Commander T.C. Kinkaid (Class of 1908).3 RADM Jackson retired, and was not replaced during 1930. The ex-officio members included the Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps, W.C. Neville, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain H.A. Baldridge (Class of 1902), the President of the Naval War College, RADM J.R.P. Pringle (Class of 1894), and the venerable CNO, Admiral Hughes.4

RADM J.V. Chase and J.R. Blakely made up the first section of the Executive Committee. The second section of the Board consisted of RADM T.J. Senn, and RADMs G.C. Day and H.V. Butler covered the third section. RADM F.H. Clark ran the forth section. Also assigned to the Board as general assistants were Lt. Colonel J.C. Lucas, USMC (Class of 1891), and Captain W.R. Gherardi (Class of 1895). 5

The greatest concern of the Board in 1930 was the building program for fiscal 1932. As previously noted, the U.S. Navy had only ten light and two heavy cruisers. Its destroyers and many of its battleships were over-age and needed to be modernized or replaced. Before the London Conference, new ship construction for each year had first

--109--


to be authorized and then be funded by Congress. Such a process led to haphazard replacement. The only satisfactory alternative was the so called "blanket authorization" bill that would authorize a building program covering a period of years, usually five. A blanket authorization bill would by-pass the yearly struggle with Congress and would allow a continuous building program that would provide new ships and replacements on a consistent basis. As such a bill had yet to be passed, the Navy Department and the General Board followed the traditional path to obtain naval appropriations.

Hoover subscribed to the belief that the primary duty of the government was to hold expenditures within the government's income. His view was like that of most members of the government and the leading economists of the period who believed that the principal test of sound" fiscal management was to maintain a balanced budget. That task became increasingly difficult as government revenues declined during the Depression. To Hoover, who had to hold spending down somewhere, the Navy was a leading target for cuts and one reason why he persisted in his efforts to get a naval limitations treaty through the Senate.6 He did not believe the U.S. should build up to the Treaty limits and instead ordered SECNAV Adams to reduce the Navy's 1932 budget to a level lower than its 1931 budget.7

The Board received a letter from Assistant SECNAV

--110--


Jahnke in February, 1930, to begin preparing its recommendations on a building program that would take into account the naval policy of the United States and should be turned into SECNAV Adams as "soon after the [London] conference adjourns as possible."8 Jahnke neither mentioned the fiscal difficulties facing the government nor recommended that the Board consider any restraint in deference to prevailing Presidential sentiment. Bristol ordered Blakely and Chase to begin preparing the Board's recommendation.

While the Board continued to develop its recommended building program during the fall of 1930, a change took place in the Navy's top command, a change that was to directly affect the General Board. As of September 9, 1930, Hoover replaced the retiring CNO Hughes with Admiral William Veazie Pratt. Pratt took over Hughes' job on September 17, 1930, and thus became the Navy's fifth CNO. 9

The differences between Hughes and Pratt soon become evident. As noted earlier, Pratt did not consider Great Britain a possible adversary of the U.S, whereas Hughes did. Also, Hughes, as an ex-officio member of the Board, took an active part in its work and had signed the major recommendations personally, thereby adding the influence of his position as CNO to the Board's recommendations. Pratt did not share Hughes' perception of the General Board.

As the new CNO, Pratt again found himself on the

--111--


Board. During 1921 through .1923, he had been a member of the Executive Committee of the Board, and had played an important role during the Washington Naval Conference. He believed that many members of the current General Board did not agree with his views on the British or naval disarmament or his close relationship with an Administration that many naval officers, including RADM Bristol, thought was anti-navy. Pratt therefore preferred not to sit on the Board, although by regulations he was an ex-officio member. He never called a full meeting of the Board and instead let Bristol conduct is business. Pratt, nonetheless, saw fit to sit in on any of the Board's hearings on topics that interested him personally.11

The Board submitted its recommended building program for fiscal 1932 to Adams on October 16, 1930.11 In the first paragraph of the recommendation, the Board noted that the London Treaty mandated a construction program, and so based its recommendation on this belief. The Board proposed three programs, a specific proposal for fiscal 1932, a five year program, and a fifteen year program. The Board's proposal for fiscal 1932 called for the continuation of the battleship modernization program and the construction of one aircraft carrier, two six-inch gun cruisers, eleven destroyers, four submarines, and twelve scouting aircraft.12

The five year program proposed that the Navy continue the battleship modernization program and build up to Treaty

--112--


strength by 1936 in the ratio specified for cruisers (10:10:7) by laying down three additional heavy cruisers and 73,000 tons of light (six-inch gun) cruisers at a cost of $551,000,000 during fiscal 1932. The fifteen year program outlined a continuous construction program through 1947 and included the replacement of every U.S.. battleship by 1945. 13

Both the five year and fifteen year programs provided for a continuous building program and an orderly replacement schedule that would insure that a large number of vessels of the same class did not reach the scrapping age simultaneously. Each program would also allow the U.S. to reach the total tonnage allowed by the two naval treaties prior to their expiration in 1936. The Board believed that in order to have a solid bargaining position at the next conference the U.S. Fleet must have all of the ships permitted by the two previous treaties either in the water or on the building ways. The Board members hoped that the U.S. negotiators at the next conference would not be so willing to sacrifice actual warships as they had been to reduce the Board's recommended paper fleet of twenty-one cruisers during the London Conference of 1930.

SECNAV Adams approved only the Board's proposal for fiscal 1932, as the cost of the other two proposals was "inhibitive."14 Moreover, in December 1930, Hoover informed Adams that the Navy would have to choose between battleship

--113--


modernization and heavy cruiser construction, as the combination of the two would be too expensive. Without consulting the Board, Pratt and Adams decided on the battleship modernization. 15 As for the building program for fiscal 1932, Adams' staff wrote the proposal into a bill and he presented it to Congress. 16

Though the Naval Affairs Committee approved the bill, it was not passed before the Seventy-first Congress adjourned in March, 1931. The Navy League blamed Hoover for "dragging his feet and for failing to exert positive leadership."17 By the time the bill made it before the Naval Subcommittee on Appropriations during the third session of Congress, it was clear that Hoover and Congress did not agree with the Board's interpretation of the London Treaty, stated in the opening paragraphs of the recommendation. The Board noted that the London Treaty now defined the size and composition of the U.S. fleet, and therefore aims to maintain world peace by "establishing a balance of world power." 18 The Board warned that this balance "fails" unless each navy "is actually composed of the specified tonnages and of vessels of comparable useful remaining life." 19 The Board concluded by noting that the proposed building program "is based upon the above considerations."20

Some influential members of Congress believed that the Treaty did not mandate anything. As Burton French, the head of the Naval Appropriations Sub-Committee, explained

--114--


"the bounds of the treaty are intended to be guides beyond which no nation may go, "and were not "mandates upon the several nations to build their navies up to a certain required strength." 21

Despite Congressman French's view. Congress approved the appropriation fox the Board's building plan. Construction on the CV-4, eleven destroyers, two cruisers, and two submarines commenced in 1931. Congress also appropriated enough money to continue the battleship modernization program that began in 1930.22

On October 8, 1930, Pratt ordered forty-eight ships taken off the active list and 4800 enlisted personnel released from the service, thereby saving the government 23 nearly $11,000,000.00. 23 But Pratt refused to yield to Congressional efforts to cut back appropriations for the air program, or de-commission either the Saratoga or the Lexington, although such a move would entail considerable savings.

Pratt's predecessor faced similar problems. As early as March, 1929, CNO Hughes, under pressure from Congress, asked his Director of the' Naval War Plans division if it would be feasible to reduce the service time of the Saratoga and the Lexington because each carrier cost 5500,000 a year more to operate than a battleship. Would it be possible, asked Hughes, to lay up one carrier for one-half a year at a time?24 The Director of War Plans, RADM

--115--


Schofield, in his reply, noted that such a plan would save only 5150,000 dollars a year due to the costs of first de-commissioning and then re-commissioning each vessel on a rotating basis. 25

Schofield argued against such a plan by noting that "they are the most powerful airplane carriers in the world." Since their first employment with the fleet, the U.S. had succeeded in developing the "most powerful aircraft organization of any navy in the world." He emphasized that "no individual ship in the U.S. Navy is needed more for the tactical and strategic development of the fleet" than the aircraft carriers, proving that some officers in the Navy regarded the carriers as critical to the future development of the U.S. fleet.26

Although such views did not convince many congressmen, the Navy did not put either carrier in a de-commission status. By 1931 the naval air arm completed its five year expansion plan and had one thousand aircraft in service, which thereby made it the most modern component of the Navy.27 Pratt and Moffett successfully resisted Congress' efforts to cut back appropriations for the Navy's air program throughout the years of Hoover's Administration.

The rest of the Navy was not so fortunate. Ship deterioration due to age and personnel limits were the most pressing problems that the Navy faced. The battleships and cruisers required yearly overhauls, but Adams ordered that

--116--


the time between overhauls be extended to eighteen months to save costs.28 A large portion of the fleet neared obsolescence, and Adam's order therefore made the situation worse and Pratt realized that some vessels would be forced out of service. During 1930, the Navy sold thirteen prewar cruisers as scrap and laid up fifty-eight aging destroyers when problems with their boilers became acute.29

In Adam's 1929 Annual Report, he noted that the fleet was badly undermanned."30 Providing personnel for the Navy's new cruisers and growing aviation program continuously drained the commissioned and enlisted manpower pool during Hoover's Administration. Because Congress set the limit on the number of active duty personnel for the Navy and refused to increase this limit, the problem became critical, as many warships went to sea with only seventy percent of their normal complement.31 But, the Depression did benefit the Navy in one respect: the quality of servicemen was the best it had been in years. Re-enlistment levels were high, and recruiting officers picked the best from the thousands of unemployed men who flocked to the recruiting offices because of the Depression.32

During 1931, the Navy ordered a number of new officers to report to the General Board for duty. RADM A. St. Clair Smith (Class of 1897) joined the Executive Committee to replace RADM Hough, who the Commander, Base Force.

--117--


The Navy promoted RADM Reeves to a full admiral and ordered him to take command of the fleet as the Commander in Chief, Battle Force, U.S. Fleet. Captain R.R. Gherardi took over as the chief of the Hydrography Office and Commander H.C. Train went to the Mississippi.33

Rather than build the Navy up to London Treaty strength. Hoover sought further arms reductions through another international conference. In 1925, the League of Nations had begun preparations for a world disarmament conference. The primary objective of the conference was to reduce the size of the world's armies. Another was to promote naval arms reduction as well. In September, 1930, the League set the date of February 2, 1932 for the opening of the Conference. Hoover promptly announced that the U.S. would participate and at the same time agreed to a one year arms holiday proposed by the Italian Foreign Minister Dino Grandi, to begin on November 1, 1931.34

Hoover decided that civilian diplomats would again handle the negotiations at the Conference. As the national election was in November of the following year. Hoover hoped that success at Geneva would mean further naval reductions and considerable budget savings. He. undoubtedly believed such achievements would help his campaign.35 Hoover instructed Adams to issue an order to officers of the Navy that no officer be permitted to make any public statement critical of the upcoming conference or the President's

--118--


efforts to reduce naval spending. Adams passed the order on to Pratt, who issued a "gag order" that ordered all naval officers to refrain from making any public statements that criticized the Administration's policies.36 Hoover then put Pratt in charge of forming a small naval advisory group.

The Board played no role in the proceedings beyond drafting a position report issued to the U.S. delegates. Bristol voiced his opinion of the armament question in a letter to a friend. He noted that:

We cannot set an example to the rest of the world by disarming, but we can set an example to the rest of the world by maintaining an armament which will be an emblem of the potential energy and strength of the United States to influence other nations who might attempt to take unscrupulous advantage of the United States.37

Bristol and the Board held to the age-old belief that only through strength could peace then be maintained, a belief held by members of the armed forces and by military advocates, including William Gardiner.

During, the spring of 1931, the Board held hearings on subjects that would be brought up at the Geneva Conference. The Board members expected that the British would propose, as they had done at Geneva in 1927 and London in 1930, that all battleships either be eliminated or limited to 25,000 tons displacement and be allowed to carry guns no larger in caliber than twelve inches.

The Board decided unanimously to reject any British

--119--


plan to eliminate the battleship class altogether primarily because the battleship was the "only substitute the United States can offer for well located fortified naval bases in a distant campaign," bases the U.S. lacked but the British did not.38 The Board members also believed that due to Great Britain's large merchant marine and cruiser force, the complete elimination of the battleship would leave the U.S. woefully behind the Royal Navy in fighting ability. Another reason the Board objected to the proposal had to do with, the Board's concern about Japan. The Board members were not about to eliminate battleships because they believed the U.S. Battle Fleet was the only practical defense of U.S. interests in the far East in the event of war with Japan.

As for the question of capital ship reduction, the Board reviewed the characteristics of the H.M.S. Hood, Rodney, and Nelson, warships it believed to be the most powerful in the world. Such concern was somewhat pointless, as the newly modified U.S. battleships were nearly equal in every respect to the British vessels. Admiral Pratt laid the member's concerns to rest. He had recently inspected the H.M.S. Nelson and Rodney, and told the Board that he was less impressed with those ships than he had been before this inspection.39 He thought that the absence of armor protection for the forecastles of each vessel spelled doom to the command-and control section of the

--120--


ships, that the arrangement of the sixteen-inch guns was such that neither ship could fire a full broadside without fear of capsizing, and that both lacked adequate side armor protection. Pratt also noted that whereas U.S. battleships could be readily converted to twelve-inch guns, such a change would not be as easy to accomplish on the Rodney or the Nelson due to the unique positioning of the main battery.40

In the end, the Board agreed that the U.S. could refit all existing battleships with twelve-inch guns while maintaining their present displacement, thus allowing sufficient armor protection against a twelve-inch shell, torpedo and bomb attack, and keep the long cruising radius. However, the Board members and Pratt all agreed that the U.S. should not reduce its battleship fleet below the current fifteen vessels.41

Thus, despite the attention the Board gave to aircraft carriers, all senior officers on the Board, and even Admiral Pratt, still saw the battleship as the premier fighting vessel of the fleet. They were therefore hostile to any suggestion to reduce either the number or size of U.S. capital ships. Such a consensus was evident to Secretary Stimson when he interviewed the individual members of the Board prior to the London Naval Conference. On that occasion, each Board member stated that the battleship was the most potent warship in the fleet and

--121--


that any attempt to eliminate or change their characteristics would be foolhardy.42 Such a belief was prevalent in 1931, as indicated by a letter written by SECNAV Adams to Admiral McVay, then Commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet. Adams wrote "The old belief that the battleship is the foundation of all naval power and that every other arm only supplements their power, is more clear than ever."43

The Board next considered the French proposal that would also be brought up at the Conference. The French suggested using budgetary limitation instead of the quantity limitation that was the method used at previous conferences. Originally designed for land armaments, the French suggested applying this proposal to the limitation of naval forces. The Board did not favor the French proposal. It noted that Japan would not publish military expenditure, figures and as such "absolutely objected to budgetary limitation for naval purposes."44 The Japanese were secretive about their fleet, and had the Japanese released such figures, such a revelation would disclose the fact that the Japanese spent more per ship than their Western counterparts, in line with the Imperial Japanese Navy's practice or advocating "quality over quantity."45

In fact, the Board knew very little about the Imperial Japanese Navy, although the head of the ONI was an ex-officio member of the Board. ONI had maintained a secret slush fund to finance a covert operation to break Japanese

--122--


naval codes, but by 1931 their work virtually halted after its acting director. Captain William Baggaley, returned the remaining money to the Treasury in a "fit of conscience" prompted by Stimson's 1929 sanction against all U.S. code-breaking activities.46 This proved to be an unfortunate incident, because previously the U.S. had been quite successful in breaking Japanese codes. Herbert O. Yardley, head of the Black Chamber, broke the Japanese diplomatic codes during the Washington Naval Conference and consequently gave the U.S. negotiators a great edge over their Japanese counterparts. The U.S. delegates knew minimum limits acceptable by the Japanese government and were thus able to "maneuver" the Japanese into accepting that limit, the 5:5:3 ratio.47

Once the Government closed Yardley's Black Chamber in-response to Stimson's demands, the principle efforts at breaking Japanese codes and ciphers fell upon the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service under the civilian William F. Friedman and the Navy's Code and Signal Section of the Office of Naval Communications (ONC).48 The ONC acquired the Red code book from ONI in 1929, a translation of the Imperial Japanese Fleet's code book, obtained and de-coded surreptitiously during the 1920's. With the Red book and radio intercepts obtained during Japanese fleet maneuvers in 1931, ONC was able to put together the Japanese order of battle and discovered that the Japanese

--123--


had compromised the latest War Plan ORANGE.49

ONC forwarded the acquired information to Adams on January 31, 1931, yet the head of ONI, Captain Harry A. Baldridge, was not made privy to the intelligence; and it was therefore not forwarded to the General Board. Pratt made the decision to withhold this information because he believed that he could not trust Baldridge. Pratt noted that "one suspicion on the part of the Japanese would undo the accomplishment of seven years."50 This changed in 1933 when CNO Admiral William H. Standley agreed to grant ONI direct access to all intelligence about the Imperial Japanese Navy.51 Nevertheless, curing the years of Hoover's Administration, the Board, and indeed the majority of the Navy, knew very little about the Japanese Navy.

In its final report on the upcoming conference, the Board noted that it opposed "budgetary limitation of armaments as not reflecting American strength accurately due to the high American cost of living."52 The Board also noted that it opposed any further reduction of naval forces taken independently of land armaments. As for naval limitation, the Board declared that it favored the abolition of the submarine. If the Navy eliminated the submarine, the Board argued, destroyer tonnage might then be reduced, because one of the destroyer's primary tasks was to protect the fleet against submarine attack. The Board also recommended that cruiser, aircraft carrier, and

--124--


battleship tonnage remain at their current levels "unless the international situation changes radically."53

Also during the spring of 1931, SECNAV Adams ordered the Board to revise the Naval Policy of the United States. Adams attempted to get the Board to shorten the length of the Policy and add in some "consideration of finances" as well. Adams believed that the Policy itself was too lengthy. He wanted "a few short principles that really mean something," and not have each bureau attempt to put in their requirements or suggestions.54 But the Policy was the basis on which the Board made its yearly building recommendations, and each bureau, according to the Board, had to have a statement on what that bureau's responsibilities were and what it needed to accomplish those responsibilities. So despite Adams' suggestion, the Board spent the entire hearing deciding if the wording of the "Fundamental Naval Policy of the United States" was correct.

The Board questioned whether the statement "overseas possessions" was in fact correct, or should the Policy read "overseas territories." The Board decided that since "some of our possessions are not territories" the Policy should remain unchanged. The Board also decided that instead of mentioning both the Washington and London treaties under the "Building and Maintenance Policy," in the interests of conciseness, the words "Treaty Provisions" would be substituted. Although Adams attended the entire hearing, he did

--125--


not speak further, and the Policy remained as lengthy as it always had.

On April 1, 1931, Pratt signed the administrative chart that reorganized the U.S. Fleet into four "Forces," without obtaining the Board's opinion of the change. The first division was the Battle Force, commanded by a full admiral. It consisted of those vessels that normally, operated in the Pacific as units of the Battle Fleet. A vice admiral commanded the battleships of the Battle Fleet, while rear admirals commanded the cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft squadrons. A vice admiral commanded the Scouting Force and subordinate to him was a new vice admiral billet for Commander of Cruisers, Scouting Force. Rear admirals commanded the destroyer and aircraft squadrons of the Scouting Force. A rear admiral commanded the Submarine Force, based at New London, Pearl Harbor, and Coco Solo. The final division was the Base Force, commanded by a rear admiral and consisting of two training squadrons, one based with the Scouting Force and the other with the Battle Force.56

Adams approved Pratt's reorganization with the hope that it would stress training and the development of unified tactics and doctrines for the Navy. The plan also called for a reduction of the authorized enlisted personnel limit by 4800 men and the decommissioning of one battleship, sixteen destroyers, twenty-five S class submarines,

--126--


and five miscellaneous light vessels in order to meet Hoover's demands to reduce naval expenditures. Pratt's plan remained in effect until 1940.57

In February, 1931, the Board began to prepare its fiscal 1933 building program and submitted the program to Adams in April.58 Underlying this recommendation, as well as the previous year's proposal, was the Board's fear that if the U.S. did not build or at least authorize the vessels necessary to bring the U.S. Navy up to the strength provided for by the London Treaty of 1930, such ships might be bargained away at the next scheduled conference to take place in London during 1936. The Board also noted that while the U.S. was not building cruisers, Japan was.59 Consequently, the Board urged that the U.S. begin construction of one 10,000 ton cruiser armed with eight-inch guns in accordance with the London Treaty, two aircraft carriers, one standard light cruiser and one with a flying deck, one destroyer leader, six submarines, and one hundred and fourteen aircraft for the CV-4.60

Both Pratt and Adams accepted the Board's proposal, and Bristol wrote enthusiastically to RADM Long, Retired, "We got through a very good building program for 1933, including in that program practically everything that was left off of the 1932 program, which was not appropriated for the last Congress."61 He also noted that "the Department is lined, up as a whole in back of the present program."

--127--


Hoover and his budget director did not agree with the Navy and called for a meeting with Admiral Pratt and Secretary Adams at the President's retreat at Camp Rapidan in June.

