NAVAL WAR COLLEGE 

Newport, Rhode Island 

CENTER FOR NAVAL WARFARE STUDIES 

Newport Paper #6 

October 1993 

"The Newport Papers" series is a vehicle for distribution of substantial work 

by, especially, members of the Naval War College's teaching and research 

faculty and students. Papers are drawn generally from manuscripts not 

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as boks from the Naval War College Press but that nonetheless merit extensive 

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Correspondence concerning The Newport Papers should be addressed to the 

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686 Cushing Road, Newport, Rhode Island 02841-1207. Telephone (401) 

841-2236 orDSN 948-2236, and Fax (401) 841-3579. 
The Burden of Trafalgar 

Decisive Battle and Naval Strategic Expectations 

on the Eve of the First World War 

Jan S. Breemer 

Copyright 1992 by Jan s. Breemer 
Contents 

Preface and Acknowledgments . 

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . 

Decisive Battle: Promise and Reality 

Decisive Battle and Historical Counter-Determinism. 

The Battle of Lepanto . . 

The Defeat of the Armada . . . . . 

The Battle of Midway . . . . . . . 

Decisive Battle and Command of the Sea . 

Decisive Battle and Annihilation . . . . 

Trafalgar: Decisive Battle in Retrospect 

The Preliminaries and Battle. . . 

What Did Trafalgar Decide? . . . . . . 

Trafalgar and Tactical Decisiveness . 

Trafalgar and Strategic Decisiveness 

Trafalgar and Grand-Strategic Decisiveness 

1utland and the Burden of Trafalgar . . . . . . . . . 

Pre-War Expectations of a North Sea Trafalgar . 

Decision at 1utland-What If? . 

The Author ....... . . . ..... ... ..... . 

v 

1 

3 

5 

7 

8 

10 

13 

17 

19 

20 

25 

25 

26 

28 

33 

33 

36 

46 
Preface and Acknowledgments 

This paper is written as part of a book-length study, currently in progress, of 

the origins and development of naval offensive thinking during the five decades 

or so leading up to the First World War. Its particular focus is the idea of the 

"decisive battle," i.e., the belief that dominated naval thinking in the Victorian 

and Edwardian periods that the goals of war at sea could, would, and ought to 

be settled by a single, all-destructive clash between massed battle fleets. The 

Great War would demonstrate, of course, that "real" war was a far cry from the 

"ideal" that had been promoted by the "pens behind the fleet." When the 

"second Trafalgar" failed to take place, apologists were quick to propose that 

this was only to be expected and that the "uneducated hopes" were disappointed 

because they had failed to grasp the distinction between what modem students 

of strategy call declaratory and action war planning. The implication was that 

the professional naval strategist did know the difference and had prepared all 

along to enjoy, as Churchill put it after the Battle of Jutland, "all the fruits of 

victory" without the need for the British to seek the battle at all. 

The distinction between declaratory and action policy, i.e., between what 

one says will be done and what is planned in fact, may be an obvious one in 

principle; in practice it is not, not even for the professional military planner. An 

important reason is that only declaratory strategy receives public exposure at 

home and abroad, and only it is read, discussed, absorbed, and liable to be acted 

upon. Declaratory plans, when repeated often enough, can take on a life of their 

own and asume an action reality that was never intended. This phenomenon 

is not unique to naval war planning at the tum of the century. Take, for example, 

the U.S. Navy's "Maritime Strategy" of the 1980s. Some people hold that the 

avowed aim of an immediate forward offensive was declaratory and intended 

to be a deterrent. Or did the "war-fighters" really mean what they said? Or is it 

the true sequence of events that planners became so carried away with their 

own declarations that in the course of public promotion, demonstrative exercises, etc., war-fighting came to imitate war-posturing? It needs also to be kept 

in mind that "real" war planning cannot be at too great odds with public 

professions for the simple reason that the discrepancy will eventually become 

evident from the kinds of military forces that are built. The fleets that went to 

war in August 1914 were built in the image of the decisive battle. 

It is true that there were some naval strategists on both sides in 1914 who 

were skeptical about the prospect of a royal road to victory. It is also correct 

that the war plans on both sides allowed for strategies short of an immediate 

pursuit of battle. Indeed, both the British and German naval war plans say 

remarkably little about quick and decisive action. It is nevertheless 
disingenuous to suggest that only lay opinion had been led astray, whereas the 

professionals knew better and were unsurprised by the absence of early battle 

action. When all was said and done. the naval profession as a whole was just 

as committed to what one commentator in 1915 called the "totally wrong idea 

of the meaning of naval supremacy .. ,1 

This paper is made possible thanks to the author's six-month appointment at 

the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, as a Secretary of the Navy 

Senior Research Fellow. I am also particularly indebted to the thoughtful advice 

and commentary of Commander James V.P. Goldrick. Royal Australian Navy, 

Professor John B. Hattendorf, Captain Wayne Hughes, U.S. Navy (Retired). 

Commander Graham Rhys-Jones, Royal Navy, Professor Geoffrey Til. and 

Mr. Frank Uhlig, Jr. If the final result does not quite live up to their high 

standards, only the author is to blame. 

vi 
Introduction 

Where is our Nelson? 

Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon 

The Jutland Scandal (1925) 

O

N TIlE AFfERNOON OF 31 MAY 1916, the British grand fleet and the 

Gennan High Sea Fleet met in the only massed battle fleet action of the 

First World War. After a series of exchanges that lasted some twelve hours, 

both sides, in what became known as the Battle of Jutland, broke off battle and 

failed to engage each other again. The Gennan decision was prompted by the 

unexpected appearance of the Grand Fleet's superior number of battleships; 

Admiral Sir 10hn lellicoe's decision not to pursue his fleeing opponent 

stemmed from his fear of running into a torpedo trap. Both sides claimed 

victory. The British rested their case on strategic considerations: the enemy's 

attempt to break into the North Sea had been thwarted, and he, not the British, 

had been forced to tum tail and hurry back to the safety of his ports, thus 

preserving British command of the North Sea. The Gennans claimed victory 

on tactical and moral grounds: they had inflicted heavier losses than they had 

suffered (the battle cost the British about 112,00 tons in fighting ships 

compared with 60,00 tons for the Gennans), but more important, the outcome 

had shown that the Royal Navy was not unbeatable after all. 

Government spokesmen in London sought to downplay the significance of 

the material losses and the failure to sink the High Sea Fleet as an episodic 

setback with no strategic or historical importance. To bolster their case, they 

pointed out that it had taken Nelson two years of waiting and watching to bring 

Napoleon's fleet to battle at Trafalgar in 1805. Even then, went Jutland's 

apologists, the destruction of the combined Franco-Spanish fleet had done 

surprisingly little to improve the safety of British merchantmen from commerce-raiding privateers. 

But few of the "uneducated hopes of the British nation" took solace in this 

explanation.2 Popular sentiment as voiced in the press and Parliament tended 
The Newport Papers 

toward the opinion instead that the Grand Fleet's failure to bring the Gennans 

to a final battle "showed a departure from the spirit of modem warfare as handed 

down in the Nelsonic tradition:,3 And in truth, the people of Great Britain had 

reason to be disappointed, for an outpouring of navalist literature and Admiralty 

pronouncements during the years leading up to the war had led them to believe 

that years of national investment in a superior battle fleet had guaranteed a 

quick. victorious, and war-deciding Trafalgar-like North Sea" Annageddon." 

As one of the war's key naval participants put it: 

When the late war burst on the nation with meteoric suddenness, the minds 

of the people were imbued with old ideas of naval warfare which created vast 

expectations of spectacular achievement and victories similar to those of 

Trafalgar and the Nile ... eyes were longingly fixed on the glories of a Fleet 

action.4 

Jutland came and went without "decision" and the war dragged on in the 

trenches of Flanders. "People asked," wrote Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon after 

the war, "What is wrong? Where is our Nelson?" Each day, he wrote, they 

looked "to find that the Gennan ships had been forced to come out and give 

battle to our fleet. They then confidently believed our day would at last have 

come-Trafalgar would be repeated, and ship after ship of the Gennan navy 

would be sent to the bottom ... 5 

Another Trafalgar, fought with steam and steel in place of Nelson's wooden 

walls, was central to popular and professional naval expectations about naval 

strategy and war on the eve of the First World War. War at sea was expected 

to be quick. destructive, and, most important, decisive. Battle fleets on both 

sides were built, exercised, and indoctrinated for this purpose, yet, as is argued 

in this paper, no one seemed to know exactly what a modem-day Trafalgar was 

to decide. 

2 
Decisive Battle 

Promise and Reality 

One of the unfortunate aspects of history ... is its inevitable concentration 

on battle as the decisive element in the unfolding of events. 

H.P. Willmott 

Sea Warfare (1981) 

A LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY naval chronicler wrote how, despite 

huge technological changes in the implements of combat at sea, "the great 

laws which govern it are the same now as a thousand years ago: concentrate 

your force, cripple your enemies' motive power, capture, risk, destroy.,,6 But 

what exactly was a victorious bataille royaZe to decide? What were its aims, 

and how did one tell a decisive from an indecisive battle? Or is decisive battle 

a chimera that, like "command of the sea," has a great deal of seductive 

significance for the naval historian and theorist but little operational meaning 

for the naval practitioner? Is perhaps Russell Weigley's recent study of the "age 

of battles" correct with the conclusion that decisive battle is the ideal of 

theorists, but that indecision has been the common outcome of war and battle? 7 

Few turn-of-the-century military and naval thinkers would have comprehended Weigley's thought that war, let alone its "highest expression" -battle-was futile. Most would have sympathized instead with Kolmar von der 

Goltz's observation that the humane way for the "civilized" nations to settle 

their military quarrels was to concentrate the maximum amount of violence in 

the shortest time span. This highly respected Gennan military thinker wrote in 

1903: "The fact that each new invention and each new advance of technical 

science seeks, in these days, to be utilised in military service need not ... alann 

us, or appear to us aught else than a retrogressive step in the direction of 

humanity and civilisation. By these means, on the contrary, the battle is only 

the more rapidly decided, and the war sooner brought to an end. ,,8 French naval 

officer Lt. A. Baudry sounded the same theme. Wars, he wrote, "tend to become 

less barbarous. In the conflict of civilized nations there is no more sacking and 
The Newport Papers 

pillage .... If the weapons of the field of battle are always being improved, war, 

outside the immediate area of their use, is becoming or tending to become, more 

human."9 

Most navalists of the Edwardian era also seconded the conviction of Baudry 

and others that victory in naval battle, especially victory won "gallantly," was 

one of the greatest accolades to the human spirit. But they were also practical 

men who idealized battle for its expected practical payoff. The problem was 

that few knew what exactly this payoff was to be. 

Three themes pervaded the navalist conception of the nature of battle's 

decisiveness. The first and most grandiose looked on battle as a grand-strategic 

undertaking whose outcome detennined or altered the course of history. The 

second, less ambitious, theme was strategic and held decisive battle as a 

prescription for shaping the course and outcome of the war at hand. Navalists 

believed decisive battle to be the royal road to command of the sea. The third 

and last theme was tactical and was centered on the importance of decision for 

its own sake, i.e., the collision of fleets that would tell the winner from the loser. 

The next discusion considers the historic decisiveness of battle from all 

three perspectives, especially the first two, by reviewing, first, the importance 

of naval battle in the overall chronology of so-called decisive battles, and next, 

the actual significance of some of history's most celebrated seagoing clashes. 

It is important to keep in mind that the spokesmen for the turn-of-the-century 

"golden age" of navalism rarely distinguished between battle's grand-strategic, 

strategic, or tactical decisiveness. This had two implications: first, the admixture of all three connotations had a mutually reinforcing effect so that the 

decisive battle idea became elevated to the apotheosis of all levels of naval 

strategic and tactical thought. Next, the failure to define decisiveness explicitly 

encouraged the tendency to reduce the ideas of grand-strategic and strategic 

decisiveness to the lowest common denominator of destructiveness at the 

tactical and material level of combat. A corollary consequence was that battles 

in which few ships were sunk were usually ignored for their strategic ramifications.10 

4 
Decisive Battle and Historical 

Counter-Determinism 

Battles decide the fate of a nation. 

