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The Hattendorf Prize Lectures, 

Volume 1

NAVAL WAR COLLEGE HISTORICAL MONOGRAPH SERIES NO. 26

The historical monographs in this series are book-length studies of the history of 

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The Hattendorf Prize Lectures, 

Volume 1: 2011–2019

Edited by Evan Wilson
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 Foreword, by Shoshana S. Chatfield. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

 Hattendorf Prize Citation—N. A. M. Rodger (2011) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

I. The Perils of History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

 by N. A. M. Rodger

 Hattendorf Prize Citation—Paul Kennedy (2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

II. The Influence of Sea Power upon Three Great Global Wars, 1793–1815, 

1914–1918, 1939–1945: A Comparative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

 by Paul Kennedy

 Hattendorf Prize Citation—Werner Rahn (2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

III. German Navies from 1848 to 2016: Their Development and Courses from 

Confrontation to Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

 by Werner Rahn

 Hattendorf Prize Citation—Geoffrey Till (2018). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

IV. History, Truth Decay, and the Naval Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

 by Geoffrey Till

 About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

 Titles in the Series. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

FOREWORD

As N. A. M. Rodger says in his prize lecture in this volume, “Recent or distant, history is all we have to go on, and we cannot escape it.” Here at the Naval War College, 

we know better than to try to escape history; instead, we embrace it. The study of history broadens our horizons. It exposes us to people, places, and experiences that are 

otherwise inaccessible, and in doing so it builds our strategic and cultural perspective. I use that last phrase deliberately, because it forms the heart of the mission 

statement of the Naval War College. The College educates and develops future leaders through the process of broadening their perspectives. It fosters a commitment 

to lifelong learning and prepares them to lead in the Cognitive Age. Thus, history 

forms an integral part of the College’s purpose. We promote its study, engage with 

its lessons, and expose our students to the benefits of its unique perspectives.

The publication of the first four Hattendorf Prize lectures demonstrates the essential value of historical scholarship to the College’s mission. The Hattendorf Prize 

is the most prestigious award that any scholar can receive in the fields of maritime 

or naval history, and it serves as a beacon to encourage new scholarship in these 

important fields. An indication of the importance of the award is that it has been 

awarded once by the Secretary of the Navy at graduation and twice by the Chief of 

Naval Operations in person at the College’s flagship international event, the biennial International Seapower Symposium (ISS). The world’s leading naval gathering, 

ISS brings together chiefs of navies and coast guards from around the globe to discuss common challenges and identify opportunities for cooperation. The prize recipients are leading members of the international academic community, and their 

presence at ISS has reinforced the College’s commitment to international cooperation, as well as the College’s mission of educating naval leaders about history and 

strategy.
x THE HATTENDORF PRIZE LECTURES, VOLUME 1 

The award’s namesake, Professor Emeritus John B. Hattendorf, embodies its 

values. During his many years of service as the College’s Ernest J. King Professor 

of Maritime History, John conducted the kind of archival research that shapes our 

current understanding of the purpose and mission of the College. His career has 

served as a model for the prize criteria: to serve the Navy by improving the quality 

and range of scholarship in maritime history; to engage globally, with an appreciation for scholarship in different languages and from different national, cultural, and 

regional perspectives; and to see maritime history as a broad field in global history, one that builds on insights that cut across traditional academic and national 

boundaries.

John is the lead author of the wonderfully readable centennial history of the 

College, Sailors and Scholars. In reading it before my arrival in Newport this summer, I was struck by his description of the College’s earliest days. At the College’s 

formal opening ceremony on September 4, 1885, Rear Adm. Stephen B. Luce, the 

founder and first President, told his audience that the College had no money for 

books, furniture, heat, or light. It was housed in the former Newport poorhouse, 

which offered little more than shelter from the winds off Narragansett Bay. Yet Luce 

was confident that his project was worthwhile and that support for it would follow.

Well over a century later, we can only marvel at how far the College has come. 

Where Luce once worried about the very survival of the institution, we now play 

host to the world’s leading scholars, alongside chiefs of navies. We also recently 

hosted the Navy’s new Chief Learning Officer, highlighting the importance of the 

College for the future of naval education. The Department of the Navy’s recent 

Education for Seapower (E4S) report argues that the education of our force is vital 

for national security. Reflecting this renewed emphasis on education, the College 

is investing in its own future by renovating Sims Hall and making other capital 

improvements.

The Hattendorf Prize demonstrates the viability of Luce’s vision and exemplifies the role that scholarship can play in supporting the mission of the U.S. Navy 

and its partners. For Luce, the College was to be “a place of original research on all 

questions relating to war and to statesmanship connected with war, or the prevention of war.” We begin every academic year at the College with these words, they 

feature prominently on the College’s website, and we frequently refer to them in 

College publications. But as with any motto, the more the words are repeated, the 

easier it is to forget their meaning. The publication of these prize lectures should 

cause us to consider these words anew. The distinguished scholars honored here 

embody Luce’s call. They have conducted original research of the highest quality 

in naval history and its role in contemporary debates, and by bringing them to the 

College the Hattendorf Prize has fortified the College’s purpose as the U.S. Navy’s 

essential connection between the sea services and academics. These stimulating 
lectures remind us of the educational mission of the College and exemplify the 

value of connecting scholars and practitioners. It is my great personal pleasure to 

commend these lectures to you.

Shoshana S. Chatfield

Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy

President, U.S. Naval War College

The Hattendorf Prize Lectures, 

Volume 1

INTRODUCTION 

The publication of the first four John B. Hattendorf Prize Lectures presents an 

opportunity to revisit the original criteria for the award. Developed with the 

support of Rear Admiral Roger Nolan and the Naval War College Foundation in 

2011, the prize is accompanied by ten thousand dollars and a medal cast in bronze. 

It is awarded for distinguished academic achievement that contributes to a deeper understanding of the uses of sea services in history. From the outset, it was 

intended to be international, so as to encourage a global perspective on maritime 

affairs. It can be given either for a single work or for a sustained body of scholarly 

achievement over many years.

It is noteworthy how the selection committees have interpreted these last two 

criteria. Not only are the four scholars honored so far not American citizens, 

but they also write about topics other than the history of the U.S. Navy. All four 

earned the prize on the basis of many decades of scholarship rather than a single 

work. In both respects, these honorees reflect the scholarship and values of the 

award’s namesake, John B. Hattendorf, Ernest J. King Professor Emeritus at the 

Naval War College. As John’s students and colleagues know, he constantly seeks an 

international perspective by engaging with scholars around the world and working 

in many languages. He has written and edited dozens of books and many more 

articles and chapters on a range of subjects—all of which make him worthy of his 

own lifetime achievement award.

All four of the honorees whose lectures are included in this collection are from 

the same generation as the prize’s namesake: all were born in the decade beginning 

in 1939 (Werner Rahn in 1939, John Hattendorf 1941, Geoffrey Till and Paul Kennedy 1945, N. A. M. Rodger 1949) and came of scholarly age in the 1970s. This 

collection presents an opportunity to reflect on the influences and achievements 

of that generation.

Paul Kennedy’s lecture, in particular, marks a return to his roots. By ranging 

widely over three great world wars and emphasizing the structural factors that 
4 THE HATTENDORF PRIZE LECTURES, VOLUME 1 

shaped naval affairs, especially geography and economics, his lecture recalls the 

publication in 1976 of the work that first made his name, The Rise and Fall of British 

Naval Mastery. It is difficult to overstate the influence of this book on the field of 

naval history. Nicholas A. M. Rodger, in an otherwise acerbic annotated bibliography, called it a “classic history.”1

 Indeed, British Naval Mastery was in many ways 

responsible for reestablishing the field of naval history within academia. In the decades before its publication, the titans of the first half of the twentieth century—Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sir Julian Corbett, and others—had been succeeded by a generation of historians shaped by the Second World War: Robert G. Albion, Samuel 

Eliot Morison, Stephen Roskill, Arthur Marder, and others. After 1945, those in the 

latter group published extensively on the conduct of the war at sea, authoring the 

official histories, engaging in fierce debates, and shaping public perception of the 

war. Yet by the early 1970s, naval history had come to be seen as a backwater of 

purely operational histories, chronicling one battle after another. Although this 

perception was slightly unfair, Kennedy’s British Naval Mastery demonstrated that 

naval history could be much more.

In his prize lecture, Kennedy’s characteristic approach comes through in the 

opening paragraphs. Despite being the recipient of an award in maritime history, 

he explicitly seeks to explain the limitations of sea power. He spends most of his 

energy on the periods between the three great wars of 1793–1815, 1914–18, and 

1939–45, and suggests that the subtitle of his piece should be Sea Power in an Age 

of Change. What motivates his analysis is not the tactics used at Trafalgar or Jutland but the Industrial Revolution that occurred in between. How, he asks, did sea 

power play a pivotal role in the first and third wars, but not (he suggests) in the 

second? His answer weaves together multiple strands: technological changes that 

influenced operational capabilities, the geopolitics of the coalitions in each war, 

and the acceleration of relative economic changes in wartime. Naval history therefore is only partially about ships at sea, and has at least as much to do with finance 

as with gunnery tactics.

Werner Rahn also looks beyond the traditional topics of naval history in examining the ebbs and flows of German naval affairs over a century and a half. In 

building a great battle fleet on the eve of the First World War, German planners 

ignored the geographical constraints of Germany’s location in the North Sea. When 

war came and the High Seas Fleet was contained, the only apparent alternative was 

submarine warfare; but this raised more questions than it answered. Chancellor 

Bethmann-Hollweg worried that a reliance on U-boats “would claim as a stake our 

existence as a great power and the future of our nation in its entirety.” This is not 

the language of the navalists. Rahn highlights the limitations of sea power much 

as Kennedy does. By risking American entry into the war—both times—German 

naval strategists played directly into the underlying relative economic strengths of 
INTRODUCTION 5

their enemies. In both Rahn’s and Kennedy’s lectures, we can hear the echoes of 

Kennedy’s best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), and we can see 

its origins in naval history. To reiterate: sea power depends on economic power.

Both Kennedy and Rahn demonstrate how historians can speak to navies. Kennedy does so by encouraging naval officers to think beyond the narrow confines 

of their professional lives and understand how sea power should be integrated into 

larger national strategies. Before launching into his survey, Rahn emphasizes that 

the public and naval personnel are interested in the past, and it is essential that 

historians inform them about it without sacrificing complexity.

If Rahn and Kennedy show historians how to speak to navies and show navies 

the value of history, Nicholas Rodger and Geoffrey Till are much more blunt: they 

tell. Their essays bookend the volume, but they work best as a pair. Rather than examining particular historical phenomena, they take a more philosophical approach.

“[H]istory is all we have to go on,” argues Rodger, and therefore it must play a 

central role in shaping naval policy. At the same time, navies need to beware the 

pitfalls of historical myths. Memories are what make us human, and history is our 

collective memory; but, much like our memories, history is fallible, and much of 

what we think we know is wrong. The role of the historian is to correct the record. 

When given opportunities to speak to those whose primary concern is what will 

happen in the future, historians should proceed cautiously. History never repeats 

itself exactly, and “lessons” from history are, at best, general warnings. Historians 

are no better than naval officers at predicting the future, but they can encourage naval officers to think more carefully about the past so as to have a better foundation 

for thinking about the future. Rodger and Rahn both make the point that historians 

cannot neglect the complexity of their subject, as the fastest way to create a dangerous myth is to oversimplify the past.

Till echoes two of Rodger’s points. First, navies need to know their histories: 

“a navy that does not know its history has no soul.” Like Rodger and Rahn, Till 

worries that history too often is used as a means of socializing new entrants, telling 

myths that shape organizational identities but that are in fact oversimplifications 

or simply wrong. He also agrees with Rodger that history rhymes. Navies should 

study their history not because past events will recur exactly, but rather because 

practitioners need to be able to draw on a wide pool of “comparable but not identical situations.” Till also extends Rodger’s arguments in two ways. History is not 

simply the gathering of comparable situations; it is an intellectual process. Professional military education should force students to think from the cabinet meeting 

to the battlefield and back again, and from military hardware back to the factory 

and raw materials. Historians seek to explain past phenomena, and they necessarily 

must think flexibly and creatively about causal chains. Training leaders to think like 

historians makes it more likely that the right questions will be asked. The burden, 
6 THE HATTENDORF PRIZE LECTURES, VOLUME 1 

according to Till, should not fall entirely on practitioners, and his lecture ends with 

a call to standards for naval historians.

Recently the Naval War College established the John B. Hattendorf Center for 

Maritime Historical Research to address precisely these issues. It advocates for the 

teaching of history in professional military education, and it serves as a central 

resource for scholars of U.S. naval history and maritime history more broadly. Its 

faculty contribute to the curriculum and publish original documentary research. In 

the spirit of the Hattendorf Prize, the center seeks a global perspective on maritime 

affairs, and it connects navies and naval historians.

These four lectures represent the best work of a generation of naval historians, 

and they illustrate the ways in which that generation crafted its work. Every discipline has its own founders, and those founders serve as reference points; they rarely require introductions or explanations (Clausewitz, Marx, Weber, Keynes, etc.). 

They become integrated into the language of the discipline, serving as shorthand for 

complex ideas and extensive bodies of scholarship. The language of naval history, 

as exemplified in this volume, uses the scholars of the turn of the twentieth century, 

especially Mahan and Corbett, to sketch the outlines of arguments and highlight 

areas of disagreement. For Kennedy, the First World War was a “Mackinder-ite 

land struggle, with surface navies operating at the margins.” Victory for the Allies 

was, to a small degree, a product of keeping open the sea lines of communication 

(Corbett) and, to a much larger degree, a product of winning on land (Mackinder) 

and introducing American industrial might (Kennedy). Rahn disagrees, arguing 

that Germany’s large battle-fleet-in-being helped pin down British resources and 

partly justified the arch-Mahanian approach of Tirpitz. (Rahn concedes that the 

fleet cost too much to be worth the trouble.) Britain’s distant economic blockade 

and Corbettian control of the sea lines of communication was not marginal but 

central to Germany’s defeat.

So long as historians do not allow shorthand versions of Mahan and Corbett to 

confuse their readers or oversimplify their arguments, we should embrace them 

as reference points. The debates these theorists sparked are timeless, and they are 

helpful in integrating contemporary scholarship into an existing framework. Yet 

Rodger and Till both warn of the limitations of Mahan and Corbett. For Till, the 

problem is the fundamental flexibility of sea power. As navies are asked to do ever 

more, especially low-intensity enforcement of international law, Mahan and Corbett do not seem to be able to offer much guidance. They should be read for perspectives on war fighting and deterrent war prevention at sea, but not as substitutes 

for a meaningful discussion of the wide range of obligations navies now must meet. 

Rodger calls attention to Mahan’s assumption that the world will continue as it 

has before. Like Thomas Malthus a century earlier, Mahan had the misfortune to 

publish on the cusp of epochal changes in his subject area. While this in no way 
INTRODUCTION 7

invalidates his work, it serves as a cautionary tale to historians eager to extract lessons from their research.

What Rodger and Till suggest, then, is that we need a more complex understanding of Mahan and Corbett. This is not a new idea. As John Hattendorf himself 

argued, “We need to return once again to these writers, considering their thought 

carefully in the light of continuing historical research and understanding.” He 

went on to praise the Naval Institute’s Classics of Sea Power series for providing 

modern commentary and annotations on the great works, and to encourage both 

practitioners and historians to consider their relevance.2 That was 1993; today, 

the Naval Institute is publishing its 21st Century Foundations series with similar 

goals.3 We must continue in this vein, but we also should understand the difference 

between a foundational reference point and scripture. Mahan, Corbett, and their 

peers are useful only insofar as we ask the right questions of them. In some cases, 

they may not be fit for the purpose, even if they seem destined to remain the stars 

by which naval history navigates.

Let this volume serve three purposes. First, it is an example of naval history 

done well. All the essays were written by distinguished scholars, and they demonstrate the best of the field. They look beyond operations, integrating sea power 

into larger frameworks; they revel in complexity, rejecting simple explanations; and 

most of all, they ask the right questions. The lectures also demonstrate the enduring relevance of sea power theory. Mahan is not enough, but—thanks in part to the 

prize laureates—no one is suggesting that he is. Understanding the parameters of 

the historical debates, as well as their limitations, is essential for all those interested 

in naval history.

Finally, the lectures connect naval historians to navies. It is remarkable how 

easy it is for the two groups to ignore each other. Navies are comfortable with their 

myths, and generally do not like to be told that most of what they think they know 

is wrong. Then, too, historians generally are uncomfortable when asked to apply 

their work. Better, some say, to keep the sacred flame of pure scholarly inquiry 

safe from the grubby hands of practitioners. Yet, as the prize lectures remind us, 

naval historians need to spend time with naval personnel so as to understand their 

culture and worldview. As the Hattendorf Prize and the Hattendorf Center at the 

Naval War College look toward the next decade of operations, these are valuable 

lessons to keep in mind.

EVAN WILSON

Assistant Professor, John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research

Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island
8 THE HATTENDORF PRIZE LECTURES, VOLUME 1

1 Rodger did not spare his own work, calling his earliest book “sketchy and unreliable.” N. A. M. Rodger, 

The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of 

Britain, 1649–1815 (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 

821, 845.

2 John B. Hattendorf, “Mahan Is Not Enough: Conference Themes and Issues,” in Mahan Is Not Enough: 

The Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir 

Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, 

ed. James Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, Historical Monograph 10 (Newport, RI: Naval War College 

Press, 1993), p. 9.

3 While new books on more-obscure thinkers are 

being added regularly, it is unsurprising to note that 

21st Century Mahan and 21st Century Corbett were 

among the first to be published.

NOTES

The Naval War College is pleased to recognize you as the first Hattendorf Prize Laureate. This 

award is predicated on your distinguished achievements as an assiduous historical researcher 

as well as the author of beautifully written and intellectually impressive studies of Britain’s naval 

history. Your scope, embracing more than a thousand years of naval history, is informed and 

given depth by an equally broad understanding of your subject. Your impressive command of 

sources, ranging from medieval documents in Latin to modern archives and scholarly works in 

a broad range of European languages, has established a new and more comprehensive approach 

to writing a national naval history. You have written that “the naval historian has to be aware 

of what other historians are writing to do justice to his own subject, and explain its importance 

to others. To do so he has to integrate a wide range of knowledge. It goes without saying that 

this demands a great deal of reading and not inconsiderable literary skills, so it is not surprising 

that successful naval histories which take this approach are rare.” Your works exemplify that 

description and have themselves become prizes for us to read. This award honors you and your 

work, expressing appreciation for your distinguished academic research, insight, and writing 

that contribute to a deeper historical understanding of the broad context and interrelationships 

involved in the roles, achievements, and uses of navies within the contexts of both maritime 

and general history.

The Hattendorf Prize for 

Distinguished Original Research 

in Maritime History

to N. A. M. Rodger, M.A., D.Phil., F.B.A., F.R.Hist.S., F.S.A.,

Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

The President, U.S. Naval War College, takes great pleasure

in awarding

Presented this 20th day of October 2011 at the 

U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.

John N. Christenson

Rear Admiral, United States Navy

President, Naval War College
According to Hegel, we learn from history that we do not learn from history.1

 We also learn that historians are deeply unreliable, and never more 

so than when they are foolish enough to predict the future. Historians, in 

fact, would certainly be the worst possible guides to the policy maker, were it not 

for the alternative. But the alternative is not other people with better information 

but other people with no information, for it is the past that makes the present and 

the future. All of us, as individuals, as organizations, and as societies, have personalities that are made up of our experiences. It is memory that makes us what we are, 

and to lose memory is to lose personality. In this age of dementia, many of us are 

painfully familiar with what happens when people lose their memories, but though 

individuals can lose their minds, societies and organizations (like navies) never 

escape their past. All we know comes from our experience, and all our experience 

is of the past. The future, which it would be very convenient to know, is regrettably 

inaccessible; the present constantly slips between our fingers. Only the past makes 

us who we are, and it shapes our understanding of the world. The question is not 

whether we should or whether we can learn from the past; we have no choice, if we 

are to learn at all. Recent or distant, history is all we have to go on, and we cannot 

escape it.

To read the writings or listen to the speeches of public figures is to encounter 

a dense tissue of historical references and allusions. Sometimes they are conscious 

references to historical events that form, or are believed to form, part of the common stock of social memory. Occasionally they are the fruit of serious knowledge 

of the past, but more often they refer to some of the common myths that bind nations and societies together. Usually these myths have historical roots, but in the 

process of shaping national identity they tend to lose any close relation with the 

truth of what really happened. Where do they come from, these urban myths and 

long-exploded fallacies that form so much of the discourse of public life? Halfremembered primary-school lessons, anecdotes overheard in the pub, newspapers 

read over someone’s shoulder seem to have more power to form opinion than any 

scholar could dream of. “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt 

The Perils of History

N. A. M. RODGER

I
, 

from any intellectual influence,” wrote J. M. Keynes, “are usually the slaves of some 

defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling 

their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”2 Our problem is 

not that we know too little history to understand the present but that we know too 

much, and most of it is wrong.

Even when it is right, moreover, the history that is put to use is often the wrong 

history. In September 2011 a short article appeared in the Economist that reviewed 

the situation of the euro, quoting an unnamed ambassador:3“I feel like a filing clerk 

in Berlin in 1945. The work of government goes on, even as the war approaches.” 

Inspired by this remark, the anonymous author indulged in an extended range of 

military metaphors and allusions to events of the Second World War. Clearly he 

wanted to show off his knowledge of that war, but it was not obvious that it told the 

reader anything at all about the financial crisis. There is of course a very relevant 

history that could and should have been deployed—the history of currency unions. 