Hoover let SECNAV Adams and CNO Pratt know that he wanted the Navy to reduce its expenditures by a minimum of ten percent and delay all construction. The President then asked Adams if the Navy had ever considered asking Congress for a "lump sum" appropriation, thus doing away with the "usual wrangles" over the importance of "one item over another."63 Adams replied that such a plan should be put into effect, and added that he believed the "lump sum" approach was the only way to handle appropriations.64 The plan, however, was not put into effect during Hoover's Administration due to fiscal difficulties.

Pratt, in October, 1931, ordered the Board to submit a new building program that requested the bare minimum construction necessary to keep the yards open. The Board complied and submitted a proposal on November 12, 1931.65

The new proposal called for the construction of one 10,000 ton, eight-inch gun cruiser, one aircraft carrier, one flying deck cruiser, one destroyer, three submarines, and two patrol boats.66 Adams rejected the plan cue to recent events that included a moratorium on naval construction authorized by President Hoover on November 1, 1931. There was to be no more construction approved during the remainder of Hoover's term of office. Hoover also cancelled the

--128--


construction of six of the eleven destroyers appropriated for the previous year.67 The Board prepared another building proposal for fiscal 1934, simply a restatement of the previous year's proposal, but the President ordered Adams not to send it to Congress.68

Such events disturbed many naval officers. But little could be done because of Pratt's gag order. Throughout 1931, Hoover, was determined to reduce government expenditure. Pratt and the Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, convinced the President that the U.S. could defeat Japan in the event of war, so long as Great Britain sided with the U.S. They also assured Hoover that the U.S. Army and Navy could, with forces then available, protect the continental U.S. from any attack. These assurances led Hoover to continue to press Adams and Pratt to reduce the Navy's budget. The President even asked Adams to return any appropriations the Navy had not yet spent to the Treasury.69

Such assurances did not take into account Japan's growing aggressiveness. In September, 1931, Japanese forces invaded the Chinese portion of Manchuria. The Board believed that the Japanese attack threatened the "Open Door Policy." Hoover decided to counter Japan's aggression diplomatically because in reality, there was little the U.S. Navy could have done to stop the Japanese. 70 The U.S. Asiatic Fleet consisted only of one modern light cruiser.

--129--


the Houston, and a number of older submarines and destroyers.71

During the same month, Pratt submitted to Adams and the Board a plan to reduce the size of the operating fleet by placing one-third of the vessels into a rotating reserve system, much like the earlier plan to rotate the Lexington and Saratoga. The plan would save money and allow the shins in reduced commission to have their hulls cleaned and receive any overhauls that might be needed. The Board's reaction could not have been a surprise to Pratt. The Board noted that "some such plan" may have been necessary to reduce expenses, but pointed out that a "Treaty Navy of which 33 per cent is in reduced or reserve commission is not in reality a 'Treaty Navy,'" unless Great Britain and Japan also put "33 per cent" of their navies in reduced or reserve condition.72

The Board characteristically refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the economic condition of the country. More importantly, it did not offer any alternative solutions or constructive criticism. The Board members, and in particular RADM Bristol, would not work with Pratt and were hostile to any plan that would reduce the operating efficiency of the Navy and therefore did not offer any other solutions. The Board correctly believed that it must stand by what it believed to be the best interests of the Service, no matter what the current political or economic

--130--


situation might dictate to anyone not on the Board. The Board complied with every order issued to it, but only begrudgingly accepted plans that it believed to be detrimental to the Navy. Nevertheless, Adams ordered Pratt to begin implementing the plan.

On October 28, 1931, William H. Gardiner, the President of the Navy League, publicly criticized Hoover's naval policies, and called the President "abysmally ignorant." Hoover stated that Gardiner has "overstepped the limits of respect and good taste," and declared that an independent committee of inquiry would, be set up to investigate Gardiner's charges.73 The committee consisted of Admiral Hugh Rodman, J.H. Hammond, former assistant Secretary of the Treasury Eliot Wadsworth, the Undersecretary of State William R. Castle, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ernest L. Jahnke. All except Rodman were personal friends or Hoover.74 Privately, Hoover instructed J. Edgar Hoover to investigate Gardiner and the activities of the Navy League.75 The Committee cleared the President of any wrongdoing, whereupon Hoover demanded a public apology from Gardiner, an apology that was not forthcoming.

Also during the month of December, the Board held hearings on a suggestion put forth by Admiral Pratt concerning the means by which the flag-selection board would determine which captains would advance to flag rank. Pratt proposed that the board draw up two lists of those

--131--


chosen to advance to flag rank instead of the current practice of drawing up a single list. The first list would include those recommended for future sea duty and higher command in the fleet. The second list would include those RADMs who would receive only shore duty assignments, and would then retire from active duty after one year.76

Under the existing system, not all captains advanced to flag rank. The Navy forced those not chosen to retire as captains. Pratt's proposal permitted all captains to advance to flag rank, though not all would be allowed to serve longer than one year. Pratt hoped that such a system would remove the "sting" of not being selected to advance.77

The Board did not approve of Pratt's suggestion because the members believed that such a plan would "cheapen" the flag rank if all captains were allowed to advance, although they noted that such a plan would remove the "sting" of non-promotion currently felt by those captains passed over and forced to retire with only four gold stripes on their sleeves. But the consensus of the Board toward promotion policy, was "why fix something that is not broken."78

The Navy, started 1932 on a positive note, as Representative Carl Vinson of the House Naval Affairs Committee in January submitted a bill that called for the construction of 120 warships at a cost of 616 million dollars, but the bill died in committee.79 Throughout the

--132--


rest of 1932, the Board held a mere eight hearings; the building program recommendation for fiscal 1934 was the same as the previous year. Board member RADM J.V. Chase replaced Mark Bristol as the Chairman of the Executive Committee when Bristol retired on April 16, 1932. A number of new officers replaced the members who either retired from the Board or moved on to new commands. RADMS G.R. Marvell (Class of 1889), C.B. McVay, Jr. (Class of 1890), Captains C.W. Cole (Class of 1899), J.W. Greenslade (Class of 1399), and E.S. Jackson (Class of 1900) all joined the Executive Committee. Commander T.S. Wilkenson (Class of 1909, awarded the Medal of Honor during World War I) replaced T.C. Kinkaid as the Secretary of the Board. RADM Senn became the Commander, Base Force, U.S. Battle Fleet. RADM Butler took command of Battleship Division Three, Battle Force. RADM Day became the President of the Board of Inspection and Survey, RADM A. St. Clair Smith cook over the command of the Norfolk Navy Yard and RADM Blakely retired.80

Prompted by suggestions from Pratt and Pringle, Bristol, in March, 1932, submitted a memorandum to Pratt suggesting that the Navy Regulations be changed. Bristol suggested the removal of the CNO and the other ex-officio members (President of the Naval War College, Director of Naval Intelligence, Major General commandant of the Marine Corps) from the Board. Pratt concurred and the regulations

--133--


were so changed.81

The changes conformed to Pratt's belief that the General Board should be strictly advisory to the SECNAV and the CNO. Having the CNO on the Board, Pratt believed, caused a conflict of interest. Pratt noted that "the General Board is the Secretary's board and should act as a balance wheel for the Navy. 82 The Board, Pratt and Bristol believed, should be free to make its own judgments, as should the CNO. Bristol explained the change by noting that there would be no ex-officio members on the Board, and that the Executive Committee was now composed of not less than five line officers, three of whom had to be of flag rank.83

The changes ended the mixture of executive and administrative duties that occurred due to the ex-officio members of the Board who held executive offices within the Navy Department while at the same time serving on the Board that, by regulations; had no executive powers. The Board was now made up of officers whose only concern, ideally, was the Board and not other offices to which the members might be assigned. The Board's advice, coupled with that of the CNO, now gave the SECNAV two sources of opinion and 84 information.84

Some Board members saw the removal of their ex-officio colleagues as an attempt by Pratt to "demean the Board and weaken its influence." They also realized that Pratt's advice would be contrary to the Board's, as Pratt

--134--


consistently supported the Administration, especially during the London Conference and as such, had sold out the Navy by supporting Hoover and ignoring the Board's recommendations about the heavy cruiser fleet. Regardless of the motivation behind the change, one fact remained clear: the Board was now divorced from any active connection with the operation of the fleet.85

By June of 1932, the World Disarmament Conference stalled. The U.S. delegation, headed by Secretary Stimson and Hugh Gibson, the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, arrived in Geneva during February. But the U.S. delegates only participated as observers in the early negotiations. As Stimson noted to a French delegate, "Having restricted our Navy and reduced our Army and being out of air range from Europe, we are not going to take a leading position."86 The U.S. began to take a more prominent role in the negotiations when Hoover released to the press a statement that Gibson was then reading to the delegates on June 22, 1932, after Hoover noted that the Conference was nearing collapse.

Hoover recommended that all nations at the Conference abolish tanks, chemical warfare weapons, and large mobile guns. He divided land armament into two classes: a police component to maintain internal order and a defense force to thwart external aggression. He further proposed that the same nations reduce their land armies by one-third,

--135--


exclusive of the police force, abolish all bombing planes, reduce battleship numbers and tonnage by one-third, aircraft carrier, cruiser, and destroyer tonnage by one-fourth, and submarine tonnage by one-third, leaving a maximum of 35,000 tons in submarines per nation. He proposed that France and Italy compute their naval strength "as though they had joined in the London Treaty." 87

Although Hoover ignored the Board's proposal for the Conference, his own proposals revitalized the Conference and got the diplomats talking again. Hoover originally proposed to his cabinet to reduce all fleets by forty percent, abolish all submarines and aircraft carriers, and cut the other categories of warships by thirty percent. Hoover amended his proposal to those figures released by Gibson at Geneva because Pratt only condoned a twenty percent reduction in capital ship tonnage and Stimson did not agree to any reduction in the "size"of the U.S. Fleet due to Japan's growing aggressiveness. 88 But the British refused to accept Hoover's plan, and the French would only agree to it if the U.S. would sign a consultative pact with France, which Hoover rejected as "a political impossibility."89 With the French-U.S. deadlock, the Conference fell apart.

The failure of the World Disarmament Conference began a slow path to the ultimate rejection of international disarmament by the U.S., Great Britain, and France, in

--136--


light of increasing Japanese aggression and Germany's re-armament. In the spring of 1933, Japan announced its intention to withdraw from the London Treaty upon its expiration in 1935, and soon thereafter withdrew from the League of Nations. Germany withdrew from the League in October 1933. The President's view that "as security by pacific means advances, so security, vainly sought by arms, will disappear," did not work, at least not during the early 1930s.90

By the end of 1932, the Navy was still one hundred and twenty ships short of treaty strength. Personnel problems and ship deterioration plagued the fleet, and there was little hope of relief in sight.92 But, the Board did not consider the economic difficulties that faced the nation when it recommended the yearly building program. The Board continually pressed for what it believed the Navy needed. But the General Board's influence within the Navy Department was waning. The CNO was then the most powerful and influential officer in the U.S. Navy. Because of Pratt's willingness to work with the Administration, Hoover turned to the CNO for advice more than he did to any officer. Whether or not Pratt actually planned to increase the power of his office power is difficult to determine, but the main consequence of his tenure in office was that the CNO became the man to whom the Chief Executive would turn.

What should the Americans have done in 1929 as their naval policy in the face of national economic collapse and the social and political pressures so engendered? Remember, that the first duty of a government is to defend the citizens who are members of the social contract that created it.  In the legitimate heirarchy of duties which Herbert Hoover's administration failed to address, the navy would be far down the list of priorities as the labor force was 20% unemployed, the agricultural base had collapsed, the overall credit system was uninsured and unsecured, people were starving to death and civil order was at hazard.     

A navy becomes an expensive luxury during a crisis like the Depression; and it becomes triply redundant when the administration which oversaw the economic disaster of 1929 soimehow manages to make things worse with seeming inaction or deliberate callousness, while using the national military to repress the people's right to peaceably assemble and demand that their government do something to fix the mess IT created.

(And people wonder why I am a socialist? M.) Hoover just did not get it. 

Here is what was fed to the American public by Hollywood about their navy.
 


Maybe there was a Lou Michaud at hand to teach a young (wo)man what a pack of lies that was, or maybe it was more basic, that an underemployed or unemployed head of family took her children to a theater as a treat to watch some escapism as Hollywood dished out from its fantasy factories to divert attention away from what deep trouble the American social contract was in, as its civilian government violated it, turning the army loose upon citizens who sought peaceful redress of justifiable greivances?    

Well, that was the mess that a gladhander CNO and the gunclubber General Board filled with battleship happy fossils ignored as they vaingloriously squabbled among themselves. They disserved their nation by so ignoring reality.  Was the United States Navy alone in this peculiar flight from reality?

I think not.

Our friends in Japan, who had a bunch of mutinous colonels and captains, saw the economic plight of the ordinary impoverished and suffering Japanese farmer or factory worker. Those midgrade officers CAME from such families and felt that they were duty bound to alleviate that suffering. What was the military solution, these officers wondered? Well, they had one. They had a HUGE war machine, far outsized in proportion to a nation with 1/5 the actual economic power of China. In the previous times when Japan faced economic ruin and political collapse, the military had attacked and looted China. It had worked, or so the colonels and captains thought, so why not go that solution one more time and make China pay to bail Japan out?  So they tried it and what happened? There is an American folk tale about a rabbit, and a tar trap. That was China for Japan. 

I think a parallel case could be made for the political elite who ruled the British Empire. Putting aside the "mystique" of the British navy, which was a practical instrument and tool of force for reaching India, and thus looting that nation for Britain's coffers, it only made logical sense to the crown governments to fund a huge outsized navy for what was actually a smallish island nation, whose own functional economic power was about half of the actual economic wealth of the Asian subcontinent. And of course there were the Japanese nibbling at the margins of the "British Empire". Funny how that one worked out, since it was the British who started the Japanese on their own road to ruin...

Then we have the French who kept a navy around, because they needed to defend their own supply lines to their African "colonies" from which French military planners expected to draw 1 in every 4 "French" soldiers to fight the Germans in the inevitable next revenge war. The navy had to be starved because the French had to fund their land army for the previously mentioned Germans. Still some navy had to be had to keep the Italians at bay. And the result? 



Castex must have wept.           

Then we have the Italians, another case of which to fund, the army or the navy? I wonder if the Italian taxpayers watched Italian newsreels and asked themselves the same questions about their navy as many Americans of the 1930s did? Why waste the money when the nation had greater more immediate needs?  Well the world is a dangerous place, filled with belligerent cretins, who think robbery is a good idea. A navy is a needed police force if your interest is legitimate trade upon the world ocean. That is straight out of Mahan.    



Well, how about that one? Ethiopia turned into a trap for Italy,.just like China did for Japan as the Moose sought out wealth by looting, instead of wealth by trade. Yet for all of his mistakes, going into multiple wars with an army which could not even feed its men, cloth them against the expected weather or guarantee the Italian soldiers enough water to drink in places of searing heat and freezing cold, the Italian NAVY, the Regia Marina, managed to keep the foolish wars going far longer than any competent enemy should have allowed. Nobody likes to remember that one little fact. 



The Italians were not the rubes some people like to pretend they were. 

===================================================================

But THIS was unforgivable.
     


The impoverished Americans HAD the money in their strapped circumstances to simulate the event three times. They knew it was the logical first strike from their most likely enemy. Yet the same utter stupidity illustrated by Hoover's Navy, continued through the administration of FDR, with politicians, both of the civilian gladhander idiot variety, that we need in our political system to balance regionalisms and narrow bigotted political interests and the politicians in uniform, who stupidly contributed to the culture of mendacity that allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, and who hobbled the fleet into impotence when it did happen.

Expletive deleted. In the fictional timeline which this is, the biggest fix is not the hardware or the political economic circumstances as in actual history. It is the LEADERSHIP of the institutions at play which needs the remedy. 

[miletus12]

DOING NOTHING

Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression 1929

As Herbert Hoover assumed the mantle of president in 1929, one of his most famous assertions had been “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” Less than a year later the country was in the throes of recession, witnessing a financial crisis that was to cause poverty and unemployment rates to skyrocket. The recession was precipitated by a cyclical downturn in the market but exacerbated by misguided economic policies. It was Hoover’s ineptitude that deepened the crisis. While he somewhat justifiably became a scapegoat for the economic crisis, his failures were not reversed by his successor, Roosevelt, and their combined actions extended the duration of and worsened the intensity of the Great Depression.

Hoover had secured the Republican nomination for presidency in 1928 despite never having been elected to public office. He had attained great fame under President Woodrow Wilson by organizing the rationing of food for World War I and for his humanitarian efforts on behalf of persons starving in the wake of the war. His mystique was enhanced by his extensive role in the Harding and Coolidge administrations as the secretary of commerce, a previously unimportant cabinet position that attained great significance under his watch. He became one of the most instrumental figures in the economic boom of the early to middle 1920s, a period that oversaw an overextension of credit that portended ill for the future. Nonetheless, Hoover was viewed as a wallet-friendly candidate and surged to the presidency despite Coolidge’s lukewarm opinion of him.

While there are many competing theories for the origin of the Great Depression, it is apparent that Hoover did not particularly err in the months leading up to its beginning. In October 1929, on Black Tuesday, the stock market experienced a monumental collapse that precipitated the most severe economic downturn of the twentieth century. While the stock market modestly rebounded in successive months, the crash had a tremendous negative effect on consumer confidence. The decline in stock prices facilitated the bankruptcies of many lenders. Many economic historians suggest the inaction of the Federal Reserve in preventing the collapse of these banks massively exacerbated the crisis.

In June 1930, Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. This protectionist gesture resulted in a deepening economic crisis worldwide. Hoover’s miscues extended beyond the tariff. Various policies aimed at encouraging job sharing and propping up wages have since been determined to be responsible for close to two-thirds of the drop in gross domestic product (GDP) in the two years that followed the crash. Hoover tried to keep industrial wages too high; the result was that unemployment increased and the GDP suffered. Contrary to many historical critics of Hoover, he rejected the arguments of his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, in favor of a laissez-faire response to the crisis that would treat it as a cyclical event from which the economy would naturally rebound. Roosevelt’s policies based on this model are often considered to have increased the duration of the depression by several years.

On Hoover’s watch, unemployment reached almost 25 percent. The number of homeless Americans dramatically increased. This resulted in a proliferation of shantytowns across the country, which were derisively referred to as “Hoovervilles.” Hoover championed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act in an effort to spur the construction of new homes and reverse the tide of homelessness, but his actions were too little, too late. Before the downturn, Mellon had overseen a tremendous decrease in taxes on the upper economic echelon of society—the top income tax rate had been cut from 73 percent to 24 percent. To finance various public works projects later in his term, Hoover largely reversed these cuts; the consequence of such a considerable tax increase was substantially mitigated economic growth.

In 1931, Hoover urged major banks to form a consortium called the National Credit Corporation (NCC). Hoover encouraged but did not force major banks to loan money to smaller banks that were experiencing difficulties. NCC members were understandably leery of taking such actions, and loans were rarely given. A year later, Hoover helped secure the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, a last-ditch effort to increase loans to financial institutions, farmers, and railroads. Though it had little effect at the time, its efforts were extended by Roosevelt.

In 1932, Hoover lost in a landslide to Franklin D. Roosevelt due to his failings on the economy and on Prohibition. The election was pivotal from the perspective that it ushered in a realignment of political views. Roosevelt would be elected four times and oversee a period of Democratic domination in American politics. Considering the crises Roosevelt faced as president (including the Depression and World War II), it is difficult to imagine what the world would look like had Hoover’s ineptitude not assisted in this political revolution. Nonetheless, Hoover’s failings should not absolve his successor. Roosevelt continued many of Hoover’s economically ruinous policies, and in so doing extended the duration of the Depression. Unemployment remained high throughout Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. It was only after the onset of World War II that the United States truly dug itself out of its rut. Nonetheless, Hoover became the electoral scapegoat for his actions; then he later became the historical scapegoat due to the favorable impression many had of Roosevelt’s economic policies. It is for these reasons that Hoover will always be remembered as a humanitarian who became an abysmal president whose economic mistakes changed America and the world forever.

Before you build a navy and consider its purpose and use, you need to know why you have that navy. (^^^)

Mahan Rules By Dr. James R. Holmes and Commander Kevin J. Delamer, U.S. Navy (Retired)
May 2017 Proceedings Vol. 143/5/1,371

Potential U.S. adversaries are studying the ideas of the great maritime strategist; we should be doing the same.

The outlook for U.S. maritime strategic thought is less than rosy, but 19th-century theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan can still help to mend the situation. Not only are his fundamental ideas encoded in the sea services’ cultural DNA, but his works have attracted the interest of Navy leadership, notably that of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, who invokes Mahan in his “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority.” As well, rising powers such as China pay homage to and draw inspiration from the evangelist of U.S. sea power.1 In light of this groundswell of interest, we espouse an ongoing renaissance in reading and debating Mahan’s treatises while speculating about the asymmetries his ideas could foster between seafaring states that hew to his thought and those that do not.