Frederick the Great 

The Art of War (1753) 

T

HE CLASSIC COMPILA nON of decisive battles is Creasy's The Fifteen 

Decisive Battles of the World from Marathon to Waterloo.lI Creasy 

selected his battles as decisive "on account of their enduring importance and 

by reason of the practical influence on our own social and political condition, 

which we can trace to the results of these engagements. ,,12 Only one naval fight, 

the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, met this stringent criterion. Using a 

similar measuring stick, Fuller's Decisive Battles: Their Influence upon History 

and Civilization, also deemed only one naval engagement (Lepanto in 1571) 

worthy of inclusion among the twenty-nine battles that the author claimed had 

altered the "destinies of nations. ,, 13 Fletcher Pratt's The Battles That Changed 

History is more generous. It counts four sea encounters (Quiberon Bay in 1759, 

Chesapeake Bay in 1781, Trafalgar in 1805, and Midway in 1942) as "turning 

points after which things would have been a great deal different if the decision 

had gone in the other direction.,,14 

Several things stand out in these and similar listings. First, battles are selected 

and credited with decisiveness for what historian Joseph Dahmus has called 

their "counter-deterministic" impact on history. IS The idea here is that certain 

battle outcomes literally and permanently changed the "expected" course of 

history. For example, had Waterloo not taken place, or had Napoleon been the 

winner, the world would presumably have turned out very different from what 

it is today. Now, the thought that the course of human events is predetermined, 

and yet can be interfered with and revised by battle, is controversial to say the 

least. Be that as it may, it is clear that non-naval battle chroniclers have given 

little credit to the history-altering power of war at sea. 
The Newport Papers 

It is no surprise that the naval historians who wrote at the tum of the century 

promoted a different point of view. Most were also propagandists who sought 

to elevate the interest in naval affairs from its narrow professional backwater 

to a national pasion. 16 Their efforts to interpret history in light of war at sea 

were literally highlighted in the title of Alfred Thayer Mahan's most famous 

bok, The Influence of Sea Power upon History.17 

Mahan's navalist confreres, especially in Great Britain, could not agree 

more. Writing half a century afterward, even Major General I.F.e. Fuller, the 

historian of land warfare, enthused how Nelson's victory at Trafalgar decided 

far more than a contest between two fleets: 

In every respect, Trafalgar was a memorable battle and its influence upon 

history was profound. It shattered forever Napoleon's dream of an invasion 

of England. It brought to an end the 100 years struggle between her and France 

for the lordship of the seas. It gave England the Empire of the Oceans, which 

was to endure for over a century and make possible the Pax Britannica. More 

imediately important, it showed the world of 1805 that Napoleon was not 

invincible, and it compelled him to fall back on his Continental System, to 

sek to establish a universal empire which would economically strangle 

England, and which instead ended by his own political strangulation. Without 

Trafalgar there could have been no Peninsular War, and without the Peninsular War it is hard to believe that there would ever have been a Waterloo. \8 

It was on the sea, not land, wrote another author, where "all great destinies were 

decided.,,19 

Another observation is that, with the exception of a few instances, e.g., 

Waterloo, there is little agreement among historians on which battles should be 

counted as counter-deterministic. The reasons are not difficult to find. The most 

important one has to do with the self-evident difficulty of deciding which battles 

truly changed history. A related reason is that the historian is a captive of his 

own time and place, and will therefore be apt to give greater prominence to 

recent military events that involved his own nation or part of the world than 

those that happened far away a long time ago. This explains why, for example, 

an 1899 American author included his country's then recent victory (the year 

before) over the Spanish fleet at Santiago, Cuba, among history'S Twenty Most 

Famous Naval Battles?O 

A last observation concerns the evident paucity of naval battles in the annals 

of decisive warfare. One reason may be statistical. Most warfare takes place on 

land so that in theory, at least, the probability of a counter-deterministic 

engagement between armies is much greater than for fleets. Another explanation may be that history ultimately concerns human beings who inhabit land. 

Sea battles usually involve only the immediate fighting forces; fleets do not 

6 
Breemer 

seize and occupy territory or cities. The operations of annies, on the other hand, 

commonly inflict "collateral" damage on the area's civilian population, and the 

outcome of battle on land, more so then at sea, has commonly had "decisive" 

consequences for the control of real estate. 

A third, perhaps most obvious, explanation is that it has been extremely 

difficult for a naval battle to produce results that, as Frederick the Great put it, 

"determine the fate of the kingdom.,,21 The next discussion suggests that this 

is almost certainly the case. It argues that it takes a generous view of the meaning 

of decisiveness in order to rank even some of the most famous sea engagements 

in history as counter-detenninistic. Here we review three battles: Lepanto in 

1571, the defeat of the Spanish annada of 1588, and the Battle of Midway in 

1942. The decisiveness of history's arguably most famous naval battle, Trafalgar, is considered later on. 

The Battle �f Lepanto 

Lepanto was fought on 7 October 1571 between a Turkish fleet of about 220 

ships and a Christian (mainly Spanish and Venetian) coalition with over 200 

vessels. The chief Christian objective was to halt Turkish advances in the 

Mediterranean. For Venice, this meant, especially, saving Cyprus. The main 

Turkish aim was precisely the opposite. Each side believed its goal could be 

achieved only by eliminating the other's fleet. The coalition victory is commonly claimed to have secured Europe's Christian future. As one historian put it, 

"it detennined the fate of the world's future by settling that old struggle between 

East and West.,,22 But did it? Lepanto was certainly the most masive and 

destructive naval battle fought in the Mediterranean Sea since Marc Anthony's 

defeat at Actium in 31 B.C. It was also the first time since the fifteenth century 

that the Ottoman empire had heen defeated. Losses amounted to 150 ships and 

25,00 dead, compared with a paltry one dozen or so vessels on the Christian 

side. Clearly, the outcome's tactical decisiveness was overwhelming. 

The result could have heen strategically decisive as well. The elimination of 

the Ottoman fleet gave the allies effective command of the sea and the 

opportunity to assault Cyprus, whose occupation by the Turks had triggered the 

campaign. This did not happen; the coalition fleet dispersed to go home and 

celebrate. Contrast this with the Turks' resolve. Within one year they had 

asembled an equally powerful fleet, and command of the Mediterranean's 

eastern basin was back in their hands. The Venetians, without allies, were 

compelled to sign a humiliating peace treaty that not only confinued Turkish 

possession of Cyprus, but that also had the Venetians pay the cost of capturing 

7 
The Newport Papers 

the island! During the negotiations, the Turkish vizier pointedly reminded his 

opposite number of Lepanto's fleeting results: 

You have doubtless observed our courage after the accident which happened 

to our fleet. There is this great difference between our los and yours. In 

capturing a kingdom [i.e., Cyprus] we have cut off one of your arms, while 

you, in destroying our fleet, have merely shorn our beard. A limb cut off 

cannot be replaced, but a beard when shorn will grow again in greater vigour 

than ever.23 

In sum, Padfield and Shaw are correct with their respective conclusions that, 

strategically speaking, Lepanto was a "famous battle, but it had no significance," and "was not decisive:,24 

But if Lepanto failed to have a decisive impact on the war at hand, did the 

Christian victory have yet perhaps a grand-strategic significance in the sense 

that it halted Ottoman expansion and made Europe safe for Christianity? Hardly 

so. One year after the peace treaty, Turkish sea power had expanded its 

domination of the Mediterranean to the sea's central basin; Turks ravaged the 

coasts of Sicily and southern Italy at will. By 1575, four years after Lepanto, 

Turkish command of the sea was restored throughout the Mediterranean when 

an army was landed at Tunis to wrest the city from Spanish contro1.25 The reality 

is that the final arrest of Ottoman expansionism did not come for another 

century, and that, if there is such a thing as a decisive battle that reversed the 

specter of a Muslim Europe, the pride of place goes to the defeat of the Turkish 

army before Vienna in 1683. 

The Defeat of the Armada 

Naval battle chronologies frequently cite the loss of the Spanish armada in 

1588 as another Sea battle that shaped the course of history-in this case the 

triumph of freedom of (Protestant) religion and, if one is to believe General 

Fuller, the birth of the British Empire. The defeat of the armada, Fuller wrote, 

"whispered the imperial secret into England's ear," and "laid the cornerstone 

of the British Empire by endowing England with the prestige Spain lost. .. 26 But 

a different view has been offered by David Howarth, who wrote that "At the 

time, to people who knew, it did not seem a famous victory, and it was not until 

long after that history made it one ... 27 

Historians are divided over the exact size of the Spanish fleet that battled the 

English in the summer of 1588; numbers are somewhere between 100 and 

130.28 They do agree that in the course of a running engagement that lasted 

8 
Breemer 

seven days, actual Spanish combat losses numbered twenty, most of which were 

smaller auxiliaries, i.e., converted merchantmen. This signifies that the tactical 

decisiveness of the battle rested on a 15-20 percent loss rate with little damage 

to the annada's frontline galleons. 

Most of the English participants were disappointed by the results; few saw 

them as decisive. When the annada took advantage of a southerly wind to 

escape into the North Sea, the English fleet, fearing that the enemy might yet 

reverse course and land elsewhere on the coast, went home to replenish stores. 

Lewis has described the somber English mood at the time as follows: 

. . . the English, both seamen and people, were far from elated. They were 

uncertain of the future. They did not know the completeness of their victory. 

They did not realise the damage they had inflicted, either material or moral. 

They only knew, at least the seamen did, that the material results had been 

disappointing.29 

If the measure of tactical decisiveness is the infliction of an inordinate 

amount of damage, then the English had failed. The annada suffered its worst 

damage by far when, caught in a stonn while rounding Scotland and Ireland, it 

lost fifty ships. The battle's true decisiveness lay at the strategic level. Although 

his combat casualties had been relatively light, they were enough to reinforce 

the Spanish commander's pessimism about the expedition's chances to the 

point of no return. Fearing further losses and unable to make his junction with 

the Spanish invasion anny that waited in Flanders, the Duke of Medina Sidonia 

chose to vacate the field of battle and effectively surrender command of the 

Channel to the English fleet. 

But did the defeat of the annada at the combined hands of the English and 

the natural elements perhaps signal a decisive reversal of the course of history? 

Spain's King Phillip II evidently did not think so. Before his death in 1598 he 

dispatched three more fleets, the last of which managed to appear in the Channel 

undetected. Fortunately for the English it was not an invasion force but carried 

reinforcements for the Spanish anny in the southern Netherlands. 

The destruction of the annada decided events at a particular moment in 

history; this is perhaps all that can be credited to all so-called decisive battles. 

The event altered the momentary course of human affairs in the sense that it 

strengthened the confidence of those who believed that religious unity would 

not be reimposed by force of anns. The annada was part of the flow of 

history-it did not decide it. The final settlement of the religious wars of the 

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not come until the Peace of Westphalia 

in 1648. Garrett Mattingly's concluding summary on the events of 1588 sought 

to make the point: 

9 
The Newport Papers 

. . . in spite of the long, indecisive war which followed, the defeat of the 

Spanish Anada was really decisive. It decided that religious unity was not 

to be reimposed by force on the heirs of medieval Christendom, and if, in 

doing so, it only validated what was already by far the most probable outcome, 

why, �rhaps that is all that any of the battles we call decisive have ever 

done. 

The Battle of Midway 

There is a basic problem with Mattingly's conclusion on the one hand that 

the victory of protestantism was almost certainly foreordained, yet that the 

defeat of the armada was decisive. The same apparent inconsistency is found 

in some of the treatments of the Battle of Midway. Here, the tactical decision 

clearly went in favor of the Americans; Japanese losses amounted to four 

aircraft carriers, one cruiser, 250 aircraft, and 2,500 dead. Also, no historian 

questions that the outcome signaled the tum of the tide of the Pacific war, for 

the los of the carriers in particular forced the Imperial Japanese Navy to fall 

back on a strategically defensive campaign. In this sense, the American victory 

was decisive at the strategic level as well. To be sure, the U.S. Navy did not 

win full command of the sea-that came later, but Midway did rob the Japanese 

of what had thus far ben their command. Midway was strategically decisive 

because it put command in "dispute." 

But did Midway decide the war? Or, to reverse the question, would a 

Japanese victory have led to a different end result? No one has yet come forward 

to say that it would have. On the contrary, historians are evidently unanimous 

that, regardless of Midway, the Japanese never had the wherewithal to defeat 

the United States and make their counter-deterministic impact on history. 

According to this view, an American defeat at Midway would have been 

tactically decisive and could have set back the strategic course of the conflict, 

but its significance for the war's final outcome could only have been temporary. 

The point has been argued persuasively in Willmott's critique of Paul Dull's 

analysis of the battle. Dull, Willmott said, could not have it both ways with his 

claim that Midway was "the' decisive' battle of the war in the Pacific," even if 

a Japanese victory would not have led to an American defeat.31 He went on to 

explain why this "explains nothing": 

It is hard to se

 how a battle's conclusion could possibly prove "decisive" if 

a different result could only have prolonged the war and not changed its 

outcome. . . . The use of the word decisive about Midway's outcome 

implies one of two things: either that the American victory at Midway was 

one from which the Japanese could not recover or that it reversed a situation 

10 
Breemer 

which could never have been turned around without such a battle and victory. 

At best, both are doubtful propositions. . . . 

If the final defeat of the Japanese was assured because of the disparity of 

national resources, Midway was at best only a milestone on the road that led 

to defeat; it was not a signpost that marked a parting of the ways, one track 

leading to American victory and the other in precisely the opposite direction. 