The history of the Zollverein (which led to the unified currency of the 1871 German Reich); of the Latin, Scandinavian, and East African currency unions (which 

all failed); of the West African franc and the Belgium-Luxembourg currency link 

(still flourishing)—all offer relevant lessons. The eighteenth-century New England 

monetary union shows that common currencies can circulate without political 

union, while the history of the United States over its first century shows that a 

political union does not require a common currency (at least initially). All these 

would have been highly instructive historical excursions; the Second World War 

was mere self-indulgence, and even if the journalist had been a real expert in it, it 

would still have been irrelevant. 

What is more, real expertise is no guarantee that history will guide us in the 

right direction. There could be no better nor more apposite example of the expert 

historian than Capt. Alfred T. Mahan, and yet in reading his great works we can 

easily see that he was wrong to assume that certain features of the world he had 

grown up with would last forever. For him the sea was always commanded by a 

single, dominant European naval power, and Britain was the only plausible candidate. He looked forward to the day when the U.S. Navy would be capable of joining 

an alliance with Britain, but he clearly did not expect that there would ever be more 

than a handful of serious naval powers. Though he lived in the first great age of free 

trade and liberal economics, he did not foresee that the result would be the creation 

of many advanced economies and modern navies all over the world. Nor did he 

realize that the growth of the U.S. Navy, to which he dedicated his career, would 

inevitably make it impossible for Britain or any other European power to dominate 

the seas of the world single-handed. Consequently he has relatively little to say to 

our age of naval coalitions.
Most common and most destructive of all, however, are not appeals to the lessons of real history, nor even conscious references to shared myth, but unconscious 

assumptions that reveal themselves in turns of phrase and habits of thought. This is 

history at the deepest and most universal level, the history that lies below the foundations of every intellectual construction and undermines so many of them. This 

is the history that everybody shares and nobody needs to think about; these are the 

assumptions that are never challenged. This history is everywhere, but much of it 

is bad history, and the longer it goes unchallenged, the more dangerous it becomes. 

This history provides people with ready-made solutions to new problems, and it 

“proves” that they are the right solutions. 

Whatever the locus of action, from national government down to precinct, whether in an 

executive body or a legislative committee, some participants are almost sure to start with 

favorite, long-developed schemes. Their inclination will be to ignore whatever seems not to 

fit and to define the problem as one calling for solutions they have handy. Their arguments 

will be supported, more than likely, by analogies.4

The analogies will be drawn from experience, that is, from history, and most likely 

from the history that has the most emotional power.

Traumatic events dig deep foundations in the national psyche. In Britain the 

appeasement of Hitler has long been such an event. Sir Anthony Eden’s response 

to the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 was clearly shaped by his 

determination never again to appease a dictator. But events suggest that the precedent of Hitler was not very helpful in dealing with Colonel Nasser, and one cannot 

help thinking that if Eden had confronted and analyzed it he would have realized 

as much. In other crises since, the reflex never to appease a dictator has evidently served British governments rather better. For the United States the equivalent 

trauma is Pearl Harbor. It was the image that leaped to many minds on that “day 

of infamy,” September 11, 2001, when the terrorists attacked the Twin Towers, and 

it evidently shaped President Bush’s response, which was to declare war on somebody at once and invade somewhere as quickly as possible. Even at the time, many 

observers doubted if it was wise to raise a criminal gang to the status of a sovereign 

state or whether invasion of one or two countries, however unpleasant they were, 

was really the best response to an international terrorist movement.5

Today, Pearl Harbor visibly lurks just below the surface of much discussion of 

U.S. relations with China. Clearly there are excellent reasons for the United States 

(and the world) to pay close attention to China, but to me it seems that the case 

differs in most respects from that of Japan in the 1930s and that the mere fact that 

China constitutes a potential threat to U.S. interests from approximately the same 

part of the world is a bad reason for drawing conscious—or, more dangerously, 

unconscious—parallels with 1941. It is especially dangerous because of one notable 

difference: in 1941 the Pacific naval powers were (as a consequence of the Washington naval treaties) so far apart that they were largely out of each other’s range, but 
, 

today the United States and China have many opportunities to clash in and around 

the China seas. A sudden emergency generated by some unexpected incident is the 

worst possible moment to be guided by unconscious historical parallels. Moreover, 

the Chinese too have their traumatic moments in history that are likely to shape 

their responses in any confrontation with an external power. In their case, it is the 

myth-history of the Opium War that is endlessly invoked to explain how to resist 

foreign aggression.6 This history would be well worth study by American policy 

makers.

Since history is impossible to escape and bad history is difficult to avoid, the 

historian has at least the essential function of distinguishing the two, of warning 

against bad history and false analogy. Historians may have no special qualifications 

to predict the future, but at least they can check the misuse of the past. For strategists and policy makers, however, this may not be enough. I know from experience 

that people can be very annoyed with historians who insist how much better qualified they are than anyone else to avoid the dangers of predicting the future by false 

analogy with the past but then refuse to risk their reputations by making any predictions at all. The historian must always be intensely conscious that history never 

repeats itself exactly; historical parallels are never really parallel, and the “lessons of 

history” are at best general warnings, not specific instructions. It has been well said 

that “history never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.”7 Historians cannot help 

noticing resemblances between the present day and the periods they study, and 

these may at least suggest pitfalls to avoid and possibilities to exploit. 

I myself have recently been studying the nineteenth century, and I believe there 

are suggestive similarities between that era and our own in two dimensions: diplomacy and strategy, and economics and trade. In diplomacy and strategy we may 

concentrate on the leading European nations, for in the nineteenth century the 

great powers were still essentially European. The United States, as the century wore 

on, increasingly acquired the economic potential to act as a great power, but in 

practice it remained largely absorbed in its own internal development; it did not 

choose to involve itself deeply in world affairs, and (except during the Civil War) 

its armed forces were negligible. For almost forty years after the Congress of Vienna 

ended the Napoleonic War, the peace of Europe was largely assured by the “Concert 

of Europe”—meaning the loose, informal grouping of the victors in that war—to 

preserve stability and restrain French expansionism. This was then disrupted by 

the Russian war of 1852–55 (rather misleadingly called the Crimean War, since its 

origins lay in the Levant and its most decisive campaign was fought in the Baltic), 

followed by the German and Italian wars of unification. 

In 1871 the creation of the German Second Reich marked the emergence of a 

new, powerful, and expansionist military power in Central Europe. For the last 

thirty years of the century and the early years of the next, Europe (and by extension 
the world as well) was increasingly destabilized by the rise of two hungry and ambitious powers, Germany and Russia, and by the decline and vulnerability of two 

extensive empires, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Comfortable, possessor powers like Britain and France had imperial ambitions and rivalries across 

the world but hoped to keep the peace within Europe by restraining aggressors and 

supporting existing frontiers. The British in particular feared that a collapse of the 

Ottoman Empire would allow Russia to expand to the Mediterranean and threaten 

the vital imperial sea route to India. Toward the end of the century the British became increasingly worried that Russian expansion in Central Asia would place the 

Russian army within direct striking distance of India—though the modern eye and 

modern maps suggest that the very long distances and very high mountains that 

separated them would have put an invasion far out of practical reach.

Retrospect suggests that Britain’s preeminence was under growing threat from 

the 1870s at latest. British statesmen, however, like the vast majority of world leaders in every age, had learned their view of the world as young men and did not substantially change it as they grew older. The leaders of that generation had formed 

their outlook in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, when it seemed that Britain had nothing to fear from Continental rivals and nothing to lose from what Lord Palmerston 

(twice prime minister) called “splendid isolation.” For them British preeminence 

was a given, a product of history and economic dominance that no one could doubt 

or challenge. There was no need to spend much money on the navy, still less the 

army, because only savages would be ignorant and foolish enough to challenge 

them. The only superpower dominated the world by political and economic rather 

than military strength. It has been well said that “superpowers in any age function 

much on strategic credit. Their writ, that is, runs much more on the basis of their 

reputation for effective coercion than on the actual exercise of power.”8 Reputation 

was cheap and effective, there had been no credible military threat to Britain for 

half a century, and British political leaders of the generation of Disraeli and Gladstone found it difficult to take seriously the idea that there might be another in the 

foreseeable future.

This confidence rested on Britain’s economic superiority. By 1815 Britain was 

the world’s leading trading nation, with an unsurpassed financial strength that had 

allowed it to finance the entire allied war effort in the closing stages of the Napoleonic War. In the succeeding years of peace the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, 

and in the 1840s the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts threw open 

British shipping and overseas trade to international competition and ushered in the 

era of free trade. This was the first age of globalization, when the free movement of 

capital and technology and the progressive removal of barriers to trade led to a very 

rapid increase in international prosperity. It also led to the rise of new industrial 

powers abroad. From being in the 1840s the only advanced industrial economy in 
, 

the world, Britain was by the end of the century only one of several, some of them 

having much greater populations, land areas, and stores of natural resources than 

its own. 

It was obvious to contemporaries that British economic preeminence was under threat, and it seemed to many that ambitious rivals might easily translate that 

threat into military terms—or rather, naval terms, for all credible strategic threats 

to Britain were necessarily naval ones. By the 1880s the old-fashioned and quite unrealistic fears of an unexpected surprise attack across the Channel had been largely 

abandoned. In their place came a newer and more credible threat to Britain’s worldwide trade, to an economy now heavily dependent on imported food and raw materials and exported manufactures. Moreover, this threat no longer came entirely 

from rival European powers. Advanced economies were rising in other parts of the 

world, some of them showing signs of spending their wealth and industrial capacity on modern navies. For two centuries the British had been able to dominate the 

seas of the world indirectly by keeping their main fleet at home, for defense against 

their neighbors, who were their only serious enemies. By the late 1890s two small 

but modern navies, those of the United States and Japan, were rising in distant seas 

that could not be dominated from Europe.

British strategists recognized their country’s radical and unique dependence on 

seaborne trade but were divided in their response. Some feared attack and planned 

various strategies of defense. Others placed more or most of their trust in the development of international law. The rise of the global economy was paralleled in the 

second half of the nineteenth century by the rise of a new kind of international law, 

founded on international treaties signed by most, if not all, of the leading powers. 

The first of these was the Declaration of Paris of 1857, which professed to outlaw 

privateering (though the United States refused to sign and still claims the right to 

issue letters of marque). More important were the Hague and London Conferences 

of 1908–1909, which set out to write international rules to protect wartime trade, 

define contraband, and forbid blockade. The Declaration of London proposed to 

establish an International Prize Court that would have been the first international 

court with jurisdiction over sovereign states (though only if both parties chose to 

appeal to it). 

The proposed Prize Court never came to fruition, and the force of these international agreements, like all their predecessors, rested on “customary international 

law,” which essentially meant the capacity of neutrals to restrain belligerent navies. 

Behind this expectation that neutral powers would have real influence over belligerents lay a clear understanding of the complexity and vulnerability of the web of 

international trade, on which all advanced economies were heavily, and mutually, 

dependent. Any form of economic warfare at sea, it was presumed, would ruin all 
the participants and render war impossible to sustain. In the era of globalization, 

therefore, modern war would have to be short if it were to be possible at all, and 

the capacity to keep it going would depend largely or entirely on neutrals’ freedom 

to trade. The First World War was to falsify almost all of these expectations, in the 

process ruining the leading belligerents and wrecking the world trading system. 

In place of free trade it brought an age of protectionism, financial crisis, economic 

collapse, and another world war.

What, if any, resemblances may we find between this world and our own? First, 

we must obviously increase the scale from Europe to the whole world. That done, 

we may see some suggestive parallels between the postwar settlements of 1815 and 

of 1945. The Cold War was scarcely a “Concert of Europe,” but in both cases the 

wartime allies continued to dominate the postwar world and prevent their rivalries 

from leading to war, except among client states on the strategic periphery. Once 

again a new age of free trade and surging economic growth lifted nations in some 

parts of the world from poverty into the status of advanced economies in two generations. Once again this huge advance in world prosperity depended entirely on 

ships trading across free and open seas. Once again it is very widely assumed that 

the complexity and interdependence of the modern world trading system makes it 

unthinkable that any advanced state would contemplate disrupting it by war. Today, 

however, the new age of free trade seems to be threatened by financial collapse and 

political instability in ways reminiscent of the 1890s. Ambitious rising powers once 

more press against the weaknesses of existing empires. 

A comparison of Japan then and China now suggests itself—but I have already 

suggested that I think this is simplistic and dangerous. I think there may be more 

to be learned by comparing modern China9 with Bismarckian Germany. Both are 

populous states in central positions with historic pretensions to imperial status, 

and with rapidly growing economic and military strength to back them. In both 

cases dazzling economic growth tends to conceal the extent to which the economies remain backward and dependent on foreign technology and finance. In both 

cases political unity and constitutional structures remain fragile, and foreign policy 

is marked by aggressive insecurity. Growing prosperity and power will no doubt 

continue to reconcile many tensions, but the Chinese regime would be vulnerable 

to any serious economic or political check. This is an uncomfortable reflection, for 

this is the classic situation in which unstable dictatorships attempt to rebuild crumbling support at home by reckless adventures abroad. The world has a heavy investment in China’s economic growth and political unity. A China growing smoothly 

to become a prosperous and advanced economy with a large stake in world security 

and peace and a huge market open to trade would be very much in the interest of 

all. A nuclear-armed China sliding backward into poverty and instability presents 
, 

incalculable risks. A large sector of public opinion in the United States regards China’s strength as a threat, but it is China’s weakness that ought to worry us.

So ought the fragility of the world economic system. Piracy and protectionism, 

to name only the two most obvious dangers, are capable of inflicting grave damage 

on world prosperity. The Somalis have shown how easy and profitable is piracy for 

ransom, in the tradition of the North African regencies, and there is plenty of scope 

for others to imitate them. Protectionism in the wake of a world financial crisis did 

much to bring on the Second World War, and there are populist politicians, in the 

United States and elsewhere, willing to try again. A regional war, in, say, the Middle 

East, could have destructive effects on essential international trades, notably in oil. 

In these and other aspects the machinery of international free trade is delicate and 

easily deranged. Precedent suggests that international law, naval power, and the enlightened self-interest of trading nations are relatively feeble defenses. I do not want 

to predict that another major war is coming soon, but it is certainly not impossible, 

and if there is any truth in my comparison with the late nineteenth century, the 

analogy is not encouraging. Navies have unequaled flexibility as instruments of 

deterrence and diplomacy, and in the present state of the world it seems to me that 

their most urgent task is to win the peace.

This chapter appeared as an article in the Naval War 

College Review 66, no. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 7–15.

1 “What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything 

from history, or acted upon any lessons they might 

have drawn from it.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 

Hegel, introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of 

History (1832).

2 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan / Cambridge 

Univ. Press, 1936), p. 383.

3 Charlemagne [pseud.], “In the Brussels Bunker,” 

Economist, September 17, 2011.

4 Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in 

Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New 

York: Free Press, 1986), p. 235.

5 A recent contribution to the large literature on this 

theme is John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (New York: W. W. Norton, 

2010).

6 Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the 

Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They 

Forced Her Gates Ajar, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of 

North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 299–303.

7 The remark is usually attributed to Mark Twain, but 

there seems to be no good source for it.

8 Colin S. Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War (New York: Free 

Press, 1992), p. 142.

9 Some elements of this comparison can also be 

applied on a smaller scale to Iran.

NOTES

The Naval War College is pleased to recognize you as the Hattendorf Prize Laureate. This 

award is fully merited by your distinguished achievements as an assiduous historical researcher as well as the author of pathbreaking studies on Britain’s naval history and the 

role of navies in the rise and fall of great powers. Your work, embracing more than five 

hundred years of history, shows not only an impressive command of sources but a unique 

comparative and interdisciplinary approach for examining naval history. In its scope and 

ambition, your work has been compared to that of the great historians Leopold von Ranke 

and Arnold Toynbee. Your innovative and wide-ranging approach to the writing of naval 

history has inspired other scholars to examine the importance of sea power for shaping 

the course of international history. In the tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Naval 

War College, you have written compelling narratives that show the interrelationships of sea 

power and land power, technological innovation and naval warfare, economic wherewithal 

and naval strength, and grand strategy and high politics. This impressive body of historical 

scholarship has not only influenced the work of other historians but reached a much wider 

audience and made a signal contribution to informing policy debates about grand strategy 

in the public arena. By breaking down barriers to interdisciplinary study, by integrating a 

wide range of knowledge, by making a contribution to policy discussions, your works have 

themselves become prizes for us to read. This award honors you and your work, expressing 

appreciation for your distinguished academic research, insight, and writing that contribute 

to a deeper historical understanding of the influence of sea power on international history, 

and the rise and fall of great powers.

The Hattendorf Prize for

Distinguished Original Research

in Maritime History

to Paul M. Kennedy, C.B.E., B.A., D.Phil., F.S.A., F.B.A., F.R.Hist.S., 

J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University.

The President, U.S. Naval War College, takes great pleasure

in awarding

Presented this 20th day of November 2014 at Yale University, 

New Haven, Connecticut.

P. Gardner Howe III

Rear Admiral, United States Navy

President, Naval War College
While many great and extended conflicts involving the use of the sea 

have been fought over the past two thousand years, the three most 

notable in modern times were undoubtedly those struggles for global 

mastery in the years 1793–1815, 1914–18, and 1939–45. Each of these conflicts 

has produced a plethora of detailed works upon aspects of the war in question, but 

the profession has avoided making a comparative study of them to draw broader 

conclusions about the influence of sea power in the modern world.1

This chapter makes an attempt to do that, and with a particular interest in examining why the exercise of naval force during the second of the three conflicts 

is generally regarded as having had much less effectiveness than in the other two. 

Examining why naval power in 1914–18 had much less “influence” than its prewar 

advocates hoped might then help us to a better understanding of the limitations of 

naval force as well as of its positive capabilities. Above all, the essay is interested in 

the changing contexts in which sea power had to operate over these one hundred 

and fifty years of what one scholar nicely termed “the influence of history upon sea 

power.”2

This is a lengthy argument, and so the structure of the essay below has been 

divided, rather obviously, into wartime and peacetime sections. Since the great 

naval struggle for mastery between 1793 and 1815 is generally regarded as the 

apotheosis of sea power in action, no detailed account is offered below of the many 

great battles that took place within those years, or of where British diplomacy 

and naval influence successfully marched hand in hand, as in the Baltic, or of the 

campaigns in the Eastern Seas.3 What seemed more important was to produce 

a reasonably brief structural analysis of why it was that sea power played such a 

prominent role in a struggle for the mastery of Europe that in the final analysis 

obviously had to be settled by military victory over Napoleon on land. Not all 

European great wars saw naval power play a significant part; indeed, the greatest in recent memory—the Thirty Years’ War between 1618 and 1648—had little 

to do with the sea, or the sea with it. Why it was different in the titanic French 

The Influence of Sea Power upon Three Great 

Global Wars, 1793–1815, 1914–1918, 

1939–1945 

A Comparative Analysis

II

PAUL KENNEDY
, 

Revolutionary and Napolonic Wars therefore obviously requires explanation before 

the rest of this essay can unfold.

From time to time this text engages with the arguments and presumptions of 

Captain Mahan regarding how sea power exactly did influence the wars in question. This is not done in any intellectually hostile way; it simply seeks to offer a reality check upon whether it was sea power itself that caused the outcomes claimed, 

and if completely or to a lesser degree. It also attempts to test the story of these 

wars against the strategic theories of the two greatest of Mahan’s “foils”: Sir Julian 

Corbett, with his claim that it was command of control of the ocean routes (not 

the decisive battle) that counted; and Sir Halford Mackinder, with his claim that it 

was land power, or who gained control of the great West European landmass, that 

would count most in the outcome of modern wars.4

To undertake a comparative analysis of the influence of sea power upon certain earlier wars—say, between the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ 

War, and the American Revolutionary War—is not so difficult, simply because 

so very much about navies and warships stayed the same, and because the battles 

largely took place within the very similar constraints of time and tide, during the 

high point of the age of fighting sail. This was no longer the case after the early 

nineteenth century, because of two enormous, and separate, changes in historical conditions. While the 1793–1815 campaigns took place in the pre–Industrial 

Revolution era, the circumstances under which the admirals of 1914 had to fight 

were dramatically different. Further and very large changes in the condition and 

circumstance of navies were also to occur in the much briefer period between the 

second and third of the great global wars analyzed here. The British Navy of, say, 

1940 may have seemed very similar to that of a quarter-century earlier, yet so much 

had changed, especially in regard to the rise of air power, both carrier-based and 

land-based. Further, the global naval balances, especially in the Far East, were now 

quite altered from those of 1914. Captain Mahan, in summarizing the “elements of 

sea power” in his first, great work, felt that they belonged to the “unchanging order 

of things, remaining the same, in cause and effect, from age to age.”5 It is the intention of this essay to test if that was really so, given the stupendous impact of the 

Industrial Revolution upon warfare, and the special influence of air power upon 

fighting in the years after 1919.

It follows that a very large part of this chapter has had to focus on the two periods between the wars. While not originally foreseen by the author, it became increasingly clear that no analysis of the influence of sea power upon history could 

be made unless maritime affairs were tested against change over time, between the 

great conflicts, especially change driven by the onset of newer technologies. It is not 

unreasonable to claim that Nelson himself would have been very familiar on board 

Blake’s flagship of 150 years earlier; but Jellicoe and Nimitz would have been quite 
lost on a century-older warship. “Sea power in an age of change” is thus the core 

theme, and implicit title, of the present investigation.