Mahan himself conceded that his most ardent admirers resided overseas, including in Great Britain, Japan, and Germany.2 Not until the Spanish-American War appeared to ratify his theories of marine supremacy—giving the United States a modest island empire to sustain foreign trade and commerce, all defended by a modern battle fleet—did Mahan become a household name for ordinary Americans. The naval historian also feared that the United States was not a natural seagoing nation. It straddled a continent, and thus had the luxury of turning inward. North America was abundantly endowed with natural resources. Unlike Britons, consequently, Americans had little need to venture seaward in search of prosperity.3 Forgetfulness toward the sea might prevail without compelling incentives.

Today, aside from a dozen or so Advanced Strategy Program students each year, Naval War College students are exposed to Mahan and his writings in only cursory fashion.4 They read from his landmark treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, selections that establish his six “determinants” of maritime might and give his account of the Anglo-American maritime war of 1778.5 At 140 pages, this is a slim selection from an author whose scholarly output was so prodigious that his bibliography alone fills a book.6 And the Naval War College furnishes the most exposure to Mahan’s sea-power theories of any service college or civilian professional school. Coverage elsewhere is even sparser. We aim to change that by demonstrating the theorist’s continuing relevance to contemporary problems.

Mahan’s History—and the Mythology

In the past, Mahanian theory was intertwined throughout the Naval War College curriculum. Many lecturers had known him; context and operational concepts for war planning derived from Mahanian assumptions about the sea. The best example is War Plan Orange, examined by author Edward Miller, who showed how the College was integral to the “evolution” of interwar strategic thought and war planning for the Pacific. A Mahanian thread ran through all versions of War Plan Orange. War fleets, bases, concentration of force, and decisive battle were central to planning efforts.7 Knowledge from Newport’s theorist molded the core assumptions underlying study, wargaming, and planning.

But the three volumes of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History—the first, then as now, being the most widely read and recognized—laid the foundation for readers’ thinking about nautical matters. Few officers acquainted themselves intimately with Mahan’s subsequent refinements of his theories, either as students at Newport or in staff positions. Readers knew about Mahan’s six attributes that equipped states to become great naval powers. From this basis emerged a script whose acts and scenes involved amassing maritime commerce, building a battle fleet, and forward-deploying that fleet for decisive combat along enemy coastlines.

Mahan’s alleged admonishment never to divide the battle fleet crystallized that wisdom—even though this is not precisely what he advised. Mahan actually opposed strategically subdividing the fleet into detachments weaker than enemy forces they were likely to encounter in high-seas battle.8 This constituted risk management, not the fixed tactical precept found in the later mythology. The naval establishment distilled such concepts into a basic primer on uses of the sea. This primer did not arise from a thoroughgoing examination of Mahanian theory that spanned his vast corpus. A narrower version of his ideas—an abridged edition—formed the core of the curriculum at Newport.

Thus, it was a partial version of Mahanian theory that was central to early teachings at the college. Mahan was the institution’s first lecturer on strategy, and his history-based approach informed much of the curriculum, as attested by his address at the opening of the 1888 academic year.9 Mahanian theory, furthermore, became integral to the U.S. Navy as an institution. Leadership tapped the Naval War College to help plan for war with Spain in 1898, thereby tacitly affirming the practical value the establishment saw in Mahanian thought.

Scholars have taken note of this. Naval analyst Norman Friedman makes the point that detailed discussions of strategy have remained an exception in the U.S. Navy establishment ever since the years when Mahan was actively writing. Friedman suggests that most writings that are purportedly about U.S. maritime strategy are in fact tactical and operational in nature—and unfold within the strategic framework erected by Mahan, even when no one mentions that framework of axioms and intuitions about marine affairs.10 Mahan’s ghost wafts through strategic discourses even when no one invokes his name.

The abridged edition of Mahanian strategic ideas became embedded in the U.S. naval lexicon, whether or not anyone mentioned the “Copernicus” of sea power.11 In the years before the United States entered World War I, for instance, Lieutenant Commander C. C. Gill developed a series of lectures on the conflict, delivering them to future leaders of the U.S. Naval Academy. Gill’s lectures were subsequently reshaped into magazine articles and later published as a book—all with the approval and support of the Department of the Navy.12 The book’s introductory chapters describe sea power and sea control in terms directly reminiscent of Mahan—without giving him credit. Not just an abridged but a simplified Mahan became common parlance within a few years after his death in 1914, which should come as little surprise. Many Naval War College leaders in the generation succeeding the founders had been students sitting in lectures delivered by Mahan. Men including Dudley Knox and William Sims made his ideas their own. In turn these ideas, passed down by Mahan’s intellectual progeny, shaped strategic discourses, operational planning, and force design throughout the interwar period.

Admittedly, these strategic ideas were not confined solely to the basic framework set forth in the Influence of Sea Power series. During the final two decades of his life, Mahan remained a prolific author. His interests transcended strategy, touching on international relations in books such as The Problem of Asia. He published a steady stream of articles in popular publications and professional journals, exploring more mundane issues that were important to the health and development of the nation’s sea services. Mahan’s later works were more nuanced. In the past he had railed against making guerre de course the centerpiece of U.S. maritime strategy; he wrote a history of the War of 1812 precisely to deliver a cautionary tale about the ills of commerce raiding. But later in life, his commentary on the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 demonstrated an appreciation for the value of interdicting commerce, even before a major fleet action had transpired.13 The diverse array of subjects on which Mahan’s pen alighted informed U.S. strategic decision-making at the margins up through World War II. Still, these later works lacked the impact of the Influence of Sea Power treatises.

Today’s Bowdlerized Mahan

Today, as noted, few naval officers read Mahan beyond a couple of selections from The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, and this neglect of the modern Navy’s intellectual founder is not new. Already by the early postwar years, faculty in Newport had taken to complaining about the Navy’s loss of strategic vocabulary. In a 1951 letter to Chief of Naval Operations Forrest Sherman, college president Richard L. Conolly portrayed U.S. mariners as “a breed of fine seamen, of able airmen, efficient administrators, and of superb tacticians and technicians.” Admiral Conolly nevertheless pronounced the service’s “understanding” and “exposition” of “the undiminished and vital nature of Sea Power . . . dangerously superficial and elementary.”14

Why? First of all, some of the ideas underlying Mahan’s worldview fell out of favor in the postwar era. For him foreign commerce was king, while sea power was the handmaiden of commercial and imperial expansion. This imperialist vision, although uncontroversial in his day, was left behind the march of history by the postwar age of decolonization. U.S. naval and air forces remained permanently stationed overseas, mainly in Eurasia. Yet Washington now relied on alliances and bases leased from host nations as the struts supporting a forward-deployed naval presence. Colonies governed from afar were passé—or worse.

But while the inspiration behind Mahanian expansionism may have been discredited, his strategic ideas remained valid and should have continued to shape maritime policy and strategy. The United States enjoyed command of the seas, and unchallenged access throughout the global maritime commons has been a fundamental assumption underpinning strategic decision-making ever since. Naval forces, continuously forward-deployed, have always prepared to pummel enemy fleets in their home waters. All of these strategic choices conform to the Mahanian script. Yet the scriptwriter himself was less and less visible in U.S. strategic discourses. Few quarreled with or overtly rejected Mahan’s ideas. They just left his works on the shelf to gather dust.

Second, generational change played its part. If the generation following Mahan absorbed from the master ideas about commerce, bases, and ships, that direct transmission ceased by the postwar years, as the second generation retired from the service. Without a concerted effort to keep Mahan’s writings on the agenda at the Naval War College, on staffs, and in the fleet, his ideas simply began to fade. In a sense Mahan was a victim of his own success. His theories had become part of a standard vocabulary of sea power—and thus had largely disappeared from view. No one saw the need to revisit his works, ponder them anew, and refresh and adapt them for new times.

Finally, the tactical and platform-centric culture that Conolly bewailed inclined seafarers to dismiss Mahan, if they thought about him at all. By most accounts this is now a U.S. Navy trait of long vintage. Indeed, Mahan himself reported discounting the value of naval history as a young officer: “I shared the prepossession, common at that time, that the naval history of the past was wholly past; of no use at all to the present” (our emphasis).15 In turn, amnesia about the past may have claimed Mahan as its victim.

By the post–World War II years, it was commonplace to equate Mahanian theory with steam-propelled battleships. But battleships had met their doom, yielding to aircraft carriers, the warbirds and guided missiles that carriers deployed, and nuclear-powered submarines. Why bother reading Mahan? Or, still less, why bother investigating such antiquarian writings as a resource to shape strategy and operations for the atomic age? Conflating Mahan with tactics and hardware—the “grammar” of naval warfare—thus came to obscure the larger strategic and grand-strategic “logic” suffusing his ideas about maritime strategy.16

Into a Mahanian Future?

Whatever the fate of Mahan’s tactical ideas, his logic of sea power remains evergreen despite technological advances, changes to the geostrategic setting, and the onrush of time. It suffers from neglect despite a partial rediscovery during the “Turner Revolution” of the 1970s, when then–Naval War College president Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner oversaw a return to a curriculum grounded in history and strategic theory.17

Today Admiral Turner’s project remains incomplete, at least as regards Mahanian thought, four decades after he set it in motion. Admittedly, in this article we interpret in rather dour terms the state of strategic thought in the sea services, and we attribute it largely to apathy toward Mahan’s works. Things may not be that grim. The late Michael Handel observed that one need not read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War to be Clausewitzian in outlook, and to arrive at the same basic precepts as did the Prussian master. Minds travel in certain well-worn grooves, suggests Handel, and reach similar destinations.18

The same goes for Mahanian insights. Certain basic ideas from Mahan’s corpus will likely endure, even if users of those ideas reach them independently—or glean them without knowing the source, to the extent that the sea-service lexicon remains Mahanian. The commons, sea control—né command of the sea—and the major fleet action may persist in U.S. maritime thought.

But there are perils to neglecting the strategic canon. For one, absorbing ideas into sea-service culture with little sense of their historical context deprives them of nuance. Worse, it can reduce them to dogma. Strategists including Bernard Brodie warn that a tyranny of maxims, or unquestioned truths, can grip military services to stultifying effect.19 For another, Clausewitz explains that if strategists do not know strategic theory, they must start the intellectual process afresh every time they grapple with some relevant question.20 They must reinvent the wheel, in colloquial terms. Becoming conversant with theory spares them that. It lays the foundation for critical analysis—and thus for strategic wisdom.

It is thus eminently worthwhile for today’s naval leadership to push for a revival of strategic study in general and of Mahan in particular. Otherwise the sea services may have to face unfamiliar intellectual territory in an increasingly contested Asia-Pacific. Strategists in rising sea powers such as China have become great followers of Mahan. Chinese strategists read and digest his concepts thoroughly, and try to press them into service for today’s postmodern world.

Today’s Navy should ask itself what happens when a fervently Mahanian China confronts an erstwhile Mahanian power such as the United States. Clausewitz, Brodie, and Mahan himself might salute prospective foes’ intellectual vigor—while doubting whether a post-Mahanian U.S. Navy had the capacity to compete. Let’s dust off Mahan’s works and compete on equal terms.

1. Margaret Tuttle Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Edward Mead Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943), 415–45.
2. Alfred Thayer Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York: Harper, 1907), 302–3.
3. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1987), 39.
4. The Advanced Strategy elective program helps fill the U.S. Navy’s need for maritime strategists. Rather than take a normal slate of electives, one per trimester, Advanced Strategy students devote all of their elective time to studying problems and opportunities relating to the sea. They are designated specialists in maritime strategy upon completing the program.
5. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1–89, 505–41.
6. John B. Hattendorf and Lynn C. Hattendorf, A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Newport R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1987).
7. Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991), esp. 37–38.
8. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (1897; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 198.
9. “Address of Captain A. T. Mahan, U.S. Navy,” Naval Institute Proceedings 14, no. 4 (1888), 621–38.
10. Norman Friedman, The U.S. Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, Md., Naval Institute Press, 1988), 13–14.
11. Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, eds., Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, 3 vols. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1975), vol. 2, 342, 361.
12. C. C. Gill, Naval Power in the War (1914–1918) (New York: Doran, 1919).
13. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1905); Alfred Thayer Mahan, Naval Administration and Warfare (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918), 133–73.
14. Naval War College Archives, Records of the Course of Advanced Study: President, Naval War College, letter to Chief of Naval Operations, A3-1 serial 2354-51, May 1, 1951, in John B. Hattendorf, “Introduction,” J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967; reprint, Westport: Greenwood, 1989), xxii.
15. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 275.
16. James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “Mahan’s Lingering Ghost,” Naval Institute Proceedings 135, no. 12 (December 2009).
17. Stansfield Turner, “Challenge: A New Approach to Professional Education,” Naval War College Review 25, no. 2 (November–December 1972), 1-9.
18. Michael I. Handel, Masters of War, 3d ed. (London: Cass, 2000), 11.
19. James R. Holmes, “Strategy and the Tyranny of Maxims,” The Diplomat, 23 February 2014, www.thediplomat.com/2014/02/strategy-and-the-tyranny-of-maxims/.
20. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Peter Paret and Michael Howard, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 141.

Dr. Holmes, a former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, is professor of strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, and a 2016 recipient of the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Medal.

Commander Delamer is a retired naval aviator and military professor of strategy at the Naval War College (NWC). He currently teaches for the NWC College of Distance Education and is senior naval science instructor at Northern High School, Owings, Maryland.

Of course in this fictional historical timeline, we want to ask Mister do nothing Herbert Hoover this question. Why did you do this stupid thing?..

BAD BUSINESS

Smoot-Hawley 1930

Few bits of legislation have managed to do the damage that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed in 1930, did to the American and world economy. The bill was introduced by the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Willis Hawley, and the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Reed Smoot. The preceding fall, the stock market had crashed, and this bill was an attempt to revive the American economy. To do this, the act created a stiff tariff on more than 20,000 foreign imports. The plan was to suck money from Europe in the form of tariffs and to make European goods more expensive so that American-made items would have a distinct sales advantage. The bill easily passed a panicky Congress and doubled the effective duties on many manufactured and agricultural products.

The real effect of Smoot-Hawley was almost exactly the opposite of its intent. The European nations, seeing their products being virtually locked out of the U.S. market, passed their own protective tariff bills in retaliation. This meant that most American goods up to doubled in price all over Europe. By 1932, the trade war Smoot-Hawley had started was in full swing.

In 1929, the United States had exported about $4.5 million worth of goods to Europe. A million dollars went pretty far in 1930, when a loaf of bread cost $0.09. By 1931, all U.S. exports there totaled only $1.5 million. Two-thirds of all imports from the United States had been blocked out by the protective tariffs passed between 1930 and 1932. Imports to the States diminished just as quickly, going from $5.5 million to just over $2 million by 1932.

But no one bought new American goods from new American factories to replace the more expensive European imports that the Smoot-Hawley bill blocked out. Had they been able to do so, it might have worked. The reason they could not was that many of the consumers no longer had the money to buy much of anything. This was because of the millions of jobs lost as factories closed because they no longer could export their products to Europe. The unemployed were unable to buy American-made goods, much less more. Job losses made the Depression much worse. Not only were the jobs at the exporters lost, but many American jobs were gone as well. The American agricultural sector also largely depended on exports, and so protectionism made it impossible for farmers to sell their crops. This forced down the price paid for agricultural products. Lower prices put many farmers and farm workers out of work and cost thousands of families their farms.

When a quarter of the buyers of your product suddenly have no money, then your sales are down 25 percent. So you have to lay off some of your workers, cut wages, or eliminate benefits to enable your business to survive. But increasing the number of employed and paying workers less mean that sales for everyone are down again. The unemployed or financially strapped workers have less money to spend. As they continue to spend less, domestic sales continue to plummet and more workers lose their jobs. This cycle of unemployment creating more unemployment, which Smoot-Hawley reinforced, continued until World War II and wartime spending ended it.

The Smoot-Hawley Act had exactly the opposite effect of what was intended. Rather than helping to end a depression, which was started mostly by bad monetary policies, the tariffs it created made the financial situation much worse. Those tariffs caused a trade war that guaranteed that the 1930s saw not just another recession, but the Great Depression.

Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley were soundly defeated in the 1932 elections. Those workers whose jobs they had destroyed voted them out. By 1944, most nations had done away with the worst of the tariffs the bill had created and the postwar recovery became the greatest expansion of wealth in recorded history. It is only in the last few years that a return to protective tariffs for some businesses have reappeared. They were a mistake that changed the world and made a bad economic situation terrible. Let us hope today’s leaders have learned from history.

Now Mister fictional do-nothing Herbert Hoover, could we have applied some common sense here? A government (John Locke and Thomas Jefferson et al.) exists to provide the environment whereby the citizenry can live and conduct their activities in daily safety. That is a SERVICE, the government provides, which means a government, as a service provider, has to have income to pay its employees to provide that service.   
 
Taxes are the service fee to provide the service as stipulated in the "social contract". 

That kind of makes the government the major service provider who must ensure that economy works properly. Whether capitalist or SOCIALIST, you cannot refute the duty of a government to ensure that people can eat, work, have shelter, have health, and have money to pay their fees to the government so the government can pay its employees to "ensure that economy works properly"..

Mister fictional do-nothing Herbert Hoover's first duty was to restore faith in the credit markets which had collapsed. Whatever it took. however it was done, the lines of credit and prudent ensured risk-taking which kept American capitalism operating had to be maintained.     

How?  

Well Roosevelt's crew would implement the credit insurance reforms and install regulatory oversight, but by the time they got in, the damage was too severe. The American people lost faith in their social contract. 

People believe in the concrete and the tangible. Deficit spending in the short term produicing goods and services for the promise of a better quality of life for the citizens in the long term is classic Keynes.

Nothing says TANGIBLE like goods and services being bought and factories humming away producing huge visible capital infrastructure.
     
 
Ocean liner. (^^^) International trade moves in ships. (^^^) You want to move that trade in YOUR ships. 

Drydock (^^^) You want to build your ships at home and also build ships for other nations. It also comes in handy when you...

Destroyer (^^^) ... want to protect your use of the sea for free trade, free navigation and commerce.

Mister fictional do-nothing Herbert Hoover, could we please have a National Recovery Act?
a. Overhaul the banking system and insure deposits, so Jane S. Citizen knows her bank will not be foreclosed? 
b. Put Jane S. Citizen's shiftless husband to work somewhere building infrastructure that will improve goods and services delivery? Power plants, libraries, more schools and hospitals aland, improved ports and docks, a global navigation system. and a huge merchant fleet to move imports and exports (Subsidized by the government; if necessary.) would be nice.
c. A navy to defend b.      
 
=======================================================

That by the way is what this guy preached; after he read MAHAN

=======================================================

What should that navy look like Mister fictional do-nothing Herbert Hoover?

Well, unlike the historical American navy centered on a singular massed Jutland style battle fleet which could only do one wrong thing not very well, that fictional fleet should exist to promote American free trade and to ensure right of American access to the world ocean at spots and times of American choosing.

The Washington Naval Treaty, as it existed, sort of strait jacketed the USN into that Jutland battle fleet model, but that treaty has loopholes.

a. The USG can build as many oil tankers, ammunition ships, submarine tender ships, "research" submarines, seaplane tenders, hospital ships, weather ships, drystores ships, cable laying ships, passenger cargo ships, sea going tugs, sea going drydocks, and radio relay ships as it wants. If some of them happen to resemble large destroyers, that is just your imagination, France.
b. All those useless battleships can receive an "Italian makeover".  How about that? More "cruisers". Big ones defined as "battleships", but now useful because now they can sail with the aircraft carriers that will be showing the flag everwhere. (Next stop, Yokohama. Why? Because that sea voyage will be good for diplomatic friendly relations with Japan and the North Pacific typhoon training will be "useful", ADM Pratt for brains. M.) 
c. Zeppelins are not working. *(Multiple crashes and fatalities.). How about some BLIMPS?  Bonus is that we save ADM Moffertt's life and get...
d. How about that unified air force?  No more Billy Mitchell, thank you. But let us keep that coast defense idea, he had, because nothing says; "No submarines allowed here, chappy.", like a large four engine bomber flying about with depth charges and a searchlight. (Got to remember this is 1930ish and radar is not a thing yet. M.)             
e. And in the margins of the sea-faring portion of the national recovery act which will set the steel and ship building industries afire to train and employ THOUSANDS, how about a few bread crumbs for...
--- effectors development and validation. Nothing in the WNT says anything about designing and proofing AAA, torpedoes, shells and assorted mines and detectors and guidance systems.
--- Do not forget the Marines. They need effectors and validation too. Nicaragua could have used some tanky Marines based on the Banana War AARs. Dive bombing was not enough.  
--- training, training, training.    

The navy should be built to ensure "free trade" and "free transit" and "right of navigation" for American use of the sea. And of course, it exists, to deny the same to America's enemies. (Not you, France. We have a "special relationship". M.) 

[miletus12]

Hellions of the Deep.

Beard on Gannon, 'Hellions of the Deep: The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II'
Author: Robert Gannon

Reviewer: Jonathan D. Beard

Robert Gannon. Hellions of the Deep: The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. xiv + 241 pp. $28.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-01508-8.

Reviewed by Jonathan D. Beard (Science Writer-Photo Researcher) Published on H-War (October, 1996)

A Bumpy Road to Success

As anyone who has studied World War II in the Pacific knows, the U.S. Navy submarine fleet was amazingly successful and virtually destroyed Japan's merchant marine. The Imperial Navy's submarine campaign, on the other hand, was a fiasco from beginning--the midget subs at Pearl Harbor--to end. This is ironic, because any submarine's main weapon is its torpedoes, and America started the war with torpedoes that almost never worked, whereas Japanese torpedoes were the best in the world.