The American victory in the Pacific war might have been inevitable. The 

American victory at the battle of Midway might have been decisive. But these 

statements cannot both be true. In short, the notion of an inevitable victory is 

irreconcilable with that of a decisive battle.32 

11 

Decisive Battle and Command of the Sea 

. until the enemy fleet is destroyed. it is not strictly correct to speak of 

either combatant having command of the sea. 

Gerald Fiennes 

Sea Power and Freedom (1918) 

T

HE HISTORIAN WHO DEMANDS that a naval battle merits the accolade 

"decisive" only if and when the outcome countennands the march of 

history asks too much. A practical interpretation requires that we lower our 

sights to the strategic level of analysis. It is here that the counter-detenninistic 

influence of the decisive naval battle must be sought-not counter-detenninistic in the grand historical sense, but for its influence on the course and outcome 

of the particular war at hand. This means that a battle may be called decisive if 

the outcome either brought an immediate end to the war at hand, or if it 

detennined the subsequent course of combat toward war tennination. For the 

navalist, decisive battle at the strategic level of analysis involved the struggle 

for command of the sea. Although he himself was skeptical about the practical 

prospects of the big battle, Julian Corbett has set forth its connection with 

command of the sea most clearly: 

Whatever the nature of the war in which we are engaged, whether it be limited 

or unlimited, pennanent and general command of the sea is the condition of 

ultimate success. The only way of securing such a command by naval means 

is to obtain a decision by battle against the enemy's fleet. Sooner or later it 

must be done, and the sooner the better.33 

One of Corbett's French contemporaries, Rene Daveluy, explained how command of the sea-deciding battle would solve all the "ulterior" tasks of navies: 

"Destroy the enemy and you will secure all these results at once: the protection 

of the coast will be assured and you will conclude successfully whatever 

operation the circumstances demand. ,,34 
The Newport Papers 

The trouble with this promise was that it gave the impression that the 

"friction" of war at sea could be overcome quickly and permanently with a 

single stroke. Corbett tried to warn his audience of the reality of "real" war at 

sea by which the glamorous prospect of a command-deciding battle would 

almost certainly be overtaken by a tedious waiting for battle while protecting 

one's commerce in an "uncommanded" sea.35 After all, why should an enemy 

agree to a single toss of the dice unless he is convinced of his own power to 

secure a favorable outcome? 

There is another reason why even an equally capable opponent might avoid 

battle. Namely, if it is granted that battle can indeed decide command of the 

sea, it follows that both sides will be inclined to seek a decision only if both 

subscribe to the same "regular system of warfare. ,,36 Conversely, battle for the 

explicit purpose of deciding the issue of command will not likely take place if 

one of the opponents holds to a different "philosophy" of war at sea, e.g., 

commerce raiding. This is likely to be the case if one of the antagonists is 

preoccupied with continental security. 

It is important to recall in this connection that the literature on naval warfare 

and strategy is dominated by the codified experience of the "seafaring" nations, 

that is to say, countries whose military and economic security has literally risen 

and fallen on the ability of fleets to protect against invasion or the stoppage of 

commerce. For those nations, Great Britain being the prime example, naval 

strategies aimed at command of the sea were a necessity. Conversely, for Great 

Britain's continental opponents, France and Germany, command of the sea per 

se was a luxury that did not warrant the risk of a decisive battle and perhaps 

losing a fleet that was necessary for the continental scheme of naval warfare. 

The first priority of this scheme was to deny a maritime opponent enough 

command to imperil a decision on land. The continental system of naval strife 

has therefore aimed at avoiding pitched battle and preserving the fleet instead 

for "secondary" purposes-diversionary raids against the enemy's coast, 

guerre de course, or defense against coastal invasion. Mahan's great accomplishment had less to do with his reputed discovery of the principles that 

spell the difference between victory and defeat, than his success at "selling" 

those principles as universal truths. One French commentator had it right: 

Mahan's system is part of the arsenal of Great Britain. Whether the English 

believe it or not, it is to their advantage to persuade the world that a war against 

them is scientifically and historically hopeless.37 

The belief that battle is the royal road to an all-securing command of the sea 

had a number of unfortunate consequences that would be painfully evident in 

the First World War. Most important, the phrase "decisive battle" encouraged 

14 
Breemer 

the belief that security at sea was an all-or-nothing condition that could be had 

on the strength of a superior battle fleet. True, thoughtful naval theorists, such 

as Corbett, recognized that absolute "sovereignty of the seas" was the slogan 

of pamphleteers, and that real-world control of the sea lines of communications 

was a circumstantial condition. Corbett also recognized that even should a battle 

fleet win command of the sea, light forces, i.e., cruisers, would still be needed 

to enforce it and protect shipping against surviving enemy "leakers." Unfortunately, these sobering reminders did little to dispel the popular image of 

command as the absolute condition that was portrayed by, for example, Clarke 

and Thursfield's unequivocal assertion that "There is no such thing as partial 

or incomplete command of the sea .... It is either absolute, or its does not 

exist.,,38 

The image of command of the sea as an all-or-nothing condition, with battle 

as its key, conditioned the pre-war preoccupation with fleet action so that naval 

planners were all too inclined to reduce the real-world complexities of sea 

strategy to a single and overriding denominator: how to ensure that a hostile 

battle fleet would be brought to action. Yet, even as naval staffs on opposite 

sides of the North Sea were fixated with schemes and stratagems for luring the 

opponent into a general encounter, the high stakes of the "real" war cautioned 

against bringing matters to a head. 

The practicalities of the war at hand took over from its theoretical ideal as 

soon as the first shots were fired in August 1914. Both sides discarded the 

navalists' battle-oriented "system" and settled down to fighting instead their 

war as befitted their particular geostrategic circumstances and war aims. 

Admiral Bacon's reminder that the Grand Fleet's disproportionate losses at 

Jutland ought to be judged in strategic terms, that is to say, the Royal Navy's 

strategic terms, applied equally to the Germans in the context of their own 

system of naval strategy. 39 

Bacon's advice was sound enough, but the fact remains that the British and 

German admiralties did look to comparative battleship strength and losses as 

the principal measure of strategic advantage and therefore the most reliable clue 

as to which side would have command of the sea. Moreover, and as Bacon 

himself well knew, the concept of battle 's strategic decisiveness was invariably 

linked with the idea of tactical annihilation. The dream of "another Trafalgar" 

took its cue far less from the strategic advantages that Nelson's victory 

presumably brought, than from the wish to duplicate the great admiral's tactical 

achievement and produce, like Nelson, more than "merely a splendid victory. ,.40 

The vision of fleet action as the magic formula for a matter of general victory 

at sea spurred the tendency to subordinate the strategic ends of war to the tactical 

means of battle-war became confused with battle, and the logic of naval 

15 
The Newport Papers 

strategy was confounded with the logic of battle. Thus, pre-war Royal Navy 

planners contemplated the pros and cons of blockading Gennany's ports less 

with an eye on the resulting safety of shipping than on the chances that a 

frustrated enemy would come out and seek battle.41 

Perhaps the most hannful effect of the professional enamonnent with battle 

as the strategic cure-all was that planners gave only pasing attention to other 

day-to-day and less than decisive methods for disputing command. Most 

notorious is the broad failure on the part of the British before the war to 

thoroughly prepare for the protection of shipping in the event that battle did not 

live up to its decisive reputation.42 The general attitude was pure Mahanian: 

"Control of the highways of the oceans by great fleets destroys an enemy's 

commerce root and branch," whereas the "depredations" of scattered cruisers 

could merely inflict "immense vexation and even embarrassment. ,.43 (Emphasis 

added.) The Admiralty reluctantly acknowledged that it had a responsibility for 

the safe arrival of Great Britain's foodstuffs, but made it patently clear to a 

Royal commission in 1905 that it would not sanction a defensive scheme that 

it believed would weaken the fleet's readiness to fight the big battle. The 

pertinent paragraph in the commission's final report makes for intriguing 

reading to say the least: 

. . . in commenting upon the apprehension that the disposition of the British 

Fleet, squadrons, or ships might be adversely affected and the free action of 

the Admiralty impaired by popular pressure, exercised through Parliament 

upon the Government, thus influencing the Admiralty instructions to the 

admirals, it was remarked that the Admiralty could never allow their action 

to be influenced by any pressure, and yet consent to remain responsible for 

the conduct of the war .44 

16 
Decisive Battle and An

lation 

The idea that safety is of paramount importance, and that the defeat of the 

enemy is only secondary, is not only directly opposed to military principles, 

but it is calculated to undermine and destroy the military spirit. 

Admiral Sir Reginald Custance 

The Ship of the Line in Battle (1912) 

F

EW EDWARDIAN NA VAL PROFESSIONALS had the time or inclination 

to try and decipher the strategic, let alone grand-strategic, significance of 

decisive battle. For most of them, tactical annihilation on a Nelsonic scale 

sufficed as the measure of decisiveness at all levels of planning. And after all, 

for the practical sailor, the only concrete fonn of decisiveness that he could aim 

for by his own endeavors was at the fighting level of battle. The outcome might 

or might not detennine the campaign or war at hand, but by seeking pitched 

battle and the enemy's annihilation, he had done all that there was in his power 

to bring final victory. The fleet's job done, it was now up to the nation's 

leadership to tum the battle's tactical decisi veness into one of strategic proportions. The unfortunate side effect of this otherwise eminently practical vision 

was the deification of battle for its own sake. 

The tendency to portray battle as a "glorious" object can be found in the 

writings of the big gun enthusiasts of the era, for example, Lieutenant A. Baudry 

of the French Navy, and Admiral Sir Reginald Custance in Great Britain. 

Baudry admitted that command of the sea had "its importance," but added that 

if won without battle, it could only be an "incomplete fonnula." True victory, 

he insisted, could be had at the point of a gun, whereas "neutralization, 

bottling-up, dispersion without ... a great and decisive battle are only halfmeasures, half-successes ... 45 Custance, could not agree more. The "true aim of 

war," he wrote in 1912, "is always to destroy the enemy's fighting force," and 

"our watchword should be, not safety, but the victory which is only to be won 

by well-served guns in sufficient numbers at 'decisive ranges., .. 46 
The Newport Papers 

Custance was one of the era's most prominent tactical interpreters of the 

decisive battle. Decision for him was a function of the ability to "strike blows 

in greater number than those received." The key to doing so was owning a fleet 

that could envelop its opposite numbers with gunfire at "decisive range ... 47 He 

described this as the distance at which "the one combatant develops such a 

superiority of attack that the other ceases to be able to offer further effective 

opposition. ,.48 In other words, decision turned on a competition in destructiveness with massed broadsides as the arbiter. 

Custance's preoccupation with the tactical decisiveness of battle is particularly striking in his criticism of Japanese Admiral Heihachiro Togo's 

decision during the Russo-Japanese War to bottle up the Russian fleet in Port 

Arthur with "defensive" mines. Doing so, Custance complained, had only 

served to arrest the offensive spirit of Togo's opponent, Admiral Makaroff, 

thereby denying the Japanese the decisive battle that would have brought 

quicker victory and fewer casualties.49 The reluctance to rely on mines for fear 

that this would inhibit the chances of decisive fleet action seems also to have 

contributed to the Royal Navy's failure before the war to keep pace with 

offensive mine warfare technolo§ies and the timidity during the war to mine 

the High Sea Fleet's exit routes.s 

18 
Trafalgar 

Decisive Battle in Retrospect 

Trafalgar was the turning point in the long conflict between England and 

Napoleon. 

James Thursfield 

Naval Warfare (1913) 

T

HE BATfLE OF TRAFALGAR was the navalists' apotheosis of the 

decisive battle idea. If its hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson, was, in Mahan's 

words, the "embodiment of sea power," then for the naval professional and 

layman alike, the battle itself was the embodiment of sea power in action. 51 The 

encounter seemed to meet all the criteria of decisiveness. It is said to have 

reversed the course of history by arresting Napoleonic domination of Europe 

and ensuring instead one hundred years of "Pax Britannica"; it saved Great 

Britain from invasion and ended more than two centuries of Anglo-French naval 

strife; it proved, once and for all, the superiority of the offensive at sea; and 

tactically, of course, the Franco-Spanish defeat was of annihilating proportions. 

It is no wonder that one late-nineteenth century British naval author concluded 

that his country's "subsequent naval history, though notable enough, need not 

detain us. ,,

52 

Trafalgar's heady list of accomplishments is considered shortly. But before 

doing so, it is necessary to try and explain why Trafalgar in particular and not 

some other famous sea fight became the "model" for the decisive battle that the 

generation of naval officers one century afterward sought to emulate. Why not, 

for example, Quiberon Bay in 1759? It too staved off a French invasion plan. 