1793–1815

Since this war ended with Napoleon’s surrender after being defeated by a great 

land-coalition force at Waterloo in 1815, it seemed incumbent upon Mahan to 

make his well-known claim that “those far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which 

the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.”6

Writing then as a professor at the Naval War College, and as the advocate of a much 

larger American Navy, his position was an understandable one. He had to convince 

readers, including perhaps congressional skeptics, that sea power counted in world 

affairs, and the British struggle against Napoleon offered him much evidence for 

that claim. Later scholars have not contested this. After all, the 1793–1815 conflict in Western Europe was mainly a struggle between three naval nations, Britain, 

France, and Spain, such that if any one side gained at sea the other was very adversely weakened; each intruded upon the other, and therefore navies very much 

counted.7

The geography of these wars at sea was thus of overwhelming significance; it 

intruded at every stage, and to a degree unimaginable in the modern jet age. Nothing here was new, for geography had played the same critical role in the five previous Anglo-Spanish-French conflicts between 1689 and 1783. Britain benefited, of 

course, from its insularity and freedom from invasion by land; and after 1603 and 

1707, by its union with Scotland. In the age of sail, it benefited from the prevailing 

currents and winds that so often pinned the French fleets into their harbors, and 

from an array of good naval bases from Devon to the Thames. It benefited to an 

incalculable degree by the possession of Gibraltar (as it would again in 1940–43), 

and also from its possession of Halifax, Kingston, and, very soon, Malta and the 

Cape. But in a struggle against France and Spain geography did not favor Britain to 

the extent it did in its wars against the Dutch, the Danes, or Wilhelmine Germany. 

Franco-Spanish raiders and larger squadrons could get out to the Atlantic and beyond, and did so repeatedly; and they also, of course, possessed good harbors in 

the Mediterranean itself. All these waters were contested space, therefore, which is 

why the naval battles themselves (the Glorious First of June, Cape Saint Vincent, 

Trafalgar, and, farther north, Camperdown and Copenhagen) were invested with 

such importance and fought so keenly by each side. Little wonder that Mahan was 

so impressed at the idea of a main battle force that would sweep all before it, and 

thus ensure command of the oceans.

Since these were wars of endurance—twenty-three years of struggle—victory 

would go to the power with the deepest purse and the greatest economic capacity. 

Ostensibly, this would have been France, with more than twice the population of 

Britain and a rich agricultural and commercial base, and a commensurate taxation 
, 

capacity; but after Colbert’s earlier efforts, this potential was never realized, and 

from the 1720s the advantage swung to a Walpolian Britain, which gave the country an adamantine political strength and an astounding creditworthiness. The hard 

figures told the story; halfway through every great conflict, the U.K. Treasury could 

continue to float loans (at much lower interest rates) when its rivals could not. As 

Osterhammel explains, between 1688 and 1815 U.K. gross national product rose 

threefold and taxation revenue fifteenfold; Britain could raise more than twice as 

much in taxes as France.8 By the later stages of the war against Napoleon, the islandnation had become a gigantic export-producing machine. If France had been able 

to shut it down, through the Continental System and other embargoes, London’s 

war strategy would have shuddered to a halt. That never happened; Britain faltered (in 1797, when the Bank of England suspended specie payments), but its 

insularity, ever-growing economy, political resilience, access to newer global markets, and strong naval edge kept it going. And it still had money to subsidize major 

and minor European allies to take up the fight against Napoleon, by funding their 

armies and providing their weapons. Again and again, French victories in the field 

blew apart these coalitions; and every time they were reassembled and refunded, 

France’s manpower bled a little more and its capacity to interrupt Britain’s space 

grew less. Finally, Napoleon’s twin bouts of imperial overstretch, into Spain and 

into Russia in 1812–14, gave London the chance to play all its cards—naval pressure, massive subsidies, a Wellingtonian army—to assist in toppling France’s gigantic bid for mastery.

The later historian is tempted to say: given the many above factors in Britain’s 

favor, all that was needed was for it to maintain a strong and unchallengeable navy, 

under steady and intelligent leadership. Such leadership for pursuing the war was 

there, even with a stricken king and when cabinet coalitions were shaky. From the 

very onset of the French Revolution, governments in London committed enough 

funds to build a huge fleet of line-of-battle ships and cruisers, with supporting 

dockyards, munitions, and manpower. While the system groaned frequently under 

the immense strains of combating the joint Franco-Spanish fleets and their massive 

resources, it never snapped. The final advantages—of Nelson’s unique charismatic 

leadership in battle and the remarkably high quality of so many other admirals and 

captains (Collingwood, Saumarez, Hood, Cochrane—where does the list stop?)—

can be added in here, but how exactly one weighs each of the above elements of 

strength that made up Britain’s war machine is impossible.

What is clear is that one has here a rare historical example of national and naval 

strength that was partly foreshadowed (in 1714 and 1763) but now came to full 

fruition. The conflict had been so lengthy, and drained so many resources, that it 

left all the other participants exhausted, winded, and in need of years of recovery. 

Little wonder that the Prussian general Gneisenau afterward inveighed against that 
“blackguard” Napoleon whose ambitions had plunged the Continent into war, leaving Britain free to exploit the fruits of the world.9

 In all this effort, the role of the 

Royal Navy had counted so much—wherever I go, Napoleon complained, I find it 

in the way—but it was as one strand, one part of the whole. Mahan was therefore 

entirely justified in enthusing about the influence of sea power upon history here, 

but it was an influence that had worked because all the other strands were in place 

as well.

1815–1914

No period in the maritime history of the previous two thousand years came close to 

the special strategic and political circumstances of the century after the surrender 

of Napoleon. When Rome dominated at sea, it was merely over Mediterranean waters; Adm. Cheng Ho’s great expeditionary fleets came and went across the Indian 

Ocean, without lasting impact; and Philip II’s navies were repeatedly challenged 

in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. But here, for the first time, 

was a global maritime empire. To some degree, the post-1815 Pax Britannica can 

be explained on negative grounds: it happened, and was allowed to happen, because the other major powers did not contest British naval predominance outside 

Europe during these many decades. Certain European countries (Prussia, Portugal, 

Greece, the Italian states) usually found the Royal Navy’s protection abroad a distinct benefit to their shipping and seamen in those midcentury decades of growing 

free trade. The French and Russian navies posed sporadic threats, but on certain 

other occasions were to be found cooperating with British naval forces, as in their 

joint crushing of Mehemet Ali’s fleet at Navarino in 1827; or, at least in regard to the 

French Navy, in shared large-scale operations in the Black Sea against Russia during the Crimean War. For a while after 1815 the fast, very heavy American frigates 

gave the British Admiralty cause for concern, but American attention to sea power, 

and to building a substantial national naval force, was never very sustained during 

the nineteenth century.10

But the Pax Britannica also existed because a long line of British governments 

and parliaments was determined to pay for command of the sea. There was no lack 

of pressure by members of Parliament to keep naval budgets low, yet spending on 

the fleets never fell to hopeless levels, and ironically it was the Liberal side of the 

House that most insisted upon maintaining a decent navy—the more so to keep 

Britain from being so weak internationally as to rely upon continental alliances. 

But of course that political prejudice against entanglements rested conveniently 

upon an economy which by the 1850s, in Hobsbawm’s calculation, produced twothirds of the world’s coal, half of its iron, and five-sevenths of its steel.11 Maritime 

preeminence, imperial advantage, technological strength, and isolationist preference all nicely reinforced each other at this time, and no foreign competitor came 

close, or seriously attempted to be a competitor. 
, 

Moreover, the naval predominance that was the Pax Britannica was not significantly affected, at least for quite a long while to come, by the advent of steam 

power and the Industrial Revolution. That may seem remarkable given that fossil 

fuels could be found in many parts of the world, so competitors had at least the 

raw potential for imitation and catch-up. But in the first instance what the Industrial Revolution did was to enhance vastly the already great economic and productive power of Britain itself, both vis-à-vis its traditional rivals (some of whom, 

like France, were not so blessed in resources of coal and iron) and vis-à-vis nonEuropean societies in Africa and India that had not even the elemental capacities for Western-type modernization. As British manufactured goods streamed out 

across the globe in the 1840s and 1850s, the world seemed to be ever more the “oyster” for the victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Thus, the rising exports of steam locomotives and railway equipment to the Rhineland and Pennsylvania seemed only 

to tie such markets to British manufacturing centers and bring large profits, and 

not to be enabling future world rivals. And it would be some time before the extensions of foreign railway networks began to create new centers of geopolitical power 

in the American Midwest and across the Ukraine, far from the workings of any 

future blockade. And since it was in south Wales that there occurred the very best 

steaming coals for all types of ships, it seemed that industrialization merely gave 

one further advantage in world power indices to a nation already almost unfairly 

endowed by geographic and other advantages. The longer-term consequences of 

the Industrial Revolution upon sea power were only to be appreciated, and then 

just partly, in the final quarter of the century, when other powers began to close 

the gap.12

One can gain a better understanding of all this if the “long nineteenth century” 

in its naval dimensions is divided into three chronological subcategories: that between 1815 and circa 1885, described above; between 1885 and 1906; and between 

1906 and the First World War. This at least was how it was in regard to the Royal 

Navy’s all-important global fleet distributions, as they were amended in each of 

these times. Geography of course could not change, but the relationship of the 

leading naval powers to each other did change as admiralties adjusted their naval 

programs, vessel types, and fleet dispositions, and the world’s leading naval power 

then sought to respond. These three chronological cutoff points also reflected some 

big changes in warship design, the increasingly stepped-up size of naval budgets, 

as well as the arrangements of the active fleets. There were some exceptions to this 

general three-part schema, but on the whole this breakdown can help readers of the 

period understand and locate such well-known events as the coming of the TwoPower Standard, the Dreadnought “leap,” and Tirpitz’s naval laws.

Mention of these later and very rapid eruptions in naval matters again allows 

the reader to see better why the maritime and geopolitical contours of the 1815–85 
years appear so relatively placid by comparison. Though there were significant 

changes in naval architecture, there was little standardization as warships sprouted 

a rich variety of profiles, funnels, masts (including sails), and gun calibers with little 

or no standardization of type compared with, say, the post-1919 era. The greatest 

war of the midcentury, the U.S. Civil War, had been overwhelmingly a land-based 

struggle, with sea power operating along its fringes. Bismarck’s three successful 

wars of unification in the 1860s were achieved without sea power being evoked at 

all. The Anglo-French naval operations against Russia during the Crimean War 

showed the difficulties of applying maritime pressure against such a landlocked, 

agrarian nation. For long decades after 1815 not much of naval significance happened in the waters outside Europe apart from antislavery patrols and the Opium 

Wars; later admirals’ memoirs could happily recall their frequent times as young 

lieutenants visiting Valparaiso and Brisbane. The many doings described in Osterhammel’s recent Transformation of the World rested, lightly and easily, upon an almost invisible and softly applied British naval preeminence.13 An integrated world 

of commerce and mainly peace was underpinned by the iron frames of the Royal 

Navy.

The significance of sea power within the Great Power system increased significantly after the mid-1880s, when both the French and Russian governments, 

already colonial rivals to Britain in the Mediterranean, Africa, the Far East, and 

Southeast Asia, embarked upon sustained and very expensive programs of capitalship building. This so shook the British press and Parliament out of their complacency that successive London governments could never again be free of the charge 

that they were underspending upon the Royal Navy, even when the Two-Power 

Act (i.e., the Naval Defence Act of 1889) and various expensive successor bills were 

announced.14 Naval spending ballooned, but so too did public agitations about a 

foreign invasion of England, the loss of control of the Mediterranean, and the end 

of the Pax Britannica.

If the British Admiralty and its planners were shaken by the sudden rise of the 

French and Russian new navies, they had every reason to be so. Geographically, 

those fleets would be very hard to handle. The fear was that fast and heavily gunned 

French armored cruisers, speedier than any Royal Navy battleship and more powerful than any British cruiser, could operate out of such well-situated harbors as 

Brest, Cherbourg, Toulon, Algiers, Dakar, Madagascar, Reunion (Indian Ocean), 

Saigon, even French West Indian ports. Russian raiders could operate out of Vladivostok, and later Port Arthur. A combined Russian Black Sea fleet and a Frenchbased Mediterranean force might possibly threaten Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean. In that case, the critical British Empire trade routes through 

the Mediterranean would have to be suspended (as they were, of course, between 

1940 and 1943).
, 

All this offered a geostrategic nightmare, and one that seemed to have no obvious solution. Build and build as the Royal Navy did, could it really place strong 

blockading squadrons off all the above ports all the time, if French and Russian 

squadrons were to be based there? It would be an operational and logistical nightmare. How also could an offshore blockade work without grave danger if the 

French chose to construct dozens of fast-attacking torpedo vessels (as they did), 

experiment with minefields and longer-range torpedoes, and design submarines 

of an ever-longer range? The close blockade was over, and the medium-distance 

offshore blockade was already at severe risk.15

This was the critical naval dimension to the “crisis of Empire” situation that 

faced British planners around the year 1900. Military disasters in South Africa 

led to huge increases in British military spending, at once far larger than anything 

spent upon the fleet. Russian military advances seemed to threaten across Asia. The 

great powers were snapping up Chinese ports—and thus newer naval bases. A war 

with France over the Nile Valley had just narrowly been avoided in 1898. Great new 

navies were being laid down by the United States and Japan, rising extra-European 

nations that would be impossible to blockade in any future war. The Pax Britannica was at an end, even before a great modern German battle fleet began to be laid 

down in the North Sea. Had the German Navy remained modest and second-class 

in size, and Germany stayed friendly throughout the Edwardian years, the British 

global and imperial crisis would have remained. But the German Navy did not remain modest in size, nor did Germany stay friendly.

Viewed from this larger gloomy perspective, it is now easier to understand that 

immense flurry of defense measures and newer naval policies that the British engaged in between about 1895 and 1906—measures that have drawn the attention 

of a whole host of recent naval historians of these years.16 The two-power standard 

was asserted again, and again. Battleships became larger and larger, to accommodate ever-bigger gun calibers, and at the same time became more and more heavily 

armored, and faster and faster—and much more expensive in consequence. Giant, 

fast, armored cruisers, even more pricey than battleships, were laid down. Flotillas of torpedo-boat destroyers were constructed, to protect those battleships from 

attack. Advances were made in various new forms of fire control, each with their 

impassioned claimants. Plans were also advanced for super-fast, heavily gunned 

though lightly protected types of battle cruisers that could scout in advance of the 

main battle fleet or range along imperial trade routes. Fresh undersea cables were 

laid along those same imperial maritime routes. Harbor defenses from Dover to 

Gibraltar, and from Toulon to Dakar, were expensively renewed. Qualitatively and 

quantitatively, navies were altering fast in this period, but none felt the pressure 

more than the number one naval power.
The revolution in naval affairs that so threatened Britain, its imperial possessions and maritime routes, and the Royal Navy in the two decades between around 

1885 and around 1905 was eventually handled, and greatly eased, not by some phenomenal new technological deus ex machina, as Admiral Fisher and other reformers sought, but through diplomacy—that is, by important changes in great power 

relationships that took place between Britain and the other nations precisely in 

these years. In the Mediterranean, Turkey, Spain, and Austria-Hungary remained 

overall friendly, and Italy very much so. In the Far East, Japan signed an alliance 

with Britain, crushed Russian land forces, and smashed the Russian battle fleet 

(1905). In the Western Hemisphere, the rising American power was accommodated through territorial concessions and a political rapprochement. Most important 

of all, Britain entered into a series of colonial agreements between 1904 and 1907 

with its two greatest overseas rivals, France and Russia, which (provided they were 

kept) took away their threats to the empire, and of course to the imperial sea-lanes. 

The nightmares of the 1890s were receding, although it was understandable that 

most admirals did not at first understand what was happening, and many feared 

that the new French and Russian rapprochements might not last. By any objective 

strategical measurement, however, Britain’s global position was far more secure by 

1906 than it had been, say, in 1890. And, to repeat an earlier point, all these diplomatic realignments could, and most probably would, have taken place even had the 

German fleet remained small and friendly.

Seen in this light, the final phase of the long nineteenth century (1906–14) is 

easier to comprehend and requires only a few broad strokes here. The new German Navy was being built, by Tirpitz’s intent, to affect British policy and to make 

London more amenable to Berlin. It was to be a very large but short-range battlefleet navy, and thus to have its greatest influence between Wilhelmshaven and the 

Thames. German public opinion was now virulently hostile, and German diplomacy under the kaiser unpredictable. As pressures eased upon Britain’s world position, a new danger seemed to have arisen much closer to home. British warship 

numbers were trimmed in the Far East, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and on 

lesser stations. Land for a new battleship base was prudently purchased at Rosyth 

as early as 1903. The new Dreadnought battleship and Invincible-class battle cruiser 

appeared after 1906; they had not been designed deliberately against Germany, of 

course, but now they were there—and the swift German intention to follow suit 

showed that the new High Seas Fleet would stay as the chief threat to Britain’s 

maritime security, and the more frightening because so close. The Anglo-German 

naval race consumed all the headlines, agitated the British Parliament, and gripped 

successive British governments.17

But Britain’s security position was made much easier by the military-strategical

decisions of two men: Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen and Grand Adm. Alfred von 
, 

Tirpitz. Schlieffen and the Prussian Army planners who followed him played such 

a vital, albeit negative, role because they completely ruled out the diversion of their 

armies for an invasion of England. It would have been very difficult to carry out 

such an invasion in any case, but it simply was not going to happen, because the 

Prussian General Staff ’s obsession throughout this time was the swift invasion of 

France, via Belgium (possibly also via the Netherlands as well), as well as gigantic 

campaigns in the east. This prospect meant that, like it or not, British governments 

now had to consider a threat to the European land balance of power for the first 

time in a century—a contingency for which the Royal Navy, not liking this at all, 

would also have to adjust. And Tirpitz eased Britain’s strategical dilemmas, ironically, by his unwavering insistence upon constructing a German Navy solely, or 

overwhelmingly, for deployment in the North Sea—the pre-1914 naval archives 

show him firmly resisting all schemes to have a larger German naval presence in 

the Mediterranean and outside Europe, as reducing the effect of his “lever point” 

against Britain in home waters.18 So it was with reluctance that he viewed the existence of Souchon’s small force in the Mediterranean and of von Spee’s squadron 

in the Far East. By the same token, Tirpitz opposed allocating large monies for 

enhancing naval harbors in the German colonies. So long as he held office, British 

imperial trade routes were not, despite any apprehensions, going to be in much 

danger in the years before 1914.

The historian is left only to speculate how the naval strategical situation would 

have looked had pre-1914 German governments decided instead to construct and 

then deploy squadrons of fast, powerful cruisers and battle cruisers, and even lesser 

squadrons, in ports in West Africa, Southwest Africa, East Africa, New Guinea, 

Samoa, the Carolines, and Tsingtao, instead of laying down yet another expensive 

battleship flotilla for the High Seas Fleet. Would this have seemed like a new version of that scarcely faded nightmare of powerful French squadrons at Dakar and 

Madagascar? Probably not, because Germany could offer a far weaker logistical 

support system to an overseas base network than could France. Yet because Tirpitz 

prevailed in his fight against the German Admiralty Staff, that alternative strategy 

did not happen. Instead, and ironically, the natural geographical advantages that 

the Royal Navy had had against the Dutch challenge in the seventeenth century 

now returned, almost as an act of strategic good fortune, to hem in the newer naval 

challenge of the kaiser’s improperly named High Seas Fleet. Sea power had not diminished in importance, of course; it simply was returning to manifest itself in an 

older, familiar locale.

1914–18

The prewar constellation of prior diplomatic arrangements, military preparations, 

and the overall “correlation of forces,” as well as the unalterable geographical situation, thus set limits and opportunities for the workings of sea power after 1914, 
affecting both the Allies and the Central Powers alike. The existing military plans 

and contractual arrangements of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany meant 

that a vast land struggle, far from the sea, would take place once decision makers 

in those capitals decided upon war rather than further negotiation. One of those 

contracts—namely, France’s commitment to its ally Russia—triggered Berlin’s declaration of war upon Paris and brought the conflict to Western Europe as well. 

While a fight against Russia and France seemed deeply satisfying to many among 

Berlin’s leadership during the July crisis of 1914, the rigidity of their Schlieffen Plan 

actually meant that Germany first attacked neutral Belgium, thus triggering the 

intervention of Britain and its empire against the Central Powers, and turning the 

struggle into a true “world” war. Wilhelmine Germany was now simultaneously 

engaged in a massive land conflict and a premature maritime struggle against a far 

larger naval power—all this, unsurprisingly, to Tirpitz’s dismay and frustration. In 

his view, Berlin had unwisely and prematurely pushed for a conflict in 1914; there 

was no sleepwalking into war here.19 And Tirpitz had fair cause for dismay, for, 

while there were good prospects for a militarily efficient Germany to overcome its 

next-door neighbors, at sea the odds were badly tilted against the High Seas Fleet.

Several early actions in the war confirmed Germany’s weaknesses overseas, but, 

coincidentally, other events in the southern North Sea and at the Dardanelles suggested that sea power’s effectiveness along the littoral waters of a huge continent 

had been greatly changed and reduced since the age of fighting sail. On the declaration of war, Germany’s two relatively small overseas squadrons were left exposed, 

like foxes in an open field. Because Britain’s Far East ally, Japan, came immediately 

into the war in order to seize Germany’s possessions in north China and the Central Pacific islands, Adm. Graf von Spee’s squadron had no alternative but to flee 

across the entire Pacific to the tip of South America, where it smashed a very weak 

Royal Navy cruiser group at Coronel (November 1914) before in turn being eliminated at the Battle of the Falkland Islands (December 1914) by a force of fast battle 

cruisers sent out by Admiral Fisher from home waters. One could say that imperial 

flotilla defense was working here, then, but afterward there was nothing for HMS 

Inflexible and Invincible to do but to come home, to risk more dangerous closewater threats (HMS Inflexible was heavily damaged by Turkish shore batteries and a 

mine at the Dardanelles, beached, and then recovered) or face Germany’s powerful 

squadrons in the North Sea (HMS Invincible was sunk by plunging fire at Jutland).