Hellions of the Deep, Robert Gannon's study of American torpedoes, attempts to be a comprehensive report on every type of torpedo used by American forces during World War II--submarine anti-ship, submarine anti-escort, aerial anti-ship, aerial anti-submarine, and those launched by PT boats and destroyers, too. It also offers a fair amount of information about what the Germans and Japanese were doing in torpedo development. In fact, it concentrates on three themes: the disastrous Mark 14, which crippled USN submarines for fully half the war; the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory (HUSL), which accounted for most of the research into torpedoes during the war; and the creation of the "Mine Mark 24," the acoustic homing torpedo used against German U-boats.

Much of this material is well researched and effectively presented, especially the story of the Mark 24, which Gannon claims was the first effective homing torpedo. Although Gannon is a professor of English at Penn State, he has worked for years as a science writer (as has this reviewer), and is well qualified, unlike most military historians, to describe the science and technology behind this revolutionary weapon. The challenge facing the collection of mostly young scientists at HUSL--few of whom had ever studied acoustics or seen a torpedo--was a formidable one. They wanted to create a torpedo that could be dropped from an airplane, locate a U-boat which had just dived, swim toward that U-boat and hit it. In the era of vacuum tube technology, it was a considerable feat just to produce a set of hydrophones and servos that could be packed into a small torpedo, stored on a ship for months, then survive being dropped into the water. Yet they succeeded, and invented a weapon that is credited with destroying 31 U-boats and damaging another 15--an almost incredible 32 percent success rate, since American planes dropped only 142 Mark 24s during the war.

Gannon captures the human drama of the work at HUSL well, no doubt because he interviewed dozens of scientists, submarine officers, and Navy bureaucrats over the course of 20 years to get the background he needed to write Hellions of the Deep. But his tremendous amount of knowledge, and the large portion of it coming from oral histories, does not always serve him well. Some of his informants seemed to have remembered the comic aspects of their war years, and not much more. Gannon's short chapter on Keyport, Washington, the Navy's West Coast torpedo facility, consists of little more than one amusing tale of using a test torpedo to chase a civilian motorboat. He would have better served his readers if he had omitted some of the "human-interest" passages, as well as the superficial introductory material on torpedoes during the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars. If, instead, Gannon could have provided more about German and Japanese torpedo work before and during the war, this would have been a better book. There is some coverage of Axis technologies, and a few mentions of British torpedoes, but not a word about Soviet, French, or Italian torpedoes.

That said, Hellions of the Deep does provide a detailed history of the wretched Mark 14, a weapon right up there with the Brewster Buffalo, and far more important to American fortunes in the Pacific. Miserly budgets during the 1920s and 1930s meant that not a single Mark 14 was ever test fired under war conditions before 1942--while the Navy wasted $78,000 (a large amount, then) developing a magnetic exploder that did not work. Gannon also provides good descriptions of the development of aerial torpedoes and of the Mark 18 electric torpedo. Among the wealth of statistics in this book is the striking fact that the United States produced 57,000 torpedoes during World War II, yet only fired 15,000 of them. Along with these statistics, Gannon has included dozens of photos and drawings, almost all of them appearing in print for the first time.

Copyright (c) 1996 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [e-mail].

Printable Version: www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=637

Citation: Jonathan D. Beard. Review of Gannon, Robert, Hellions of the Deep: The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II. H-War, H-Net Reviews. October, 1996. URL: www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=637

Copyright © 1996 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [e-mail].

I am reading that book and another, entitled "Ship Killer: A History of the American Torpedo by Thomas Wildenberg", to supplement it. When I get through with both books; I will have a lot more unkind things to write about the American navy after the Woodrow Wilson criminal regime wrecked it.

But for today, let me drop a few comments about the average British, the inconsistent French, the gadget happy Japanese and the Italians, when it comes to torpedoes.

The British:

Whatever you might say about British engineering in theory, which is beautiful and elegant on paper, if you have ever owned a piece of their manufactured goods produced from it, you immediately notice that "craftsmanship" and "functionality" and "maintenance", may not have been the first quality, or best manufactured practices designed or built into the object. The specific object in this case, the British interwar torpedo had about 14,000 individual parts per type, and was not much evolved from the Whitehead Mark V of WWI.   

The British dabbled in two types of propulsion systems inside their fish.

The more common was the wet-heater, where kerosene was used as fuel and water was used as combustion chamber coolant and as the working fluid in the form of steam to drive a four cylinder radial engine. This was the actual world standard, with the Americans being the only ones to use pure turbine drives instead. It was highly inefficient in that it wasted about 80% of the available chemical and kinetic energy possible from the "steam" due to poor gaskets used and cylinder seals leakage. 

The other torpedo was a type also favored by the WWI Germans, which was called the "burner cycle" or closed loop diesel engined torpedo. It was more efficient than the wet heater and gave about DOUBLE the work throughput and correspondingly much greater range as the air was the working fluid as well as the combustor, with 45,000 times the expansion gradient as opposed to 22,000 for superheated steam in the cylinders. 

The British dabbled with enriched combustion gas mixes to improve either wet heater or burner cycle without much success. Their Mark VIII, for example, was deployed with 50% oxygen and inerts, with no significant performance improvement even though it was a burner cycle. That was probably due to that rather unusual manufacture process I previously mentioned.     

British guidance systems were of the standard gyro steer setup that had not significantly changed since d'Orbry had first patented his control setup around 1900. Depth control was by annular membrane hydrostatic valve with mechanical linkages to depth planes in the aft steer control unit via mechanical linkages, easily recognizable from the first setup Whitehead had originally designed in 1888. Roll dampening was supposed to be provided by a pendulum system in conjunction to the gyro control. It never occurred to the British or to anyone else to adapt the SPERRY autopilot system to torpedoes when that was developed for aircraft.     

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------    

Remember this description of guidance and propulsion methods, it was the same setup, with minor variations, that virtually the entire naval weapon design establishment globally used.   

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The end that went bang in a British torpedo, as long as it was the contact function, worked quite well. If you looked at a British torpedo funny, it would go off. That is not much of an exaggeration. They were dangerous fish to load and store as they were shock sensitive. The British torpedoes only failed to bang when the designers tried to put a magnetic influence ignition feature into it. For much the same reasons as the Americans and the Germans would goof up their own fish, the British failed to install a sensitivity control or a variable disruptor into their magnetic field disturbance setup, as they replicated the error of making the Earth's magnetic field the field to be disrupted.  Flux lines change angle of incidence, as any halfway competent high school physics student who ever did the iron filings on a sheet of paper with a bar magnet experiment could have told those collective idiots. At least the Americans tried to map the globe for that problem. The British and the Germans did not even do that much. 

Going back to the warhead sensitivity and the tendency of British torpedoes to break up and explode if they were dropped from height, the British spent a lot of time and money on how to air launch their torpedoes in the 1920s, and that is to their credit. The cable retarded fall system they used at Taranto was brilliant. It worked well. The torpedoes splashed into the water, and half of them sank, ran in circles or missed completely as their gyro steer failed, but they did not break up or explode on impact as German made or American made air dropped torpedoes did.      

All in all, when the magnetic feature was diosabled and when the target was not moving too fast or too distant, British torpedoes did have a good success rate. About 10% PH, which was not too shabby. 

======================================================

The French

If you looked at a Schneider or a Toulon torpedo you saw two varieties of fish. It was either a kerosene fueled wet heater modified Brotherhood three cyclinder radial engined or an ethyl alcohol burner cycle four cylinder stolen Schwartzkopf propulsion cycle setup. The French for some unknown reason refused to follow the British and the Germans into gadgetsville with fancy magnetic exploders. They used a simple contact pistol and packed in as much secondary charge as their fish could carry. Aside from that differfence, their fish were essentially Whiteheads with better manufacture quality control and more reliability than the British made ones. 

Where the French failed was in doctrine and purpose of use and fire control solutions. They never could decide if they were snipers, brawlers or volley shooters. If you look at their warships, you see that they carried relatively few torpedo tubes per class versus the Americans or the Japanese. The Briitsh were of a like mindset, but early on the British decided that they were snipers and applied doctrine and fire control systems accordingly with the acceptable results. You would think the French, who were going up against the Italians of all navies, would have decided on massed volley fire and brawling with advanced fire control systems of their own?  The few times the French tried to torpedo anybody, this inconsistency as to the method of torpedo employment and their poor fire control systems failed them. They usually missed. It was as much a fault of their inconsstent doctrine of employment as it was in their aiming and torpedo data control setups for shoots, which unlike the British, were simply awful.         
 
======================================================

The Japanese. 

Using licensed Schwartzkopf WWI four cylinder radial engine wet heater designs and successful and I do mean successful oxygen enrichment schemes of 90% or more in 90/10 oxygen/inert gas mixes with 2 stage starter cycles, the Japanese created the longest ranged torpedoes in the world. The propulsion systems were made to the German WWI standard and were reliable. The exploders were contact pistol initiated, backed up by a kinetic sensitive primary charge that would go off on impact if the silly things hit anything at 45 knots or faster. These things should have been deadly, yet their probability of hit was about half that of a US torpedo.
     
Why? 

Their gyro control setup was miss matched to the time of run. If the gyro falls out of control at 500 seconds and the torpedo runs at 1000 seconds that is 500 seconds where a badly designed tail control will allow angular momentum of the torpedoes radial engine to drift it off the ideal intersect path as computed in the Japanese torpedo data computer which incidentally was a piece of bad engineering in itself as the peoplw who designed that fault prone gadget failed to make the gearing match the SPEED of the new torpedoes. Which is to say, if your torpedo runs 25,000 meters and your drift error is 300 meters at 10,000 meters runout or 4X drift error of what your American enemy's Mark 15 is at the same run time at 10,000 meters, well you missed at the same range that he hit you. 

Add to that problem that the Japanese were the most undisciplined snap shoot single ship indidualists who believed in their own propaganda. In addition, for all their range test shots in the 1930s they did not test for two real things when they exhaustively proofed their fish:
a. drift error.
b. sensitivity of that same contact pistol to ship's wakes.  Americans learned about that one real quickly and sped up and crossed their own wakes in turns. That is what saved USS Washington from those 40 torpedoes launched in her general direction at Second Guadalcanal. They prematured on her crossed wake.  

The result for the Americans fortunately was the most inaccurate torpedoes ever made used by the most incompetent naval gunslingers (Except for Tanaka, Raizo, who knew about those drift defects and volley fired accordingly in massed division disciplined line of bearing attacks to neutralize for drift. He was the Tokyo Express. So naturally the IJN fired him and beached him ashore at Singapore. American luck is incredible is it not?  M.), in WWII. 
 
======================================================

Italy

The Italians were conservative. They were of the Keep it Simple Susan and if it worked do not change it school. They had two series or rather manufactories of torpedo series. The original one was Fiume which they acquired from Austria by WWI conquest, and the other was Naples (Silafurico) which came into existence about 1920 or thereabouts. These lines were of the Whitehead/ Brotherhood engine WWI design l updated to wet-heater configuration in the 1935 Regia Marina program.   Of the two lines, the Americans thought the Sllafurico line was the better made and more reliable. The difference in quality was insignificant though. If in range and proper lead computed, both sets of fish sank you as the British discovered. The reason their deadliness is not better known was that the Italians had about 40 months to play with the British. The British have a tradition among their historians to make it all about Germany with maybe a side mention of Japan and neglect to cover those 40 naval months when they failed against the Italians.    

The Italian fish were probably the second best torpedoes in the world as to run mechanics next to the Japanese, and certainly as accurate as the British fish. How good were they? The Germans mostly copied the back ends and control setups of the Italian 1935 fish for their own use and used Italian air dropped fish when their own air dropped versions turned out to be garbage.    

[miletus12]

Lessons from the Early Imperial Japanese Navy By Midshipman Fourth Class Jack Montgomery, U.S. Navy

Lessons from the Early Imperial Japanese Navy
By Midshipman Fourth Class Jack Montgomery, U.S. Navy
February 2021 Proceedings Vol. 147/2/1,416

Over the past few years, the U.S. Navy has experienced personnel training problems, ship design fiascos, and fleet operating concepts that failed to materialize. As it grapples with these issues, as well as a rising competitor in the Pacific, the Navy can look to the example of the early Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and its emergence as one of the most respected navies of the early 20th century.

The IJN was born into a period of chaos during the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Pushed to the sidelines by the army, the leaders of the IJN had to figure out how to build a fleet without the traditions, technical knowledge, and operational experience most first- and even second-rate naval powers already exhibited—and how to do this for pennies on the dollar. The IJN’s early admirals realized foreign nations could hold valuable lessons.

At the outset of the 1870s, the IJN had a pitiful collection of ships and crews from the former Tokugawan Shogunate and various clan navies. Few sailors had operating experience, and even fewer knew much about modern fleet tactics, strategy, or maintenance. Knowing they would need a corps of highly competent officers and enlisted personnel, the IJN established a Naval Studies School, and recruits were sought from the more traditional elements of Japanese society, such as samurai families of the powerful clans, usually those with ambition for future government leadership. This failed to produce well-trained officers in any significant number, however, as only two graduates were commissioned from the first class in 1873.1 After this setback, Katsu Kaishū and Kawamura Sumiyoshi—often called the fathers of the Japanese Navy—realized the IJN would need to change its practices.

Japan adopted British training practices for sailors, opened applications to the Naval Studies School to all strata of society, and educated its officers to be experts on the technology they operated.2 Not only did IJN leaders focus on building a strong officer corps, but they also put effort into training first-rate enlisted crews. Both officers and enlisted received intensive, continual training that kept them up to date on advances in naval technology.3 It was around this well-trained body of sailors that the IJN built its fleet, and despite the ever-changing demands, the crews were always able to quickly adapt and help the IJN fulfill its missions through the remainder of the 19th century. This investment in personnel development would yield sailors such as Marshal-Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, who would lead Japan to victory at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

However, a navy cannot be built on personnel alone. The first ships the IJN acquired were a mixture of what little the Japanese clans had constructed or had purchased from foreign powers. The early IJN decided initially to maintain a reliance on foreign construction, also requesting advisors to come to Japan to teach crews how to operate the ships.4 The Japanese Naval Ministry had no intention of remaining dependent on foreign shipbuilding for the long term, however. Soon it secured the appropriate funding from the central government to begin constructing naval shipbuilding facilities. By the late 1880s, these facilities began producing ships.5 In addition, the IJN began customizing its foreign ship orders to better fit its predicted needs.

A prime example is the purchase of the first pair of steel-hulled cruisers, the Naniwa and Takachiho, in 1884. These were cruisers based on the “Elswick” protected cruisers, designed by W. H. White and built by the Armstrong Whitworth shipyards in Great Britain.6 What made this purchase unique compared with previous purchases were naval architect Sasō Sachū’s negotiation terms. Rather than just purchase the Elswick design, Sasō had the British designers modify it to carry a stronger weapons array to better fit Japan’s need for strongly armed, “destroyer leading cruisers” instead of “light cruisers” that escorted battleships.7 As a result, the Naniwa class was for a short time considered the most powerful cruiser in the world.8

These two efforts propelled the Imperial Japanese Navy’s meteoric rise to power in the early 20th century. At the Battle of Yalu River in 1894, where Chinese naval forces outnumbered Japanese forces so significantly that Japan’s government prepared for a Chinese invasion in case of defeat, Japan’s smaller, more maneuverable fleet was able to annihilate the Chinese Beiyang Fleet. The First Sino-Japanese War gave the expertly trained IJN officers and enlisted experience that would further augment their performance at Tsushima, where the IJN soundly defeated the Imperial Russian Navy. One observer commented that Japan’s great victories at sea around the turn of the 20th century were as much the result of the training and morale of the average Japanese seaman as they were from the effectiveness of the IJN’s ships or the caliber of its guns.9 These victories earned Japan the respect due a first-rate navy, and the IJN would dominate the western Pacific until the Second World War.

The IJN’s rise is far from a perfect analogy for today’s U.S. Navy, which is currently considered the most powerful maritime force in the world and without most of the political and budgetary constraints the early IJN faced. The IJN also had a much smaller obligation to maritime defense, whereas the U.S. Navy is tasked with providing maritime security around the world. However, there are lessons that are still applicable today.

After the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and McCain (DDG-56) collided with merchant ships in 2017, the Navy conducted three investigations. Several reasons for the collisions were outlined in those investigations, but one of the systematic failures identified was a lack of training for the surface warfare community. The Navy has taken steps to address this issue; however, some believe it has not gone far enough. For example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office determined the Navy has not appropriately assessed its investments in surface warfare officer training.

Having a skilled officer corps manning the fleet is vital to success in both peace and war. Years after his initial push to focus the Imperial Japanese Navy on perfecting its officers and crew, Katsu Kaishū remarked: “Officers are the heart of a warship.”10 This is as true today as it was then. Realizing how inadequately prepared its surface warfare officers were for high-intensity situations, the Navy should have placed a greater emphasis on improving training after the McCain and Fitzgerald incidents—and still should today. Officers must be leaders, warriors, technologists, and mariners. If the Navy’s officers cannot adequately fill these roles, then the Navy should not be worrying about expanding the fleet size or modernizing technology. When it comes down to the basics of running a navy, having properly trained personnel should be the number one priority.

In today’s environment, naval expansion seems more vital than it has since President Ronald Reagan’s push for a 600-ship Navy in the 1980s. But the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) spent two decades in development, its mission roles and performance expectations constantly changing, its design and construction costs ballooning, and the number of ships in the class falling from 21 to 3. The two littoral combat ship (LCS) classes met a similar fate, as the Navy realized the LCS could not fill the role of frigates. These failures to create viable designs suggests the IJN experience has something to teach here as well.

Much like the Imperial Japanese Navy, the U.S. Navy has, at least for the immediate future, looked to allies to assist in building the fleet of the future. The announcement of the Constellation-class frigate, using a foreign design modified with U.S. systems, has similarities to Japan’s purchase of the Naniwa. Augmenting with proven foreign designs customized to U.S. Navy needs will be necessary to put more missile platforms at sea to contest Chinese expansion in the western Pacific. The Navy should not be afraid to enhance the fleet using the best means available.

History has proven a useful guide for many in the maritime tradition. Its lessons ring true, whether ships are propelled by wind, steam, gas turbines, or nuclear fission. With the rise of the People’s Republic of China as a significant maritime competitor, the U.S. Navy needs to outfit itself appropriately in response. This means creating a better training program that produces surface warfare officers proficient in all duties that will be asked of them as officers in the fleet. It also means using the best means to augment and expand the fleet, even if it comes from foreign sources. Understanding these lessons will assist the Navy in creating the best possible fleet it can field.

J. Charles Schencking, Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922 (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 22.
David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 11–13.
Schencking, Making Waves, 24.
Evans and Peattie, Kaigun, 14.
Schencking, Making Waves, 19.
Hansgeorg Jentschura, Dieter Jung, and Peter Mickel, Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1869–1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977), 95.
Evans and Peattie, Kaigun, 14.
Evans and Peattie, 15.
Evans and Peattie, 11.
Schencking, Making Waves, 21.
Midshipman Fourth Class Jack Montgomery, U.S. Navy

It is an interesting article, but it has sort of misrepresented the actual problems of the present USN by ignoring the past history of the USN and instead looking for the WRONG historical paradigm shift as a model out of our current doldrums. We were and are not susceptible to the IJN development path which led to the Japanese navy's huge in the end navy snuffing errors of WWII judgement for their organization. The arroganr foolish expletive deleted admirals who plunged their nation into that huge naval error in judgment lacked strategic depth of vision and thought mere tactics would substitute for operational art shortcomings and lack of naval vision. 

The 1920s USN as already has been remarked had a different set of problems which our foolish midshipman above has not been educated about. The Honda Point disaster, much like the Apia Typhoon and the Halsey Typhoons were and are more serious disasters in their historical contexts than the USS Fitzgerald or the serious recent incident in the South China sea with the USS Connecticut. Such incidents, once investigated as to cause and circumstance, reveal a different problem. The USN is out there using its ships hard, getting ships and crews hurt, doing what it is supposed to do, operating in the real environment, making the inevitable mistakes humans make when operatinmg upon the world ocean. That it makes these mistakes was and IS a good thing, so long as the lessons were and are repeatedly learned. You have to keep charts up to date. You have to improve close quarters ship handling and station keeping. It is when you lose ships at pierside, doing NOTHING... that is when you needed to kick in the reforms and the courts martial.  

That was the problem the IJN had as it lost ships in port and to typhoons at sea, doing NOTHING. Our young midshipman does not know the history of and about the badly-designed and badly-built warships of the IJN, which blew up, or which burned down and were lost because the idiots who built them had no clue how to calculate flexion, or weight over length, or how to lay ships out for function after inevitable engineering casualties or battle damage. As awful as the LCS series of vessels have been, they have ridden out typhoons in the modern age. As bad as the flatiron Amphitrites were in the 1890s, not one of them was lost in a Pacific typhioon. 
             