Or alternatively, why not the Battle of La Hogue (Barfleur) in 1692? One naval 

historian at least has rated it as important as Trafalgar.53 

Part of the answer has to do with the way Trafalgar was fought as 

foreshadowed in a comment made by Nelson shortly before the battle. He 

confided to an old comrade-in-arms how, "No day can be long enough to 

arrange a couple of fleets and fight a battle according to the old system ... 54 The 
The Newport Papers 

"old system" was the custom of fighting battle in opposing line ahead fonnations-fleets drawn up in long parallel lines, with each seeking to outlast the 

other, while exchanging weight of roundshot.ss Designed to ensure fleet order 

and discipline while guarding against being outflanked, the line ahead fonnation was basically a defensive tactic. The main preoccupation, wrote Corbett, 

was "not so much to break the enemy's line, as to prevent your own being 

broken."s6 It worked admirably, but it also offered little hope of breaking 

through the enemy fonnation to prevent his retirement and bring the fight to a 

conclusive result. But as Michael Lewis has observed, the naval leadership of 

the day was willing to pay the price: "The pursuit of total victory, with all its 

attendant glory and risk, was subordinated to the need for discipline and 

operational control. "

S7 

Trafalgar was different from La Hogue or Quiberon Bay in that it broke, for 

once and for all, the line ahead "fetish" that Mahan lamented had led to the 

preoccupation with "defensive consideration of avoiding disaster" over "offensive effort for the destruction of the enemy.',S8 Trafalgar and Nelson did for 

naval strategy and war-making what Napoleon had done on land: battle and 

annihilation replaced maneuver and limited aims as the "ideal" of strategy.S9 

The result was the discovery of the "true principles" of warfare that students of 

Napoleonic warfare believed would dominate future hostilities on land, and 

which Nelson's successors thought would be the hallmark of future naval wars. 

The Preliminaries and Battle 

Trafalgar was fought on 21 October 1805, two years and five months after 

France and England had resumed their war begun in 1793 but interrupted by 

the Peace of Amiens of 1802. Aligned with the British in the Third Coalition 

were Rusia, Austria, Sweden, and Naples. Spain and French-occupied Holland 

were allied with France; together they marshaled about ninety combat-ready 

ships of the line. The British number was some one-hundred twenty.60 

Between 1793 and 1802, the English navy had fought and won four major 

battles: Ushant ("The Glorious First of June") in 1794, Cape St. Vincent in 

1797, the Nile (Aboukir) in 1798, and Copenhagen in 1801. Its principal 

preoccupation between battles was to "observe" the French and French-controlled naval bases that were strung out between the Dutch island of Texel in 

the north and Toulon on the French Mediterranean shore. The purpose of 

observation was to prevent the opponent from concentrating his different 

squadrons so they might overwhelm the English fleet piecemeal and perhaps 

go on to raid England's overseas possessions, or even land an anny on the 

20 
Breemer 

English coast itself. French invasion fleets had twice so far ( 1 796 and 1798) 

managed to elude the English blockade and sail for rebellious Ireland. Both 

expeditions failed, due to bad weather in the first instance and the Royal Navy's 

interception of the force in the second. Meanwhile, the British naval blockade, 

the seizure of France's overseas possessions, and the operations of cruising 

squadrons had served to effectively halt all French oceangoing commerce. Not 

interrupted was the enemy 's important coastal trade. 

The principal plus on the French side of the naval ledger during the wars of 

the first two coalitions had come by way of guerre de course against British 

merchantmen. It has been estimated that just over 5,00 vesels engaged in 

overseas trade were captured by French cruisers and privateers between 1 793 

and 1 800.61 It has also been calculated that this amounted to an annual average 

loss rate of almost seven percent of English shipping engaged in overseas trade. 

The peak year was 1 797, when 1 1 .5 percent of shipping fell victim, prompting 

pasge of the Compulsory Convoy Act that required shipping to sail in escorted 

groups.

62 

The enemy's depredations caused consternation in London's fmancial circles, 

but they never came close to threatening the kind of economic strangulation 

that appeared within the grasp of the V-boats in 1917. For one, Great Britain 

of 1800 was far less dependent on imported foodstuffs than it would be one 

century later. For another, and unlike 19 14- 18, new ship construction more 

than made up for losses; between 1793 and 18 15, the number of Englishregistered vessels went up from 16,329 to 24,860.63 Having said this, it should 

be noted that the French commerce-raiding activities had nevertheless demonstrated the limitations and relativeness of command of the sea. The Royal 

Navy's superior battle fleet and the victories at Vshant and elsewhere had 

secured a general command, but this had not been enough to keep the enemy 

from carrying out a hannful "secondary" strategy. Historian Geoffrey Marcus 

put his finger on the problem: "The immense numerical superiority of the Navy 

was of small avail in the face of these destructive, mosquito-like tactics.,,64 

It is also noteworthy in this connection that the privateer's bounty was richest 

in precisely those sea areas where English sea power was at its peak: the North 

Sea and the English Channe1.

65 This suggests that command of the sea is 

nonnally a relative condition not only in tenns of time and place (i.e., the 

concepts of temporary and local command) but also infunctional tenns. In other 

words, the situation is conceivable in which one side may exercise enough 

command to protect against one enemy course of action, say, invasion, yet be 

incapable of preventing another-for example, commerce raiding. It follows 

from this that if two opposing navies pursue asymmetrical objectives, both can 

theoretically be in a position to claim command. 

21 
The Newport Papers 

Both sides resumed their customary strategies when war broke out again in 

1 803-the English fleet blockaded the French and allied ports, and the French 

re-embarked on guerre de course. A key additional preoccupation for the Royal 

Navy was to monitor the progres of French preparations to launch a crosChannel invasion. These had begun in 1 80 I, and by the summer of 1 805 more 

than 90,00 of Napoleon's troops were encamped at different Channel ports 

with enough landing craft to transport an army of more than 1 50,00

.66 

The series of naval operations that culminated in Trafalgar began in March 

1 805 with the escape of Vice Admiral Villeneuve's I I-strong line-of-battle 

squadron from Nelson's cordon at Toulon. Villeneuve, joined by six Spanish 

vessels, sailed for the West Indies to ravage the British island possessions and 

shipping. While so engaged, he was to await for forty days the arrival of the 

Brest and Rochefort squadrons, so that the entire fleet could next return to 

Europe and "proceed direct to Boulogne."67 He was also instructed that, should 

the rendez-vous with the 2 1-ship Brest squadron fail to take place, he was to 

return to Cadiz, Spain. In the event, the Brest force never managed to slip 

through the British blockade. The Rochefort squadron of five ships broke out, 

failed to join up with Villeneuve, and broke back into port, having achieved 

nothing. 

Nelson followed Villeneuve a month or so afterward, after he had concluded 

that his original hunch that another French invasion of Egypt was in the offing 

was wrong. His fleet of eleven ships-of-the- line arrived in the Caribbean on 4 

June. When, four days later, Villeneuve learned of his antagonist'S arrival, he 

decided to return to Europe before the end of the 40-day waiting period. Nelson 

pursued again, hoping to catch his prey before Cadiz, where he thought the 

French might be heading. Again, the two missed one another as Villeneuve 

aimed his fleet for the northern Spanish port of Ferrol instead. On his way, he 

fought an inconclusive encounter with a British squadron under Admiral Sir 

Robert Calder. 

As soon as Nelson learned that Villeneuve had gone north and that therefore 

the Medi terranean was safe, he too turned north, to join Admiral Sir William 

Cornwallis' fleet off Brest. This was the Channel fleet that was responsible 

for fighting the "last stand" against invasion in the event the blockading 

squadrons had failed to keep the French fleet from concentrating. Uncertain of 

Villeneuve's next move, Nelson is said to have followed the Royal Navy's first 

rule: "In case of any uncertainty as to the enemy's movements, all forces are to 

fall back on Ushant, so as to cover the mouth of the Channel. At that point it is 

of the utmost importance to have a decisive superiority, for if the enemy 

command the Channel, England is lost.,,68 In mid-August 1 805 the Channel 

Fleet boasted forty ships-of-the-line. 

22 
Breemer 

Napoleon's plans to use Villeneuve 's fleet to support an invasion of England 

had meanwhile evolved through a bewildering succession of orders and 

counterorders. In mid-May he sent instructions for Villeneuve to team up with 

the Ferrol squadron to drive off the English blockading force before Rochefort, 

and then to join forces with Admiral Ganteaume at Brest. The "principal object 

of the whole operation," he wrote, "was to procure our superiority before 

Boulogne for some days. ,,69 But there was a catch, or actually two catches. 

Villeneuve's junction with the Brest force was to be consummated without 

risking an encounter with the Channel fleet. Should this prove impossible, the 

admiral was given two options: he could sail around Ireland in order to 

rendez-vous with the Dutch squadron at Texel, or, if this proved infeasible, he 

was allowed to return to Cadiz. These orders arrived in the West Indies after 

Villeneuve's departure. 

In late July, after he had learned that his admiral had returned to Europe, 

Napoleon drew up a new set of instructions that urged Villeneuve to sail for 

Brest, enter the Channel and ensure command of the sea "even for three days 

only." The emperor wrote: "If you can make me master of the Pasde-Calais 

even for three days only, by God's help, I will put an end to the destinies and 

existence of England.,,7o 

Although he was worried about the condition of his Combined Fleet and 

uncertain about the strength and whereabouts of his opponents, Villeneuve 

obeyed and left Ferrol with twenty-nine ships-of-the-line on 13 August. His 

anxieties got the best of him however; a week later the fleet dropped anchor at 

Cadiz. In another ten days an English force of thirty ships-of-the-line had 

gathered under Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood to bar his exit. At the end of the 

next month Nelson arrived to take command. Villeneuve and the Combined 

Fleet were trapped. 

The French emperor learned of Villeneuve's return to Cadiz one week after 

he had decided to raise his camp at Boulogne and march on Vienna.71 Furious 

with his admiral's apparent timidity, he ordered Admiral Rosily to Spain to 

asume command of the fleet. At the same time he sent Villeneuve his last 

instructions, ordering him to take the fleet to Naples. A raucous council between 

the French and Spanish ship captains followed. According to Villeneuve, 

everyone "recognized that the ships of the two allied nations were for the most 

part badly manned from the weakness of the crews .... To put to sea in such 

circumstances," he wrote, "has been termed an act of desperation."n 

But Villeneuve had become a desperate man. Although he had yet to receive 

the formal letter of his dismissal, rumors were rife. On 15 October, three days 

before the Combined Fleet set sail for its final destiny, Villeneuve graciously 

wrote of Rosily's impending arrival that, "I should indeed be delighted to yield 

23 
The Newport Papers 

him the foremost place," but added that, "It would be to terrible for me to lose 

all hope of having an opportunity of showing that I was worthy of a better 

fate:·

3 

On 21 October the two fleets, twenty-seven English and Thirty-three Franco-Spanish ships, clashed. The battle lasted about six hours. The English lost 

no ships, but half of the fleet was badly damaged and casualties were 1 ,700, 

including Nelson. The Combined Fleet lost one ship due to battle damage, but 

sixteen others were captured (thirten of these were lost in the next two days in 

a storm or were recaptured by the French). Four of the surviving French vesls 

were captured on 4 November. Allied casualties were 2,60 dead and wounded 

plus 7,00 prisoners, including Villeneuve. 

24 
What Did Trafalgar Decide? 

Of all the great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so 

barren of immediate results. 

Julian S. Corbett 

The Campaign of Trafalgar (1910) 

P

AUL KENDY HAS WRITN THAT Trafalgar was "probably the most 

famous naval battle in history:,74 No other naval battle has received as 

much literary glorification.75 It was the last great sea fight under sail whose 

outcome arguably laid the foundation for one hundred years of Pax Britannica. 

In sum, Trafalgar was Mahan's "superb battle" that the Edwardian naval 

profesional turned to for inspiration on how victory at sea was to be achieved.76 

But fame aside, what did Trafalgar accomplish? What was decided? Was 

Nelson's victory counter-deterministic? Did it save Europe from French 

domination and was therefore Waterloo "but the coup de grace" and Trafalgar 

"really the mortal wound?,,77 Was Great Britain saved from invasion, or is 

Corbett right that this is merely a "legend" designed to fill the void of a great 

victory "which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result?,,78 Or is 

the fair question to ask whether Trafalgar's decisiveness was strategic? Did the 

battle secure British command of the sea and thereby produce greater security 

for Great Britain's seagoing enterprises and less so for the French? In short, 

which decisive outcome was it that Nelson's successors on the eve of the First 

World War believed another great battle would emulate? 