Secondly, and even earlier, von Souchon’s Goeben and Breslau had fled through 

the Mediterranean and forced themselves for refuge at Constantinople, thus partly 

helping to bring Turkey into the war on the side of the Central Powers (also in 

November 1914), which in turn led to Anglo-French counteractions and expansion across the Middle East. With an Allied naval blockade in operation in the 

Atlantic and the Channel and from Gibraltar, and with all Germany’s overseas cable 
, 

communications cut off, there would be no great naval campaigning in overseas 

waters in this particular war. And Italy’s entry into the conflict (May 1915) kept 

Austria-Hungary’s fleet bottled up as well. Naval clashes in the Baltic and Black 

Seas were interesting, but local affairs. Only America remained as a major neutral 

force, albeit tied by finance, trade, and communications much more to the Allied 

side. So the greater part of this war was, in essence, a giant Mackinder-ite land 

struggle, with surface navies operating at the margins; it could not help being so.20

The destruction of Germany’s prospects overseas suggested that the workings 

of sea power were running in Britain’s direction, but further encounters pointed 

to another, unsettling fact: the coming of certain nineteenth-century technologies, when converted into weapons systems, was going to curb the application of 

maritime force along well-defended hostile shores, and even a bit farther out. In 

October 1914, a single enemy mine sank the new battleship HMS Audacious off 

northern Ireland, a stunning example of what one would later call “asymmetrical 

warfare” and a precedent that deeply worried Jellicoe. Even before then, in September 1914, three large cruisers (HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Crecy) patrolling off the 

Dutch coast were sunk by a small, elderly U-boat, causing the loss of a staggering 

1,400 British sailors. As Corbett put it in his official history, “nothing that had yet 

occurred had so emphatically proclaimed the change that had come over naval 

warfare.”21 Close blockade was supposed to have been given up as Admiralty practice years before the war; now it decidedly was.

This left the far easier practice of the distant blockade of Germany’s maritime 

commerce, taking advantage of Britain’s favorable position over the entrances to the 

North Sea. Yet the hoped-for “squeeze” upon the German economy did not work 

as decisively as in prewar planning, partly because the Central Powers (with their 

extensive grain fields of the east) were to be largely self-sustaining in food supplies 

for much of the war, and partly because angry American protests about the interruption of neutral shipping slowed down the operation of the seaborne blockade 

of German commerce.22 Economic warfare against the Central Powers took many 

forms—the cutting of cable communications, the suspension of German credits, 

the simple fact that the huge Anglo-German mutual trade spluttered to a halt (as 

did, of course, all German-Russian and German-French economic exchanges), the 

closing down of the access to British shipping for German goods, the purchase 

of supplies overseas that might otherwise have gone to Germany, and the nowcautious inspection of neutral shipping on the high seas—but the effects of this 

could not be swift, and the whole process was obviously much less visible to the 

public and their governments than the battles of the Marne and Tannenberg. Ironically, of course, land warfare was also to show itself less decisive and promising 

by the time of Ypres (1915), causing the generals on both sides to call for an evergreater share of resources and manpower they now needed for carrying out vast, 
industrialized warfare. All prewar planning assumptions, for land and sea, seemed 

confounded.

While it was patently clear that in this war the Royal Navy could not operate in 

the Baltic as it had done in the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, Admiralty planners 

and their pugnacious First Lord, Churchill, did still think that they could strike at 

Constantinople and alter the outcome of the war in the Black Sea and across Eastern Europe itself.23 However, the disaster that hit the first naval operations against 

the Dardanelles—the loss and crippling of so many British and French battleships 

upon the Turkish-laid minefields on the single day of March 18, 1915—was not 

only spectacular and devastating in itself. It finally confirmed that the older application of naval force against enemy shores was now impossible in a new age of 

small, “killer” weapons like the mine, torpedoes, entrenched coastal gunnery, fast 

torpedo boats, and submarines (the bombing of warships by aircraft had not yet 

arrived).

Then the second stage of the Dardanelles campaign—the failure of ever-larger 

Allied armies to break through at Gallipoli and advance upon Constantinople—

showed that the classic weapon of amphibious warfare was also crimped unless the 

invading forces were to be far better equipped and trained than they were at this 

time. Future militaries like the U.S. Marine Corps at Okinawa learned much from 

studying the failures of the Allies at the Dardanelles.24 At the time, of course, that 

meant nothing. What seemed to be happening was that while the Central Powers 

were quite unable to shake the Allied command of the oceans, the Allies could do 

little or nothing to hurt their foes from the sea. Worst of all, of course, France and 

Britain also could do nothing to help their beleaguered Russian ally except, so their 

high commands argued, by massively increasing land pressures along the Western 

Front.

But the greatest confounding of the hopes of Allied sea power advocates lay 

where they had expected a decisive blow against the German Navy to occur—in the 

North Sea itself. Geography was not a friend to Jellicoe here. Enemy vessels operating from Wilhelmshaven could get to England’s east coast more swiftly than could 

the Grand Fleet coming out of Scapa Flow, and even when the two navies met the 

actions were fast, furious, confused, and attended by mists, poor communications, 

and the failure of command and control. What therefore took place between 1914 

and 1916 in these North Sea encounters was much more of a cat-and-mouse game 

than a decisive battle-fleet action like Trafalgar. Early German bombardments of 

the towns of Scarborough and Whitby shocked the British nation, so the Admiralty had to conjure up a credible response in these new and trying circumstances. 

The Grand Fleet could not be relocated south with individual battleship squadrons 

based in the Tyne, Humber, Harwich, and the Thames, for bringing them together 

again off, say, Scarborough Head would be a signals nightmare (signals turned out 
, 

to be a great Royal Navy weakness), and the possibility of one of them getting into 

a running fight with Hipper’s dangerous battle cruisers or even Scheer’s entire fleet 

was too daunting to contemplate. The best that could be done, and this was sensible 

enough, was to base Beatty’s battle cruisers at Rosyth and to fill southern ports such 

as Harwich with cruiser and destroyer flotillas—and rely upon the Germans’ loose 

wireless chatter to indicate when the High Seas Fleet might be emerging. Thus 

the Grand Fleet would stay far up north—leaving Jellicoe, however, with another 

operational problem: should it, upon alert, steam south as fast as possible, shrugging off the risk of newly strewn enemy mines, or proceed instead at around eight 

knots behind a screen of minesweepers, making things easier for U-boat attack, 

and being also possibly too late to help an outnumbered Beatty? Clearly, Rodney 

and Nelson had had no such problems.

All these reminders of space and weather puts the Anglo-German North Sea 

surface fleet encounters—off the Yorkshire coast, the Dogger Bank, even Jutland—

in their context. The historian of an exact century later should be wary of being 

smart after these events. Jellicoe, Beatty, and Tyrwhitt were nervous, excited, and 

worried about a battle scenario that could emerge from the mists in less than fifteen 

minutes, and so, surely even more so, were Hipper and his bleary-eyed lookouts 

on the German side. Yet it is impossible to accept Churchill’s hyperbolic claim that 

Jellicoe was the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon. While the 

Dogger Bank clash delivered to the Germans a salutary spanking and a warning, 

Jutland in turn gave the thinly protected British battle cruisers a hammering and 

the nation a blow to its pride; gave both historians and participants the stuff for 

endless postmortems, claims and counterclaims; and also gave rise to a large literature, much predictable and of relatively low value.25 It has never been shown—for 

how could it be?—that even if the Grand Fleet had lost, say, six capital ships and 

not three, the overall maritime balance the day after Jutland would have been much 

different. Nor does a British claim much matter that, had its deficient shells been 

replaced before the war, the hits that occurred on six further German battleships 

would have been fatal ones. Improved fire control here or improved shells there 

were simply not the point. Strategically, Jutland changed nothing. The British nation was understandably shocked at the loss of 6,094 seamen. But on July 1, 1916, 

on the first day of the Somme, the British Army lost 19,240 men out of a total of 

57,500 casualties—and the British press moved on. The German High Command 

didn’t care about Jutland, nor about an invasion of England. So what was Jellicoe 

to have lost?

The historian can be brief about what was left.26 If the German Admiralty wished 

to bring the British nation to its knees after 1916, it seemed it had no practical alternative but to initiate full-scale and unrestricted U-boat warfare against mercantile commerce in the Atlantic, whether Allied or neutral. It thus traded off a high 
political risk against its increasing post-Jutland naval ineffectiveness, and by April 

1917 that risk playing had led to the entry of the United States into the conflict. 

That was simply too much. Provoking the British Empire into this struggle ensured 

that Germany would not win the First World War; provoking the Americans also to 

enter meant that Germany would lose. The odds, as A. J. P. Taylor pointed out sixty 

years ago, were simply too great.27

This did not mean that the naval situation for the Allies immediately became 

any easier, but it did become very different. Success in the maritime conflict was 

now counted by the tonnage of merchantmen sunk versus the number of U-boats 

destroyed and, above all, by the successful flow of New World foodstuffs, munitions, and fighting men to British and French ports during 1917 and 1918. And 

the losses of merchant ships were huge and frightening—3.6 million tons in six 

months—yet they were never enough to achieve the German Admiralty Staff ’s purpose. And the British return to the older practice of convoy gave the operational 

and tactical advantage to the Allied escorting fleets; if the U-boats wanted to score, 

they would have to attack the convoys and thus provoke counterattack.

Obviously, in this great struggle, neither the Grand Fleet nor the High Seas Fleet 

counted very much, except as a manpower drain, and as neutralizing each other. To 

return to a consideration of the three grand theories about sea power mentioned 

above, one might conclude that the eventual Allied victory in late 1918 chiefly 

came, not from a big battle-fleet struggle in the North Sea (Mahan) but from the 

linked strategies of keeping open the North Atlantic lines of communication (Corbett) while beating off Ludendorff ’s bid for land supremacy (Mackinder). This was 

difficult for fleet admirals and their later historians to swallow.

This did not, of course, mean that sea power had not worked at all, but that it 

had operated, and worked, in a very different context from that anticipated by most 

prewar planners and policy makers. When the conflict opened, the signal was sent 

out that “The King’s Ships Were at Sea,” and so they were, or at least the smaller 

patrolling vessels and the submarines were.28 But the heavier surface warships came 

out infrequently, not only because the waters were dangerous but also, importantly, 

because their actual presence at sea was ever less necessary. The preponderance of 

naval force, plus geography, had ensured Allied naval supremacy in any case. It just 

was harder to explain that when the war ended and the leaders of the victor powers 

assembled at Versailles. The advocates of the influence of sea power had a far easier 

time of it after 1815 and 1945.

1919–39

There was to be no long century of relative naval peace following 1919, but in 

the mere twenty-year interlude a remarkable amount did occur that would affect 

the workings of navies. History speeded things up, as it were. One hundred years 

afterward, one can see rather better than did contemporaries why the very special 
, 

international and domestic circumstances after the First World War wrought havoc 

upon any traditional attempts to develop a naval policy; indeed, wrought havoc 

upon the usual ways of thinking about sea power itself. The new features to this altered strategical landscape were daunting, and admirals everywhere, and the policy 

makers who controlled them, were at first understandably daunted, distracted, and 

confused by all this.29 By the second half of the 1920s, however, the landscape of 

world affairs had settled down a bit and seemed altogether more reassuring.

With a suspicious U.S. Senate and American public forcing Woodrow Wilson 

and his successors to pull back from leading the efforts to create a post-1919 world 

order, it was left to policy makers in London, Paris, Rome, and other capitals to 

shape the contours within which navies would operate and naval planners would 

work. What is clear is that the challenges uppermost in the minds of Lloyd George 

and his political contemporaries were very definitely not those of, say, Admirals 

Jellicoe and Beatty.

How could they be? Germany and Austria-Hungary had collapsed, and there 

was the threat of international mayhem across Eastern Europe as new nationalist 

forces strove to establish boundaries and governments. Most of the regular armies 

of the First World War had dissolved and gone home, leaving those of France, 

Belgium, and Italy, intact if vastly reduced. Polish, White Russian, and Bolshevik forces fought on, with Lenin eventually gaining a breathing space for his new, 

puzzling regime. All this, of course, took place on land, indeed on Mackinder’s 

very “heartland” of the Ukraine, and therefore had little to do with the Western 

admiralties’ efforts to create their postwar international order. Urgent European 

issues—on boundaries, war debts, reparations, plebiscites, working out League of 

Nations practices, and carrying out old-fashioned-type great-power diplomacy at 

places like Lausanne and Locarno—took most of the headlines of the day; to France 

especially all this was crucial. In parallel to negotiations over the Saarland and upper Silesia were those over the future boundaries of the entire Middle East, but even 

here naval considerations played no role because there was no challenge to British and French imperial dominance, and nor was there in Africa. Commonwealth 

navies were shrinking and Commonwealth armies dissolving, following the American lead. All the civilized (sic) Western world seemed to want was for its armies to 

come home, allowing governments instead to focus upon reconstruction and social 

priorities, in which context all defense expenditures had to be brutally cut. Generals were now despised, and navies told to find their place and think themselves 

lucky that their budgets were not further slashed.

Despite the navalists’ dismay, this was not the end of sea power, and in fact 

the setting of reduced, economy-based priorities by the governments in Washington, London, and Paris gave navies a rather good, if limited, circumstance in 

which to “find their place.” All the admirals—including the Japanese, French, and 
Italian—kicked, screamed, and protested as they were forced into the straitjacket of 

the powerful clauses of the Washington Treaties of 1921–22, but when their navies 

emerged from this harrowing experience into the placid years of the later 1920s 

things did not seem so bad after all. Even the very fact that warship sizes were 

standardized by displacement and gun caliber grew to be reassuring to planners 

and designers; a heavy cruiser had eight-inch guns, a light cruiser less than sixinch guns. Each class—carriers, battleships, cruisers—was neatly described and 

circumscribed.

The German Navy was no more, chiefly sunk at its own hands; the French Navy 

was under firm political control; the Italian Navy small and inward-looking; and no 

other European navies counted. Sea power, as manifested by large fleets, was held 

by the three great navies of Britain, the United States, and Japan, and all were being 

compelled to find their diminished position within their nation’s current list of priorities. Treaties established the maritime status quo regarding territories and naval 

bases across the Far East and Pacific; and in the Atlantic and Mediterranean the 

Royal Navy enjoyed an uncontested superiority, with the French and Italian navies 

well behind. The American and British admiralties were still going to quarrel over 

cruiser sizes and numbers right through until the London Naval Treaty of 1930, but 

this was a mild affair compared with prewar passions. A better expression of what 

was going on might be captured in photographs of the great harbor of Hong Kong 

in these years, with the 5th RN Cruiser Squadron at anchor, under their awnings, 

while in the distance a few American warships peacefully took in fuel and other 

supplies. In the Mediterranean, French, British, and Italian vessels paid port visits. 

Not much else was going on. The age of frantic navalism was over.

The most interesting aspect to the story of evolving sea power in these years 

was not, therefore, navies, and certainly not traditional battle fleets, but the emerging newer technologies of warfare, especially in the air. Both the Royal Navy and 

the U.S. Navy experimented keenly with “flattops” after 1919, and although those 

very early vessels like HMS Argus and USS Langley were small and primitive it is 

really remarkable how swiftly the speed, displacement, size, and striking power of 

subsequent carriers became [greater]. HMS Ark Royal, for example, was laid down 

less than twenty years after Argus had put to sea. And the later carriers had to be so 

much bigger because aircraft in general were so much more powerful—the ships 

had to have a longer space for both takeoff and landing. The new dive-bombers, 

torpedo bombers, and high-level aircraft flew more swiftly, carried greater armaments, and came in so fast. The admirals may have pooh-poohed Billy Mitchell’s 

claims in 1920, but by the late 1930s it is noticeable that all heavy warships, battleships, cruisers, and carriers were having ever more antiaircraft guns fitted. More 

importantly—at least as far as the Royal Navy was concerned, since it operated 

chiefly in European waters—the threat might come more from land-based air 
, 

power than from enemy carrier aircraft. Early in the First World War, mines and 

torpedoes had made a close-in naval blockade a thing of the past. But what if the 

threat of land-based aircraft pushed the more powerful navy into operating farther 

and farther from the shore? How limited was sea power’s “influence” then?

The years after 1936 saw changes come thick and fast for all the major navies. 

The historically distorting naval “holiday” in capital-ship building was at an end, 

as were the total caps on fleet tonnages. Naval construction surged forward, in the 

British case in the form of the new King George V–class battleships, Illustrious-class 

fleet carriers, Town-class cruisers, and flotillas of fleet destroyers.30 The American 

Navy also grew rapidly in the late 1930s, although it was not until the third VinsonTrammel Act of June 1940 and the Two-Ocean Navy Act of the following month 

that legislation went through that would make it the largest naval force in the world 

by 1944. The three revisionist, fascist states were also investing heavily in new 

fleets. Italy was laying down powerful, fast battleships and heavy cruisers (although 

no aircraft carriers). Hitler’s huge rearmament schemes also encompassed the 

German Navy, and if its initial laying downs were not large, they were enough to 

have London seek the controversial Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1936), a 

desperate effort to achieve a one-power standard in home waters while also being 

able to send a fleet to the Far East as large as Japan’s. But the Japanese were also rebuilding, way beyond that calculus. Everyone was building, running faster to keep 

up, just as the shapes of the wartime coalitions of power took shadowy form. The 

Axis trio was moving: Italy in Ethiopia (1935), in Spain (1937), and in the Balkans 

(1939); Japan in China (1937); and Hitler across central Europe (1938–39). Britain 

and France stood once more together, diplomatically and navally, by 1939. The 

USSR desperately bought time, as did a neutralist, geographically favored United 

States.

In sum, by the eve of the Second World War sea power—always a different thing 

from navies, or from naval policies, or from naval technologies—possessed a form 

both familiar and yet unfamiliar. Command over the surface waters of the Atlantic 

Ocean, and of the Mediterranean, was being asserted, by the battle fleets of the prevailing Western navies (Mahan); and plans were simultaneously being made to protect the enormous yet scattered flocks of individual merchant ships making their 

way to port (Corbett). One giant commercial map of November 1937 shows the 

streams of little dots headed to British ports from La Plata, from the West Indies, 

around the Cape, past Freetown, through the Mediterranean.31 And even two years 

later those Elder Dempster, Blue Funnel, P&O, and Compagnie de Suez merchant 

vessels must have all seemed reasonably safe. The Axis navies were locked into the 

North Sea and Mediterranean, and in the absence of a High Seas Fleet the surface 

balance of power was even more favorably tilted toward London and Paris than it 

had been in 1914.
But those vast numbers of Allied merchantmen were also more vulnerable because the greatest threat to their security now came not from hostile surface raiders 

but from an undersea menace that challenged the power of regular fleets to claim 

command of the oceans and threatened merchant fleets, grain carriers, oil tankers, 

and ocean liners alike. This was not completely new, of course; as described above, 

the early submarines had already shown their threatening capacities, in the North 

Sea by 1916, in the Atlantic by 1917. But many a traditional admiral, in Japan no 

less than in the West, had tried to brush away that fact, and the cozy international 

scene and naval holidays of the 1920s helped to perpetuate the illusion. And illusion it was. Four centuries of surface sea power, from Hawkins’s Revenge to the new 

Ark Royal itself (sunk by a German submarine on November 13, 1941), had been 

an impressive historical “long phase” in the larger story of the advance of the West. 

But a new age had commenced, lasting to the present, whereby surface sea power, 

when under way upon the high seas, would always be vulnerable to an attack out 

of the deep.

In those same few years, from roughly 1930 to 1940, the engine power, speed, 

carrying capacity, and range of the modern bomber aircraft greatly increased in 

size. This became a mixed bonus to navies. The striking power and reach of the 

newer Japanese, American, and British carriers rose greatly, but so did the danger 

from their foes’ carrier fleets, and the nascent threat from land-based aircraft (from 

Stuka dive-bombers to the later high-level B-17s) was a completely new factor. 

While the Anglo-French surface fleets stood in great numerical superiority over 

those of their foes at the end of the 1930s, what did that mean if hostile air power 

could threaten their security, and thus their operating maritime effectiveness, up to 

one hundred or more miles off a theater of war? What did it mean in the Pacific and 

Southeast Asia if a newer, Japanese, carrier-based air power threatened the Allied 

hold over the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore? What did it mean, closer to 

home, when Italian land-based air power threatened to drive its foes’ fleets out of 

the central Mediterranean?

When war broke out again in 1939, therefore, the Royal Navy may have been 

still the leading navy by count of the numbers, and to this could be added the 

considerable French fleets, plus the preponderance in naval bases possessed by the 

Anglo-French powers. Yet number counting alone clearly was not a true measure 

of the strategical balances. In September 1939, as Churchill resumed his position as 

First Lord, the British Admiralty proudly announced, “Winston Is Back!,” suggesting that things were [again] much the same as in 1914. They were not, on at least 

two significant counts. While Italy and Japan remained initially neutral, they were 

obviously potential foes and had to be regarded as such, giving the Royal Navy a 

much more serious fleet distributional problem than it had had in 1914. And, secondly, there was now the question of how much air power’s potential would be of 
, 

greater advantage to Britain’s foes than to the number one maritime nation itself. 

Finally, looming in the background, although a concern of only a few thoughtful 

observers of geopolitics, there was the even larger question of how Western European maritime power would fare in a new era structured by the emergence of giant 

nations—real superpowers.

1939–45

The Second World War was so immense that it is better understood as five great 

(and interrelated) conflicts rather than as a single struggle for supremacy. From 

1937 until 1945, a gigantic land war raged throughout much of China, as the Imperial Japanese Army committed over one million men to crush the Nationalists, who 

were in turn trying to crush the Communists. From 1941 onward, an even greater 

land struggle took place along the entire western front of the USSR in a fight to the 

death between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army (with approximately three million German and five million Soviet men in the initial fighting alone). Across the 

vast distances of the Pacific Ocean, with outlier campaigns that ranged westward to 

the Indian border, a third great struggle, mainly maritime-amphibious, was waged 

between Japan’s forces and those of the American-Australian-British commands 

and forces. Eight thousand miles away, and starting over two years earlier, another 

geographically widespread war was fought between Britain and its allies and the 

German-Italian coalition; its scope was small in 1939–40, though it soon ranged 

from Archangel to Abyssinia, and from Newfoundland to Egypt, and all the waters in between. And from 1942 onward, a great Anglo-American double strategic 

bombing campaign was unleashed against the Third Reich from hundreds of British (and later Sicilian-Italian) air bases, as another, and independent, form of winning the war.