If you wanted a role model for the 1920s USN or for the modern USN to emulate, do not look to Japan of the 1890s to 1920s. Those people lucked into great power status and a great reputation, by piggybacking off the French and the British traditions, tech and trainmg. Using that the IJN trounced a pair of politically corrupted  knucklehead navies that posed no real challenge. Look to the 1890s American navy, which had to claw itself up from nothing and take on a rather underrated Spanish navy long before the Amerrican naval officers thought they were ready to fight anybody.

The Americans began with a British starter set of badly designed export monkey ships, then graduated into their home grown technology, based on their own experience and their own naval traditions. They borrowed bits and pieces from the two known supposed best ship builders and users, the British and the French, as the protected cruiser Baltimore and the armored cruiser New York attested in planform, but the building and manning was all American. 

The Americans emphasized in those days, several things which the Europeans were sloppy about: training, shiphandling, damage control, and technological innovation. The USN had mixed results. The Maine blew up when her automatic sprinkler system was turned off and the coal bunker fire set off a coal dust explosion, USS Brooklyn almost hit USS Texas in a mid battle collision, and an idiot admiral (Sampson), put half of the USN into the repair yards post war because he wrecked engineering plants by overtaxing ships or pulled a Beatty with sloppy battle instructions (USS Masschusetts turret fire, due to sloppy ammunition handling.) as well as general ship mishandling. Yet for those flubs, the USN pulled together to ad hoc (Schley after Sampson deserted in the face of the enemy. M.), brawl the Spaniards to ruin at Bahia de Santiago, exhibited good damage control, (The USS Massachusetts did not blow up like the MNS Liberte or the British battleships usually did.), and the American admirals did know how to op-art and war-plan, even if their tactical skills left a lot to be desired. 

So if we in this fictional timeline want to FIX the real timeline 1920s American navy, we should take our lessons from the fleet that had the best gunnery, the best training regime and the best ship handling of the year 1898 on Earth, and emulate THAT model, not the Japanese delusionary one.             
    

[miletus12]

The Influence of Thinkers and Ideas on History: The Case of Alfred Thayer Mahan



Alfred Thayer Mahan

Alfred Thayer Mahan stands out as one of the foremost thinkers on naval warfare and maritime strategy. Indeed, he might be considered the thinker on sea power, the essential starting point for studying the course and conduct of war at sea and for understanding the strategic importance of the maritime commons in determining the rise and fall of great powers. Respected as a scholar in his own times—he was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1902—Mahan is now best remembered as a naval historian, his reputation resting primarily on his famous books on The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.[1] These histories examine the role played by navies in determining the outcome of wars fought by the European great powers during the period between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and remain valuable for their insight into sea power and strategy.

While made famous by the publication of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, Mahan was also a close student of international relations and policy analyst of strategic affairs. Indeed, he sought to apply the study of history to understand foreign policy and strategy problems of his own day. He served as a celebrated and prolific policy commentator for almost a quarter of a century. His views on strategy and international relations were highly sought after by news outlets, the public, and policy makers. None other than Franklin D. Roosevelt, to cite just one example, solicited Mahan to publish commentary on strategy and international affairs. Mahan’s words carried such weight that, after the outbreak of the First World War in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson issued a notorious gag order, meant to silence him because his candid remarks in support of Great Britain in the struggle against Germany contradicted the administration’s views on American neutrality. Wilson wanted Americans, including retired officers of the armed services, “to be neutral in thought as well as deed.”

Mahan’s thought belongs squarely within the power politics tradition in the field of international relations. This tradition traces its lineage back to Thucydides and includes such prominent thinkers as Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. Mahan was certainly a close reader of Thucydides and examined the strategies pursued by the great powers of the Ancient Greek world.[2] Many of his tenets about world politics and strategy are mainstays of contemporary international relations theory. From his study of history, Mahan concluded that war and change in world politics was rooted in competitions among the great powers, which struggled for security, wellbeing, and leadership. He contended that the great commercial seafaring states in particular would play a leading role in world politics because of the wealth they generated from international trade. During the period examined by Mahan in his histories of sea power, the warring states of Europe — Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England — had struggled with one another for leadership of the international system.

Mahan’s study of history also made him dubious of the ability of states to promote cooperation by the means of international law or the organization and political activity of peace societies. Arbitration agreements among states and the establishment of norms for conduct in the international arena were likely to work only so long as the issues at stake were limited in importance. Once a great power’s vital interests were threatened, however, international agreements to promote cooperation would give way to armed force in the search for security. Nor did Mahan think that this Darwinian state of nature in the intensely competitive strategic environment was likely to change in the near future, despite the claims of liberal internationalists. His scathing comments on Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion show how far Mahan was from the view that great power rivalries were atavistic and suicidal. Mahan argued that the “entire conception of the work [by Angell] is itself an illusion based on a profound misreading of human action.”[3] Mahan thought that the threat or reality of war could never be banished from international relations. In Mahan’s view, the best way to prevent war was for a country to be so well armed that potential adversaries would be deterred from risking a conflict.[4]

In Mahan’s day, Britain was viewed as the leading world power. Britain’s leadership of the international system rested on its strength as a trading state, financial power, vast colonial holdings, and manufactures. Britain’s naval might protected this global system. Britain’s leadership position, however, was threatened by other great powers aspiring to change the system. Mahan considered the decline of British power in the face of challenges from other great powers as the cardinal feature of the international system in the early twentieth century. He was concerned with Britain’s ability to hold its position in world affairs against rising great-power challengers. Mahan was not alone among leading Americans who viewed British power as waning. The historian and public commentator Brooks Adams wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge: “England is sad — to me very sad. Like you I hope she may revive, but I admit my hope is faint. The current is flowing away from her.”[5] American security was wrapped up in this underlying dynamic in the international system of waning British power.

One challenger to Britain that concerned Mahan was Imperial Russia. It was an axiom of world politics at the turn of the twentieth century that the imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia throughout Asia and the Middle East — the so-called “Great Game” — must sooner or later result in a diplomatic showdown and perhaps even war. Britain and Russia had already fought one another in a major conflict, the Crimean War, at the middle of the nineteenth century. Other crises in the Great Game over the next fifty years also threatened to erupt in war.

A corollary to this axiom held that Britain would not be able to contain Russia’s expansion in Asia without the support of major allies. In the United States, such prominent national leaders and commentators on world affairs as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Brooks Adams subscribed to this axiom and its corollary. Mahan belonged to this group who envisioned a showdown between Britain the sea power and Russia the continental state. They feared that an expansionist Russia would take control of an enfeebled China, and Britain would have difficulty stopping this Russian advance on the Eurasian land mass. Before Halford Mackinder wrote his famous article on the geographical pivot, Americans were alive to the looming clash of land and sea empires. This group wanted the United States to take a more active role in world politics in support of Britain’s position. In his 1900 book America’s Economic Supremacy, Brooks Adams declared “America must more or less completely assume the place once held by England, for the United States could hardly contemplate with equanimity the successful organization of a hostile industrial system on the shore of the Pacific, based on Chinese labor.”[6] Mahan argued that the United States should not only align itself with Britain, but with Germany and Japan as well, to contain Russia on the arc of Eurasia, stretching from Europe, through the Middle East, to China and Northeast Asia. This bloc of “sea powers” should act to prevent Russia from gaining “preponderant political control” of China.[7]

To check Russian power in Asia, Britain did take the extraordinary step of breaking out of its “splendid isolation” and concluding a formal alliance with Japan in 1902. This alliance, in turn, emboldened Japan to take on Russia, resulting in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. With British backing, Japan inflicted a stunning defeat on Russia. The United States, while on the sidelines during the fighting, played a prominent part in ending the war. President Theodore Roosevelt brokered an end to the fighting by hosting negotiations between Japan and Russia. In recognition of his role, Roosevelt would receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

For Mahan, the war between Japan and Russia held important lessons for the United States. He would write extensively about the war, and he wanted to stress the important role played by naval power in determining its outcome. Mahan argued that Russian leaders committed strategic folly in misusing the naval power at their disposal. If Russian leaders had concentrated their navy, massing its naval forces rather than scattering them, or showed more offensive zeal in the war at sea, then Russia would have defeated Japan. Russia’s strategic error in not concentrating its naval forces was the principal lesson that Mahan wanted Americans to learn.

Russia’s defeat, however, did not mean an end to Britain’s travails. In place of the Russian danger, Germany’s rise as a great naval power, along with Japan’s success over Russia, heightened Mahan’s concern about the balance of power in Europe and Asia. Mahan thought that a global rivalry involving the great powers in a quest for commercial and naval supremacy would characterize world politics in the twentieth century. These struggles for world power and naval mastery were viewed by Mahan as a twentieth-century replay of the wars that he had described in his volumes on The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. These coming struggles were likely to produce dramatic shifts in the power balances among the great powers. These shifts, in Mahan’s estimation, would have an impact on the security of the United States.

Germany’s rising power and ambitions, in particular, troubled Mahan. By 1908, he identified Germany as the most serious challenger to Britain. “The rivalry between Germany and Great Britain today,” Mahan told his readers, “is the danger point, not only of European politics, but of world politics as well . . . No such emphasized industrial and maritime competition between two communities has arisen since the time of Cromwell and the later Stewart kings, when England wrested from Holland her long possessed commercial supremacy, supported by a navy until then unconquered.”[8] Mahan’s study of history, his attempt to apply what he learned from historical cases to understand the kaleidoscopic international strategic environment of the early twentieth century, led him to warn of impending great power clashes. In assessing change in the international environment, Mahan took note of Germany’s rapidly rising population and industrial production. To Mahan, Germany’s dramatic demographic and industrial growth meant that it would demand overseas territories as an outlet for its growing population and as markets for its products. Mahan saw a close connection between Germany’s industrial growth, rising naval strength, and drive for world power. As Mahan put it, there is “an inevitable link in the chain of logical sequence: Industry, markets, control [of overseas territories], navy, bases.”[9]

Was this link inevitable, was a clash between Britain and Germany foreordained, as Mahan maintained? Or, was the contest contingent on the choices made by the leaders of the great powers? It would seem clear that a clash between Europe’s strongest powers was not inevitable. To be sure, the growing German economy enabled Germany to challenge Britain at sea. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the leader of the industrial revolution, Britain became the workshop of the world. As other countries industrialized, however, they challenged Britain’s leading position in world manufactures. The passing of the era when Britain was the world’s leading industrial power also pointed to a waning of its leadership as a naval power. On this connection between industrial and naval power, the historian Avner Offer writes: “In a world of many workshops, it became difficult [for Britain] to keep ahead in armored warships.”[10] But what made the contest inevitable was the conscious choice by Germany’s rulers to harness the economic power at their disposal to contest Britain’s dominance in the maritime domain.[11] Within Germany, a new generation of leaders wanted their country to take a larger role in world affairs. The champion of Germany’s development as a sea power was Kaiser Wilhelm II, a disciple of Mahan. “I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book, and am trying to learn it by heart,” Wilhelm proclaimed. “It is a first-class work and classical in all points.” An American journalist in Berlin observed: “I have heard several times of the Emperor’s references to Captain Mahan’s doctrines. The Emperor is familiar with all that Mahan has written.”[12]

The Kaiser sought to educate the German people into Mahan’s message. Where the Kaiser led, the German government and people followed. The eminent historian Friedrich Meinecke paid tribute to Wilhelm as the Flottenkaiser. The Kaiser, Meinecke intoned, “ceaselessly converted the nation and enticed it out onto the water . . . [and] he has the satisfaction of knowing that his conviction has become the conviction of the nation.”[13] To build the fleet, the Kaiser turned to Admiral Alfred Tirpitz, naming him navy secretary in 1897. Tirpitz wrote in his memoirs: “There was no way to the position of world-power than by building a fleet.”[14] By advocating the buildup of the navy, by stoking German nationalism and anti-British public opinion, by channeling popular passions toward the acquisition of naval weaponry to fight Britain at sea, Kaiser Wilhelm unintentionally contributed to his own downfall and Germany’s defeat in the Great War. By building a fleet against Britain, Germany raised British fears of a German super-state seeking European hegemony. One historian even argues: “Germany’s naval armament under Wilhelm II was a fundamental cause of the Anglo-German war.”[15] The choices in grand strategy made by Germany’s rulers — their decision to challenge Britain at sea — was conditioned in part by their reading of Mahan. The application by German leaders of Mahan’s writings on naval history and international relations was working to influence the unfolding of history in a destructive way.

Receiving praise from the Kaiser provided no comfort for Mahan. Indeed, that his German followers were building up a navy to challenge Britain greatly alarmed him. Germany’s stated program of naval construction, along with its decision to follow the lead of Britain in building “all-big-gun” or dreadnought battleships, triggered in Mahan a response to warn about the danger posed by German actions in upsetting the international equilibrium. He pointed out: “The huge development of the German Navy within the past decade, and the assurance that the present rate of expenditure — over 20,000,000 annually — will be maintained for several years to come, is a matter of great international importance.”[16] In this rivalry, Mahan was not an impartial observer: he took Britain’s side in the emerging competition and eventual showdown in the Anglo-German struggle for naval mastery.

The famous 1909 “naval panic” in Britain heightened Mahan’s concern about Germany’s foreign policy aims. Prompted by the naval panic in Britain, he tried to alert American readers to the political significance of the growing German battle fleet. For Collier’s Weekly, he wrote an article entitled “Germany’s Naval Ambition: Some Reasons Why the United States Should Wake Up to the Facts About the Kaiser’s Battleship-Building Program — Great Britain’s Danger Exaggerated, But Not Her Fright.” He reminded his readers of the German involvement in Venezuela in 1902 — “a condition almost sure to arise” again — and warned that Germany would “have the whip hand” in a future crisis if it possessed “a decisively superior navy.” He asked whether the Monroe Doctrine should be “dependent upon the uncertain indulgence of a foreign state, which is notoriously thirsting for colonization in the supposed interest of racial development?” Only by building “a navy adequate to prevent such humiliation” could the United States be prepared for the crisis to come. In the years between 1909 and his death on 1 December 1914, one of Mahan’s biographers calls him “a journalistic Paul Revere” alerting his English-speaking audience “to the fact that the Germans were coming.”[17]

Mahan also believed that Germany’s ambitions would almost inevitably lead to a contest with the United States. He wanted the United States to prepare for that looming clash. Of great concern to Mahan was that Americans would not realize the danger from Germany and fail to build a sufficient number of modern battleships to match the German naval program. Mahan lamented in 1909:

The German Navy will in 1912 — in three years — have a stronger battle fleet in A[ll]-B[ig]-G[un] ships than we. What then shall we say, upon what shall we rely, if she, on occasion arising, defy us in the Monroe Doctrine? How do we propose to keep that national idol on its feet without a superior navy?[18]

The U.S. Navy’s General Board shared Mahan’s anxiety about Germany rapidly outstripping the United States in naval strength. The President of the General Board, Admiral George Dewey, the celebrated hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, famously predicted that the next war fought by the United States would be against Germany. The General Board argued that the United States needed to maintain a condition of rough parity with Germany’s battle fleet. But no political consensus existed in the United States to meet this standard of keeping pace with Germany in the building of capital ships. Given German naval ambitions, the cost of achieving this goal was going to be substantial and, as it turned out, more than what the American public was willing to afford — that is, until the United States entered into the war against Germany, as foretold by Dewey and Mahan.

Mahan also advocated that the existing American force of battleships be massed on the east coast of the United States, where it could be more readily assembled to defeat a German move to seize territory in the Western Hemisphere.[19] The Navy’s General Board agreed that Germany represented a “more formidable” enemy than other threats to American security, even greater than that posed by Japan in the Pacific. Concentration against the German battle fleet constituted the strategic fulcrum of United States naval planning.[20] Whenever asked for his views, Mahan never wavered in his conviction that Germany posed a grave danger. Since he feared that a fickle and ignorant public might pressure an administration into dividing the fleet, Mahan made repeated efforts to publicize his views on strategy. One of Mahan’s avid readers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rising young politician and assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Woodrow Wilson administration, also thought it important to educate the public about naval strategy and geography. In the spring of 1914, Roosevelt wrote Mahan to enlist his support in writing “an article or articles” because his “voice will carry more conviction than that of anybody else.” Roosevelt thought the “people can be educated, but only if we all get together ahead of time and try to show the average ‘man in the street’ the military necessity of keeping the Fleet intact.”[21]

Concentration of naval force was a strategic necessity because Mahan feared that a collapse of British power would usher in an era in which Germany was the leading world power. Unlike Britain, a satiated power, Germany was in Mahan’s assessment aggressive, expansionist, seeking new colonies. The growth of German power might result in a challenge to the United States’ position in the Western Hemisphere. Britain and the United States had a common interest in working to preserve the existing international order from which both benefited during the nineteenth century. Mahan argued that the United States was better off strengthening Britain’s strategic position rather than in undermining it. By aligning itself with Britain, the United States would be in a stronger position to contain German expansion. Faced by an Anglo-American strategic alignment, Germany might be deterred from foreign policy adventures. Theodore Roosevelt agreed that the United States needed to play a larger role in upholding the international system against any German attempt to overthrow it. Roosevelt bluntly told one German diplomat: “As long as England succeeds in keeping ‘the balance of power’ in Europe, not only in principle, but in reality, well and good; should she however for some reason or other fail in doing so, the United States would be obliged to step in at least temporarily, in order to restore the balance of power in Europe, never mind against which country or group of countries our efforts may have to be directed.”[22]

American public opinion, however, made a formal alliance between Britain and the United States outside the bounds of practical politics. Still, Mahan urged what amounted to a foreign policy of tacit cooperation with Britain. This strategic alignment entailed that the United States build a powerful navy, while at the same time eschewing any policy of provoking a naval competition with Britain. Mahan wanted to impress upon American readers the seriousness of the threat posed by the German battle fleet for the security of the United States. He warned that the growth of the German battle fleet was rapidly overturning Britain’s naval supremacy. In 1910, in The Interest of America in International Conditions, Mahan told his fellow countrymen that they could not remain unconcerned to this German challenge to Britain because it might prove successful. Americans must ask themselves “whether they can afford, to exchange the naval supremacy of Great Britain for that of Germany; for this alternative may arise.” Mahan advanced the lurid scenario that, once the European balance was overturned, “a German navy, supreme by the fall of Great Britain, with a supreme German army able to spare readily a large expeditionary force for over-sea operations, is one of the possibilities of the future.”[23]

In Naval Strategy, published in 1911, Mahan drew attention to the importance of the decline of British power for the United States. “The power to control Germany does not exist in Europe,” he wrote, “except in the British Navy; and if social and political conditions in Great Britain develop as they now promise, the British Navy will probably decline in relative strength, so that it will not venture to withstand the German on any broad lines of policy, but only in the narrowest sense of immediate British interests . . . for it seems as if the national life of Great Britain were waning at the same time that of Germany is waxing.” Mahan argued “it is this line of reasoning which shows the power of the German Navy to be a matter of prime importance to the United States.”[24]

For Mahan, then, it was essential that Britain and the United States attempt to defeat Germany’s naval challenge. But Mahan was not sanguine that either Britain or the United States — despite his estimation that they possessed superior economic resources — would be able to keep ahead of Germany in this naval rivalry. Mahan was concerned that governments representative of the people might not pursue a long-term strategy to beat back Germany’s challenge. Despite their superior resources, Britain and the United States appeared incapable of harnessing them. Germany’s government, in Mahan’s estimation, appeared better able to mobilize the resources of the country to support its foreign policy aims. “The two English-speaking countries,” Mahan wrote, “have wealth vastly superior, each separately, to that of Germany; much more if acting together. But in neither is the efficiency of the Government for handling the resources comparable to that of Germany.” Mahan argued that “the habits of individual liberty in England or America [do not] accept, unless under duress, the heavy yoke of organization, of regulation of individual action, which constitutes the power of Germany among modern states.”[25] Mahan, then, questioned whether democratic governments would be able to make and carry out a long-term strategic plan.[26]

When war engulfed Europe in the summer of 1914, Mahan worried that this prediction might soon come about if Germany quickly defeated her enemies. He told interviewers from The New York Evening Post:

"If Germany succeeds in downing both France and Russia, she gains a respite by land, which may enable her to build up her sea power equal, or superior to that of Great Britain. In that case the world will be confronted by the naval power of a state, not, like Great Britain, sated with territory, but one eager and ambitious for expansion, eager also for influence. This consideration may well affect American sympathies."

To one of his English correspondents, Mahan expressed the fear “that if Germany wins by a big margin she is likely to be nasty to us [in the United States].” Thus, Mahan’s sympathies were squarely for Britain in the Great War at the time of his death. Moreover, he deeply resented the gag order imposed by the Woodrow Wilson administration that prevented him from arguing the case for containing German power.[27] On the outbreak of war, Mahan urged Franklin D. Roosevelt “that the fleet should be brought into immediate readiness, and so disposed as to permit of very rapid concentration.”[28] Mahan’s correspondence with Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the last services that he would give to his country and navy. In failing health, he would pass away only four months after the outbreak of fighting in Europe. He would not live to see how well his views on sea power, strategy, and international relations would play out during the war. Mahan would no doubt have viewed the Great War’s outcome — that Britain the sea power, supported by the naval and military might of the United States, defeated the challenge from Germany the continental state — as a vindication of his theories on history, strategy, and international politics.