Trafalgar and Tactical Decisiveness 

There is no argument about Trafalgar's decisiveness at the tactical level of 

combat The scale of human los was unprecedented in two hundred fifty years 

of sailing ship warfare. According to Fred T. Jane, Franco-Spanish casualties 

averaged three hundred or more per ship; in one, the killed and wounded 
The Newport Papers 

amounted to five out of every six.79 Between captures and other mishaps, the 

Combined Fleet practically ceased to exist, yet it is an interesting side note that this 

was a different kind of "anlation" than naval planers one hundred years later 

envisioned. Anlation on the eve of World War I meant destruction; preferred 

in Nelson's day was the term's broader meaning, i.e., the opponent's nullification. The most rewarding way of doing so was to capture, not sink his ships, 

for this not only diminished the enemy's strength, but also added to one's own.80 

Nullification of the enemy was probably all Nelson had in mind when he 

prepared for battle. He was fully aware of Napoleon's invasion scheme (he had 

led an abortive raid against the Boulogne landing flotilla in 1801), but there is 

no evidence that his desire for an annihilating battle was spurred by the fear of 

a French invasion.

81 There are vague hints in his correspondence at strategic 

motives; for example. his expressed hope that Villeneuve's defeat would bring 

a "seven years' peace. "

82 Yet, the burden of his writings indicate little preoccupation with the strategic, let alone grand-strategic significance of battle. He 

was a fighting admiral, not a strategic planner. 

Nelson was a vainglorious man as well. For him battle was a professional 

responsibility, but also the opportunity to make his mark on history. But this is 

not the same as saying that he had calculated that Villeneuve's annihilation was 

necesry to change the course of history. The admiral's instructions when he 

left England to take command of the blockading force before Cadiz contained 

no hint that only an absolute victory could guarantee his country's survival. His 

orders were to prevent French interference with the forthcoming pasage of an 

English expeditionary fleet to Naples, and to do so, he was given practically a 

fre hand, and was not directed specifically that only the enemy's anihilation 

would to the job.83 As far as Prime Minister William Pitt was concerned, all 

Nelson had to do was keep Villeneuve from putting to sea. 

As Corbett has phrased it though, "the ideas of the Government did not quite 

coincide with those of Nelson. "84 For Nelson, merely containing the enemy, no 

matter how decisive from the strategic point of view, was not enough. He did 

not question that keeping Villeneuve locked up in Cadiz would have ensured 

the safety of the expeditionary force, but after having chased his opponent back 

and forth acros

 the Atlantic for seven months. he resolved that it was "annihilation the country wants 

.

.. 8S 

Trafalgar and Strategic Decisiveness 

Much more doubtful than the battle's tactical decisiveness is Trafalgar's 

strategic significance. If the strategic measure of a naval battle's decisiveness 

26 
Breemer 

is the gain or loss of command of the sea, then for the British, at least, Trafalgar 

was unnecesary. They already owned "general" command before the battle, 

and the victory did little to improve this. At best, Trafalgar was the "knock-out 

blow" in a fight the British had long won on points. 

The defeat of the Combined Fleet did not improve the safety of British 

shipping. In fact, the opposite occurred. Just as Jutland forced Germany one 

century later to recognize that British naval power would not be defeated by 

"traditional" means, leaving unrestricted U-boat warfare as the only option left, 

so Trafalgar prompted Napoleon to break up his fleet for cruiser warfare. 

"That," wrote his minister of the marine, "would be a war after my own heart . ..86 

The results showed; in 1 804, French privateers and cruisers accounted for 387 

captures; in 1 806 they rose to 5 19, and in 1 8 10 they climbed to 619, prompting 

a public outcry.

8

7 The Naval Chronicle wrote at the time: "We have more than 

once referred to this very surprising fact that, with a fleet surpasing the navy 

of the whole world, and by which we are enabled to set so large a portion of it 

at defiance, we cannot guard our coasts from insult. .. 88 

Merchantmen were not the only vessels that remained at risk in spite of 

Trafalgar, for British warships continued to be lost to enemy action at about the 

same rate as before. Between 1 793 and October 1 805, eighty-seven combatants 

of all types were sunk or captured by the enemy; between November 1 805 and 

1815, sixty-one were lost, plus another twenty due to American action in the 

War of 1 8 1 2.

8

9 Neither did the elimination of the Combined Fleet negate the 

necessity to escort civilian and military shipping. The hazardous supply condition of Wellington's army on the Iberian Peninsula is illustrative. 

In the summer of 18 13, Wellington reported that shortage of supplies had 

forced his army to use the smaller caliber French ammunition. "Surely," he 

wrote to London, "the British navy cannot be so hard run as not to be able to 

keep up communication with Lisbon with this army.,,90 A few days later he 

ruefully compared his desperate supply situation with the French ability to send 

reinforcements by sea.91 

One of Mahan's most famous phrases holds how "Those far distant, stormbeaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked stood between it and 

the dominion of the world . •• 92 Did Trafalgar tie the final knot in the economic 

noose the British fleet had laid around France's ports and harbors? Not likely. 

While it is quite true that British naval preponderance effectively reduced 

French overseas shipping to zero, command of the sea was never complete 

enough to interfere with the enemy's much more important coastal trade.93 

Furthermore, oceanic commerce made a comparatively small contribution to 

France's overall import and export picture. Most trade was carried on with the 

continental neighbors and few, if any, overseas imports involved vital 

27 
The Newport Papers 

foodstuffs or critical raw manufacturing materials. Economic historians have 

accordingly long found that the loss of overseas income had a marginal effect 

at best on France's fiscal condition. For example, at the same time that its trade 

had been swept from the seas, the French government spent one billion francs 

on public construction and social services without having to raise one 10an.94 

Unfortunately, Royal Navy planners gladly embraced Mahan's "far distant, 

storm-beaten ships" thesis.9s When mated with the decisive battle idea, the 

result was a single formula for success that went something like this: a superior 

battle fleet equated to decisive battle victory; victory in decisive battle meant 

command of the sea, and command of the sea ensured war-terminating 

economic pressure. The equation was elegant for its simplicity, but it ignored 

such complex intervening variables as the opponent's actual dependence on the 

sea, and the risk that he might force a decision on land before economic pressure 

had taken its toll. 

As explained by Willmott, the adjective "decisive" must mean one of two 

things: the battle outcome is one from which the loser can never recover, or it 

reverses a situation for the victor that could not have been brought about in any 

other fashion. This signifies that the strategic meaning of Trafalgar's decisiveness must be found in one of the following: either Villeneuve's defeat spelled 

the end of Napoleon's pre-Trafalgar naval and military ambitions, or Nelson's 

victory was Great Britain's last chance of fulfilling its naval and military goals. 

Trafalgar and Grand-Strategic Decisiveness 

Napoleon's plan to invade the British Isles is the emperor's one history-altering ambition that Trafalgar is alleged to have ruined. Not only is Villeneuve's 

defeat supposed to have scotched the emperor's immediate scheme to master 

the Channel for "three days only," but also his long-term hope to subdue Great 

Britain by sea. The reality is much less dramatic-the battle did not save the 

country from seaborne assault, either in 1805 or later. The story that it did is, 

to repeat Corbett, a "legend." 

It is a legend on several counts, even if it is allowed that Napoleon did mean 

to invade. This is not a trivial point, for historians are still at odds over the 

question of whether the invasion scheme was a legitimate threat or merely an 

elaborate hoax. Desbriere, for example, maintained that an invasion plan existed 

all right, but that it was abandoned sometime in 1 804.96 He also seconded 

Napoleon's claim that the Army of England was kept at Boulogne instead of 

further to the east in order to lull the Austrians into a false sense of security. 

97 

28 
Breemer 

Corbett agred that, considering Napoleon's military genius otherwise, the "astounding confusion in which the arrangements sank ever more deeply," meant "that 

so great a captain can never have intended the operation seriously. ,,98 

Other, mostly more recent historians are les convinced that Napoleon did not 

mean busines. Howarth, for example, believes that "the threat was real" that "of 

all his conquests, this was the one he most pasionately wanted.,,99 Glover, too, 

has concluded that Napoleon had "every intention of landing in England and 

crushing his enemies there on their own soil."lOO And finally, Weigley thought 

that the Army of England's very appearance of unreadiness, i.e., the shortage 

of horses and wagons, was proof of the plan's genuineness. 10

1 

The truth lies probably somewhere in between. To begin with, Napoleon 

invested too many resources over too long a time, and his wish to bring Great 

Britain to heel was too strong for the invasion scheme to have been but a 

deception. The plan was real; what was missing for its execution was the right 

opportunity, that is to say the right opportunity on Napoleon's terms. The 

invasion army was genuine; what gave the preparations the appearance of a 

charade was Napoleon's failure to make an equal investment in creating the 

opportunity to get across. Napoleon sought to "master" the Channel on-thecheap-by relying on luck (a dark winter's night to slip by the British fleet 

undetected, a popular uprising in Ireland, the off-chance that Villeneuve had 

the courage and good fortune to escape unmolested from his British guardians) 

or his opponent's mistakes (by, for example, planting the rumor that Villeneuve 

had sailed for Egypt). Unfortunately for Napoleon, luck was against him and 

the British made no mistakes. It is an intriguing paradox that the same man who 

sought battle at all cost on land sought his crowning achievement at sea by 

subterfuge and maneuver. 

As a practical matter, the question whether the invasion plan was a hoax or 

not is irrelevant for Trafalgar's outcome or, for that matter, even Villeneuve's 

failure two months earlier to give Napoleon his "three days.,,

102 Recall that in 

the first instance Villeneuve had no intention to sail north -his destination was 

Naples. Had Trafalgar been less than decisive and the Combined Fleet still 

seaworthy, or (and this is difficult to imagine), had the decision gone the other 

way, that is where he presumably would have gone. 103 As to the second 

instance, even if Villeneuve had not aborted his departure from Cadiz in August 

and had managed to arrive off Boulogne intact, he would have found the 

invasion army gone. Namely, already before Napoleon received positive confirmation that his admiral had returned to Cadiz, his army had already broken 

camp to march against the Austrians. The irony of the situation did not escape 

Desbriere, when he wrote how Napoleon began his mobilization against Austria 

before he could be certain that Villeneuve's fleet had not arrived in the Channel 

29 
The Newport Papers 

and "would not carry out the great design which was to enable England to be 

stricken to the heart."I04 

Even had the anny still been waiting at Boulogne, it is extremely doubtful 

still that Villeneuve's fleet could have mastered the narrow seas to cover an 

invasion. If this scenario had come to pass, the invasion fleet would almost 

certainly have fallen in with Cornwallis' Channel fleet of forty sail. Desbriere 

at least believed that "there can be no possible doubt that Villeneuve would 

have been overwhelmed.,,105 

If Nelson's victory did not settle his country's military fate, did perhaps 

Villeneuve's defeat catalyze a decline of Napoleon's war fortunes? Popular 

navalist lore at the turn of the century has commonly portrayed it that way. 

Thus, one writer told how Trafalgar ensured "the ultimate fall of the continental 

Dictator," for it was "the ships of Nelson that were the victors at Waterloo. "l06 

Again however, Trafalgar's mystique looms larger than its factual significance 

for either the outcome of the war of the Third Coalition itself, or the final 

denouement of the Napoleonic wars ten years later. It was after Trafalgar that 

Napoleon reached the zenith of his power and seemed to be most unbeatable. 

At the time of its occurrence, most European politicians and military men, 

including French and British, looked on Trafalgar as a "sideshow" -heroic and 

upl ifting for the British and embarrassing for the French, but hardly relevant 

for the great contest that was being fought in central Europe. In London, the 

news of Nel son's victory did little to raise Prime Minister Pitt's spirits. Only 

days before he had learned of his Austrian allies' defeat at Ulm; his effort to 

entice the Prussians into the Coalition was about to collapse. It happened on 2 

December with Napoleon's "thunderstroke victory" at Austerlitz. 107 In another 

three weeks the Austrians were compelled to sign the humiliating Treaty of 

Pressburg that broke the Third Coalition and, so it is said, Pitt's heart. lOR 

The evidence neither supports the popular belief that the defeat at Trafalgar 

tenninated, for once and for all, Napoleon's naval ambitions, including his hope 

to send an army across the Channel . Great Britain's military-political leadership certainly did not see it that way at the time. Four months after Trafalgar, 

shortly after Austerlitz, the head of the Admiralty, Lord Barnham, feared that 

Napoleon's defeat of Austria would bring "an immediate revival of his design 

to invade this country." 109 The fortification of the coastline and the raising and 

training of an anti-invasion militia went on unabated. 1 10 And the British had 

good reason to still cast a wary eye across the Channel, for as one studies the 

events of 1 805 and after, it becomes clear that Napoleon considered Trafalgar 

a temporary setback, not an unalterable failure of his invasion plan. Almost 

until the very end of his regime, the emperor continued to deluge his Navy with 

instructions of one sort or the other to prepare for an amphibious assault. I I I 

30 
Breemer 

Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the British naval leadership at the 

time were far less ready than their successors to proclaim the fmality of 

Trafalgar was the (successful) Copenhagen campaign of 1 807 and the (failed) 

Walcheren expedition of 1 809. Both operations were aimed at preventing a 

buildup of enemy naval power that would outstrip the Royal Navy. 