All five grand campaigns were interconnected, to a greater or lesser extent, with 

the Chinese-Japanese War having the fewest links to the other fighting. All five 

campaigns have each attracted a vast historiography, with the majority of the writings focusing solely on their own zones of battle, often laying claim to its significance for the final victory, sometimes even querying the size or the importance of 

another campaign.32 This is not necessary in any proper assessment of the influence 

of sea power upon the Second World War, for the significance of the great battles 

of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Mediterranean are incontestable; and it is clear that 

the Anglo-American leadership saw those theaters as interlinked, as they shifted 

warships, air squadrons, and landing craft from one to the other as they judged 

necessary. And there are other linkages: neither the giant Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign nor the Normandy landings were possible without the 

Allied naval escorts getting the invaluable convoys safely across the North Atlantic; 

the bombing of German railways and submarine pens hurt U-boat production and 

crippled overall Wehrmacht communications; and seaborne/landborne supplies 
from the Western Allies gave far greater help to the Red Army than is usually acknowledged, while the same strategic bombing also significantly diverted large resources of German manpower and material to home defense that could have been 

used on the Eastern Front.33 As the war went on, certain Luftflotte Fliegerkorps 

were juggled by Goering’s staff between the Mediterranean, Eastern, and French/

Atlantic fronts, just as many British warships went from Mediterranean operations 

to Arctic convoy duties to Atlantic campaigning. Few if any leaders and their advisers viewed the war with complete balance, and holistically, although the meetings 

of the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff did their best in this regard. 

Viewing sea power within this larger, grand-strategical framework best lets historians see where and how it worked, as well as where it played little or no role. 

In the hard-fought campaigning of 1939 to 1942 in the Western theaters of war—

where Britain fought to maintain itself as the major military power—sea power’s 

importance was undoubted, and was virtually everywhere. The Battle of the Atlantic, where hostilities began on the first day, was, after all, the longest campaign 

of the war, and convoys were already under attack and Royal Navy warships being 

sunk even during the so-called Phony War period. The diplomacy of the late 1930s 

had set up the battlefield: Hitler’s attack upon Poland drew France and Britain into 

the fighting, which then escalated greatly with the explosive German assaults upon 

the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway. Those losses to the Western alliance 

would have been great enough, but in May–June 1940 the largest strategical change 

since Napoleonic times occurred when France itself was toppled.

In less than two months, therefore, Britain had forfeited all its usual geographical advantages, save that incomparable one of being an island-state, protected by 

its moat. Its control of the two exits from the North Sea was no more. Back in the 

late 1920s, an obscure strategic writer named Rear Adm. Wolfgang Wegener had 

argued that in a future war the only way that Germany could escape the geographical “trap” that it had occupied in 1914–18 would be to have naval bases in Norway 

or in western France; now it had both.34 This huge transformation of the balances 

made the fighting at sea ever more important and fierce. The Royal Navy lost many 

ships itself as it mauled its German foe badly in the Norwegian campaign. As it 

pulled the British and French armies out of Dunkirk, it encountered more losses 

from Luftwaffe attacks. German bombers hammered away at British shipbuilding 

yards. German submarines, from their new advanced bases, punished the convoys 

severely.

Italy’s entry into the war, just after the fall of France, made an awful strategic 

situation for Britain now close to catastrophic.35 The loss of the French ally and 

the entry of the Italian fleet involved a “swing” of literally hundreds of warships, 

and even when the French fleet was brutally neutralized the plain fact was that 

Britain no longer had control of the Mediterranean. For the next two and a half 
, 

years that sea became the most contested naval theater in all of history, and warships and merchantmen littered the seabeds from off Crete to the approaches to 

Malta. In these years, without a doubt, the Royal Navy had its own “finest hour.” In 

these years, as Churchill and his cabinet realized, keeping command of the sea was 

elemental, vital, urgent . . . and so very precarious. The reader of the narrative of 

a Malta convoy—say, the epic Operation PEDESTAL convoy battle of August 11–13, 

1942—comes away awed at the intensity of the fighting by the British, Italian, and 

German units thrown into the struggle.36

The Battle of the Atlantic was even larger, more widespread, and more costly; 

in 1940, the Allies lost 3.9 million tons of merchant shipping, chiefly to surface 

attacks and U-boats but some also to German aircraft and to mines; in 1941 that 

total jumped to 4.3 million tons, including seven merchant ships in the foray by 

the cruiser Hipper; and in 1942 the total was a terrifying 7.8 million tons.37 Then 

the fourth year of the campaign started badly for the convoys. It was shortly after March 1943, when no fewer than four convoys had been torn into by U-boat 

wolf pack attacks and some 627,000 further tons lost, that the official Admiralty 

record read, “The Germans never came so near to disrupting communications between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March, 1943.”38

Here, clearly, was Corbett’s claim that sea power equaled command of the maritime 

routes most clearly evidenced. Here also was made clear the stark fact: unless control of the sea routes to Britain was maintained, there would be little or no strategic 

bombing (the fuel for the air squadrons could only come by tanker) and no Allied 

landings in France (for the equipment for two million U.S. soldiers could not cross 

the Atlantic unless it was protected).

It is true that certain other Atlantic convoys were being successfully routed to 

avoid the U-boats altogether and thus successfully make it to the Clyde and Liverpool. And it is also true that the enormous American shipbuilding effort was by 

this stage producing millions of tons of additional merchant shipping (11.5 million 

tons in 1943).39 Yet it is not at all certain that, had the U-boat packs not been driven 

out of the North Atlantic by the extraordinary Allied counteroffensives of April 

to June 1943, those additional stocks of shipping would have made much of a difference; if undefeated at sea, Dönitz’s increasingly larger wolf packs surely would 

have sunk more and more ships, and the dreadful losses of merchant-ship crews 

clearly was not sustainable. So the amazingly swift change of fortune that followed, 

with the German Navy losing forty-one U-boats in May 1943 alone, actually meant 

that a strategic watershed had been crossed. With the Allied control of the Atlantic 

convoy routes never again in such dire danger, the first of the Casablanca military 

directives had been achieved. Naval specialists will energetically debate which of the 

newer weapons of war made the greatest contributions to this sharp defeat of the 

U-boats (the list would include the coming of long-range patrol aircraft, the arrival 
of the escort carriers, the astounding miniature radar [cavity magnetron] sets, plus 

hi-fi signals detection, improved depth charges, homing torpedoes, hunterkiller groups, and ULTRA signals-intelligence decrypts).40 But the chief point is that 

the greatest struggle ever for command of the sea had been fought, with the defending navies triumphing after a long, bloody contest.

With that vital maritime campaign won, the Anglo-American alliance could 

move to the next stages of the Casablanca military agenda and commence the 

amphibian counteroffensive against the Third Reich’s vulnerable, overextended, 

southernmost holdings. Geography again favored the Allies, for it was a lot easier 

to move invasion armies from the Clyde and Virginia to the shores of Morocco 

and Algeria than it was for the German High Command to send divisions from the 

Balkans to North Africa—especially at a time when the Wehrmacht was involved in 

the grinding maw that was Stalingrad. The Anglo-American forces were also lucky 

in that their large-scale landings were on undefended beaches—there was opposition neither to the large-scale Sicily landings in July 1943 nor to crossing the Straits 

of Messina into Italy proper the next month. Still, the Admiralty took no chances to 

ensure that these invasions went undisturbed; for example, not only did it provide 

enormous naval and aerial close support for the actions to take the Algerian ports, 

but it sent a heavily augmented Force H from Gibraltar into the Central Mediterranean to deter any sorties by the Italian or Vichy French navies—altogether four 

fleet carriers, five smaller carriers, and six battleships were involved.41

All this experience proved immensely useful in the following year, when the 

Allies at last launched the largest amphibious operation of all time, against the 

Normandy beaches. All the Mediterranean commanders had been brought home 

(Eisenhower, Ramsay, Montgomery, Patton, and so on), as were the most experienced army divisions, and of course the navies and the amphibious units. In a 

very real degree, the Allied invasion of June 1944 was the apotheosis of Western 

sea power—the Admiralty insisted upon calling this “Operation NEPTUNE”—but 

the historian has also to note how integrated the naval side was with the forces of 

air power and land power. Five armies marched ashore on June 6, while no less 

than 11,400 (!) aircraft were aloft that day over western France and the Channel. 

German torpedo boats and U-boats were ordered to interrupt the invasion, but 

they all understood this was a suicide mission and called it so.42 In other words, 

the entire littoral of Western Europe was under Allied aerial dominance. (One can 

again notice the difference with the situation around 1917, when Jellicoe’s fleets 

kept carefully to the other side of the North Sea.) The D-day operation was indeed 

stupendous, and yet in the very same month of June 1944 the Red Army launched 

its most enormous land advance against the Third Reich yet, Operation BAGRATION, involving 1,700,000 troops.
, 

By contrast, the battle of the Pacific was a war concerning sea power through 

and through. Japan’s first six months of expansion, using its fleets, air forces, and a 

relatively small military force to seize an astonishing amount of territory, ranging 

from the Philippines to the Burma-India border, was spearheaded by an extremely 

well-equipped and well-trained carrier force accompanied by supporting cruiser 

and destroyer flotillas and expeditionary armies. The Royal Navy especially was ill 

prepared for this and suffered defeat after defeat, with the loss of Prince of Wales 

and Repulse, the stunning surrender of Singapore, and the further losses in the Indian Ocean. America’s losses, of the Philippines and the battle fleet at Pearl Harbor, 

were even greater; but the critically strategic position of Hawaii was not taken, nor 

was the U.S. carrier fleet at all damaged, and both were to be of immense value 

when the counteroffensive came. 

Tokyo’s aim was to establish a secure perimeter ring around its recently acquired 

possessions and then, nourished by the oil fields of Sumatra and Borneo that had 

been the real object of its southern drive, to resume its massive landward compaigns into mainland China. America’s aim was to recover all the territories lost, 

to smash the Japanese forces in the Pacific, and to inflict an overwhelming defeat 

upon the Japanese nation itself. There would be no great landmass over which this 

war would be fought, but instead vast distances at sea, with the advantage going to 

the side that readjusted best to the novel logistical and operational requirements. 

And there would also be no great Battle of the Atlantic fight over convoys. The reinforcement route from America’s West Coast to Australia was not contested, and in 

any case the Japanese submarine force did not focus upon a war against merchantmen but acted in support of its own battle fleets. And the American submarine 

attacks upon Japanese merchant shipping, while murderously effective after the 

torpedo defects had been remedied, came late in the day, in 1944 and 1945.

By that stage, the main contours of the war in the Pacific had become evident, 

with sea power playing the central role, albeit in a new hybrid form that merged it 

with air power and amphibian power. This was most clearly manifested in the massive forces that were assembled under Admiral Nimitz’s Central Pacific Command 

and in the operations they carried out in an irreversible drive across the Pacific, island group by island group: from Hawaii to the Gilbert Islands, then the Marshalls, 

Carolines, and Marianas, then on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the approaches 

to Japan. Although every one of these operations had their own separate features, 

there was a common operational pattern: the arrival of a large number of carrier 

task forces to gain control of the air and punish any Japanese warships and bases 

(including major ones, like Rabaul) in the region; the offshore pounding by heavy 

cruisers and battleships—in their new, non-Mahanian role—of the island’s land 

defenses; and then the amphibious assault itself.43 The land fighting was always ferocious, but the garrisons were isolated, and no American assault was thrown back. 
The last great Japanese counterattack was in their multipart operation at Leyte Gulf 

(October 1944), finally involving their Main Fleet. In retrospect, one can see that 

even this operation, with its various subplots to trap some of the American squadrons, would not have stayed the offensive tide for long; the U.S. economy, eight or 

possibly ten times greater than that of Japan, had now geared up to full production.

Around the middle of 1943, that great shift in the global power balances that 

had been building up, tectonically, since the 1890s and more obviously after the 

huge American defense spending near the end of the First World War showed itself 

in full display. In June 1943, the first of the new, fast, Essex-class fleet carriers, the 

USS Essex itself, slipped into Pearl Harbor. By August it was joined by another, the 

new USS Yorktown, and afterward by USS Intrepid—and twenty-one more. A new 

class of light fleet carriers was also streaming into the Pacific, accompanied by fast 

new destroyers and heavy and light cruisers. The mighty sixteen-inch-gun Iowaclass battleships were not far behind. A galvanized American shipbuilding industry 

was also completing fast oilers to accompany the future long-range operations of 

the carrier groups, and hundreds and hundreds of landing craft for future amphibian landings on the scattered Japanese-held islands. And, from Seattle (Boeing) to 

Long Island (Grumman), the U.S. aircraft industry poured out 85,898 aircraft in 

1943 alone, and a staggering 96,318 in 1944.44 Nothing compared.

All this now dated those older disputes between sea power and land power advocates, as Leo Amery had so presciently guessed it would when he made his amazingly insightful commentary upon Mackinder’s “Geographical Pivot of History” 

paper of April 1904.45 The chief thing to understand now was neither the display 

of great warship fleets occupying the high seas nor the successful control of the 

routes of trade, nor even the fight to defeat the giant Nazi land empire—all of them 

vital, epic, remarkable in their different ways—but the coming of continent-wide 

superpowers of “vast munitioning potential” that brought the winning of wars to a 

new level of force projection. In this narrative, one can certainly see how sea power 

influenced the outcome of the Second World War, not as the determinant but as the 

many-sided instrument of Allied force projection, in specific theaters, to a specific 

degree.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Sea power had played an enormously important part in the outcome of the French 

Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. One hundred years later, however, during the 

second “Great War,” of 1914–18, it seemed both to participants and historians to 

play a far less significant role in influencing the result of that conflict. Yet twentyfive years after that, in the epic global struggle of the Second World War, sea power 

once again claimed an indisputable “influence.” This curious and remarkable discrepancy has never really been explained by naval historians. Nor is the reader 

helped very much in understanding the difference by drawing from the writings of 
, 

any one of the three great theorists of modern geopolitical thought concerning sea 

power and land power, Mahan, Corbett, and Mackinder, because each argued and 

composed, understandably, within the limits of his time and his perspective. Each 

had magnificent insight, yet saw but a part of the struggle for world power. Still, 

what they saw, and what they argued, helps us greatly to understand the puzzle. 

The best way of helping us comprehend the puzzle is to think about contested 

space, that is, the struggle by every large and small power to defend its own spheres 

of influence and to invade and grasp the enemy’s. In the French Revolutionary and 

Napoleonic Wars the emperor not only sought to dominate his immediate continental land space but to move into Britain’s—in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Egypt, the Near East, and also in the Atlantic—through the assembling and 

deployment of large, threatening, Franco-Spanish fleets. So, from the beginning of 

the conflict until 1805, the struggle was indeed determined by vast, overpowering 

force upon the sea, that is, by large consolidated battle fleets that could drive the 

enemy’s forces away and gain control of the central commons. Great fleet fights, 

prefigured by those in the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the War of the Spanish Succession, 

and the Seven Years’ War, occupied the center of the stage. From this Mahan drew 

his theory about what constituted the essence of sea power: the superior battle fleet. 

Yet strategic space was also being fought over in two other ways during the 

struggle against Napoleon, and particularly after 1805. Here of course naval warfare was far less glamorous—Trafalgar had been won, but Nelson was dead—yet 

other battles for strategic “space” were being fought. There were the really interesting fights in the eastern seas, the struggle for the Baltic, the frigate encounters in 

the Mediterranean, and the French privateer wars against British commerce on 

the seas. The latter, being so much more of concern to Corbett, was just a part of 

the economic warfare waged during these years between Britain and Napoleonic 

France that encompassed mutual blockades, the Continental System, the use of 

credit, and the British subsidies to the land armies of its European allies.46 Just because an epic, single-day naval battle had not taken place did not mean that sea 

power after 1806 was not being exerted—and felt. 

Finally, fearing a Napoleonic domination of western and central Europe, the 

British leadership felt it had no choice but to contest the emperor’s own continental 

space, seeking to defeat him in many ways, from encouraging and funding coalitions of friendly land powers to pull him down from power, to the actual deployments of the British Army, in the Peninsula, in southern France, and eventually in 

Belgium. From Helsinki to Flanders and Dover, down to Lisbon and Gibraltar and 

on via Naples to the Bosporus, Britain sought to put a wrap around the emperor’s 

efforts to break out, holding on to the rimland (sic) until there was sufficient coalition force to win at the heartland. This was a long and frequently unsuccessful 

grand strategy which only saw its successful realization in the battles of Borodino 
(1812), Leipzig (1813), and Waterloo (1815)—many leagues from Mahan’s far-off 

fleets, even if sea power had decidedly affected the outcome of this long struggle. 

During the mid-eighteenth century, it is sometimes argued, Britain had been torn 

between a “maritime” and a “continental” strategy; in bringing Napoleon down, 

there was no question but that both were needed.47

One hundred years later, ideas about the importance of sea power never stood 

higher in the public realm. All the great powers before 1914 (including land-based 

ones such as Russia) strove to have as large a navy as possible, naval “races” occurred between so many of these nations, and Mahan’s theories about the role of 

the battle fleet in deciding victory were dominant. What followed in 1914–18, as 

described in the section above, was therefore all the more disappointing, and yet 

this is understandable if one thinks again about contested “space.” During the war, 

sea power was seen by contemporaries to play a lesser role because the Germanled Central Powers had no real opportunity to enter the British Empire’s maritime 

space, at least not in the form of surface warfare in the Atlantic and beyond. Grand 

Mahanian battle fleets were there, all right, but they were confined by circumstance 

to remain chiefly in their North Sea harbors. In the Baltic, North Sea, and Adriatic 

waters there were some small, desultory surface actions, but really after 1916 the 

struggle for mastery at sea became much more a battle for the Atlantic sea-lanes—

Corbett’s vital maritime routes.

Since extra-European spheres could not be invaded by Berlin except by this 

challenge by the U-boat after 1916, and there already existed a gigantic struggle 

between the Austro-German and Franco-Russian empires for control of the land 

space of Europe, what took place, to the dismay of the navalists, was the dispatch 

of huge British Empire and later American armies to swing the land balances on 

the western and Italian fronts; the maritime nations were invading continental 

space, not the reverse. Significant military operations also took place in Palestine, 

Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus during 1915–19, but those were contested only by 

Germany’s lesser ally, Turkey, and thus the chief battlefronts remained in Europe, 

in France, Italy, and Poland-Ukraine. In none of those areas did sea power play 

a direct role. When the year 1918 saw each side committing all their respective 

military resources for the hoped-for victory, the Grand Fleet, to Jellicoe’s frustration, swung at anchor in Scapa Flow. Allied naval power had fairly easily preserved 

Britain’s own physical security, and then maintained command of the Atlantic sealanes, but those were negative achievements, and ones out of sight, which is why 

the role of navies was much less celebrated that it had been in the triumphant years 

following 1815. 

Even so, the swift collapse of the League of Nations system, the rise of the three 

revisionist nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the reoccurrence of another 

furious worldwide naval arms race in the late 1930s meant that sea power’s role was 
, 

not doubted when the Second World War broke out. The British Admiralty had 

no other choice but to rely upon a Mahanian battle posture: off Norway, in sinking 

the Bismarck and the Scharnhorst, in protecting the Mediterranean convoys, and in 

shepherding the North African and Sicilian landings. At the same time, it had no 

other choice but to commit to a massive, unrelenting Corbettian strategy of securing the Atlantic sea-lanes. In the European-Atlantic naval battles, therefore, each 

theorist had his vindication.

Further east, the navalists’ case could be much more easily made. The Pacific 

War had been from beginning to end about winning or losing maritime mastery. 

And if one substituted carrier groups for battleship squadrons, it turned out to be 

much more of a Mahanian struggle for command of the central oceans than a Corbettian fight over convoy routes and sea-lanes. It didn’t really matter, though. The 

point was that, in this war, naval power had proved to be vital for the Allied victory.

In sum, to every navalist author’s delight, the Pacific War had joined with the 

prolonged Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns in being fought for command 

of the sea. And even if Stalinist propaganda was to attempt to ignore the fact, the 

war of the eastern front was also affected, in some part, by seaborne supplies to the 

USSR and the choking off of such supplies to Germany. Why not then agree that 

navies, and naval power, had once again counted for such a lot in world affairs? 

That seemed so obvious, when a vast Allied fleet rested in Tokyo Bay, while hundreds of German U-boats were being scuttled or surrendered to their victorious 

naval opponents. The end of the First World War was signed in a railway carriage at 

Compiègne; but now, the end of the Second World War was signed on the afterdeck 

of the battleship USS Missouri. What place of signature, on each occasion, could be 

more symbolic? As was the case in 1815, but had not been the case in 1918, Neptune in 1945 could again hold his trident high.

But to what end? Even then, as those victorious Allied navies rested in that bay, 

sea power’s role had not really been settled, or, rather, it was about to be unsettled. 

Over the post-1945 age there hung the immediate shadow, and the conundrum, of 

the coming of atomic weaponry. The claims of all armed services, navies included, 

were now thrown into question. This was an odd fate, and an odd ending to a naval 

historical narrative that otherwise seemed so teleological; but the fact was that the 

story of sea power’s place in the three great global wars of these 150 years simply 

did end with such a paradox. The Anglo-American navies that had fought so well, 

so impressively, so successfully, came out of this war with their futures more uncertain than ever before in history.
NOTES This chapter originally appeared in a slightly different 

form in Strategy and the Sea: Essays in Honour of John 

B. Hattendorf, ed. N. A. M. Rodger et al. (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2016), pp. 109–37. ©2016 by 

Paul Kennedy. Reprinted by permission.

1 There are, however, important observations in two 

much earlier classic works: Bernard Brodie, Sea 

Power in the Machine Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

Univ. Press, 1941), and Herbert W. Richmond, Sea 

Power in the Modern World (London: G. Bell and 

Sons, 1934). 