Mahan made an important contribution to public policy debates by helping to inform and educate Americans about the international strategic environment. He attempted to highlight the importance of the international balance of power for the security of the United States and how emerging geopolitical threats to Britain’s world position also posed a danger to American security. Theodore Roosevelt had reached the same conclusion: “we ourselves [the United States] are becoming, owing to our strength and geographical situation, more and more the balance of power of the whole world.”[29] Mahan argued that the United States needed to play a role — an increasingly important role — in upholding the balance of power on a global scale. Mahan was warning his American readers that “the age of free security” — to use C. Vann Woodward’s apt phrase — was passing away.[30] The security of the United States could no longer depend, as it largely did during the nineteenth century, on latent military power buttressed by the natural moat formed by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the icebound wastes of the Arctic. Instead, the United States was moving from an era of inexpensive security to expensive insecurity — from the “age of free security” to the age of “the national security state.”

So what can studying Mahan and turn of the twentieth century America’s strategic predicament offer for understanding the place of the United States today in the international arena? What value do Mahan’s writings on American grand strategy and the international balance of power have for understanding the unfolding history of the twenty-first century? What dangers would Mahan forecast in surveying the international strategic environment?

Mahan, if writing today, would certainly take note and warn about the shifting global balance of power. Our current age is witnessing what the policy commentator Fareed Zakaria describes as “the rise of the rest.” In Zakaria’s view, “the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.” This transformation of power balances augurs a “post-American world.”[31] These underlying changes in the international system identified by Zakaria resemble Britain’s declining power position at the beginning of the twentieth century, about which Mahan wrote. In particular, China’s growing economy has increased that country’s power on the international stage. What Brooks Adams wrote in 1900 seems even more relevant in our time than his own — namely, that on “the fate of China may, perhaps, hinge the economic supremacy of the next century.”[32]

What makes China’s rising power appear so ominous is that its rulers’ foreign policy ambitions and increasing military might presage a violent replay of past struggles for security and mastery, as occurred before the First World War. The columnist George Will sees the parallel: “At the start of the turn of the 20th century, the world’s most formidable challenge was to integrate into the international system a rising, restless, assertive Germany. This did not go well. Early in the 21st century, China poses a comparable challenge. If this does not go well, the differences might be arbitrated by weapons undreamt of a century ago.”[33] China’s leaders, to be sure, have called for “a new type of great-power relationship.” But the steady buildup of the Chinese armed forces and blustering foreign policy actions hardly seems new at all. Today’s Asia seems poised to fall into what Graham Allison has labeled the Thucydides trap, where rising great powers take on the international system’s leading power.[34] The clashing foreign policy ambitions and naval buildups taking place in Asia thus would seem to follow the iron logic of inexorable great-power competition that Mahan examined in his writings.

Mahan would recognize these dangerous undercurrents in the international security environment. Robert Kaplan writes: “Tellingly . . . the Chinese avidly read [Mahan]; the Chinese are the Mahanians now.”[35] Chinese strategists draw from Mahan and the American experience a blueprint for how a rising power can build up anti-access, area-denial capabilities to fight in the interlocked aerospace, information, and maritime domains on their way to asserting regional dominance and global leadership. President Xi Jinping certainly sounds like he is as much a committed disciple of Mahan’s school of sea power. In an internal speech to the Central Military Commission, Xi made clear the connection between sea power and national greatness:

"In the 21st century, mankind has entered the age of the large-scale exploitation of the sea. . . . History and experience tell us that a country will rise if it commands the oceans well and will fall if it surrenders them. A powerful state possesses durable sea rights, and a weak state has vulnerable sea rights. . . . We must adhere to a development path of becoming a rich and powerful state by making use of the sea."

Xi calls for “accelerating construction of a modernized navy, enhancing the capability to ensure our maritime rights, and resolutely acting to guard those maritime rights and interests.”[36] Meanwhile, Chinese naval leaders want to possess a high sea fleet of five carrier battle groups, as well as the forces to carry out an anti-access, area-denial strategy. Sounds like pure Mahan. Economic development and increased naval armaments go hand-in-hand to rising challengers who harbor grand ambitions to act on the world stage. China’s strategy resembles that of Kaiser Wilhelm and Tirpitz in building up their armed might as a precondition for furthering their geopolitical ambitions on the world stage. The slogan “China Dream” — like the German demand to attain the status of world power, a place in the sun — might appear vague but it nonetheless stands for real aspirations to achieve greater international standing and security, to dictate change in global affairs.[37]

That Beijing is flaunting its flouting of the recent Hague ruling is another indication of Mahan’s cautionary views on the limits of international law and liberal norms when a powerful country seeks to impose its will on the weak. In the famous Melian Dialogue, Thucydides called attention to this stern dictum of international relations that great powers act differently toward weaker states than they do toward their peers. China’s actions would not at all surprise Mahan, who would undoubtedly caution readers that to think otherwise is to indulge in an “illusion” about the behavior of great powers in international disputes. China wants weapons to command respect from other great powers and to intimidate countries — big or small — that stand in the way of Beijing’s ambitions.

In Mahan’s own troubled times, he called for the United States to play a larger role in world affairs. He feared that, if the United States abdicated its responsibility to uphold international order, rising imperial powers would move aggressively to exploit Britain’s deteriorating strategic position. To Mahan, there was no elegant way for a superpower to decline. A great power unable to defend itself would be picked apart by rivals, eager to expand and emerge as the new hegemon. The two world wars and the decline and fall of the British Empire provide a hideous validation of this theory about the workings of the international system. By pivoting against rising aggressors, by building up American naval power, by forming coalitions with other countries invested in upholding and benefiting from the existing international order, the United States could have contributed to avoiding these horrors and helped to preserve the peace. Alas, American domestic politics prevented the United States from playing the role envisioned by Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt. The American people preferred to act out a different foreign policy script of reducing armaments to a low level and avoiding making security commitments that risked international entanglements. American power would come into play only after aggressor states had initiated fighting, with the United States intervening to win the world wars rather than prevent them. American leaders took this grim experience to heart. After the Second World War, the United States brought its power to bear to prevent a recurrence of great-power wars. These policy and strategy prescriptions offered up by Mahan more than a hundred years ago thus have enduring value for American decision makers in the twenty-first century. The renewal of American power and its exercise on the world stage remains the best guarantee of a lasting peace.[38]

[1] See, for example, Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Peter Paret, editor, Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 444-477.
[2] Captain A.T. Mahan, Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted With the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911), 222-230.
[3] See Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1977), 586-591. Hereafter cited as Seager, Mahan.
[4] See Mahan’s short article “Why Not Disarm?” in Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), volume 3, 685-687. Hereafter cited as Seager and Maguire, Mahan Papers.
[5] Brooks Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, 14 October 1900, Lodge MSS., quoted in Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (New York: Collier Books, 1962 edition), 450.
[6] Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 197-198.
[7] See A.T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effect upon International Policies (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, 1970 edition), passim. This book first appeared in 1900. On Roosevelt’s views that the United States might be drawn into a war with Russia, see Beale, Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, pp. 263-4; and, Seward W. Livermore, “The American Navy as a Factor in World Politics, 1903-1913,” The American Historical Review, volume 63 (July 1958), 877.
[8] A.T. Mahan, The Interest of America in International Conditions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918 edition), 163-164. This book first appeared in 1910.
[9] Mahan, Interest of America in International Conditions, 87.
[10] Avner Offer, First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, paperback edition, 1991), 220.
[11] The relationship between economic power and naval strength is well told by Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Ashfield Press, paperback edition, 1983).
[12] Elmer Roberts to Stephen B. Luce, May 13, 1910, Luce Papers, Naval War College Archives.
[13] Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 191.
[14] Alfred von Tirpitz, My Memoirs (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1919), vol. 1, 230.
[15] Offer, First World War, 324.
[16] Admiral A.T. Mahan, “Britain and the German Navy,” The Daily Mail, July 4, 1910.
[17] Captain A.T. Mahan, “Germany’s Naval Ambitions: Some Reasons Why the United States Should Wake Up to the Facts About the Kaiser’s Battleship-Building Program — Great Britain’s Danger Exaggerated, But Not Her Fright,” Collier’s Weekly, volume 43 (April 24, 1909), pp. 12-13; Seager, Mahan, p. 468. On the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-3, see Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise to World Power, pp. 357-358; and Seward W. Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt, the American Navy, and the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-1903,” The American Historical Review, volume 51 (April 1946), 452-471.
[18] Mahan to Charles W. Stewart, March 19, 1909, Seager and Maguire, Mahan Papers, volume 3, 290- 2.
[19] John H. Maurer, “American Naval Concentration and the German Battle Fleet, 1900-1918,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (June 1983), 147-181.
[20] Dewey to the Secretary of the Navy, November 17, 1910, and Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer’s endorsement, November 17, 1910, General Board Papers, File 420-1.
[21] Franklin D. Roosevelt to Mahan, May 28, 1914, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Collection, Box 137, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
[22] Beale, Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 447.
[23] Mahan, Interest of America in International Conditions, 161-162.
[24] Captain A.T. Mahan, Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted With the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911), 110.
[25] Mahan, Naval Strategy, p. 109; and Mahan, Interest of America in International Conditions, p. 163. The seemingly chaotic German decision making structure in this era might undermine Mahan’s contention that Germany possessed these attributes of governmental efficiency. Still, Tirpitz did put forward a plan for Germany’s naval development and the German government set out to execute it, building a powerful naval force to rival that of Britain over a twenty-year period before the First World War.
[26] On this theme, see Mahan’s “Britain and the German Navy,” in The Daily Mail.
[27] Seager, Mahan, 689, note 31.
[28] Mahan to Roosevelt, August 3, 1914, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Collection, Box 137, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
[29] Beale, Roosevelt and Rise of America to World Power, 447.
[30] C. Vann Woodward, “The Age of Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review, vol. 66, no. 1 (October 1960), 11-19.
[31] Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2011 edition), 2, 4.
[32] Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, 196.
[33] George Will, “A Restless China Flexes Its Muscles, But Americans Are Interested in Other Matters,” accessed at National Review Online, July 16, 2016, accessed at www.nationalreview.com/article/437969/china-south-china-sea-aggression-republicans-nominate-unserious-trump.
[34] Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015, acessed at www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/.
[35] Robert D. Kaplan, “America’s Elegant Decline” The Atlantic, volume 300, no. 4 (November 2007).
[36] John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, “China’s Security Agenda Transcends the South China Sea,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 72, no. 4 (2016), 218.
[37] Liu Mingfu, The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (New York: Beijing Mediatime Books, 2015).
[38] Samuel P. Huntington, “The U.S. — Decline or Renewal,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 67, no. 2 (Winter 1988/89), pp. 76-96.

You will see this reposted in "Thunder and Lightning".

Miletus

[miletus12]

An example of naval incompetence and stupidity>

The Fleet and Anglo-German Relations: Rear Admiral Tirpitz to Admiral von Stosch (February 13, 1896)

Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930) was Admiral of the German navy and chief architect of the massive increase in naval armaments in the years before the First World War. He argued that sea power was the key to becoming a great power. A large navy to match Germany’s new found industrial strength would challenge British dominance. This naval build-up provoked British animosity.

I have received Your Excellency’s kind letter dated the 12th of this month and will hasten to reply. Having just returned to Kiel, I only now have the chance to express to Your Excellency my cordial thanks for the highly instructive and interesting letter of December 25, 1895. My time in Berlin was completely consumed by very urgent and unexpected affairs. I would like to inform Your Excellency in complete confidence and for Your Excellency’s ears alone that I had the opportunity to present Your Excellency’s opinions at the highest level, including Your Excellency’s view on the necessary naval developments. I am hopeful that the matter will be pursued where it was abandoned in 1883. Perhaps I will be able to provide Your Excellency with more details at a later date. As Your Excellency already knows, my appointment as squadron commander to Asia is now uncertain. I am saddened by this, since it was my great desire to go. It would have done my nerves a great deal of good to be relieved of this taxing intellectual activity for a while and to distance myself from Madrid. I must wait and see what fate has in store. As for the Transvaal matter, in contrast to the general public and our political leadership, I believe that we have blundered. England is doing nothing about America’s affront not only because of what it fears might follow but also because America is an unpleasant opponent; and Germany is paying the price since it currently lacks any substantial naval power. At the moment, our policies only build on the army as a genuine foundation, but the army only has a direct impact on our national borders. Beyond these borders it only has an indirect impact through the pressure exerted from here. Our politicians do not understand that in many cases the value of an alliance with Germany, even for the states of Europe, does not rest on our army but on our navy. For instance, if Russia and France oppose England on a matter, the support of our fleet is of little significance. But if England has a Pittite understanding of policy, she will prefer Germany as an enemy over a strictly neutral Germany. As an enemy, we will always be a highly prized object; in the event of our neutrality, we will profit extraordinarily as England’s rival. The English are well aware of this. Up to now, our policies have completely overlooked the political significance of naval power. Yet if we want to go out into the world and increase our economic strength at sea, we will only construct a hollow edifice if we do not obtain a degree of naval strength. If we go out into the world, we will find either existing interests or interests that will be claimed in the future. These make conflicts of interest inevitable. Now that the prestige of 1870 has faded, how can even the cleverest policies accomplish anything without real power that reflects the diversity of interests? Naval power is the only politically versatile type of power there is. This is why we will always end up getting shortchanged politically, even if there is no war. We must bear in mind that England probably no longer believes we will send our army into battle against Russia for her benefit. On the other hand, if Germany is the one paying the price, England can make Russia considerable concessions—in East Asia, for instance. This is the danger that we will face if we get entangled in a conflict involving Russia, France and England. Even if we were to say that we would not wage war over transatlantic interests, the other three states would not come to the same agreement, and we would continue to operate at a political disadvantage. Much more can be said on these matters; I at least wanted to allude to the fact that I did not form my opinion on the current Transvaal question without long rumination. I naturally had the same view after I had read the telegram to President Kruger in the newspaper. To make matters worse, the telegram was not well edited: since England has the right to approve any treaties this state enters into with foreign countries—which we do not contest—we were not able to offer the Transvaal our help.

Still, this incident can do some good. I would even consider a larger disgrace of this sort to be useful to us if it opened the eyes of our misguided parliamentarians. First, the Anglomania in certain circles would definitively stop, and, second, the nation would be roused to build a fleet as outlined in Directive IX [Dienstschrift IX]. In fact, this bill is expected to be introduced in the next budget. The national government and the heads of parliament naturally see no prospect for success. If the navy wholeheartedly demonstrates the military and political value of our current fleet, it will at least be doing its part, and history will be forced to hold other people accountable. So I believe that we should retract our claws and, over the next twelve years, build a modern fleet whose strength will approximate the size discussed in Your Excellency’s 1872 paper.

[As for operations against England, if war breaks out in the near future, let me inform Your Excellency that the Supreme Command has not yet worked through this scenario; the more pressing issue has been the possibility of war against France and Russia. We worked solidly with two competent departmental heads to create a reasonable plan for this contingency. We had nothing at all when I came to Berlin, and we were all astonished at how much ground we were able to cover. We will be able to transfer much, but certainly not all, of this model to other cases; the military approach will require further consideration. For this reason I am only able to discuss my general understanding of this matter, not one that has been entirely thought through. I do not have great hopes for cruiser warfare, even against England. The ships that we have overseas will be quickly cut off, probably captured and destroyed, since England will not respect any political neutrality. We will be able to cause some disquiet with our Lloyd steamships, but not much, since our steamship fleet has not been built with this purpose in mind—though it could have benefited both sides, both Lloyd and the navy. While we lack any ports abroad, the English have ports and coal everywhere, and the world is teeming with English warships of the most modern design. This leaves us with our actual battle fleet, which must be concentrated in the North Sea. As long as it continues to exist, it must cover the Baltic and paralyze English trade there. If England badly underestimates our naval power—if she underestimates our only strength, the torpedo boats—there will be a battle off Heligoland with those English forces that are lying ready in England. It is conceivable that we might repel a poorly executed offensive by the English fleet and profit from the catastrophe breaking out in London—also, Russia might consider it an advantageous opportunity to strike England herself. But we would not be able to withstand a second English offensive.

If England acts correctly, she will attack us with overwhelming superiority, taking Borkum and establishing a foothold there. She will block the North and Baltic Seas, which will simultaneously serve as a show of force against Russia. She will take our colonies, destroy our trade across the world and wreak as much havoc along our coasts as possible. If France does not come to our aid, we will be forced to capitulate. Can we count on this happening? I don’t think so. If England pursues the right military policy, she will have to mobilize her entire home fleet, if only to guard against complications. She will have to mass her forces in the mouth of the Thames with strong surveillance squadrons to counter our attack. English mobilization will proceed slightly more slowly than ours, at least if it is done on a large scale. We would possibly have a few days’ head start and would have to decide whether we should go into the Thames with everything we could muster. We could use to full advantage the many vessels we have for harbor and river warfare. At one go, we could capture a fairly large part of the English mercantile fleet and be in a position to shell parts of London. The question is whether this short time period would be sufficient [?] to achieve success in the form of an agreement that is fair for both sides.

As Your Excellency sees, this would be an act of desperation, yet it is perhaps our only chance. Even in the event of a strategic defense, our only chance lies in biding our time and hoping for allies. We only have a real chance if the French navy joins us along with the Russians. Although I do not doubt for a moment that England will nonetheless emerge victorious, this turn of events would be a very unpleasant complication arising from a small-scale war with Germany.

Your Excellency will easily see from the offensive outlined above that, for a thorough evaluation, we need accurate information on forces and speed of mobilization. In addition, German naval officers need to make a careful study of the Thames to make a more or less reliable [illegible] assessment. Nevertheless, Your Excellency will see how I currently assess power relations and recognize the direction we need to take. When it comes to British military power, our newspapers are as reliable as a deaf man discussing music. Your Excellency is definitely right in saying that English policy is guided by trade interests. The “City” forges English policy, yet this does not change the fact that we must reckon with this circumstance. We currently have many ships that are obsolete or not seaworthy. As soon as we have two to three modern squadrons supported by cruisers, as well as reserve material in this old fleet, the city on the Thames will suddenly see Germany as a nation worthy of respect under all circumstances and in all matters.

It will probably be impossible to bring back the vessels from East Asia. They do not increase our chances against England, and any attempt to retrieve them would make it even more obvious that we have gotten ourselves into an unfavorable situation there. All told, there is a tendency in Berlin to demand a greater presence abroad. I have also spoken in favor of this. But we do not have any vessels for this purpose, and naturally we cannot do without the cruiser squadron in case of a war against France at home.

I beg Your Excellency to excuse the rather long ramblings above, but the matter has greatly preoccupied me].

Source: Rear Admiral Tirpitz to Admiral von Stosch on the political function and significance of naval power in Germany’s relations with England (February 13, 1896) Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Nachlaß Tirpitz N 253/321.

Original German text reprinted in Volker Berghahn and Wilhelm Diest, Rüstung im Zeichen der wilhelminischen Weltpolitik: Grundlegende Dokumente 1890-1914 [Armament within the Context of Wilhelmine Global Politics: Key Documents 1890-1914]. Dusseldorf, 1988, pp. 114-17.

Translation: Adam Blauhut

=================================================================================

That Tirpitz would develop a hatred for the United States and somehow transmit that hatred to infect other German naval officers is ineluctably part and parcel of the "aggrieved party mentality" that seemed to become a general psychosis among these Wilhelmine nitwits. Do you really want to know why^1 the saner German admirals, post WWI, the relatively few of them, dispaired of this attitude that Tirpitz spread about as much as he also spread his lunatic risk fleet theory.?

The Jameson Raid, December 1895

 By Alistair Boddy-Evans

Updated on January 27, 2020

The Jameson Raid was an ineffective attempt to overthrow President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal Republic in December 1895.
  
The Jameson Raid

There are several reasons why the Jameson Raid took place.

Tens of thousands of uitlanders had settled in the Transvaal following the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The influx threatened the political independence of the recently formed republic (negotiated at the 1884 London Convention, three years after the 1st Anglo-Boer War). Transvaal relied on revenue generated by the gold mines, but the government refused to grant the uitlanders the franchise and kept upping the period required to qualify for citizenship.

The Transvaal government was considered to be excessively conservative over economic and industrial policy, and the various non-Afrikaner mining magnates in the region desired a greater political voice.

There was a significant level of distrust between the Cape Colony government and that of the Transvaal republic over Kruger's attempt to claim control of Bechuanaland in contravention of the 1884 London Convention. The region was subsequently declared a British protectorate.

Leander Starr Jameson, who lead the raid, had first arrived in Southern Africa in 1878, lured by the discovery of diamonds near Kimberley. Jameson was a qualified medical doctor, known to his friends (including Cecil Rhodes, one of the founders of the De Beers Mining Company who became premier of Cape Colony in 1890) as Dr. Jim.

In 1889 Cecil Rhodes formed the British South Africa (BSA) Company, which was given a Royal Charter, and with Jameson acting as emissary, sent a 'Pioneer Column' across the Limpopo River into Mashonaland (what is now the northern part of Zimbabwe) and then into Matabeleland (now south-west Zimbabwe and parts of Botswana). Jameson was given the post of administrator for both regions.

In 1895 Jameson was commissioned by Rhodes (now prime minister of Cape Colony) to lead a small mounted force (around 600 men) into the Transvaal to support an expected uitlander uprising in Johannesburg. They departed from Pitsani, on the Bechuanaland (now Botswana) border on 29 December. 400 Men came from the Matabeleland Mounted Police, the rest were volunteers. They had six Maxim guns and three light artillery pieces.