I 12 Had 

Trafalgar reversed Napoleon's fortunes beyond repair, the preventive destruction of the Danish fleet and the attempt to destroy the Antwerp dockyards would 

not have been necessary. I 13 

Trafalgar was the last big fleet engagement of the Napoleonic wars, and 

popular history proposes more than a coincidence. It urges instead that, after 

having been defeated at sea with tiresome regularity, Trafalgar was for France 

the final straw that broke the back of its aspiration for a naval "destiny." Again 

though, there is nothing about Napoleon's post-Trafalgar planning that suggests 

that he had resigned himself to a condition of pennanent naval inferiority. 

Within days after the battle, the emperor and his naval minister laid the 

groundwork for a new fleet that ultimately was to have numbered 1 50 shipsof-the-line. The goal was never reached, but a few years later "another navy, 

as if by magic, sprang forth from the forests to the sea-shore. ,, 1 1 4 By 1813 it 

numbered eighty ships ready for sea with another thirty-five building. 1 1 5 

Fortunately for the British, they never learned how Napoleon expected to use 

this force. The more immediate dangers on the Continent, and mismanagement 

of relations with reluctant coalition partners ensured that France's fleet-in-being 

remained exactly that. Nevertheless, Lord Melville, then First Lord of the 

Admiralty, conceded after the emperor's final defeat that, had Napoleon won 

his battles in Russia and at Waterloo, he would "have sent forth such powerful 

fleets that our navy must eventually have been destroyed, since we could never 

have kept pace with him in building ships nor equipped numbers sufficient to 

cope with the tremendous power he could have brought against us." 1 16 

31 

Jutland and the Burden of Trafalgar 

Officers and men were haunted by the fear that the day of reckoning might 

never come. 

Arthur J. Marder 

From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: Vol. II. 

The war Years-To the Eye of Jutland ( 1965) 

O

N 4 AUGUST 1 9 14, Great Britain declared war on Gennan� and "her 

large Fleets vanished into the mists at one end of the island. ,,

11 "Rarely," 

wrote Arthur Marder, "had a fleet so itched for action or had so much confidence 

in the outcome."lI8 On the opposite side of the North Sea the High Sea Fleet 

too waited for der Tag, convinced that "the English Navy would immediately 

take the offensive.,, 1 1 9 Both fleets were confident that the titanic clash would 

take place in the first weeks of the war. After all, everyone expected the conflict 

to be short, and both navies were imbued with "a healthy contempt for the 

defensive. ,,

12

0 Few planners on either side seem to have given much thought as 

to how they would reap the strategic benefits of a victorious new Trafalgar. 

Pre-War Expectations of a North Sea Trafalgar 

It is difficult to conclude that, for all the mental and material preparations 

that went into the prospect of a North Sea Trafalgar, much systemic thought 

was given to how success on a Nelsonic scale was to be exploited. The theory 

of the decisive battle offered a number of possibilities. First, a great fleet action, 

ideally coinciding with a victorious battle on land, might ensure the short war 

that everyone expected. Both navies toyed with this hope early in the war, but 

it soon became evident that the opposing annies had settled down in the trenches 

for the duration and were not likely to be dislodged by a big battle at sea. In any 

case, neither side had given much thought on how decisive fleet action would 

support the annies' strategies on land. 12

1 This lack of "jointness" cut the other 
The Newport Papers 

way as well. Neither the British, nor the Gennan anny war planners seem to 

have considered whether and how naval battle might contribute to their goals 

on land. The British general staff was interested in the Navy 's plans mainly so 

as to make sure that its expeditionary divisions would get across the Channel 

safely. Its Gennan counterpart was even less interested. It thought that naval 

interference with the British cross-Channel expedition would be helpful, but 

not necessary. When the Navy's chief of staff, Vice-Admiral Baudission, asked 

Von Molkte in 1908 whether the anny preferred that the fleet not be initially 

involved in a decisive battle, he was told that the anny had no objections to the 

fleet's full involvement and that it "would happily greet any tactical success 

that the fleet would have.,,

122 

If battle at sea alone could not end the war, succesful fleet action might still 

"enable" victory by securing the sea for an invasion of the opponent's homeland 

and, alternatively, against a counter-invasion. Both sides, the British more so 

than the Gennans, contemplated "peripheral strategies" against the opponent's 

homeland, and both reckoned with the possibility of an enemy seaborne asult. 

Even so, few naval and military planners on both sides thought the prospect of 

an invasion so menacing that a decisive sea battle was called for. 123 None of 

the various schemes that Churchill and others put together before and during 

the war for launching a naval offensive in the Baltic was contingent on wiping 

out the High Sea Fleet first. The reason why one or the other, Frisian island or 

the Pomeranian coast, were never invaded had nothing to do with the continued 

existence of the Gennan battleships, but everything to do with the realization 

that the would-be invaders would not be able to maintain themselves once they 

had landed. 

On the more practical side of war planning, the British Admiralty reiterated 

the "paramount value of the quick decision" on the grounds that, with command 

of the sea in hand, cruisers could then be dispatched to hunt down the enemy's 

remaining commerce raiders. 1 24 The argument that the big battle would ensure 

the safety of one's shipping, rang "strategic" enough, but ignored historical 

experience, including the aftennath of Trafalgar itself: big fleet engagements 

have rarely solved the safety of shipping. 

It is a curious paradox that Admiralty planners thought a decisive battle 

desirable for the sake of the safety of shipping and yet insisted that the threat 

to commerce would be minor compared with the depredations of Napoleon's 

privateers. Corbett, who was more aware of the linkage between naval strategy 

and commerce protection than most of his contemporaries, thought that "so far 

as it is possible to penetrate the mists which veil the future," the prospects for 

commerce destroyers making "any adequate percentage impression" were "less 

34 
Breemer 

promising than ever.,,

1 25 Tirpitz agreed, rejecting attack against trade as the 

High Sea Fleet's goal. 

126 

It can be protested that Corbett, Tirpitz, and the naval profession were right; 

cruiser warfare on the surface would have inflicted little injury, and no one 

could have anticipated the havoc wrought by the U-boats.

127 The argument 

misses the point, however. How could another Trafalgar be promoted as 

decisive for the safety of shipping when the anticipated losses before the battle 

were not a major concern. If the loss of merchant shipping while command was 

still in "dispute" amounted to no more than "breaking eggs" while the fleet 

waited to fry its "omelette," then why have an omelet at all, especially since the 

war was not supposed to last more than a few months? 128 

A final observation concerns the Admiralty's ambiguous connection between the tactical means of fleet battle and the strategic objective of the safety 

of the sea lines of communications. This is that, when all was said and done, 

the strategy of sea warfare took a backseat to the strategy of battle. The upshot 

was that the protection of commerce was effectively treated as a "necessary 

evil" that could not be allowed to interfere with the "practical" business of battle 

but that yet needed to be put forward as the "national" reason for decisive battle. 

The irony is that the Admiralty and its supporters in the press made no effort 

to hide the priority of the Navy's goal over the nation's. The Royal commission 

report of 1 905 on the Navy's readiness to safeguard the arrival of enough 

foodstuffs has already been cited-"popular pressure, exercised through Parliament upon t�e Government" could not be allowed to interfere with the Navy's 

concentration for battle. The Admiralty'S pen-writing supporters joined in. The 

"defence of commerce," wrote Thursfield in Brassey's Naval Annual in 1906, 

"is merely a secondary object" that "must not in any way or to any degree" be 

permitted to take precedence over the "primary object" of command of the 

sea. 129 If the safety of seagoing traffic was not the fleet's and battle's first 

purpose, then what was it? 

The gap between strategic purpose and battle planning was even wider in the 

German Navy. Before the war the German Navy formulated a series of 

ambitious plans for fighting an offensive Entscheidungschlacht on the high 

seas. 130 They contained a great deal of discussion about the operational "necessity" for such a battle, but at no point was it made clear what the outcome was 

expected to deliver other than a great deal of carnage. But then, the High Sea 

Fleet was built for "luxury." It was a fleet with all the material qualifications 

for battle but without a reason other than the vague notion that it would, 

somehow, bring Weltmacht. Had the High Sea Fleet fought and won its big 

battle, it is doubtful that it would have known what to do with the results. 131 

35 
The Newport Papers 

Decision at Jutland-What If? 

A lot of ink has been spilled over the great things that Jellicoe would allegedly 

have accomplished if he had had Farragut 's fortitude and "damned the torpedoes" to fight the High Sea Fleet to the bitter end. This article concludes with 

another look at some of those claims, a good summation of which appeared in 

a small, unhappy bok published five years after the war. 'The pertinent passage 

is cited at length: 

There can be no doubt that a decisive naval victory at Jutland in 1916, in 

which the Gennan fleet had ceased to exist, would have had a tremendous 

moral effect on the Gennan nation and her annies in the field. With her annies 

driven back into their trenches, with enemies on all sides, and here communications with the outside world lost, Gennany in 1916 may be regarded 

as a besieged and doomed fortress .... Had there been a decisive victory 

for us at Jutland, there certainly would have been no submarine campaign of 

1917, for the submarine campaign was based on the Gennan fleet. A decisive 

victory would have shortened the war and all its attendant suffering and 

expense, and England and Europe a very different Europe. A decisi ve Jutland 

would have thrown the Baltic completely open to us and our Allies. We could 

have entered the Baltic at any time had we so desired; ... The Russian fleet 

would have been free to take the seas. Russian annies could have been landed 

on the coasts of Gennanf. Berlin would have been occupied and Rusia would 

have ben saved to us.

! 2 

Final judgments are impossible ninety years after the event. Certainly, some 

things would have turned out differently if the British fleet had proved that the 

one hundred years since Trafalgar had not diminished its invincibility. For one, 

if the High Sea Fleet's defeat had indeed aborted the "supreme submarine peril 

of 19 17," it is unlikely that the United States would have been drawn into the 

war. 133 Jutland's draw may have been decisive in that regard at least. 

But would a victorious Grand Fleet (which would have suffered its own share 

of losses) have entered deep into the Heligoland Bight to wipe out the "hornets' 

nests"? The chances seem slim for the same reason that the Admiralty embraced 

an "open" blockading strategy. The rejection of the old "close" blockade had 

nothing to do with the High Sea Fleet but everything to do with "sneak attack" 

weapons-with mines, torpedoes, and submarines. Moreover, the uninterrupted operations of the U-boat bases in Flanders, despite the nearness of British 

guns, suggest that the U-boats were quite capable of sustaining themselves 

without the High Sea Fleet's protective guns. 

Even if the argument that a glorious Jutland would have saved Russia from 

revolution is addressed on its own logic, it is clear that this would have depended 

36 
Breemer 

entirely on the ability of (a much reduced) British Navy to force the Baltic and 

maintain a secure l ine of communications. This would have had to be done in 

the face of still substantial numbers of older enemy cruisers and battleships, 

mines, torpedo boats and, of course, submarines. The losses the allies suffered 

when they tried to force the Dardanelles at Gallipoli are a clue to the likely 

consequences. In short, the scenario is improbable for the same reasons that the 

specter of a post-Jutland assault against the U-boat nests lacks credibility. 

Not much is left to be said about Germany's decisive battle expectations after 

Jutland. Jutland gave the Navy all it could have hoped for to begin with-a 

material victory and a setback to the "world prestige of the English."l34 Writing 

a couple of months after the event, Scheer came to terms with the reality of 

naval strategy: 

Should the future operations take a favorable course, it may be possible for 

us to inflict appreciable damage on the enemy; but there can be no doubt that 

even the most favorable issue of a battle on the high seas will not compel 

England to make peace in this war. The disadvantages of our geographical 

position compared with that of the island Empire, and her great material 

superiority, can not be compensated for by our Fleet. . . . 135 

Both the British and the German navies went to war in 1 914, burdened by 

the legacy of Trafalgar. For the British, Trafalgar meant a set of expectations 

about war at sea that Trafalgar did not fulfil then and that could be lived up to 

even less in the technological environment of 1 914. But if the British can be 

criticized for having too grandiose a vision of battle, Germany 's naval planners 

were guilty of strategic myopia. Their image of an Entscheidigungschlacht was 

focused on a tactical and material trial of strength that would bring the winner 

"prestige." And it is in this sense perhaps that Trafalgar turned out decisive 

more than one century after the event. "We were defeated," wrote Tirpitz after 

the war, "by the old traditional English naval prestige.,, [36 

37 

Notes 

1. Percival A. Hislam, "Some Aspects of the Naval War, " United SenJ;ce Magazitle, 

March 1915, p. 573 

2. Admi ral Sir R eginald Bacon, The Jutland Scandal, 3d edition (London: Hutchinson 

& Co., 1 925), p. 3. 

3. Maj. A.C.B. Alexander ,Jutland: A Pleafor a Naval General Staff(London: Hugh Rees, 

Ltd, 1 923), p. 5 t . 