2 Kendall D. Moll, The Influence of History upon 

Seapower 1865–1914 (Menlo Park, CA: Stanford 

Research Institute, 1968). 

3 Geoffrey J. Marcus, A Naval History of England, vol. 

2, The Age of Nelson (London: Longmans, 1971); 

Tim Voelcker, Admiral Saumarez versus Napoleon: 

The Baltic, 1807–1812 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 

2008); C. Northcote Parkinson, War in the Eastern 

Seas 1793–1815 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 

1954); N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: 

A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London: 

W. W. Norton, 2004). 

4 Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime 

Strategy (London: Antony Rowe, 1911); Halford J. 

Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” 

Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (April 1904), pp. 

421–37. 

5 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power 

upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 

1890; repr. London: Methuen, 1965), p. 88. 

6 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power 

upon the French Revolution and Empire (Boston: 

Little, Brown, 1894), vol. 2, p. 380. 

7 It is rather like saying that the influence of land 

power upon the fate of the Kingdom of Poland was 

incontrovertible.

8 J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in 

England 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967); 

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: 

Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 

to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 149; 

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the 

World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), p. 452.

9 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 574.

10 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World,

pp. 452–55; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of 

British Naval Mastery (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 

1976), pp. 149–76.

11 Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: 

Ideology, Interest and Sea Power during the Pax 

Britannica (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1986); Eric 

Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London: Weidenfeld and 

Nicholson, 1968), p. 110.

12 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,

chap. 4. 

13 Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, esp. 

chaps. 7 and 9.

14 Beginning with the sensationalist article William 

T. Stead, “The Truth about the Navy,” Pall Mall 

Gazette, September 15, 1884. Scaremongering journalism in Britain never looked back after this.

15 The Admiralty’s worries about all this are covered 

in great detail in Arthur J. Marder, The Anatomy of 

British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy

in the Pre-dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (New York: 

Frank Cass, 1940), chaps. 7, 10, 13, and 17.

16 Among the most prominent are Jon T. Sumida, In 

Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology 

and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (Winchester, 

MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), and Nicholas A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia: 

Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1999).

17 See especially Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher 

Era 1904–1919, vol. 1, The Road to War 1904–1914
, 

(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), and Paul 

Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 

1860–1914 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1980).

18 Paul M. Kennedy, “The Development of German 

Naval Operations Plans against England, 1896–

1914,” English Historical Review 89, no. 350 (January 

1974), pp. 48–76.

19 Alfred von Tirpitz, My Memoirs (London: Hurst and 

Blackett, 1920). There is more evidence of Tirpitz’s 

strong disapproval of how the German leadership 

acted in 1914 in his private papers in the Military 

Archive in Freiburg. Cf. Christopher Clark, The 

Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New 

York: HarperCollins, 2012).

20 It is worth noting that the massive media coverage 

of the First World War just recently, at the centenary 

of 1914, contained hardly any reference to the war at 

sea; and that the comprehensive three-volume 

Cambridge History of the First World War, ed. Jay 

Winter (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 

2014), contains only one chapter out of seventythree on the war at sea.

21 Julian S. Corbett, The History of the Great War: Naval Operations, vol. 1, To the Battle of the Falklands 

December 1914 (London: Longmans, 1921), p. 182.

22 Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British 

Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). Lambert 

shows in great detail the difficulties the British had 

in implementing strict economic warfare against 

Germany in light of all of the American protests 

against the interruption of trade. Even if the blockade were to have been much tighter, it is not clear 

(see p. 501) what difference that would have made 

upon Germany’s overall economic capacities during 

the war.

23 Except later, through the rather audacious operations of Britain’s own submarine forces in Baltic 

waters.

24 Jeter A. Isley and Philip A. Crowl, The U.S. Marines 

and Amphibious War: Its Theory, and Its Practice in 

the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 

1951), pp. 581–84.

25 It is nice to name an exception: Andrew Gordon, 

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval 

Command (London: John Murray, 1996).

26 See Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I 

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994) for the 

best single-volume coverage of the naval conflict.

27 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 

1848–1918 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), 

pp. xxv–xxxi.

28 James Goldrick, The King’s Ships Were at Sea: The 

War in the North Sea, August 1914–February 1915

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984). A fine 

narrative and analysis of the opening period of the 

war.

29 On this, see Paul Kennedy and William I. Hitchcock, eds., From War to Peace: Altered Strategic 

Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (Binghamton, 

NY: Vail-Ballou, 2000), chaps. in pt. 1, “Reordering 

Europe after World War I.”

30 Joseph A. Maiolo, “Did the Royal Navy Decline 

between the Two World Wars?,” RUSI Journal 159, 

no. 4 (July 2014), pp. 18–24.

31 The map is reproduced in Paul Kennedy, Engineers 

of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the 

Tide in the Second World War (New York: Random 

House, 2013), pp. 8–9.

32 Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: 

Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II

(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), 

pp. 1–13.

33 An invaluable book is Jürgen Rohwer, The Critical 

Convoy Battles of March 1943 (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1977), which does the invaluable task of recording what the contents were of 

each merchant ship sunk, such as fifty boxed crates 

of fighter aircraft, a thousand sheets of corrugated 

iron, two thousand tons of grain, etc.

34 Wolfgang Wegener, Die Seestrategie des Weltkrieges

(Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929).

35 Germany invaded France and the Low Countries 

from the north on May 10, 1940. Italy entered the 

war on June 10, 1940, and invaded southern France. 

On June 24, 1940, France surrendered to Germany, 

at which point Italy was occupying a swath of 

French territory in the southeast. It continued to 

occupy this zone even after the establishment of the 

Vichy regime in the rest of southern France.—Ed.

36 Stephen W. Roskill [Capt., RN], The War at Sea, 

1939–1945, vol. 2, The Period of Balance, History 

of the Second World War (London: Her Majesty’s 

Stationery Office, 1956), pp. 302–308. 

37 Eric Grove, “The West and the War at Sea,” in The 

Oxford Illustrated History of World War II, ed. Richard Overy (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), 

pp. 135–67.

38 Roskill, The Period of Balance, p. 367.

39 Grove, “The West and the War at Sea,” p. 151.

40 See Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, pp. 50–64.

41 Stephen W. Roskill [Capt., RN], The War at Sea,

1939–1945, vol. 3, pt. 1, The Offensive: 1st June 

1943–31st May 1944 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960), pp. 118–25.

42 See Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, pp. 250–79.

43 These operations are covered in Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in 

World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947–62), vols. 

7, 8, and 14. 

44 Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 354.

45 Amery’s comments are discussed in Paul Kennedy, 

“Mahan versus Mackinder: Two Interpretations 

of British Sea Power,” in Strategy and Diplomacy 

1870–1945: Eight Studies (London: George Allen 

and Unwin, 1983).

46 François Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade and Economic 

Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic 

History 24, no. 4 (December 1964), pp. 567–88.

47 Richard Pares, “American versus Continental Warfare, 1739–63,” English Historical Review 51, no. 203 

(July 1936), pp. 429–65.

The U.S. Naval War College is pleased to recognize your achievements by naming you Hattendorf 

Prize laureate. This award is fully merited by your distinguished scholarly contributions to 

maritime history. You shaped the world’s understanding of German navies and traced their 

influence on professional military education and on the roles of navies and of sea power. Your 

definitive historical studies reveal the social dynamics of naval cultures in the broadest sense. 

Drawing from original documentary sources, you employed the critical interdisciplinary 

approach to discover completely fresh perspectives in naval history, most prominently in the 

naval sections of the multivolume work Germany in the Second World War, published in English 

by Oxford University Press. In so doing, you advanced the discipline in the spirit of the great 

German historian Leopold von Ranke. In particular, we honor you for your work as senior 

editor, with Dr. Gerhard Schreiber, of the annotated, facsimile edition of the War Diary of the 

German Naval Staff, 1939–1945 that appeared over nine years, between 1988 and 1997, in sixtyeight bound volumes. Your impeccable scholarship on this huge documentary source made 

your edition the single most important authoritative source for the strategic and operational 

decisions of the German Navy during the Second World War. Your innovative approach to 

naval history inspired other scholars to understand the past by first using documentary sources 

to establish “how it actually was.” In the tradition of our own Alfred Thayer Mahan and the 

U.S. Naval War College, your operational histories and strategic studies of the German Navy, 

in particular, informed contemporary practitioners’ understanding of the role of underlying 

politics and organizational group dynamics on naval affairs in both peace and war during the 

entire scope of German naval history from 1848 to the present. In addition to your published 

work in several languages, your fellow historians are most grateful for your long service to 

maritime history within the German armed forces, first as an instructor at the Naval Academy 

Mürwik; then at the German General Staff College at Hamburg; and finally at the German 

Armed Forces Military History Research Office from 1988, where you rose from head of the 

naval section to deputy director of that office, before serving as its general director in 1995–

1997, after which you retired from active service. Your long and impressive naval service 

combined with your continuing body of scholarship represents a singular contribution to the 

future of history. This award honors you and your incomparable work as a naval professional 

and as a scholarly historian, expressing appreciation for your distinguished contributions in 

framing our collective understanding of the influence of sea power upon international history.

The Hattendorf Prize for 

Distinguished Original Research 

in Maritime History

to Dr. Werner Rahn, Captain, German Navy (retired).

The President, U.S. Naval War College, takes great pleasure

in awarding

Presented this twenty-second day of September in the year two thousand sixteen

at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.

Jeffrey A. Harley

President, U.S. Naval War College 

Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy
German Navies from 1848 to 2016

Their Development and Courses from Confrontation

to Cooperation

Military history deals with the evolution and structure of armed forces 

and their position in state and society. In this sense, naval history is 

taken to mean that part of military history that concentrates its studies 

on the navy. However, when dealing with fields of research, one sphere provides 

the greatest challenge for military and naval historians: warfare in the widest sense.1

In his book The Face of Battle, British historian John Keegan points out that 

many historians are shy about exploring the profundities and realities of war.2 Generally speaking, we can expect naval or other military historians to have a certain 

affinity for the subject of their research. They should have a basic knowledge about 

the military, in the same way that we expect an economic historian to have a sound 

basic knowledge of economic theory. But Keegan is justified in demanding that 

the military historian spend as much time as possible among military personnel, 

“because the quite chance observation of trivial incidents may illuminate his . . . 

understanding of all sorts of problems from the past which will otherwise almost 

certainly remain obscured.”3 Like any historian, the naval historian bears a great 

responsibility in his striving after historical truth, if he wants to be taken seriously. 

The uncritical patriotic history that used to glorify naval actions should be a thing 

of the past.

Today, some historians tend to judge personalities, events, and structures according to today’s moral categories. They end up “putting the past on trial, and 

since the critical historian, armed with his generation’s self-confidence or with his 

progressive concept of the future, knows everything better, in this trial he will be 

prosecutor, judge, and legislator all in one.”4

In 1957, the German navy began to develop a new approach to studying its 

own history. That year, the first fleet commander in chief, Rear Adm. Rolf 

Johannesson (1900–89), organized the Historical-Tactical Conference. Since then 

it has been held every year, and is now a standard element of the naval officer’s 

historical education. Johannesson’s aim was to distance his service from subjective 

naval history about World War I.5 He hoped that a critical discussion of the past 

would teach his officers truth, loyalty, and moral courage, and that they would 

III

WERNER RAHN
, 

determine their own position more solidly by recourse to history and the federal 

constitution. Through 2016, fifty-six conferences have been held, covering a wide 

variety of subjects.6 Papers usually are presented by junior officers from the fleet, 

assisted by naval historians. The presentation of the papers and the candid discussion of subjects relevant to the business of the day usually provide testimony 

to the intellectual talents among the navy’s officer corps. Many an admiral-tobe made a mark when as a lieutenant he presented some critical theory about 

history—provoking the older generation’s opposition.

It is a perennial challenge to historians even to come close to historical truth. 

The commercial success of popular publications, as well as the large number of 

visitors attracted to museums, indicates how many people have historical interests. 

Such continuing interest is a stimulating challenge for professional historians. We 

should continue to try to present our findings about background information and 

structures from the past in such a way that the message gets across—meaning that 

historical knowledge and historical sensitivity become factors serving to help stabilize a liberal society.

THE BIRTH OF A GERMAN NAVY

The first German navy worthy to bear such designation was established in 1848, 

when a conflict over the duchy of Schleswig resulted in a war with Denmark.7 At 

that time, Germany could do nothing against the Danes’ efficient blockade; ocean 

trade came to a standstill. This dilemma resulted in a rather emotional movement 

that advocated building up a fleet. The issue soon captivated the members of the 

national assembly that had convened at Frankfurt’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral only a 

short time before. On June 14, 1848, by an overwhelming majority, the first German parliament voted a large appropriation to build a fleet.8

Prince Adalbert of Prussia (1811–73), who had concerned himself with maritime problems rather early, played an important part in those first maritime plans. 

In May 1848, he published a memorandum on the buildup of a German fleet 

that became, so to speak, the Magna Carta of the German navy. By analyzing the 

maritime-strategic situation of Prussia and Germany and having taken into consideration already the imminent technical revolution, it formed the first theoretical 

basis for a German naval concept. The memorandum included three models on 

which Germany might establish a navy: (1) providing mere coastal defense; (2) 

defending sea lines of communication (SLOCs); or (3) building up an independent 

sea power. Prince Adalbert, however, clearly emphasized that even steps leading toward the buildup of an independent sea power would involve many risks, and that 

once this option had been chosen there could be no stopping halfway.9

During the preparations for the buildup of a fleet, it soon became clear that 

almost all requirements—in personnel, matériel, and organization—could not be 

met. It was, therefore, only natural to ask for foreign assistance. Arnold Duckwitz 
(1802–81), the first German secretary of the navy, in October 1848 forwarded an 

official request to the American government for assistance in building up, with 

regard to personnel and matériel, a German fleet. In the United States, the German liberal revolution had been observed with interest and with an open mind. 

Thus, the German requests met with a positive response within both private and 

official circles. First contacts were established by the frigate USS St. Lawrence, 

commanded by Capt. Hiram Paulding (1797–1878), which was visiting Bremerhaven in the fall of 1848. The ship and crew were received enthusiastically 

as envoys of a hoped-for ally. The U.S. Navy immediately began personnelsupport activities by rendering assistance with training: the frigate took aboard 

four Prussian sea cadets for practical exposure. Captain Paulding, as an adviser, 

was for weeks the center of attention during all discussions on the fleet buildup, 

which were held in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hannover. The matériel support concentrated on providing a modern frigate, which was equipped at the New York Naval 

Yard and transferred to Europe in the summer of 1849.10

Even though the duration and the scope of this first American military aid to 

Germany were limited, that assistance provided early evidence of an American 

policy of being ready and able to support, across the Atlantic, the principles of 

democracy and liberalism. On both sides of that ocean, common goals and mutual sympathy for the liberal-democratic forces resulted in the first steps toward 

cooperation. How close these idealistic ties actually were became evident after the 

Frankfurt National Assembly failed, when high emigration rates resulted from disappointed democrats finding their spiritual home in the United States. One example was Carl Schurz (1829–1906), who later became Secretary of the Interior. Such 

a “brain drain” strengthened the hand of conservative forces in Germany—the consequences of which are well known.

The German navy remained in existence even after the dream of a united Reich 

had long gone and the reality of particularism governed German politics. However, 

in 1853 the fleet was disbanded and its few ships were sold or scrapped.11 Only 

Prussia, with its relatively longer coastline, still had available a limited number of 

naval forces, proudly named the Royal Prussian Navy.

Yet the idea of the navy as an instrument of national unification stayed alive 

even after 1848. After the foundation of the Reich in 1871, the navy’s function 

as a symbol of German unity was stressed officially, in contrast to the army’s organization by individual states. The very term Imperial Navy emphasized that 

this instrument of power was subject directly to the Reich. The personnel of 

the Imperial German Navy (IGN) came from all parts of Germany, and the 

fleet became, as Tirpitz (see below) once put it, a “melting pot of teutonicism.”12
, 

However, until 1897 the navy’s development was overshadowed by that of the 

army. The navy’s contributions to the wars against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 

1866, and France in 1870–71 seemingly were of no importance. Strategically, the 

IGN concentrated on providing a forward coastal defense.13

STRATEGIC ROOTS OF BUILDING A GERMAN BATTLE FLEET

In 1894, spurred by the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), the German naval high command prepared a strategic concept for the buildup of a 

battle fleet.14 Capt. Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930), then chief of staff of the naval high command, seems to have taken the initiative to formulate the famous 

Dienstschrift (Service Memorandum) No. IX, under the misleading title “General 

Lessons Learned from the Fleet Autumn Exercise.”15

In this memorandum, Tirpitz resolutely pleads that strategic offensive actions 

should be considered “normal tasks of a fleet.”16 Such actions should aim at bringing about “the earliest possible initiation of a battle,” a battle that would reach the 

“main decision” of naval warfare. That decision could not be reached by a cruiser war, such as was prescribed under the tenets of the French Jeune École school 

of thought, but “only by permanent naval supremacy and lasting pressure on the 

enemy.”17

Owing to Germany’s position in the heart of Central Europe, its long coasts on 

the North and Baltic Seas, and its borders with eight neighboring nations, any strategy of the Reich that did not rely on strong alliance partners required it to decide 

whether a threat should be neutralized defensively or eliminated offensively. As 

long as Germany considered only France as a potential enemy (and later Russia as 

well), the offensive strategic concept for naval operations that Tirpitz laid down in 

Service Memorandum No. IX seemed appropriate.

In June 1897, Tirpitz was appointed state secretary in the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Naval Office).18 Not least because of his influence, the politics of the Reich 

gradually expanded to consider the risks involved in confronting Britain. For Tirpitz, England was, from the beginning, “the most dangerous naval enemy,” against 

which Germany “most urgently required a certain measure of naval force as a political power factor.” Since Tirpitz considered cruiser warfare a lost cause, owing to 

Germany’s lack of naval bases, he asked for the buildup of a fleet that “can unfold its 

greatest military potential between Heligoland and the Thames.”19

Elsewhere within the IGN there were well-founded doubts regarding this conceptualization. Capt. Curt Freiherr von Maltzahn (1849–1930), who at that time 

taught tactics and naval history at the German naval academy, warned as early as 

1898 that reaching “Seeherrschaft” (sea control) by means of a battle would not suffice by itself to impose peace on the opponent, for such sea control would have to 

be maintained and exploited. This would require a surplus of strength. As long as 

neither party achieved sea control, the weaker party would be confined to fighting 
against the achievement of sea control by its enemy, forgoing victory as the goal 

of its own combat actions. It would be important to maintain a national seaborne 

trade “corresponding in strength to the means deployed for defense.”20 Maltzahn 

considered a combination of squadron operations and cruiser war to be the most 

suitable naval strategy. “Squadron operations are indispensable in this type of warfare, but they are only a means and not an end, and they become only really valuable if the freedom of action thus gained is exploited.”21

However, such a foresighted and realistic alternative, one that combined a balanced defensive fleet with strong cruiser elements, stood no chance in the IGN. 

Tirpitz repressed any further strategic discussions so as not to jeopardize the buildup of the fleet, which had received legislative backing and thereafter was scheduled 

to be accomplished over an extended period.22

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE: THE NAVAL ARMAMENT RACE

The objectives and planning principles of the German battle fleet construction 

can be summarized as follows: The basic prerequisite for gaining sea control was 

the destruction, or at least the decisive weakening, of the enemy battle fleet. Thus, 

planning focused on the fleet’s capability to impose a decision in battle. The battle 

fleet also was considered a political means of power that could enable Germany to 

defend its overseas interests adequately. Britain, the most dangerous potential opponent, was to be deterred from a war with Germany by means of a strong fleet, or, 

should deterrence fail, was to be engaged successfully.

Among the liberal bourgeoisie, the naval policy met with strong support, which 

was increased even further by propaganda skillfully directed. However, while 

drawing up its ambitious armament program, Germany misjudged the dangers 

arising from its geographical situation in Central Europe. Any German approach 

that strove to establish an international maritime stature and adopt a counterpoint 

stance toward Britain was bound to be met with profound suspicion from Britain. After the German-British alliance talks in 1901 failed to produce any tangible 

results—the two sides were pursuing incompatible objectives—the buildup of the 

German battle fleet became and remained a crucial disruptive factor, preventing 

any subsequent arrangement with Britain and resulting in an arms race.

From 1905 onward, that escalatory dynamic was characterized by an enormous 

increase in the combat power of battleships. With the construction of HMS Dreadnought in 1905–1906, the Royal Navy set a new standard. Tirpitz had to keep pace 

if the IGN was to remain equal, ship for ship, with its potential enemy. As a result, 

his long-term financial planning had been in vain, for the construction of capital 

ships involved ever-increasing costs.

Britain could cope with the cost increases involved in the construction of capital 

ships, or at least it had to do so since its security was exclusively dependent on the 

superiority of the Royal Navy. In contrast, the defense of Germany was primarily 
, 

an army responsibility, with the navy playing a secondary role. Britain’s first lord 

of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (1874–1965) explained this in a public speech 

in February 1912. The strategic situations of both countries, Churchill pointed out, 

made his own fleet a vital necessity to the British Empire, whereas “from some 

points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury.”23

Groaning under the burden of high naval expenditures, in 1912 both governments tried again to come to an agreement that they hoped would reduce the building rates of capital ships. In February 1912, the British cabinet sent Secretary of 

State for War Richard B. Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane (1856–1928), to Berlin to 

try to reach a general settlement in these matters. However, Lord Haldane’s talks 

with the German side never converted into real negotiations, and the effort failed 

after a few days. The British were unwilling “to commit themselves to neutrality,” 

and the German side—under pressure from Tirpitz—was unwilling to modify the 

country’s planned building rate.24 Tirpitz appreciated that for England “the Entente 

with France gives her the best security against a too powerful Germany,” he said. 