The uitlander uprising failed to materialize. Jameson's force made the first contact with a small contingent of Transvaal soldiers on 1 January, who had blocked the road to Johannesburg. Withdrawing during the night, Jameson's men tried to outflank the Boers but were finally forced to surrender on 2 January 1896 at Doornkop, approximately 20km west of Johannesburg.

Jameson and various uitlander leaders were handed over to British authorities in the Cape and sent back to the UK for trial in London. Initially, they were convicted of treason and sentenced to death for their part in the plan, but the sentences were commuted to heavy fines and token prison stays - Jameson served only four months of a 15-month sentence. The British South Africa Company was required to pay nearly £1 million in compensation to the Transvaal government.

President Kruger gained much international sympathy (the Transvaal's David versus the Goliath of the British Empire) and bolstered his political standing at home (he won the 1896 presidential election against a strong rival Piet Joubert) because of the raid. Cecil Rhodes was forced to retire as prime minister of the Cape Colony, and never truly regained his prominence, although he negotiated a peace with various Matabele indunas in his fiefdom of Rhodesia.

Leander Starr Jameson returned to South Africa in 1900, and after the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902 took over leadership of the Progressive Party. He was elected prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1904 and lead the Unionist Party after the Union of South Africa in 1910. Jameson retired from politics in 1914 and died in 1917.

Now how the United States figured in that strictly British criminally incited imperialist filibuster is beyond me, except that the American ambassador in Madrid was bemused by the British reaction to the Kruger telegram and said so. Tirpitz, himself, was infuriated by that American official's public humiliation of his Kaiser, when he witnessed it. In effect, Tirpitz was quite aware that Hannis Taylor was plotting the overthrow of the Spanish rule in Cuba right in front of his German naval consul's nose, and that Taylor was quite obviously further successful in thwarting a Spanish effort to recruit other European states, especially GREAT BRITAIN in a pan European coalition to thwart the United States..   

The bemoaning of Germany's lack of a suitable navy to settle America's hash in that matter, was and is evident. Tirpitz was to be future infuriated by the United States Navy in further German humiliations at Morocco and Venezuela. He could not understand right up until the First World War "why" the Americans were allowed to get away with such outrages upon the world ocean, why the British looked the other way, while "poor Germany" was British checked and chafed at every time she looked for "colonies" and her "place in the sun".      

Well the reason was simple. Americans were not trying to overthrow the world order... yet. Mahan was ours. He taught us patience and circumspection.   

[miletus12]

More on Tirpitz.

Tirpitz and Technology
By Gary E. Weir
January 1990 Naval History Magazine Volume 4 Number 1

Three major advances in naval technology between 1897 and 1918 provide an opportunity to view the decision-making process in the Imperial German Navy from a neglected vantage point. The development of nickel-steel armor, the turbine engine, and the submarine exhibit the navy’s move toward modem technology and its ability to adapt to change.

Throughout this period the policies, ideology, and prejudices of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, chief of the Imperial Naval Office or Reichsmarineamt (RMA), determined not only the reception accorded some technological changes but also the direction taken by scientific and industrial research.

In 1894, Tirpitz set forth what would become his strategic doctrine in a memo on the navy’s fall fleet maneuvers. Service Memo IX proposed a direct challenge to Great Britain and a vast increase in German naval power via the battleship. Tirpitz suggested building a formidable naval force that would drastically increase the risk to anyone contemplating conflict with Germany on the high seas. This “risk theory” suddenly made naval war, even with Great Britain, game of chance that Germany might win. When Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed Tirpitz to the post of State Secretary of the RMA in 1897, this personal strategy became the blueprint for RMA policy and German naval expansion over the next 17 years.

Admiral Tirpitz’s strategic theories and his personal convictions shaped his policy toward technological change. If a particular innovation in maritime technology easily complemented his capital ship strategy, he became its champion. However, the admiral believed that the development of new technology should take place entirely in the private sector, with the RMA’s sole responsibility to keep abreast of current research. Therefore, he often refused to commit RMA resources to perfect what were to him essentially private ventures. Also, if he felt a particular development threatened his strategic writ or the financial foundation of his construction program, he ignored or applied all of his formidable powers to challenge it.

In light of these propensities, it is interesting to examine RMA reaction to the advent of nickel-steel armor, and Tirpitz’s conflict with the powerful armor monopoly dominated by two of Germany’s leading steel producers, Friedrich Krupp of Essen and the Dillinger Hüttenwerke, based in the Saar. The perfection of nickel-steel armor by Krupp in 1894 in no way threatened Tirpitz’s strategic precepts or the supremacy of the battleship. If anything, it gave the capital ships built by the RMA after 1897 greater lasting power in battle. However, the excessive price of this innovation threatened to curtail the pace of ship construction desired by the admiral, as well as posing a threat to the continued flow of funds from the Reichstag.

In 1900, Fritz Krupp used his influence with Kaiser Wilhelm II to frustrate Tirpitz’s initial efforts to force an armor price reduction. The RMA had attempted to drive prices down through an anti-Krupp press campaign combined with political pressure from the Reichstag—both of which Tirpitz orchestrated. Krupp upset the Kaiser with a melodramatic response to naval pressure and thus prompted Wilhelm to insist that Tirpitz calm the situation. Determined to fight another day, the admiral saw delay rather than defeat in this episode.

Oddly enough, the American sector of the international armor market eventually handed Tirpitz the advantage over the Krupp-Dillinger armor monopoly. Intensive competition between Carnegie, Bethlehem, and Midvale for American naval contracts lowered the price of their nickel-steel armor to 1650 marks (M) ($396) per ton in 1903. By 1906, Midvale’s determination to control a larger part of the American market intensified the competition and resulted in a record low price of 1450 M ($348) per ton. Both Tirpitz and his American counterpart. Secretary of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte, took advantage of the golden opportunity presented by this new price. During the summer of 1906, Bonaparte forced Bethlehem and Carnegie to match Midvale’s price on the armor for both the USS Michigan (BB-27) and South Carolina (BB-26). In November, Tirpitz asked the Midvale Company to provide the RMA with samples of its armor for testing. That very same month, the RMA offered its support to Fritz Thyssen, the best of Germany’s smaller armor manufacturers, if he would consider competing in the domestic market against Krupp and Dillinger.

The circumstances created by American competition and the navy’s talks with Thyssen resulted in three price reductions by Krupp and Dillinger in 1907. Between May and June the price fell from 1750 M ($420) to 1630 M ($391) per ton. By August 1907, the monopoly asked only 1600 M ($384) and Krupp agreed not to object to any outside competition the navy might promote. When both Krupp and the Dillinger Hüttenwerke asserted that they could produce armor at least 5% cheaper than any competitor, the RMA knew it was finally making progress.

In 1909, the price dropped to 1550 M ($372) per ton when Reichstag representative Graf von Opporsdorf launched a political attack on the monopoly during the Reichstag budget committee hearings. In spite of their success, Tirpitz and his RMA colleagues felt uneasy about relying on an American company for their armor, and Thyssen had demanded too many expensive guarantees to ensure the profitability of his competition against the monopoly. At this point Tirpitz folded his hand, counted his winnings, and signed a contract with Krupp-Dillinger. Even Tirpitz’s opponents in the Reichstag duly noted his efforts and were momentarily encouraged by the results.

The extraordinary results of Tirpitz’s watchful doggedness and Krupp’s technical expertise served the fleet well at Jutland in 1916. German armor protection proved superior to the British at every turn. Even the battle cruiser SMS Seydlitz, perforated by 21 heavy and two medium shells as well as assorted torpedo hits, steamed back to Wilhelmshaven under her own power. Both this vessel and the heavily damaged SMS Moltke survived this battle and were again ready for action by the autumn of 1916. Thus, when the innovation in question supported his basic strategy, Tirpitz displayed all the qualities of an effective, flexible, and sagacious administrator.

The turbine engine neither posed a problem in price nor did the character of the innovation conflict with Tirpitz’s plans. Although he did not involve himself in the research and development of naval technology, he instructed the RMA to keep track of Charles Parsons’s 1884 invention and the subsequent testing of the machine in HMS Turbinia. As a result, an RMA commission witnessed the successful naval turbine trials in Great Britain and strongly recommended this new form of propulsion to the navy.

Certainly a danger lay in a British monopoly of this quantum leap forward in naval engine design, and many firms and inventors still openly challenged Parsons’s hold on the best in current turbine technology. Both the French System Rateau and the Swedish DeLaval model soon presented possible alternatives. In contrast to a number of unlucky German inventors like Adolf Muller who fell by the wayside when charged with violating the British inventor’s patents, the Swiss developed a successful turbine called the Zoelly and patented it in 1899. The Americans, however, became Parsons’s strongest rivals. The Curtis turbine, a product of the General Electric Company originally used to drive electrical generators, successfully competed with Parsons in Germany, Britain, and the United States.

The question of which machine to use was a perplexing one. In 1906, the Royal Navy naturally chose a Parsons power plant for HMS Dreadnought and did not consider an alternative for its ships until 1912 when HMS Tiger received a Brown-Curtis turbine. Both Germany and the United States tried a variety of models, apparently biding their time until private industry created a system employing the latest technology available from around the world. The Americans alternately used Parsons and Curtis turbines in their battleships from 1907 until 1917, when Westinghouse displaced Parsons. In Germany a large-scale duplication of effort took place involving Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Numberg, Siemens-Schuckertwerke, Brown and Boveri, and seven other firms.

In this situation, Tirpitz might have used his authority and influence to better focus German industry’s efforts in this area. He advocated introducing the new propulsion system into German ships, and yet he refused to allow the RMA to become involved in the research and development process. Moreover, his “hands-off” policy remained unaltered, even when German efforts at duplicating and improving Parsons’s technology became diffuse and only minimally successful.

By 1911, no fewer than five different turbine systems propelled German battleships. A Vulcan-Curtis engine drove SMS Friedrich der Grosse. Other German ships used Weser, Schichau, and Bergmann engines, but the majority employed Parsons. In this phase of capital ship technology Germany never matched Britain or the United States, in large part because the very man whose talents were so well suited to the task of coordinating and channeling the industrial response to Parsons prevented RMA involvement.

In 1914 the war obliged the RMA to adopt a more effective turbine policy. Shortly thereafter, exclusively German firms began to receive contracts to power the few remaining capital ships still slated for construction as the navy shifted its emphasis to U-boat production. Schichau, Bergmann, and the AEG-Vulcan provided the RMA with reliable turbine engines for some ships of the Bayern class (1912-1914), as well as the never completed Ersatz Yorke and Mackensen classes (1916-1917).

The development of the submarine posed quite a different dilemma for Tirpitz. Unlike nickel-steel armor or the turbine engine, the submarine had no place in the admiral’s plans for the navy. Rather than bolstering his risk theory, the U-boat instead fit easily into the commerce raiding strategy popularized in the 1890s by Tirpitz’s strategic opposite, French Admiral Theophile Aube and his “Jeune Ecole” or “Young School.” Tirpitz felt threatened by this weapon, for it not only challenged the battleship, but also the admiral’s political and professional reputation, both of which rested solidly on the validity of the risk theory. Tirpitz ignored U-boat research until 1900 and his feeble efforts to integrate U-boats into the navy lacked conviction. Like the Americans, he saw the submarine as a more advanced form of the torpedo boat, useful for coastal defense but barely able, in its most advanced form, to operate in conjunction with the fleet. Only the growing attention paid by other naval powers to the submarine convinced Tirpitz that Germany must keep pace.

Of all the major naval powers involved with submarines only France cast the new underwater weapon in a major role. Influenced by the strategic writ of Aube’s Young School, France adjusted the composition of its fleet to give an important assignment to the submarine. As early as 1899, the French successfully experimented with submersible vessels like the Gustav Zede, and by 1900 the submarine was an integral part of their navy. Late in 1899, the French ordered 26 of the craft; by February 1900 12 were nearly completed. In 1906, French naval experts submitted the following projections of naval needs through 1919 to the Senate: 34 battleships and 36 cruisers; 109 torpedo boats for defense and 170 more for offensive operations; and 49 defensive and 82 offensive submarines.

Across the channel, two-man submarine prototypes initially occupied British attention. However, in 1903 the Royal Navy decided to purchase five Holland submarines built by the firm of Vickers, which was licensed by the patent holder, Isaac Rice’s Electric Boat Company.

The U. S. Navy ordered a half-dozen Holland submarines, which it began testing in 1902-1903. Like the Germans, the American attitude toward the submarine was cautious and skeptical. Unlike the French and British, the U. S. Navy kept its submarines under 800 tons displacement and restricted them to coastal defense before 1914. While the war forced a change of attitude in Germany, the Americans hesitated and modified their position only after witnessing Germany’s early success against Great Britain. Thus, when the United States entered the war in April 1917, its navy possessed only one dozen oceangoing boats capable of independent action.

The lively prewar naval debate on both sides of the Atlantic over the value of the new weapon did not convince Tirpitz. Unlike his flamboyant British counterpart, Admiral Sir John Fisher, he saw no merit in these small vessels, and devoted little time and even fewer RMA marks to submarine research. When liberal leader Eugen Richter confronted him in the Reichstag about the RMA’s lack of interest in U-boats in spite of French advances, Tirpitz replied that “the U-boat is of no great value in war at sea.” He made similar statements before a Reichstag budget committee session in March 1901. It is possible that Tirpitz, like his contemporary, President Theodore Roosevelt, feared that politicians would see in the submarine a cheaper alternative to the battleship. The U-boat thus endangered not only his plan to build a strong surface fleet but also the uninterrupted flow of money from the Reichstag. Clearly he had to meet the challenge posed by this vessel and her proponents.

In Tirpitz’s marginalia to an October 1901 report by the German naval attache in Paris he commented on every imperfection exhibited by the French submarines. He noted, for example, that the French had yet to perfect a practical periscope. How then could they attack submerged? This was more than a reluctance to explore fully the possibilities of the submarine. It was his strict policy of noninvolvement in technological development taken to the extreme. Tirpitz never suggested that German industry, with RMA guidance, might succeed where the French had not. He rarely allowed the RMA to act as a catalyst or coordinator among its firms and especially so in the case of the U-boat.

When Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914, the German Navy had only two shipyards building submarines, and 28 boats actually or nearly ready for service. Of these two yards Krupp’s Germania installation in Kiel manufactured nearly all of the navy’s boats, completely outstripping the RMA’s only alternative, the Imperial Shipyard at Danzig. Thus, on the eve of hostilities, Tirpitz’s policy toward the U-boats nearly left him with a Krupp monopoly in submersible construction.

Luckily for Germany, in 1914, the Weser Shipyard of Bremen entered the submarine market, spurred on by international interest in the U-boat and the success of Krupp, Vickers, and the Americans Lake and Electric Boat. Weser engineers and architects had begun working on their own U-boat designs more than two years before. When the Vulcan firm of Hamburg and Stettin followed suit, the threat of buying almost exclusively from Krupp lessened considerably. Consequently, Germany entered the war with four yards engaged in U-boat work primarily due, not to RMA prompting, but private initiative alone. In the final analysis, it is revealing that Tirpitz’s submarine building policy had very little to do with the number or success of his navy’s U-boats in the early months of World War I.

When the submarine became the prime German naval weapon in 1914 and 1915, its particular success in commerce raiding boldly exhibited the final passing of Tirpitz’s risk theory. The activity of the U-boat and the corresponding inactivity of Germany’s surface fleet severely damaged the State Secretary’s credibility. The admiral’s political and military clout firmly rested on his strategic dogma and its alluring promise of a genuine challenge to Great Britain. Therefore, the success of the U-boat contributed significantly to his professional demise in March 1916.

Before 1914, few experts in industry or the military could have predicted the impact of the U-boat on the course of the war. However, greater prewar RMA involvement in research and development might have prepared the German Navy for almost any wartime contingency. Closer cooperation between the navy and its suppliers in the development of both the U-boat and the turbine would have given the RMA more immediate control over the advent and application of these innovations, subject only later to strategic discussions regarding their usefulness.

The application of advanced technology to sea warfare certainly guaranteed a change in the nature of conflict on the world’s oceans. The case of the U-boat showed that firms such as Krupp, Weser, and Vulcan risked capital, labor, and physical plant on a venture that many naval professionals tried to ignore. The inflexible views of individuals and the accepted conventions of military institutions play as decisive a role in the effective evaluation of technology for military use as the willingness of industry to commit its resources.

Primary Sources: RM 3 (Reichsmarineamt) Collection of the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau, Federal Republic of Germany, paying special attention to the Handakren Dahnhardt and Handakten von Gohren; The Industrial and Family Archive of the Fried. Krupp A. G., at the Villa Hugel in Essen; General Board Records (418 and 420 series) held by the National Archives in Washington, D. C. as part of RG-45.

Secondary Sources:
1. V. R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz Plan. Düsseldorf, 1971
2. E. Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik, 1894-1901. Berlin, 1930
3. P.-C. Witt, “Die Finanzpolitik des deutschen Reiches von 1903 bis 1913." Historische Studien 415. Lübeck, 1970
4. G. E. Weir, "The Imperial Naval Office and the Problem of Armor Prices in Germany," Military Affairs (vol. 48, #2, April 1984), 62-65
5. G. E. Weir, “Tirpitz, Technology and Building U-boats, 1897-1916," International History Review (vol. 6, #2, May 1984), 175-190
6. B. F. Cooling, Grey Steel and Blue Water Navy. The Formative Years of America's Military Industrial Complex. 1881-1917. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1979
7. K. T. Rowland, Steam at Sea, A History of Steam Navigation, New York: Praeger, 1970
8. S. Bryer, Battleships and Battlecruisers, 1905-1970, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1973
9. E. Rössler, Geschichte der deutsche U-bootbaus. Munich, 1979.

PROFESSIONAL naval officers are by their nature, with the people and resources placed in their care; cautious, conservative and not likely to make rash decisions based on snap judgments.

They tend to be guided by what worked in the past and are leery of newfangled notions, until some IDIOT tests it out first and proves that there might be something to be noticed, emulated, used or improved.

It goes to that old American saying; "The first man through the door gets shot, so then you use the grenade."

When Tirpitz formulated his battleship centric "risk fleet" theory around 1896, he had yet to see the Americans or the Japanese operate naval campaigns. He HAD read Mahan (1890) and like every other incompetent amateur^1 out there, latched onto the "Big Concentrated Battle Fleet: and ignored the 99% that Mahan wrote about commerce, naval geography, WEATHER, blockades, supply, etc. that followed in the decade after "The Influence of Seapower Upon History". 

Nor had Tirpitz bothered reading the French accounts of the Sino French wars or Japanese accounts of the First Sino Japanese War, or he might just have realized that battleships were not all that important. TORPEDOES were.  

But gunfights at sea are glamorous and who paid attention to the French and was not the Battle of the Yalu decided by gunships shooting at each other?

The Battle of the Yalu was a draw. We have Philo Norton McGiffin's accounts of that debacle. 

So, based on incomplete precedents, comes Tirpitz's risk fleet idea and his two decade politically engineered monomaniacal pursuit of a battleship centric fleet parked one day away from the British Isles so as to put the British Empire at risk.

And the British get into a battleship building race (Which they win.), and still almost lose the war at sea, because in spite of Tirpitz and the Kaiser and the rest of those certifiable Wilhelmine naval nitwits, the Germans bumble their way around to Admiral Aube's way of doing in the British Empire.   

Vice-Admiral Hyacinthe Laurent Théophile Aube

Hyacinthe Laurent Théophile Aube, (1826-90) was born at Toulon. He entered the French Naval Academy in 1840, and from the date of his first commission nearly the whole of his life was spent on the sea. Aube had spent most of his career on overseas stations and as a result had developed an outlook focusing on the defense of overseas interests and commerce. Aube served with distinction in the colonies, and was a post captain in charge of some coast defenses during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and was present at all the engagements on the Loire. In 1879 he was appointed governor of Martinque, and on his return to France in 1881 was made a rear-admiral. His appointment to the ministry of the navy and to the rank of Vice-Admiral followed in 1886.

In the view of Admiral Aube, the foreign squadrons maintained under the French flag were as valueless politically as were the well-paid officers of the diplomatic and consular services. In 1870, Admiral Aube thus described and criticised the French system of foreign squadrons :

"On foreign stations we usually maintain a frigate, having on board the admiral and his numerous staff, and two or three despatch boats. To each smaller vessel a division of the station is assigned. The frigate lies in the harbor of the capital, leaving it only for an annual visit to the ports of secondary importance. Three years pass by in this service, nearly always at anchor, the only voyages undertaken being of quite limited scope. If service on a foreign station is a school, it is a school of indolence and indifference. Neglect of professional duties and studies is veiled by a deceptive appearance of efficiency. After eight months at anchor at Valparaiso or Rio de Janeiro nothing can be more attractive to the eye than the appearance presented by one of our frigates ; the order and the cleanliness could not be exceeded.

"It is not the officers in command of squadrons who are responsible for such a state of things. There are many to whom their enforced inactivity is utterly distasteful. But their movements are fettered by the protests and demands of ministers and consuls accustomed to rely on the presence of our war ships. These men have no appreciation of the necessity for active cruising at sea, in order to train officers and crews. If an admiral absents himself for a time from the centre of the station protests are raised, and complaints are sometimes addressed to the Government at home."