4. Bacon, op cit. , p. 2. 

5. Ibid. , p. 3. 

6. Edward Kirk Rawson, Twenty Famous Naval Battles-Salamis to Santiago, Vol . I. 

(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1899), p. . 

7. Russell E. Weigley, The Age c?f Battles: TI,e Questfor Decisive Waifare From Breitenfeld 

to Waterloo (Bloomington: I ndiana University Press, 1 991). 

8. Lt. Gen. Baron von der Goltz, TI,e Nation in A nns (London: Hugh Rees, Ltd, 1 903), 

pp. 5-6. 

9. Lt. A. Baudl)', French Navy, The Nallal Battle: A Study of the Tactical Factors (London: 

Hugh Rees, Ltd, 1914), p. 6. 

to. A case in point is the Battle of Chesepeake Bay between nineteen British and 

twenty-four Frenc h ships-of-the-line on 5 September 1 781. In tenns of ships engaged, 

damaged inflicted (the B ritish were forced to bum one damaged ship after the battle) , or 

numbers of casualties (the Bri tish suffered 336 killed and wounded, and the French 209) , the 

action did not amount to much by the standard of 1 8th centul)' naval warfare. However, 

the B ritish flight ensured Gene ral Cornwallis ' blockade and surrender shortly thereafter at 

Yorktown, thus breaking the B ritish will to continue the war with the American revolutionaries. See, David Syrett, The Royal NallY itl A merican Waters 1 775- 1 783 (A1dershon 

Scholar Press, 1 989) , p. 1 92. 

11. E.S. Creasy, TI,e Fifteen Decisi,'e Battles c?f the World from Marathon to Waterloo (New 

York: John B. Alden, 1 885). 

12. Ibid. , p. iii. 

13. Maj. Gen. j.F.C. Fuller, Decisi,'e Battles: Their Influence Upon History and Cillilisation 

(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1 940) . 

1 4. Fletcher Pratt, TI,e Battles TI,at Chatlged History (Garden City: Hanover House, 1 956) , 

p. 12. 

15. Joseph Dahmus, Seven Decisive Battles of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 

1983), p. 13. 

16. For an excellent account of the role of navalist propaganda in shaping public opinion 

in Edwardian England, see W. Mark Hamilton, The Nation and the NallY: Methods and 

Organization of British Navalist Propaganda, 1 889- 1914 (New Yark: Garland Publishing, Inc., 

1 986), especially, Chapter V: "Pens Behind the Fleet," pp. 1 76-253. 

17. Capt. A.T. Mahan, The ltifluetlce of Sea Power upon His tory 1160- 1 783 (London: 

Sampson Low, Marston, Searly, & Rivington, 1 889) . 

18. Maj. Gen. j.F.C. Fuller, A Military History c?f the Westem World: Vol. 2. From the 

Defeat c?fthe Spanish A nnada. 1 588, to the Battle c?f Waterioo. 1815 (Cited hereafter as A Military 

History of the Western World. Vol. 2 (New York: Minerva Press, 1 967) , pp. 403-4. 

19. J.H. Burton, History c?f Scotland, Vol. I, 1 873 , p. 318. Cited in Adm. Sir Cyprian 

Bridge, Sea-Power and Otller Studies (Lo ndon: Smith, Elder & Co ., 1 910), p. 17. 

20. Rawson, op. cit. A later generation of historians is more likely to agree with Robert 

Seager's conclusion that the Battle of Santiago was "no battle at all," but a four-hour tu rkey 

shoot that pitted four Spanish cruisers and two destroyers against four U.S. battleships and 

one cruiser. Robert Seager II. Alfred Thayer Mahatl: TI,e Man atld His utters (Annapolis, Md: 

Naval Institute Press, 1 977). p. 380. As Frank Uhlig has reminded the author however, there 

is not necessarily a contradiction between a "turkey shoot" and a decisive battle. 

21. Jay Luvaas, ed., Frederick the Great on the Art c?f War (New York: The Free Press, 

1 966). p. 1 39. 

22. E. Keble Chatterton, Battles by Sea (London: Sidgwick a nd Jackson, Ltd, 1 925) , 

p. l 02. 
The Newport Papers 

23. Cited in Lord Eversley, The Turkish Empirefrom 1288 to 1914 (New York: Dodd, 

Mead and Co., 1 923) , p. 1 44. 

24. Peter Padfield, Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigm in the Rise of the West, Vol. 

I, 148 1-1654 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1919), p. 1 08; and Stanford Shaw, History 

of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Vol. I, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of 

the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1 808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 976) , p. 1 78. 

25. Shaw, op. cit., p. 179. 

26. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, Vol.2, pp. 38, 39. 

27. David Howarth, The Voyage of the Annada : The Spanish Story (New York: The Viking 

Press, 1 981), p. 240. 

28. Marain and Parker believe that the Annada set sail from Lisbon with 1 30 ships. See, 

Colin Marain and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Annada (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1 988), 

p. 1 05. Michael Lewis has calculated that the English met a combined fleet of 1 05 ships. See 

his The Spanish Annada (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1 960) , p. 101 . The difference 

between the two numbers is partly accounted for by the fact that not all ships that departed 

reached the English Channel. Jt appears, however, that the larger number is the more reliable 

one, for Marain and Parker cite a Spanish report of 21 August 1 588, three weeks after the 

clash in the Channel, claiming that 112 vessels were still intact. Marain and Parker, p. 229. 

29. Lewis, p. 1 74. 

30. Garrett Mattingly, The Annada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1 959) , p. 401. 

31. Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the ImperialJapanese Navy (1 94 1- 1 945) (Annapolis: 

Naval Institute Press, 1 978) , p. 166. Cited in H.P. Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin: 

Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies Febrnary to June 1942 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 

1 983), p. 519. 

32. Willmott, p. 559. 

33. Sir Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Longmans, Green 

and Co., 1 91 1), p. 1 69. 

34. Cdr. Rene Daveluy, French Navy, TI,e Genius of Naval Waif are. Translated by Philip 

R. Alger (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1910), p. 11. 

35. See Corbett, op. cit. , especially chapter I, "The Theory of the Object-Command 

of the Sea," pp. 87-104. 

36. This is how Colomb described "true naval strategy," i.e., aimed at establishing 

command of the Sea . Rear-Adm. P.H. Colomb, Naval Waifare: Its Ruling Principles and Practices 

Historically Treated (London: W.H. Allen and Co. , 1 891), p. 7. 

37 . J. Legrand, "La guerre sur mer et ses lecons," L1 Marine francaise, no. 1 3, 1 900, p. 

89 . Cited in Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 

187 1- 1 904 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1 987) , p. 336. 

38. G.S. Clarke and J.R. Thursfield, TI,e Navy and the Nation (1 897) , pp. 1 26-27. Cited 

in Geoffrey Till, Maritime Strategy and tile Nuclear Age (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 982) , 

p. 1 30. 

39. Adm. Sir R.H. Bacon, TI,e Lje of Sir John Rushworth, Earl Jellicoe (London: Cassell 

and Co., Ltd, 1 936) , p. 306. 

40. When he set out to fight the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson made it abundantly clear 

that he meant to annihilate the enemy fleet and not score "merely a splendid victory." See, 

Walter Jerrold, TIle Nelson Touch (London: John Murray, 1918), p. 84. 

41. Between 1 905 and 1912 the Admiralty produced a series of war plans that envisaged 

a blockade of the German coast. In each case though, the object of bringing economic 

pressure to bear was secondary to the primary goal of enticing the High Sea Fleet to come 

out and give battle. For the authoritative account of British naval blockade planning, see 

A.c. Bell, A History of tile Blockade of Gernlany and of the Countries Associated with Her in the 

Great War, 1 9 14-1918 (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office (HMSO) , 1961 ), especially, 

pp. 23-32. The volume was originally published in 1917 " for official purposes only." 

42. For an account of the abysmal lack of systematic Admiralty thinking about the 

problem of commerce protection, or what the author generously called " confused thi nking," 

see Bryan Ranft, "The Protection of British Seaborne Trade and the Development of 

Systematic Planning for War, 1 860-1906," ill Bryan Ranft, ed., Teciltlical Change atld Britis/I 

NaIJal Policy 1 860-1 939 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1 977) , pp . 1-22. 

40 
Breemer 

43. Capt. A. T. Mahan, Sea Power and Its Relations to the War of 1 81 2, Vol . II (Boston: 

Little, Brown, and Co. , 1919), p. 1 26. 

44. Archibald Hurd, The Merchant Navy, Vol. I (London: John Murray, 1 921), p. 214. 

45. Baudry, op. cit. , p. 7. 

46. Adm. Sir Reginald Custance, The Ship of the Line in Battle (Edinburgh: William 

Blackwood and Sons, 1912) , pp. 105, 1 1 3. 

47. Ibid. , pp. 1 , 3. 

48. Ibid. , p. 3. Custance was a critic of Admiral Fisher's all-big gun Dreadnought policy 

and proposed to rely instead on a decisive "hail offire" brought to bear at medium and close 

ranges. 

49. Ibid. , pp. 131-32. 

50. See, Capt J.S. Cowie, Mines, Minelayers and Mine/aying (London: Oxford University 

Press, 1 949), p. 31. 

51. Capt. A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain, 

2 volumes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. , 1 897) . 

52. Cdr. Charles Robinson, The British Fleet: The Growth, Achievements and Duties of the 

Navy of the Empire (London: George Bell and Sons, 1 895), p. 47. 

53. Helmut Pemsel, A History of War at Sea, trans. Maj. D.G . Smith (Annapolis: Naval 

I nstitute Press, 1 977), p. 1 56. The author gave Trafalga r and La Hogue seven points each 

for their numerical and strategic importance and tactical execution. Neither received points 

for political significance. The author is grateful for John Hattendorfs reminder that Barfleur 

and La Hogue were, strictly speaking, two battles, separated by two days . Ha ttendorf also 

reminded the author of the 1719 Battle of Cape Passa ro in which a British fleet under Admiral 

Byng annihilated a twenty-strong Spanish fleet. 

54. Cited in John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The E,/olution of Naval Waif are (New 

York: Viking Penguin, I nc), 1 989, p. 50. The end of naval warfare under sail did not diminish 

the crucial importance oftime in preparing for and concluding battle. The author is indebted 

to James Goldrick's reminder that Jellicoe was well aware that the geography of the North 

Sea meant that if the Grand Fleet and High Sea Fleet were to meet at all, it would almost 

certainly happen in mid-afternoon, and there would therefore be little time to bring about 

a decision. 

55. For the evolution of the line ahead tactics, see Julian S. Corbett, Fighting Instructions 

1 530-1816 (Navy Records Society 1 905) (New York: Burt Fra nklin, 1 967), pp. 1 33-320, 

a nd William Maltby, " Politics, Professionalism, and the Evolution of Sailing-Ship Tactics, 

1650-1714," in John A. Lynn, ed. , Tools of War: Instruments, Ideas, and Institutions of Waifare, 

1 445-1871 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 990), pp. 53-73. 

56. Corbett, Fightir'g Instructions 1 530-18 1 6, p. 1 78. 

57. Michael Lewis, The Navy of Britain : A Historical Portrait (London, 1 948), p. 470. Cited 

in Maltby, p. 69. 

58. Capt. A.T. Mahan, Types of Naval Officers Drawnfrom the History of the British Navy 

(Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1 901), p. 13. 

59. Frank Uhlig, Jr. , has reminded the author that, though not then in use, the term 

"operations" would be a more precisely accurate description for Nelson's achievement than 

"strategy" wars. 

60. Pemsel, op. cit. , p. 83. 

61. Hurd, p. 68. 

62. G.J. Marcus, A Naval History of England: Vol. 2, The Age of Nelson (Sheffield: 

Applebaum Ltd., 1971), pp. 1 1 9-20. 

63. Hurd, p. 69. 

64. Marcus. op. cit. , pp. 36 1'-{)2. 

65. The reason the Narrow Seas were the privateers' most popular hunting grounds was 

their nearness to their well-protected bases, of course. 

66. Richard Glover, Britain at Bay: Defence Against Bonaparte, 1 803-14 (London: George 

Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1 973), p. 14. The author's data are taken from Edouard D esbriere's 

Projects et Tentilles de Debarquement aux Isles Britantli ues (Paris, 1 902). 

67. Edouard Desbriere, The Naval Campaign oj 1 805: Tr<ifalgar (Paris, 1 907). Translated 

and edited by Constance Eastwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 933) , p. 1. 

41 
The Newport Papers 

68. Ibid. , p. 1 05. A footnote by the English editor points out that this quotation could 

not be traced. 

69. Ibid., p. 68. 

70. Ibid., p. 72. 

71 . Ibid. , pp. 1 45-56. 

72. Ibid. , p. 1 67. 

73. Ibid. , p. 1 82. 

74. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall oj British Naval Mastery (New York: Charles 

Scribner's Sons, 1976), p. 1 24. 