“I no longer believe that we can get out of this vicious circle.”25 As Germany did 

not have enough resources to fulfill all the requirements of both the army and the 

navy, the IGN could not keep up in the unconstrained arms race that commenced 

thereafter, even though by 1914 it had become the world’s second-strongest navy.

Before 1914, modern warships, such as capital ships, cruisers, and torpedo 

boats, were not only part of a nation’s military potential but striking evidence of 

its industrial and technological capability. Only highly industrialized nations could 

solve on their own the complex technological problems that the transition to modern capital ships involved. This was particularly true for the new technologies of 

engines and weapons, as well as for the improvement in ship survivability achieved 

through the use of high-quality steel armor.26

The period between 1905 and 1914 was characterized by a technological revolution that made naval weapons obsolete rapidly. This applied to cruisers, torpedo 

boats, and submarines as well as larger units. During the first major naval battles 

of World War I, the decisive effects of superior speed and more-powerful guns 

became apparent.

STRATEGY AND GEOGRAPHY

Tirpitz based his strategic concept on the assumption that the Royal Navy always would act offensively in a war against Germany; in particular, it would establish a close blockade of the German coast. Such a blockade near Heligoland 

“would provide abundant opportunities to equalize naval strength” or to “enter 

into a decisive battle.”27 For the IGN, this hypothetical battle became an element of 

dogma—the focal point of its operational concept and fleet training. For this reason, knowledge of and experience with weapons technology, tactics, and shiphandling were more-decisive factors in the careers of naval officers than qualification 
in staff assignments—which had a long-term effect on the choice of personnel for 

command-and-control appointments. The work of the Admiralstab (naval staff), 

established in 1899, and the creation of a specialized corps of staff officers to man 

it, seemed secondary in importance. As a consequence, the naval officer corps remained unprepared for the complex strategic dimensions of a naval war against 

Britain.28

Although all the preparations focused on the “decisive battle,” a great deal of 

confusion existed regarding the true purpose of the battle.29 While those staffing 

the German naval command had adopted Mahan’s theory of sea power willingly, 

they paid only lip service to a central element of that theory: the importance of 

geographical position and the resultant strategic options. By throttling Germany’s 

seaborne trade, an opponent could decide a “war by severing an artery essential to 

the existence of Germany.”30

An incorrect assessment of the effects of geography on British naval operations 

led the German naval leadership to a faulty assessment of British strategy. Britain 

had never attempted to eliminate an opponent’s navy at any price; it did so only 

when the British Isles and their SLOCs in the Atlantic were threatened. And these 

SLOCs remained outside the range of the German naval forces, except for a few 

cruisers and, later, submarines. To maintain a close blockade of the German coast, 

the Royal Navy would have found it useful to eliminate the German fleet at an 

early date, but the Admiralty was well aware that such a strategic offensive would 

involve considerable losses. Especially cognizant of the threat that German torpedo 

boats, submarines, and mines represented, after 1911–12 the Royal Navy no longer 

considered deploying its Grand Fleet to the southern North Sea.31 In November 

1912, the Admiralty issued a set of “General Instructions” to its war plans against 

Germany, summarizing Britain’s strategic approach as follows:

The general idea is to use our geographical advantage of position to cut off all German shipping from oceanic trade and to secure the British coasts from any serious military enterprise 

and incidentally but effectually to cover the transport across the Channel of an Expeditionary Force to France. . . . It is believed that the prolongation of a distant blockade will inflict 

injury upon German interests. . . . To relieve such a situation, Germany would be tempted 

to send into the North Sea a force sufficient . . . to offer a general action. Such an action or 

actions would take place far from the German coast and close to our own.32

This plan implied a new wartime deployment for the Grand Fleet: basing it at Scapa 

Flow, in the Scottish Orkneys.

When in 1912 the German naval staff discovered the new orientation of its potential enemy, the chief of naval staff, Vice Adm. August von Heeringen (1855–

1927), examined in a war game whether and how Germany’s High Seas Fleet 

could counter a distant blockade. The result was sobering. The Blue (i.e., German) 

wargaming party had advanced its squadrons as far as the Firth of Forth, but there 

they encountered difficulties and suffered considerable losses while withdrawing. 
, 

The admiral concluded: “If the British really restrict their activities to the remote 

blockade and consistently hold back their battle fleet, then the role of our beautiful 

High Seas Fleet could be a very sad one in wartime. The submarines will have to 

do the job.”33

It must be left open what type of submarine employment Heeringen had in 

mind, but his estimate hit the central strategic problem for German naval warfare 

during World War I. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the role of the submarine as a naval weapon “had grown from base to coast 

defence and from this to an offensive task in enemy waters.”34 Basically, the submarine was a mobile torpedo boat with long endurance. Submerged, a submarine 

made only slow progress—but it had the ability to vanish below the surface of the 

sea for several hours.

In comparison with other naval powers, the IGN came late to building submarines. The first one, U-1 (282 tons), was commissioned in December 1906. Obviously, Tirpitz had waited until he was sure that submarines were an effective offensive weapon. After 1908, he ordered more than forty oceangoing submarines, of 

which twenty-eight had been completed before war broke out.35

WORLD WAR I

When Britain joined the war on the side of France and Russia in August 1914, it 

became clear that the German High Seas Fleet could not perform its political function of deterrence. Britain, relying on its superior fleet and the strategic positions 

the country and its empire held worldwide to protect its vital SLOCs, considered 

the German fleet, which could operate only from the North Sea, to be an acceptable risk.36

In August 1914, the IGN lay under the spell of great enemy superiority. The naval command placed all its hopes on reducing enemy forces through offensive submarine and minelaying operations. The assumption was that the opponent would 

seek battle, but Germany’s fleet was to be employed in such a battle only “under 

favorable conditions.”37

Although the few German cruisers stationed overseas at the outbreak of war 

were quite successful in guerre de course (warfare against merchant vessels), the 

Royal Navy soon neutralized them. Germany’s East Asiatic Squadron, under Vice 

Adm. Maximilian von Spee (1861–1914) moved across the Pacific Ocean and destroyed a British squadron off Chile, but its advance to the Falkland Islands in the 

South Atlantic on December 8, 1914, proved fatal.38 The example demonstrates that 

the IGN neither recognized nor made use of the strategic advantages it might have 

derived from coordinating the operations of its naval forces overseas with those at 

home.

However, one small but powerful German squadron did influence the balance of forces and the overall course of World War I: the Mediterranean Division, 
comprising the battle cruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, under Rear Adm.

Wilhelm A. Souchon (1864–1946). The breakthrough of the two units to Constantinople and their formal handover to Turkey in August 1914 influenced Turkey to 

join the war on the side of the Central powers in October 1914. The Turkish straits 

(the Dardanelles and the Bosporus) became impassable for the Allies; all their attempts to penetrate them failed, with heavy losses.39 Thus, the second important 

route to Russia, other than the Baltic Sea, remained blocked, contributing to Russia’s loss as an ally of the Entente in 1917. After the war, Sir Julian S. Corbett commented as follows on this German strategic success:

When we consider that the Dardanelles was mined, that no permission to enter it had been 

ratified, and that everything depended on the German powers of cajolery at Constantinople, 

when we also recall the world wide results that ensued, it is not too much to say that few 

naval decisions more bold and well-judged were ever taken. So completely, indeed, did the 

risky venture turn a desperate situation into one of high moral and material advantage, that 

for the credit of German statesmanship it goes far to balance the cardinal blunder of attacking France through Belgium.40

The various operations the High Seas Fleet conducted in the North and Baltic 

Seas, which culminated in the battle of Jutland in May 1916, cannot conceal the 

fact that primarily it performed the functions of a “fleet in being”: securing the 

German coast, blocking the Baltic approaches, and keeping clear the submarines’ 

sailing routes.41

In the first few months of the war, the submarine gave a striking demonstration 

of its power. On September 22, 1914, U-9 (Lt. Otto Weddigen [1880–1915], commanding) sank three aged armored cruisers in an hour. At first, the Royal Navy 

could not believe the cruisers “had been attacked by a single submarine and attributed the disaster to a whole flotilla.”42 Over the next couple of weeks, the U-boats 

extended their patrols; by October 1914, U-20 had penetrated the Channel to attack 

transports on their way to France, circumnavigated the British Isles, and returned 

to Germany, having cruised 2,200 miles in eighteen days.43

Commerce Raiding by U-boats, 1915–18

The varied arguments concerning the degree of success German submarines 

achieved in their raiding against Britain’s maritime commerce are a classic example 

of the civil-military struggle of a nation at war. At the time, this struggle was influenced greatly by public opinion, for submarine warfare became a popular myth to 

which a large number of Germans subscribed; they believed the U-boat was some 

sort of infallible, magic weapon that would bring victory. Because of some successful surprise raids, not only the public but the naval command overestimated the 

efficiency of submarines.

Initial considerations within the IGN regarding the employment of submarines against British shipping had not yielded a clear picture by the time Tirpitz 

spoke publicly on the issue—which he did without consulting Chancellor Theobald 
, 

von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856–1921) or chief of naval staff Adm. Hugo von Pohl 

(1855–1916). In response to the British threat to “strangulate the [German] economy with the help of a blockade,” as Churchill had put it in a speech on November 9, 

Tirpitz responded in an interview that Germany could “play the same game”—by 

torpedoing all British shipping.44

This triggered a passionate public debate that had repercussions for the naval 

command. The young historian Gerhard Ritter (1888–1967) knew from his own 

experience during the war that

[i]t was Tirpitz’s interview that poured more oil on the fire when it was published in late 

December. Thenceforth the question of submarine warfare was no longer a naval problem 

for the experts to judge, but a political issue of the first order, with everyone having his say. 

A “U-boat movement” quickly came into being. . . . Again the academic superpatriots were 

in the forefront with plans and petitions to the Chancellor and the navy on how to starve 

Britain into submission. Some of the most renowned names at the University of Berlin were 

among them.45

The naval staff encouraged support for commerce warfare from the government; however, the method’s prospects for success could not be assessed, because 

so few submarines were available. Of the twenty-two submarines in the North Sea 

in early 1915, only fourteen (those with diesel engines) could operate west of the 

British Isles. The chancellor came under both public and naval pressure while making his decision, and he relied too much on the navy staff ’s optimistic forecast. 

Early in February 1915, Bethmann-Hollweg gave his consent to submarine warfare—without either the government or the naval command having analyzed thoroughly the methodology of commerce raiding itself or the associated political risks 

and international complications.

The German proclamation of February 4, 1915, declared “the waters around 

Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, to be a war 

zone in which every merchant ship encountered would be destroyed, without it 

always being possible to assure the safety of passengers and crew. Because of the 

British misuse of neutral flags, it might not always be possible to prevent attacks 

meant for hostile ships from falling on neutrals.”46 By conducting commerce warfare in this way, Germany opened new issues in international law, because submarines could not adhere adequately to the classic prize rules. This was particularly so 

after the British began arming merchant vessels, and later created disguised British 

auxiliary cruisers (Q-ships), which were a great threat to U-boats.

Despite these challenges, the commanding officers of German submarines, displaying a combination of caution and skill, achieved remarkable results with their 

deck guns while managing to comply with the prize regulations. Owing to a lack 

of space, submarines could not embark survivors, but in many cases they towed 

lifeboats to nearby coasts. However, the German naval staff criticized this practice: 

“The deterring effect of the submarine war will be lost if it is felt that passing the 
blockade zone is no longer a serious risk to the lives of the crews.”47 Without providing its submarine commanding officers with clear instructions, the naval command 

obviously assumed that most ships would be sunk by torpedoes without warning, 

further deterring neutral shipping.

When the U.S. government raised concerns about the way the war was being 

waged and referred to the international principles of naval warfare, the chief of the 

general staff, Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn (1861–1922), feared the United States 

might enter the war. He wanted a guarantee that submarine warfare would force 

England “to give in” within six weeks. When the kaiser inquired about the matter, 

Tirpitz and the new chief of naval staff, Vice Adm. Gustav Bachmann (1860–1943), 

confirmed this amazing forecast—without explaining what they meant by England’s 

“giving in.” On February 12, Bachmann wrote to Admiral Pohl, then commander in 

chief of the High Seas Fleet: “It is in the military interest to make submarine warfare as effective as possible. Do not shy away from sinking enemy passenger liners. 

Their loss will cause the greatest impact.”48

The first serious instances of confrontation with the United States arose from 

German naval activities. On May 7, 1915, the submarine U-20 sank the British 

passenger liner Lusitania (31,550 gross registered tons [GRT]), using only one torpedo. This attack was conducted without warning and claimed the lives of 1,198 

civilians, including 126 Americans; however, it was established later that Lusitania 

had been carrying some war matériel in its forecastle.

This incident caused a severe diplomatic rift with the United States. President 

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) called on Germany to adhere to the accepted principles of naval warfare and to respect the safety of American citizens traveling in 

the war zone. Following a similar incident in August 1915, the German government yielded. In September, over the objection of the naval command, commerce 

raiding was ordered stopped west of the British Isles; only in the North and Mediterranean Seas was commerce raiding continued, and then in accordance with the 

prize regulations.

By early 1916, the number of operational U-boats had risen to fifty-one. Intensified submarine warfare, as demanded by the chief of general staff, resumed in 

February 1916. It aimed at sinking armed British merchant vessels, without warning, while sparing passenger liners. But the French Channel steamer Sussex was 

torpedoed on March 24, 1916, and another severe crisis between Germany and the 

United States ensued. On April 18, 1916, Washington threatened to sever diplomatic relations.49

Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg now saw his earlier pessimistic assessment of 

the situation confirmed. From the onset of the new stage of submarine warfare, he 

had doubted the need for such a hazardous venture, “which would claim as a stake 

our existence as a great power and the future of our nation in its entirety, while the 
, 

chance of winning, that is, the prospect of bringing England down by fall, is a rather 

uncertain one.”50

So the chancellor provided assurance to Washington that merchant vessels 

“would not be sunk without warning or without saving people’s lives.”51 As a result, 

the frontline commanders of the IGN (i.e., of the High Seas Fleet and the German 

marine corps in Flanders), acting on their own initiative—later backed up by the 

naval command—moved their submarines out of the western operating areas because they felt that operating under prize regulations exposed their vessels to great 

danger. Commerce raiding under the prize regulations was continued only in the 

Mediterranean. In the North Sea, the submarines operated against military targets 

until September 1916, without achieving any significant results.

This extreme reaction—transferring submarines out of the operating areas 

entirely—was inconsistent with the actual situation. Of the thirty-five submarines 

that had been lost by June 1916, only four had been destroyed by Q-ships, and none 

had been destroyed by armed merchant vessels.

Submarines’ promising capabilities for commerce raiding, even under the prize 

regulations, became more discernible in summer 1916.52 The resumption of submarine warfare under the prize regulations provoked no political risks while achieving 

considerable results: the monthly average of sinkings between October 1916 and 

January 1917 was 189 merchant vessels, of 324,742 GRT. This was not enough to 

force a decision in the war against Britain, but the war economy of the Allies was 

damaged heavily enough to produce a chance for a negotiated peace. Still, the naval 

command, in a rigid and dogmatic manner, repeatedly demanded “unrestricted 

submarine warfare.” The IGN was convinced that this would result in decisive victory, even presuming the expected break with the United States.

The naval staff decided to test the U.S. government by sending a submarine to 

the U.S. East Coast. On October 7, 1916, thirty-one-year-old Lt. Hans Rose (1885–

1969), endowed with powers equivalent to those of an ancient Roman proconsul 

(his wording), headed his submarine, U-53, for Newport, Rhode Island, as a demonstration of the efficiency of German submarines—and as a warning to the U.S. 

Navy. After a three-hour visit to the Naval War College, Rose departed Newport—

and sank five enemy merchant ships off the American coast, under prize rules. 

Sixteen U.S. destroyers observed this action at close range.53

The atmosphere and attitude among German naval officers at that time were 

portrayed in a diary entry by Lt. Ernst von Weizsäcker (1882–1951) of September 

27, 1916. “The naval officers are sitting around, drinking, talking politics, hatching 

plots, and into the bargain feel patriotic, trying, in a dishonest way, to force submarine warfare. Submarine warfare is designed to conceal the foolish things done in 

developing the fleet and employing the fleet in war. This inadmissible propaganda 

evidences their bad consciences.”54
However, the propaganda Weizsäcker mentioned was effective. This was especially significant since the new general headquarters of all army forces, under Field 

Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) and Gen. Erich Ludendorff (1865–

1937), realized that the attrition campaign had failed and that, as things stood, 

victory in France was becoming less and less likely.

Unlike the military, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg intended to avoid U.S. entry into the war on the Allied side. He hoped that President Wilson would arrange a 

negotiated peace. However, when the British government in December 1916 harshly rejected a German peace offer, German leaders changed their opinion. Now the 

military leaders, especially Hindenburg and Ludendorff, categorically demanded 

“unrestricted submarine warfare,” claiming it was the last means of gaining victory. 

At a conference on January 9, 1917, after heated discussion, the chancellor supported their demand, and the German high command recommenced unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, 1917.55 A few weeks later, at a meeting of the Main 

Parliament Committee, Adm. Eduard von Capelle (1855–1931), Tirpitz’s successor, 

“went so far as to insist that the effect of American entry into war would be ‘zero’! 

American troops would not even be able to cross the ocean for lack of transport.”56

In response to unrestricted warfare, the United States broke relations with Germany, announcing “armed neutrality.” However, the Entente wanted the United 

States to enter the war, so the alliance could take utmost advantage of a fully mobilized American war economy. Thanks to maladroit German diplomacy, this goal 

soon was accomplished.

Seeking to keep the Americans militarily engaged on their continent and in 

the Pacific Ocean, Germany proposed an alliance with Japan and Mexico. The 

proposal was sent by cable to Mexico in the so-called Zimmermann telegram 

on January 16, 1917. With the aid of captured German codebooks, British naval 

intelligence managed to decrypt all the German diplomatic cables transmitted 

among Berlin, Washington, and Mexico City. To expedite the U.S. decision-making 

process, the British government transmitted the pertinent cables to Washington, 

and President Wilson had them released to the press on February 28.57

Germany’s offer to Mexico of an alliance inflamed American public opinion 

against Germany. Early in April, the United States entered the war on the side of 

the Allies. Thus, unrestricted submarine warfare alone did not trigger the American declaration of war, but Germany’s naval stance contributed to it in a substantial 

way.

On February 1, 1917, Germany had 105 operational submarines available to 

conduct unrestricted submarine warfare. By June 1917, their number had been increased to only 129. Because of the increase in operations between February and 

July 1917, repair periods gradually were prolonged, leading to a decrease in the 

number of operationally ready submarines.58
, 

On the other hand, in April 1917 alone, 458 Allied ships totaling 840,000 GRT 

were sunk. This led to a severe crisis for the Allies, who momentarily doubted their 

ability to continue the war. However, Germany did not achieve its strategic objective—effective disruption of British shipping. The Allies introduced convoying in 

the summer of 1917, and thereafter far fewer ships were sunk. Between February and June 1917, an average of 363 ships of 629,863 GRT were sunk per month, 

whereas during the last quarter of 1917 sinkings averaged 159 per month, totaling 

365,489 GRT. In 1918, the numbers of ships sunk decreased even further. Because 

Cause 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 Total

Ramming

• By warships

• By merchant vessels

2 1 —

—

8

2

3

2

14

4

Artillery

• By warships

• By merchant vessels

• By Q-ships

—

—

—

2

—

3

3

—

2

—

—

6

3

1

—

8

1

11

Searching gear with petard — 1 1 — 1 3

Explosion of ammunition aboard a 

merchant vessel

— — — 1 — 1

Attack by aircraft — — — 1 — 1

Depth charges — — 2 7 21 30

Torpedoing — 4 1 7 6 18

Mines 2 2 6 21 23 54

Accidents

• By German mines

• By German torpedoes

• By beaching

• During diving

• Collision with German submarine

—

—

—

—

—

2

1

1

—

—

1

—

2

—

—

6

—

2

1

1

1

1

—

—

—

10

2

5

1

1

Unknown 1 2 4 — 7 14

Total 5 19 22 63 69 178

Note: Excludes accidents in home waters.

Sources: Robert M. Grant, U-boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-submarine Warfare 1914–1918 (London: Putnam, 1964); Robert 

M. Grant, U-boat Intelligence (London: Putnam, 1969). Cf. Joachim Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers: Die Geschichte des deutschen 

U-Boot-Krieges gegen Großbritannien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 2003), and Rahn, “Die Kaiserliche Marine und der 

Erste Weltkrieg,” p. 72.

German Submarine Losses 1914–18
of this, the German naval staff was not able to keep the promise it had made: by the 

autumn of 1918, about 1.4 million American soldiers had made it to France. U.S. 

entry into the war proved to be the decisive factor in the defeat of Germany.59

After the Allies introduced the convoy system, German submarines faced serious operational and tactical problems. The concentration of merchant ships in a 

convoy had to be countered with a concentration of submarines. Even before that, 

reconnaissance was required—the convoys had to be detected. The few boats available west of the British Isles could not cover the entire operating area, allowing 

many convoys to reach Britain undetected. When a submarine sighted a convoy, 

it could conduct a submerged attack, with torpedoes. The gun armament, which 

until the institution of convoying had achieved most results, fell into disuse.