In 1886 the Minister of Marine, himself au ex-Colonial Governor, elaborated a scheme of colonial naval defence which, if successfully put into execution, would place each colony beyond the reach of attack, and make it at the same time a center of disturbance against British trade. Admiral Aube's plan was that each colony should be made the headquarters of one or more Groups of Combat, destined not merely for the defences of that colony, but to harass the trade of any nation with which France might be at war. A glance at the map will show how fatally destructive such a scheme would bo to English commerce.

These groups are to consist of one swift steaming cruiser of about 2,500 tons, capable of steaming twenty knots an hour, and of keeping the sea at a rate of ten knots for a distance of 3,000 miles ; the craft was to be armed with two five-inch breech- loading guns, a couple of torpedo-tubes, and a considerable number of Hotchkiss cannon. She was to be the flag-ship of the little squadron, and is to carry reserve crews, and reserve supplies of food, coal, ammunition, aud provisions for her satellites; these comprise two swift-steaming gun-vessels and eight sea-keeping torpedo-boats. The gun- vessels were to be craft of about 400 tons burthen, and armed with one five-inch breechloader, a proportionate number of machine guns, and a crew of fifty men. They, too. are to possess a high rate of speed, and to be capable of keeping the sea for a considerable time. The torpedo boats were to be of two types, one carrying two Whitebead torpedoes, and no other weapon of offence or defence ; the other, a spar torpedo, and a couple of powerful Hotchkiss. The duty of the former craft is to threaten and destroy an enemy's vessel; the duty of the latter to protect her consort from the attack of small craft, and if necessary, to use her own spar torpedo in self-defence.

The great principle formulated by Admiral Aube regarding torpedo vessels was, invisibility, divisibility and number ; from this it came to pass that small torpedo vessels were built to obtain invisibility, to increase their number, and because they are less costly ; their number gave an idea of their value. The French torpedo-boats seemed to be very faulty. No. 102 upset within sight of Toulon, and six of her crew were drowned. On Thursday, March 21st of 1889, torpedo-boat No. 1 10 left Havre for Cherbourg, and when off Bardeur, went down in a gale of wind, with her crew of fourteen hands. Of the torpedo-boats lately constructed for the French Government, no fewer than fifty had proved so uns eaworthy, that they had to be overhauled at a cost of 600l each. And when the money was expended, it was by no means certain that they would be efficient. So much was admitted by Admiral Krantz, Minister of Marine.

Unfortunately for Admiral Aube's scheme, sea-going torpedo-boats had not as yet proved themselves capable of keeping the sea. The experiences of the French craft operating in the Gulf of Toulon, proved these vessels to be valuable only in smooth weather.

Admiral Aube was probably the most influential exponent of submarine torpedo boats who had yet come forward. This officer when Minister of Marine made a special hobby of this mode of naval warfare, and although he never succeeded in finding anything which really came up to his requirements, one at least of the numerous inventors whom he proteged has succeeded in producing a very fair specimen of submarine torpedo boat, though for a foreign government. In 1888 M. Goubet, such is the inventor's name, submitted a submarine boat driven by electricity derived from accumulators. The vessel, which at the best was only able to go five knots, was not a success ; but Admiral Aube gave the inventor further encouragement.

The manual of the laws of war was adopted at the Oxford session of the Institute of International Law in 1881. There was no difference between the rules of the law of as to bombardment by military forces on land and that by naval forces. The bombardment by a naval force of an open town - t. e., one not defended by fortifications or other means of attack or of resistance for immediate defense .... was inadmissible, except in order to obtain by means of requisitions or of contributions what is necessary for the fleet.

In 1882 Admiral Aube, in an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes on naval warfare of the future ["La guerre maritimes et les ports militaires de la France" Vol. L., pp. 314-346], expressed his opinion that "As wealth is the sinews of war, all that strikes at the wealth of the enemy - a fortiori all that strikes at the source of wealth - becomes not only legitimate but obligatory. It must therefore be expected that the fleets, mistresses of the sea, will turn their powers of attack and destruction, instead of letting the enemy escape from blows, against all the cities of the coast, fortified or not, peaceful or warlike, to burn them, to ruin them, and at least to ransom them without mercy. This was the former practice; it ceased; it will prevail again. Strasbourg and Peronne assure it."

Admiral Aube argued that in the naval war of the future France would most certainly act on the defensive, and that it was therefore the business of the nation to prepare, to organise, and to bring to the highest state of efficiency its weapons of defence. He blamed the Admiralty for spending the millions which had been voted for the navy in the creation of "mastodons" which "had neither speed, nor teeth to bite."

He pointed out that to adopt this course would be the true policy of France, in the event of a war with England. The French Government, on being asked by the British Government whether it accepted responsibility for Admiral Aube's articles, dissociated itself from him. But this repudiation, which was immediately followed by his appointment as Minister of Marine, and by the adoption of a scheme of naval construction in accordance with his views, seemed to British observers to have no serious value.

These views appeared to have found much favor in French and British naval circles. There was no reason to believe that either political or naval opinion in France dissented from these views. His proposals met with the approval of the newspaper press. They were supported and exceeded in various articles spread over a considerable space of time. M. Charmes, whose position and influence in the Foreign Office rendered his utterances noticeable. The only voice raised against them was that of Admiral Bourgois in 1885.

But for some, this was a "relapse into barbarism was like a bolt in a clear sky" because there were very few examples of the bombardments of undefended coast line and these precedents were universally discredited. The only recent example of the bombardment of a commercial town as an act of devastation was the case of Valparaiso, attacked in the year 1868 by the Spanish fleet, but, to quote the measured language of the late Mr. Hall, " the act gave rise to universal indignation at the time, and has never been defended." The article of Admiral Aube gave rise to great discussion, and it may be said that the proposition to subject undefended coast towns to destruction met with little or no favor. The Admiral's suggestion that they should purchase their immunity by ransom met a like fate, but a very lively and by no means unprofitable discussion arose over the question whether undefended ports, towns, and villages might be subject to requisitions and contributions under international law.

Admiral Aube, from the time of his taking office, appointed a Committee to prepare new regulations conducive to economy. The head of the Admiralty was perfectly willing to work with that Committee, and the plan had worked welï. When Admiral Aube reduced the French Naval Establishments, he induced the Committee to grant a considerable sum of money in order to prevent a cruel discharge of a large number of men in the winter.

Admiral Aube wrote in 1885 - "The empire of the sea will belong to that nation of the two which has the most numerous ironclad fleet. Every power of attack and destruction will be employed against all England's littoral towns - fortified or unfortified - -whether purely peace establishments or warlike, to burn them, to destroy them, or to pitilessly ransack them. In any future war the French will come down from the height of that clouded sentimentality which has created the monstrous association of words, 'the rights of war,' or les droits de la guerre, and the attack on every source of riches will be not only legitimate but obligatory on them."

 You REALLY should pay attention to the French. If the Americans had (Surprise attacks. M.), the USN would have suffered a lot less grief.

But that is not glamorous, is it? And of course, 60 warships sunk by MINES out of a 600 ship fleet. incuding 20 of 60 ironclads. That would be the United States Navy experience in the American Civil War, which is why mines were such a huge concern during the Spanish American War, with the Americans going to extreme measures to ensure that the Spanish could not get any that worked.       

Ironclads or Monitors = BATTLESHIPs. 
 
And of course there is that thing about Naval Geography about which Mahan wrote...



I think it might be the first time in history, where the SUPERIOR in numbers fleet, just had to play "FLEET IN BEING".

You begin to see where the Tirpitz incompetence sets in? Alfred Thayer Mahan, the man who the British despised, and who they regarded as inferior to Julian Corbett, predicted that the naval war of WWI would assume the shape it did in the North Sea and the English Channel, with blockade as the deciding element of naval strategy based on the two exits configuration of the shorline barriers. Perhaps, the fact that Mahan guided a strategic naval campaign of his own (General Board in the Spanish American War. M.), and had to sweat out real decisions that forced him to modify his opinions on the Operational Naval Art, especially when he was relieved to discover that the Bermejo Armada was stupid enough to come to America's home waters where it could be isolated in a fjord, blockaded and then army forced out of harbor into the waiting guns of an American fleet (NO torpedoes! M.) which experience incidentally enabled him to predict the shape of the Battle of Tsushima and its likely outcome as the end result of a long BLOCKADE of Port Arthur, its failed relief by the European squadrons of the Russian navy, and naval shoreline configuration that allowed the Japanese to set up a kill funnel, could have alerted a better admiral than Tirpitz. Or His Opposite^1. The result of a proper naval campaign is a compelled battle, not a decisive battle. And the side which compels it is not guaranteed to win it! 

In the case of Tirpitz and his British counterpart, it was the fulmination of follies decades in the making. While the two battleship fleets stared at each other across the North Sea for two years, one afraid to fight because it would be sunk, and "what would the Kaiser say?", and the other was afraid to fight because the Germans just might win and would then transport over an army to land in England: the actual compelled naval battle / campaign happened in the North Atlantic, where the British navy was busy losing the naval war, with the excuse that it needed destroyers to protect its battleships from submarines,  while the confused fumbling Germans sank all those helpless freighters with rinky dink U-boats in an on again and off again political start-stop Admiral Aube type naval war. 

But as to the lessons neither the British, nor the Germans learned prior to WWI?    

The Japanese and the Americans really feared an enemy fleet would resort to guerre de course for which they had no answer. Instead the obliging enemy, in each case, sailed into the waiting embrace of a defending fleet that could just position itself to fight the enemy when the enemy chose to come to it to be captured or destroyed under ideal conditions for the defenders. 

So in WWI, which expensive useless battleship centric navy had to fight to break a blockade and could not risk it? Why... It was the Risk Fleet of course.   

 Nothing in naval matters says STUPID, like those who misunderstand MAHAN.          

^1 Jackie Fisher, the worst admiral of WWI, who was so incompetent, that he could not read a sounding chart, before he proposed his stupid Pomerania idea. 

POSTSCRIPT: Some navies never learn.   

Did you know, reader, that the British navy did not institute convoy OFFICIALLY in WWI until after Admiral Sims visited the British to arrange convoys for the AEF? 

Here is another one... The British navy did not OFFICIALLY institute convoy in WWII until 21 September 1941.
 
CYNICAL Miletus

  

[miletus12]

Incompetence That Shaped History
Khalid Elhassan - March 9, 2020

Did you know that one of Napoleon’s most crushing defeats was caused by hapless underlings, who mistakenly blew up a bridge and stranded a big chunk of his army on the enemy side of a river? Or that when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his bodyguard was out drinking instead of guarding the president’s booth at Ford’s Theater? History is shaped not only by the brilliant, capable, and competent. The dim, inept, and incompetent, can also inadvertently produce long-lasting results. Following are forty things about incompetence that helped shape history.



Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in disaster. Total War Center

40. Blowing Up a Bridge at the Wrong Time
In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with 685,000 men – the largest army ever seen until then. He came out with only 120,000 cold and hungry survivors, including 35,000 Frenchmen. The rest had died (over 400,000), deserted, or switched sides. Napoleon’s dominance of Europe was shattered, as client states and subject nations rushed to shake off French hegemony.

Racing back to France, Napoleon raised an army equivalent in size to the one recently lost, but of lower quality and experience than the veterans lost in Russia. However, they were led by one of history’s greatest generals. Although vastly outnumbered, Napoleon conducted a brilliant campaign in 1813, fighting his enemies to a draw. Then catastrophe struck when a lowly corporal was entrusted with blowing up a bridge after a reeling but still formidable French army had retreated across it. He blew up the bridge too soon, stranding a major part of the French army on the other side.


Battle of Leipzig. Weapons and Warfare

39. Surviving the Battle of the Nations

Napoleon’s 1813 German Campaign culminated in the Battle of the Nations, so-called because it was fought by contingents from many countries. Fought near Leipzig from October 16th to 19th 1813, it pitted 225,000 men under Napoleon against a multinational coalition army of 380,000 men. Napoleon held his own until the 18th, when 10,000 Saxon allies suddenly switched sides, abandoned their positions in Napoleon’s lines, and marched off to join his foes.

With a gaping hole now suddenly appearing in his lines, Napoleon had to abandon an entire sector. By nightfall, his position had become untenable, so he ordered an orderly retreat. Without alerting the enemy, Napoleon began withdrawing his forces across the nearby Elster River, using a single bridge in Leipzig. It was to be blown after the last of Napoleon’s men had crossed to prevent the enemy from using it. Things went smoothly at first, until incompetence struck.

Napoleon was having a BAD day. To see just how badly one inept corporal can screw up, read the rest at the citation. It will set the tone nicely for what follows...

As this is a NAVAL disarmament thread; so let us now turn to how the USN disarmed itself with criminal stupidity in the 1920s and early 1930s.

===============================================================================

Live fire test in which the magnetic exploder used in Mark 14 Torpedo failed to detonate beneath a target ship, and the torpedo continued on. Wikimedia

23. The US Navy’s Worst Weapon?

When America joined WWII, our submarines’ standard weapon was the Mark 14 Torpedo. It was supposed to be a dramatic improvement over earlier torpedoes, which detonated on impact with a ship’s hull. The Mark 14 had an advanced magnetic detonator that was supposed to set off the explosive charge directly beneath the enemy’s keel and break its back – fatal damage to any ship.

The concept was good, as it meant that a single Mark 14 could sink a ship, regardless of size. Before, it frequently took multiple torpedoes holing the enemy in various spots on the hull. However, because of secrecy and penny pinching, only two Mark 14s were tested, and one of them failed. That 50% failure rate did not give the Navy pause and prompt it to conduct further testing. In 1938, the Mark 14 was approved and issued to the US submarine fleet as its standard torpedo. The results proved disastrous.



Mark 14 Torpedo. Pacific War Online Encyclopedia

22. Discovering the Mark 14’s Flaws at the Worst Possible Time

The Mark 14 Torpedo’s defects only became apparent when America joined the war – which is the worst possible time to discover that a standard-issue weapon is seriously defective. Within the first month of hostilities, submarine skippers correctly reported that the Mark 14 had serious problems. Not least was the trouble maintaining accurate depth so as to pass within the correct distance beneath an enemy ship’s keel.

The magnetic detonator often detonated prematurely, or failed to detonate at all. The contact detonator failed to set off the torpedo, even when it struck an enemy’s hull at a perfect angle with a loud clang that was clearly audible in the firing submarine. Worst of all, it could boomerang, missing its target and running in a wide circle to come back and strike the firing submarine. At least two submarines, the USS Tang and USS Tullibee, are known to have been sunk by their own Mark 14s circling back to hit them.



US Navy Bureau of Ordnance personnel inspecting a Mark 14 Torpedo in 1943. Imgur

21. Refusing to Acknowledge and Address a Problem
The US Navy ignored a flood of reports from submarine commanders complaining about the Mark 14. In one incident, a submarine’s skipper fired two spreads totaling a dozen torpedoes at a large Japanese whaler, but only managed to cripple it. Then, with the enemy ship dead in the water, he maneuvered his submarine and carefully positioned it so that his torpedoes would have a perfect angle of impact, and fired off 9 more Mark 14s. Not a single one detonated.

Despite myriad reports detailing the Mark 14’s shortcomings, it took the Navy two years from the start of hostilities to even acknowledge the possibility that a problem might exist, and to conduct tests to find out what, if anything, was wrong. The tests verified what American submariners had been complaining about all along. Remedial steps to address the problems were finally begun – two years later than should have been the case.

=================================================================================

Ah, the Mark 14. It is a little too simplistic, that one.

The whole story as told in The Hellions of the Deep, a deeply flawed book that I just finished, is that during the Hoover Administration, the USN along with other global navies, had undertaken to modernize its WWI inventory of torpedoes. Now a nation keeps a munitions and equipment stockpile on hand in case a war breaks out suddenly. The theory is that the stockpile will carry the armed services along until wartime production tools up and new improved stuff comes along to equip the forces in the field.

That is fine as long as there is a technological plateau and, whoever the expected enemy or unexpected enemy is, remains as static in that technological plateau as you do. This was NOT a safe assumption with either the British or the Japanese, both who were regarded as potential hostile forces that the USN just might have to confront.

So the American navy decided to improve its ordnance just in case. And that was prudent, because the British and the Japanese, who were afraid of the Americans, and each other; reached exactly the same conclusions and did the same thing at the same time.

How did that turn out? 1929 happened; so NOT TOO GOOD.

The British stuck with their stolen German Schwartzkopf 4 cylinder radial engine modified WWI runners, screwed up their magnetic influence exploder and developed a nifty aircraft torpedo drop system. Their results were mixed.

The Japanese already had switched to Schwartzkopf 4 cylinder radial engines. They spent a fortune on testing for run reliability and costly manufacture of an oxygen boosted long range family of surface ship and submarine launched torpedoes. The Japanese did not test for nose wander, and they did not TRAIN for massed volley fire by surface ship divisions until Tanaka, Raizo introduced that novel concept to the Tokyo Express in mid 1942. The wake pressure sensitive contact detonator was an even bigger surprise failure to the Japanese, which they never fixed. On the plus side, their aerial dropped torpedo worked just fine and killed a few American aircraft carriers. The novel secret they had, the PID controller came back to the United States in a dud torpedo recovered after the Battle of Midway.

Then we have the Americans who did everything they could from involving corrupt congress persons, to incompetent and corrupt naval officers, to creating a civil service, cannot fire these idiots, labor union, to a not invented here mentality, to an isolated factory test development center, to suing the FINEST TORPEDO MAKER on earth and driving them out of the business to starving the torpedo development people for funds and ignoring one GLARING crucial nautical fact.

If you punch through the numbers from 1880 to 1922, the one weapon that had sunk more ships in total than the previous 500 years of naval warfare combined was...

... the torpedo.

You would think a navy, who had the lessons of mine and torpedo warfare pounded into its officer corps by no less than Stephen Luce and Alfred Mahan would be extremely anxious to ensure that its torpedoes worked and would plead with its diplomats to somehow make sure that the same kinds of treaty technical limits put on guns would be applied to the far more deadly torpedo?

Nope.

The treaty technical limits WERE applied to the Germans. If you read the Versailles Treaty there are things in there about tanks, airplanes, naval guns, large bore artillery, submarines, machine guns aircraft (engines watts restricted), and TORPEDOES.

Then came the Anglo German Naval Treaty and the SPEED BRAKES were off.

I cannot emphasize how STUPID the AGNT was. Now the Germans could buy from the Italians, and openly develop those naval weapons that VERSAILLES hobbled them to lag in development in clandestine reduced circumstances and forced them to hide. As Vanovar Bush, an EXCELLENT Amertican scientist pointed out post war, the lack of development lead time, that Versailles imposed, and a decade of lost Gewrman own research robbed the Germans of an even bigger technical edge over the British in 1939.

Not that the Americans did not hobble themselves in exactly the same way as mentione in the previously mentioned stupidities listed.

So the Americans did what the Americans usually do, when a war is thrust upon them, called for volunteers, hired their best from industry and threw a LOT of MANPOWER and MONEY at the problem.

To quote another American scientist; "If you put enough chimps on enough typewriters, all pounding away at the keys, you will eventually get the works of William Shakespeare."

Or the FIDO, and the Mark 18 and Cutie. And somehow, you completely redesign the Mark 13, 14, and 15 torpedoes, invent sonobuoys, and apply game theory, and MIT fixes the defective British centimetric radar, and you win the naval war in the Atlantic and the Pacific in 1943. And all that you paid to do it with was 3,000 American submariners killed, 4,000 air crew drowned, and 2.5 BILLION 1940 dollars poured into torpedo research to fix what was not properly developed in peacetime.

If you are an American, whose family lost members in WWII, you could just ...

[miletus12]

As I head north this weekend to the land of smoke inhalation, let me leave you with an article about the British Navy, naval geography and naval technology.

GEOGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, AND BRITISH NAVAL STRATEGY IN THE DREADNOUGHT ERA

By Jon Tetsuro Sumida

When I get back, we'll discuss Jackie Fisher and Julian Corbett

[miletus12]

Jun 9, 2023 18:59:05 GMT miletus12 said:

As I head north this weekend to the land of smoke inhalation, let me leave you with an article about the British Navy, naval geography and naval technology.

GEOGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, AND BRITISH NAVAL STRATEGY IN THE DREADNOUGHT ERA

By Jon Tetsuro Sumida

When I get back, we'll discuss Jackie Fisher and Julian Corbett

First, let us look at a MAP.




Color annotated.



WWI and WWII color coding.

Red was what Britain needed to do to win. 
Yellow was what the Germans needed to do to win.
Blue off color was what the US or Japan needed to do to win. 

Now you can see that John Fisher and Julian Corbett totally ignored what Mahan wrote as to naval geography? 

Add to the utter blindness of those two naval amateurs the brand-new danger of the submarine as a weapon of sea denial.  You would think that a halfway competent naval officer would understand that if you cannot feed yourself and if you cannot find the raw materials inside your country to keep your economy going, then you might want to protect the freighters that bring you the imports you need? 

Battlecruisers and submarines do not do that function very well. 

As Mahan wrote: 
 

were of more use than ships of the line when it came to defense of commerce. 

This piece of garbage...
  


was much less useful than this ship;