75. The Battle of Jutland may have received as much literary coverage as Trafalgar, but 

it was not "ldorious. " 

76. Mahan, The Ufo oj Nelson: The Embodiment oj the Sea Power oj Great Britain. Vol. II. 

p. 398. 

77. This was the claim made by Capitaine de Vaisseau Gabriel Darrieus in his War t1n 

the Sea: Strategy and Tactics. trans. Philip R. Alger (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1 908). p. 

54. 

78. Julian S. corbett. The Campaign oj Trqfalgar (London: Longmans, Green and Co .• 

1910). p. 408. 

. 

79. Fred T. Jane, TI,e British Bailie-Fleet: Its Inception & Growth Throughout the Centuries 

(London: S.W. Partridge & Co., 1912), p. 123. 

80. Nelson almost certainly had the "nullification" ofViUeneuve's fleet in mind. A few 

hours before the battle he and Captain Blackwood discussed how many captures would 

constitute a "glorious victory." Blackwood thought that fourteen would be enough, while 

Nelson would not be satisfied with fewer than twenty. Nelson also made it clear that the 

enemy's ships were to be destroyed only as a last resort if they evaded capture and attempted 

to flee back to Cadiz. See. Mahan The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment oJthe Sea Power oj Great 

Britain, Vol. II, p. 373. 

81 . After the failed attack against Boulogne in 1 801. Nelson wrote of the French landing 

craft he had seen that, "I do not think it possible to row to England; and sail they cannot." 

Cited in Marcus, op. cit .• p. 1 95. 

82. Jerrold, p. 72. 

83. Corbett, The Campaign of Trqfalgar, p. 320. 

84. Ibid. 

85. Jerrold, p. 84. 

86. Desbriere. The Naval Campaign of 1 805: Trqfalgar, p. 1 48. 

87. Hurd, p. 68. 

88. Marcus, p. 366. 

89. Otto von Pivka. Navies oj the Napoleonic Era (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 

1 980). pp. 217-21, 239-45. Pivka's data were taken from William Laird Clowes's classic The 

Royal Navy: A History jr" m tl,e Earliest Times to the Present. (London: Sampson Low, Marston 

and Co .• 1 899) . 

90. Michael Glover. Wellington as Military Commander (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd, 

1 968). p. 118. 

91. Ibid .• p. 1 60. 

92. The Influence oj Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire. Vol. II, p. 118, cited 

in G.J. Marcus, p. 242. 

93. See, Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, p. 60. 

94. Bell. pp. 1 9-20. 

95 . In 1 909 the British consul-generals i n Hamburg. F rankfurt-on-Main. Amsterdam. 

and Antwerp responded to a request by the Foreign Office that they investigate Germany's 

dependence on overseas supplies. and reported that an economic blockade would be of little 

conse uence. The Admiralty thought that their report made a "somewhat too favourable 

case" for Germany. Without marshalling any supporting evidence. it preferred to conclude 

that a blockade would create shortages "such as to produce a condition of grave distress little 

short of national calamity." Ibid. , pp. 26-27. 

96. Desbriere. The Naval Campaign oj 1 805: Trqfalgar. p. 1 00. 

97. This is reported by the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, in his memoirs. 

Cited in Colomb, op cit .• p. 200. 

42 
98. Corbett, The Campaign of Trafalgar, Vol. I, p. 1 7. 

99. Howarth, op cit., p. 45. 

1 00. Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, p. 16. 

lOt . Weigley, op cit. , p. 376. 

Breemer 

1 02. Three days was only one of Napoleon's progressively conservative estimates of the 

time needed to get his anny across the Channel . In June 1 805 he asked for six hours, later 

six days, then fifteen days, and ultimately two months. See, William Laird Clowes, p. 181. 

103. Cautious critics of Nelson's tactics at Trafalgar pointed out that, had he been faced 

with an aggressive and skilled fleet, the result could well have been disaster. See Corbett, 

Fighting 1mtructions 1 530-1816, pp. 335-42, 351 -58. Nelson's genius was, of course, that he 

knew that Villeneuve's fleet did not have those qualities. 

104. Desbriere, The Naval Campaign of 1 805: Trafalgar, p. 1 46. 

105. Ibid., p. 1 34. 

1 06. Robinson, op cit. , pp. 46-47. 

1 07. Just as Trafalgar became synonymous with the decisive battle at sea, so Austerlitz 

came to personity "the thunderstroke Victory that destroyed the enemy anny in a single clash 

of anns" that became "almost every general 's hoped-for means to the goaL " Weigley, p. 

389. 

1 08. Legend has it that the news of Austerlitz was "the blow that broke Pitt's heart. " The 

prime minister's final words reputedly were. "I am sorry to leave the country in its present 

condition." See Richard Eddington. The Duke-A Ufe of Wellington (New York: Viking 

Press, 1 943)'1' 1 03 . 

1 09. Cite in Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, p. 1 23. 

1 10. For an excellent discussion of Great Britain's anti-invasion measures, see Richard 

Glover, Bn'tain at Bay, especially chapters 5 and 6. 

111. For example, in the spring of 1 808 Napoleon calculated that he would have 

seventy-four French and allied ships-of-the-line that, combined with armies at Bayonne, 

Cadiz, Lisbon, Brest, and Texel, "will give us a good chance against the English." Capt. 

D.A. Bingham, ed., A Selection from the Letters and Dispatches oj the First Napoleon, Vol. II. 

(London: Chapman and Hall, 1 884), pp. 377-78. 

112. At the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1 807, Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon agreed to 

combine all the European navies and overwhelm the British with numbers. Glover has 

calculated that in the summer of 1 808 the confederated fleet numbered 1 55 ships-of-the-line. 

Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, pp. 28-29. 

1 1 3. See, Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, r' 16. 

114. Edward Pelham Bre nton, The Nava History of Great Bn'tain From the Year 1 783 to 

1 846 (London: Henry Colburn, 1 847), p. 1 1 2. 

115. For an overview of Napoleon's ship-building efforts after Trafalgar, see Richard 

Glover, "The French Fleet, 1 807-1814; Britain's Problem and Madison's Opportunity." 

Joumal of Modem History, no. 39, 1 967. pp. 233-52. 

116. Cited in Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, p. 1 9. 

117. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911-1918, Vol. I. (London: Odhams Press, 

1 938), p. 1 85. 

118. Arthur ]. Marder, From tlte Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher 

Era 1 904-1919: Vol. 11, 17,e War Yeary-To the Eve of Jutland (London: Oxford University 

Press, 1 965), p. 436. 

1 19. The High Sea Fleet's commander-in-chief in 1916-1 8, Admiral Reinhardt Scheer, 

wrote after the war "how universal was the conviction that the English Navy would 

immediately take the offensive." Admiral Scheer, Germany's High Sea Fleet in the War 

(London: Cassell and Co., 1 920), p. 26. Scheer's predecessor during the war, Admiral Von 

Ingenohl. wrote later how "The entire development of the fleet ... , our tactics, our 

maneuvers, even part of our building program ... , hinged on the expectation of a decisive 

battle within or near the Gennan Bight." Korvettenkapitaen Otto Groos, Der Krieg in der 

Nordsee: Vol. 1, Von Kriegsbeginn bis A nfang September 1914 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler 

und Sohn, 1 920). p. 62. This volu me is part of the official Gennan account of the First World 

War at sea, Der Krieg zur See. 

1 20. This is how the popular British naval commentator Percival A. Hislam characterized 

the Gennan Navy's "spirit" in his The A dmiralty of the A tlantic-A n Enquiry into the 

43 
The Newport Papers 

Development oj German Sea Power Past, Present, and Prospective (London: Longman's, Green 

and Co., 1 908), p. 59. 

121. The lack of joint planning between the military and naval staffs in both Great Britain 

and Gennany is legendary. Thus, even as the British general staff finalized plans to dispatch 

the Anny to France, the naval staff schemed to use it as a "projectile" to be fired against 

Gennany's Baltic coast. See, Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914-1918, Vol. Two 

(London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1 961 ) , pp. 76-84. The absence of coordination 

on the Gennan side was even worse. According to Luigi Albertin's study, "There had been 

no collaboration between the Anny and Navy general stafIS. Gennany had acquired a 

powerful navy worthy to measure swords with that of England. But the Navy chiefS were 

not asked for their opinion on the problems raised by a possible European war. The Origins 

of the War of 1914, Vol. III. Translated and edited by Isabella M. Massey (London: Oxford 

University Press, 1 957), p. 249. 

1 22. Cited in Ivo Nikolai Lambi, 7111' Navy and German Power Politics, 1 862-1914 (Boston: 

Alen & Unwin, 1 984), p. 342. The Army's lack of interest in the Navy's war plans is nothing 

short of astounding. For example, had the High Sea Fleet been used with daring and 

imagination in the early days of the war against the Qargely unprotected) cross-Channel 

convoys that were shuttling the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France, the effect on 

the outcome of the Gennan offensive might well have been decisive. The author is indebted 

to Frank Uhlig, Jr. for this observation. 

123. The last of a series of invasion debates in the British Committee oflmperial Defence 

(CID) appears to have occurred in October 1914, and concluded that, though raids were still 

possible, no Gennan invasion was foreseeable. This conclusion substantially reaffinned the 

CIO's finding of 1 908. See, Hankey, op cit. , pp. 212-2 1 . The Germans on their part were 

evidently aware of the Admiralty's scheme to land forces in Denmark or elsewhere along the 

Baltic coast, but neither the naval nor the Anny staff thought the danger i mportant enough 

to risk a big naval battle. See, Lambi, p. 342. 

1 24. For the Admiralty's 1 907 war plans, see Lt. Cdr. P.K. Kemp, The Papers of A dmiral 

SirJohn Fisher, Vol. II (London: Navy Records Society, 1 964) , pp. 316-468. 

1 25. Corbett, Some Principles oj Maritime Strategy, p. 283. 

1 26. While he sought to create "his" navy and learned that Wilhelm II still wavered 

between a battle and a cruiser fleet, Tirpitz reminded the emperor that because "commerceraiding and transatlantic war against England is so hopeless, because of the shortage of bases 

on our own side and the superfluity on England's side, that we must ignore this type of war 

against England in our plans for the constitution of the fleet." Cited in Jonathan Steinberg, 

Yesterday's Dete"ent: Tirpitz and the Birth oj the Gennan Battle Fleet (London: Macdonald, 

1 965), p. 209. 

1 27. Fisher's famous memorandum of 1 913 in which he warned that Gennan submarines 

would target merchant vessels without warning was one of a few exceptions. But it is not 

clear if Fisher's prediction was the result of serious study, or one of his famous shoot-fromthe-hip verbal thunderbolts. 

1 28. In explaining that some merchant ship losses were unavoidable early in the war, 

Corbett remarked that, "We cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." Corbett, 

Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, p. 284. 

1 29. J.R. Thursfield, "The Attack and Defence of Commerce" inJohn Leyland and T.A. 

Brassey, 7111' Naval A nnual 1 906 (Portsmouth: J. Griffin and Co., 1 906), p. 66. 

1 30. The German admiralty statTs last pre-war offensive battle plan Was the brainchild of 

Vice-Admiral Baudissin. I n 1 909 he prepared instructions for the High Sea Fleet "to do the 

greatest damage to the enemy, risking all the forces at your disposal. To that end you should 

attack the enemy with all available high-sea forces." Cited in Lambi, p. 343. Also cited in 

P.M. Kennedy, "The Development of Gennan Naval Operations Plans against England, 

1 896-191 4," Paul M. Kennedy, ed. , 7111' War Plans oJtlre Great Powers 1 880-1 9 14 (London: 

Unwin Hyman, 1 979), pp. 1 84-85. The Baudissin plan was quickly succeeded by the High 

Sea Fleet's de Jacto war strategy of a "waiting offensive. " 

131 . Tirpitz' call for a "place in the sun" or his insistence that Great Britain be shown 

that Germany was her equal are not considered strategic ends that might be decided by battle. 

1 32. Maj. A.C.B. Alexander, op. cit. , p. 51. 

44 
Breemer 

133. "The World Crisis," cited in William Oliver Stevens and Westcott, A History of Sea 

Power (New York: Doubleday & Co. , Inc. , 1948), p. 39 1. Admiral Scheer's memoirs too 

claim that the High Sea Fleet's guns were critical for the U-boat campaign. One suspects 

that he sought to rationalize the fleet's inactivity otherwise. See his Germany's High Sea Fleet 

in the World War. 

134. Grand Admiral Von Tirpitz, My Memoirs (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1919), 

Vol. 2, pp. 27-28. 

135. Cited in Cdr. Holloway H. Frost, USN, TIle Battle of Jutland (Annapolis: U.S. Naval 

Institute, 1 936), p. 510. 

136. Tirpitz, Vol. 2, p. 31 . 

45