Along with introducing the convoy system, the Allies enhanced antisubmarine 

defense by developing more efficient depth charges and the first underwater locating devices. But above all, it was the intensive mining of the shipping lanes in the 

North Sea and the English Channel that caused most U-boat casualties. Of the 132 

German submarines lost in 1917–18, at least fifty sank after hitting mines.60

At the end of September 1918, the army’s supreme command admitted military 

defeat and demanded an immediate armistice. The United States made termination of unrestricted submarine warfare a precondition for reestablishing diplomatic contact. Yet the German naval command—to justify its existence—prepared 

to send the fleet out for one final battle. The ships’ companies discerned that the 

naval command was acting arbitrarily and refused to obey. Within a few days, this 

mutiny developed into a revolt that led to the collapse and end of the IGN, which 

accelerated a general uprising in Germany.61

The Lessons of the Great War

In spite of outstanding achievements and successes against a superior opponent 

in various war theaters, the outcome of German naval operations was negative at 

the end of World War I. Not only did the IGN’s strategic concepts for fleet employment and for commerce warfare using submarines fail, but those failures were 

the starting point for a revolt that triggered the political overthrow of the government. Nevertheless, the High Seas Fleet effectively operated as a fleet in being. Its 

presence pinned down the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea, including lighter 

naval forces, which consequently were not available for convoy-escort duty in the 

Atlantic. The fleet protected the German coast, blocked the Baltic against Allied resupply shipments to Russia, and, to a certain extent, backed up submarine warfare 

by keeping the departure and return routes clear. Contrary to the current view of 

historians who entirely deny the fleet’s strategic importance, the fleet was an asset 

for the German war effort; but a realistic cost-benefit analysis shows that, in the 

end, the fleet did not achieve what it was expected to.
, 

One of the fundamental lessons learned during World War I was that, over the 

long run, an effective blockade could so weaken the German war potential and 

economy, which were greatly dependent on the importation of raw materials, that 

not even defensive operations could be conducted. The German naval command 

had not realized that sea power, i.e., the ability to control and successfully use the 

sea, essentially is the product of both fleet strength and geographical position. If 

either factor were deficient, the entire result suffered. This was one of the essential 

reasons the High Seas Fleet did not bring about a decision in the overall conduct of 

the war. It failed to develop a concept in which the two components of naval warfare—surface forces and submarines—were integrated to enable timely and effective 

deployment against the two key strategic weak points in the enemy alliance: Allied 

merchant shipping in the Atlantic and the Russian coastline in the Baltic.

During the submarine war against Allied merchant shipping, the naval command rigidly relied on a one-sided and, in the end, inadequate naval concept that 

ignored the possibility and reality of U.S. entry into the war, thereby contributing 

to Germany’s defeat. During the operations against Russia, Germany hardly ever 

exploited its naval superiority. However, Germany’s blocking of access to the Baltic, in parallel with its ally’s control of the Turkish straits, diminished Russia’s war 

potential considerably. This success in the economic war, which Germany had not 

foreseen, relieved the country of the necessity to prosecute the war on two fronts 

by the spring of 1918; but that was too late to bring about success for the overall 

war effort.

The result Germany experienced in World War I was due not only to insufficient concepts and means but to the naval command’s strategic incompetence. 

The leadership seemed to be incapable of recognizing the natural limits that 

existed—limits that would have to be imposed on any German naval strategy within the overall strategic concept.

THE INTERWAR PERIOD, 1919–39

The Treaty of Versailles reduced Germany to the status of a third-rate naval power.62

Submarines and military aircraft were forbidden to it altogether. As a result, the 

navy lacked the weapons that modern naval warfare required. However, French 

opposition thwarted the British attempt to abolish the submarine entirely; Paris 

became the champion of minor naval powers by emphasizing the importance of the 

submarine as a naval weapon for weaker nations.63 During the preparation of the 

peace treaty, Adm. William S. Benson (1855–1932), the American Chief of Naval 

Operations (CNO), advocated only moderate cuts in the strength of the future German navy so as to maintain a counterbalance to the British fleet in the North Sea.64

The British never considered taking over the German ships for their own fleet—

too costly; they simply wanted to sink them. However, France and Italy dismissed 

this idea. The problem was solved when the Germans themselves sank the major 
part of their fleet at Scapa Flow on June 21, 1919.65 The German naval command 

regarded this accomplishment primarily as a moral success. The consequences of 

the scuttling were severe: the Allies demanded full compensation, and claimed 80 

percent of all German port equipment; and the navy had to surrender its last five 

modern light cruisers.

German naval forces came to seem superfluous, given the total military defeat 

of 1918, the domestic unrest of 1919, and the ongoing border conflicts with Poland. However, for the navy to continue in existence and preserve its independence 

from the army, the service required a plausible long-run mission. When, during 

the peace negotiations in the spring of 1919, the German government offered to 

renounce its force of six old battleships so as to achieve concessions in other areas, 

the victorious powers refused, pointing out that Germany should retain some limited naval forces for its own protection. They projected a small German fleet as a 

stabilizing factor in the Baltic area. Thus, Germany’s former enemies contributed 

considerably to the continued existence—modest as it was—of the German navy.66

The naval command argued that a navy was necessary because of the territorial 

changes in eastern Europe, referring primarily to the alterations to Poland’s borders 

and the resultant isolation of East Prussia. In 1919–21, a Polish-Russian border 

dispute led to war, and future border conflicts could not be ruled out.67 If Germany 

had no naval forces at all, it would be impossible to defend East Prussia; the Poles 

would be able to cut the sea route across the Baltic—the only reliable line of supply 

for the German enclave.

The navy’s deliberations, unlike those of the army, soon expanded to consider 

other possible conflicts. As early as 1922 they took into account Poland’s ties with 

France. Once again, German naval strategy focused its attention on the North Sea. 

Given the German economy’s great dependence on seaborne supplies, the prerequisites for conducting defensive operations could be achieved only if German shipping in the North and Baltic Seas continued unhindered.

The navy considered itself to be an instrument of territorial defense against 

France and Poland, while hoping, in better times to come, for an end to armament 

restrictions. When it became apparent that the limitations on their own arms that 

the victorious powers had announced at Versailles were not going to materialize, 

the German government consistently aspired to equal rights and national sovereignty in the military sphere, such that it could develop the country’s armed forces 

into an effective instrument of national defense.

In terms of matériel, a new start gradually was made, by constructing some 

torpedo boats and light cruisers. However, the challenge of developing a tenthousand-ton armored vessel (permitted by the peace treaty) that had sufficient 

combat power to survive an engagement with French capital ships was a tough nut 

to crack. Given the displacement limitation, it was not possible to meet normal 
, 

requirements for armament and armor plating. When the changes in the armament 

limitations for which the naval command had hoped failed to materialize, the navy 

was forced to concentrate on designing a ship that was more like a cruiser than a 

battleship.

The decisive elements that influenced this change in planning lay on 

two levels, the tactical-operational and the political-military. In the tacticaloperational sphere, exercises showed that heavy naval forces needed more speed. In 

the political-military sphere, the naval command thought it imperative that every 

German ship constructed be superior in at least one respect to the warship categories defined in the Washington Naval Agreement (encompassing multiple treaties) 

of 1922. For battleships, it sought speed; for cruisers, heavy guns. To replace the 

old battleships while remaining under the terms of the peace treaty, the naval command planned a ship carrying six twenty-eight-centimeter (cm) guns and capable 

of twenty-eight knots.

To understand the German line of reasoning, it is necessary to look at the status 

of international naval armaments at the end of the 1920s. The countries that had 

signed the Washington Naval Treaty (Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United 

States) had navies dominated by capital ships having eight to twelve heavy guns 

(with calibers between 30.5 and 40.6 cm) and speeds of twenty to twenty-three 

knots. Only Britain and Japan had battle cruisers equipped with six to eight heavy 

guns. These had a top speed between twenty-seven and thirty-one knots. Until 

1930, the Washington Naval Treaty limited the total tonnage and construction of 

battleships and aircraft carriers. For cruisers, the treaty established ceilings only for 

the displacement and armament of individual vessels. Thus, cruisers with a standard displacement of ten thousand tons and light armor were built. Their main 

armament comprised six to ten 20.3 cm guns; they had a top speed of thirty-three 

knots. Although they could evade the slower capital ships, they had to avoid contact with battle cruisers, which were capable of similar speed yet far superior in 

armament.

Since the core of the French fleet consisted of nine slow capital ships and five 

fast heavy cruisers, the German naval command deliberately endowed its tenthousand-ton vessel with the characteristics of a “small battle-cruiser”: it was superior to cruisers in armament and to capital ships in speed. With six 28 cm guns in 

two triple turrets and a speed of twenty-six to twenty-eight knots, the Panzerschiff 

(armored ship, also known as a “pocket battleship”) came very close to the concept of the battle cruiser. Moreover, diesel engines would give the ship a maximum 

range of twenty thousand miles, vastly exceeding that of any cruiser or capital ship. 

Owing to its combat effectiveness and endurance, the pocket battleship was suitable for both warfare in the North Sea and offensive operations in the Atlantic.
The construction of the ship immediately attracted the attention of foreign naval experts. In April 1929, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold 

(1869–1941), reported to his government as follows:

From a naval technical point of view, the building of this vessel is to be welcomed, as its design promises to include a number of new features in warship construction. The principal of 

these are reported to be a comparatively heavy armament of six 11-inch guns, eight 5.8-inch 

and twenty antiaircraft guns, six torpedo tubes, adequate armour protection, special Diesel 

engines giving a cruising speed of 26 knots, the extensive employment of light metals and 

electric welding in place of riveting, and the highest degree of unsinkability.68

However, Germany’s naval command regarded the construction of pocket battleships not just as a military necessity but as a political-military lever with which 

to upset the entire system of international naval armament controls that had been 

established—without German participation—at Washington in 1922. The naval 

command hoped this step would give Germany the chance to be readmitted to the 

community of major naval powers.69 Of course, if Germany had been included in 

the Washington Naval Agreement, this would have been tantamount to a wholesale 

abrogation of the naval arms limitations laid down in the Treaty of Versailles.

Change of Strategy and Operational Planning

The naval command was cognizant that Germany was highly dependent on seaborne imports. It tried to impress this overall strategic reality on the army so the 

latter would take that factor into account when drawing up its operational plans. 

From 1928 onward, the new minister of the Reichswehr (German Imperial Defense), Lt. Gen. Wilhelm Groener (Ret.) (1867–1939), set new standards for all 

operational planning by the army and navy. He stressed that the idea of a largescale war had to be ruled out from the start. Military operations against foreign 

powers should be limited to two possible types of conflict: (1) repelling raids from 

neighboring states onto German territory; (2) maintaining armed neutrality during 

a conflict between foreign powers.

Groener demanded that the Reichswehr be combat ready to oppose immediately any sudden Polish invasion. For the navy, this new concept meant it had to be 

able, on seventy-two hours’ notice, to begin operations to destroy the Polish navy 

and neutralize the port of Gdynia as a naval base.70 Such a demonstrative strike 

clearly was intended to be part of a strategy of deterrence. Under this concept of 

calculated escalation, the German government could react quickly to a possible 

invasion, then refer the conflict to the League of Nations without delay. Thus, the 

government gave the navy, for the first time, a role as an effective instrument of 

crisis management.

In the spring of 1929, Groener requested that the naval command review 

whether Germany, to conduct its maritime defense, would need any surface units 

that went beyond the ceiling of the peace treaty. By so inquiring, Groener got at 

the heart of the self-perception of the navy’s leadership, which saw its service not 
, 

merely as an instrument of national defense but, in the long run, as an indispensable prerequisite for a future German maritime position of power. Under no circumstances would a return to brown-water-navy status be acceptable; the German 

navy instead intended to build oceangoing units, in accordance with the traditional 

concept of naval prestige, and thereby to express hope for a better future. Naturally, 

it was not possible, nor was it intended, to explain this to a minister who, although 

he had pushed the Panzerschiff through the Reichstag (national legislature), otherwise had expressed often his critical attitude toward the buildup of the German 

High Seas Fleet before 1914.

In his reply to Groener’s question, “Does Germany need large warships?,” the 

chief of naval command, Adm. Erich Raeder (1876–1960), championed the earlier 

naval concept, which focused on a potential conflict with France and Poland.71 He 

argued that the attitude of the navy must not be determined by wishful thinking 

to reestablish itself as a major naval power. Its most important task in war was to 

prevent—at all costs—enemy forces from interdicting German SLOCs. World War 

I had proved the connection between German resistance at the home front and naval blockade: “Cutting off our sea lanes is the simplest and safest way, without any 

bloodshed, of defeating us. Our enemies know this as well. England has the most 

powerful fleet world-wide and its geographical position is disastrous for Germany. 

Therefore, any armed conflict has to be avoided that would turn England into one 

of our enemies. We would be doomed to failure right from the start.”72

Raeder’s memorandum concluded that the navy—without even considering the 

limits the peace treaty set—could fight the fleet only of a second-class sea power, 

such as France.

Naval Rearmament under Hitler, 1933–37

A few days after seizing power in January 1933, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) made 

it clear to naval and other military commanders that he intended to develop the 

armed forces into an instrument of his power politics. As far as the translation of 

this objective into armament was concerned, Hitler was initially cautious. As he 

explained in a speech on February 3, 1933: “The most dangerous period is that of 

rearmament. Then we shall see whether France has statesmen. If she does, she will 

not grant us time but will jump on us (presumably with eastern satellites).”73

The Reichsmarine (German Navy) had to make do with compromises regarding 

the displacement and armament of its future capital ships. However, in view of the 

anticipated long-term buildup of the fleet, these compromises seemed acceptable. 

The last of three Panzerschiffe was launched in June 1934. The next two units were 

upgraded to battle cruisers (31,000 tons, thirty-one knots, nine 28 cm guns) in answer to the French battle cruisers Dunkerque and Strasbourg.

74

The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 18, 1935, allowed Germany to 

have a surface fleet with a tonnage up to 35 percent of that of the British Empire. 
German naval leaders now believed they had attained their goal of “equal” rights. 

The 35 percent ceiling applied not just to total tonnage but to individual categories 

of warships. In the case of U-boats, Germany was allowed to achieve 45 percent 

at first, later 100 percent, of British submarine strength. In this context, Germany 

gave assurances that its navy would adhere to what were known as the “cruiser 

rules” regarding submarine warfare conducted against merchant shipping.75

The navy’s planning thus was based wholly on the structure of that of the other 

naval powers. Its motto was: What the other navies, with their rich traditions, consider proper, and what Germany now is permitted within the 35 percent ceiling, is 

what Germany will build. The navy started to build a so-called normal fleet: fast 

capital ships, heavy and light cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers, and—for the 

first time after seventeen years—submarines. One week after the Anglo-German 

Naval Agreement was announced, the navy commissioned its first, small (250-ton) 

U-boat—thereby revealing its long-term secret preparatory activity in this area.76

Even if the U-boat had not been improved in basic ways since 1918, it had developed considerably in every direction (e.g., in its improved torpedoes, its minelaying ability, and its capacity to transmit and receive signals both while surfaced 

and while submerged). Nevertheless, opinion was widespread in all navies that 

the U-boat had lost the eminence it had achieved in World War I as one of the 

most effective naval weapons. The British Admiralty was convinced that asdic 

(a submarine location device named after its progenitor, the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) had reduced the submarine threat almost to extinction. In contrast to this opinion, the small German U-boat staff, centered on 

Capt. Karl Dönitz (1891–1980), was convinced that antisubmarine warfare (ASW) 

weapons were greatly overrated and had not made decisive progress since 1918.77

From 1928 onward, Admiral Raeder determined the navy’s thinking. In studying Germany’s World War I cruiser campaign, he had come to the conclusion that 

during the autumn of 1914 there had been a strategic correlation between the 

North Sea campaign and the operations of the cruiser squadrons in the Pacific and 

South Atlantic. Raeder realized that all naval theaters of war formed an interconnected whole, so any operation had to be viewed in relation to those in other areas. 

Accordingly, he made overseas cruiser warfare and battle-fleet operations in home 

waters integral components of a single naval strategy that sought to exploit diversionary effects, thereby exhausting the enemy’s forces and disrupting his supplies.78

Raeder formulated his strategic thinking most clearly in a briefing to Hitler on 

February 3, 1937. Analyzing Germany’s Great War experiences, he pointed out the 

correlation between strategy and a country’s military-geographical situation. Raeder was aware of the likely “totality” of a future war—that it would be a struggle not 

just between forces but of “nation versus nation.” He emphasized the negative consequences for Germany if it were unable to procure continually the raw materials it 
, 

lacked. In so doing, Raeder pointed out the glaring weaknesses in Germany’s war 

potential—but was unable to influence Hitler’s policy of confrontation.79

Buildup of the Navy against Britain, 1938–39

A fundamental change in strategic planning by the Kriegsmarine (as the German 

navy was known after 1935) commenced in spring 1938. As it became apparent 

that the Western powers opposed German expansion, Hitler issued a directive that 

all German war preparations should consider not only France and Russia but also 

Britain as potential enemies. A second confrontation with Britain now influenced 

all further planning for the next naval war. Raeder followed Hitler’s hazardous 

course of confrontation willingly, or at least without protest, in contravention 

of his strong statement on this matter to Groener in 1929. Raeder assumed—

erroneously—that the navy would have several years of peace to continue its 

buildup.

In the summer of 1938, the naval staff produced a strategic study that concluded 

that, given a geographical starting position similar to that of 1914, only oceanic 

cruiser warfare, employing improved Panzerschiffe and U-boats, held any prospect of success.80 Despite this realization, a planning committee of senior officers 

busied itself with the question of what tasks battleships could perform in a cruiser 

war in the Atlantic. The result was paradoxical and revealing: “The chief of staff of 

the naval staff concluded at the end of the discussion that all participants agreed 

that battleships were necessary, but that no consensus regarding their use could be 

achieved for the time being.”81

Traditionalists considered the most important arm of naval power to be capital 

ships. Focusing on them meant that the concept of sea control pushed the concept 

of sea denial into the background. Unlike the big-ship traditionalist Tirpitz, the 

naval staff during the 1930s had proposed a sea-denial strategy repeatedly. In contrast, the suggestion to develop a German strategy of sea control constituted a new, 

alternative approach to sea and world power in the twentieth century. In September 

1938, the commander in chief of the fleet, Adm. Rolf Carls (1885–1945), noted as 

follows: “If, in accordance with the will of the Führer, Germany is to achieve a firm 

world-power position, it will need, in addition to sufficient colonies, secure sea 

routes and access to the high seas. . . . A war against Britain means a war against 

the Empire, against France, probably also against Russia and a number of countries 

overseas, in other words against one-half or two-thirds of the whole world.”82

Nevertheless, Raeder was more inclined toward a sea-denial strategy via an oceanic cruiser campaign with Panzerschiffe, and he intended to give this strategy priority in the future armament program. However, by November 1938 he had been 

unable to gain Hitler’s support for his program. Hitler did not accept the cruiser 

warfare strategy, insisting instead that the navy step up the pace of its battleship 
construction so that as soon as possible he would have at his disposal an instrument of power he could employ globally.

The navy had to accept this decisive change. It formulated a new concept, the 

so-called Z-Plan, which centered on the construction of six capital ships by 1944. 

Additionally, battle cruisers, Panzerschiffe, aircraft carriers, fast light cruisers, and 

247 U-boats were to form the backbone of German naval forces for the future Battle 

of the Atlantic. On January 27, 1939, when Hitler ordered that the buildup of the 

navy was to take precedence over all other tasks, including the rearmament of the 

army and the Luftwaffe (air force), he heralded a gigantic buildup of naval forces. 

Within a few months, the planning of a series of six new-design, diesel-driven battleships was complete; the construction of two units began in the summer of 1939. 

In the meantime, on April 27, 1939, Hitler denounced the Anglo-German Naval 

Agreement of 1935.83

The experiences of World War I acted as the starting point for developing the 

so-called pack tactics that German U-boats employed against enemy sea routes 

during World War II.84 Dönitz recognized that the concentration of merchant shipping in convoys would require a similar concentration of U-boats to counter. And 

before the U-boats could attack a convoy, they needed to locate it—in other words, 

the problem of reconnaissance would have to be solved. In 1917–18, a number of 

U-boats had attacked successfully on the surface, under cover of darkness. During 

the evaluation of wartime experiences, former U-boat commanders recommended 

adoption and further development of this method of attack. Dönitz also had drawn 

attention to the advantages of night attacks in his book Die U-Bootswaffe, published 

in 1939. Nonetheless, later in World War II, this type of attack took British ASW 

defenses by surprise—they had relied too much on the supposed superiority of 

asdic. The escort forces were unable to cope with the German tactic, particularly as 

asdic had an effective range of no more than about 1,400 meters, which left it ineffective against U-boats operating on the surface.85

WORLD WAR II

Disillusionment came on September 3, 1939. Totally unexpectedly, Hitler ordered 

the navy to launch a naval war against Britain.86 The German navy was in no way 

prepared. Raeder’s initial estimate of the situation was very pessimistic, and he resigned himself to the realization that neither the few U-boats nor the surface forces 

would have any decisive effect on the outcome of the war: “They can do no more 

than show that they know how to die gallantly and thus are willing to create the 

foundations for later reconstruction.”87

However, the progress of the war soon demanded a new estimate of the situation. Nine months on, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, and 

the Netherlands had been occupied; by June 22, 1940, France had suffered a total 

defeat. German naval control extended from Norway to the Pyrenees. Therefore, 
, 

the German naval staff switched to an offensive concept of naval warfare, aimed 

solely at destroying Britain’s maritime transport capacity. The Kriegsmarine’s surface forces were insufficient for such a task; to supplement them, the navy concentrated on constructing and employing the means of naval warfare that had proved 

its worth during World War I—the U-boat.

The naval staff knew from its experience during the previous war that employment of the U-boat against the enemy’s merchant marine could be successful only 

if U-boats were deployed continuously along the enemy’s SLOCs, employing as 

many vessels as possible. The navy calculated that the number of U-boats permanently at sea should range from 100 to 150 boats. Taking into consideration time 

for maintenance and resupply, this meant the navy needed approximately three 

hundred operational boats at its disposal.88 In the quest to achieve this, time was an 

important factor:

1. In an economic war waged against a country that depended on supplies by 

sea, success could only be achieved in the long run. It was therefore a question 

of continuously weakening the enemy’s maritime transport capacity to an extent 

that exceeded the rate at which the enemy could construct new merchantmen.

2. From the summer of 1940 onward, it became apparent that the British war 

effort increasingly was being supported by the resources of the United States. 

This made the naval staff intent on “putting Britain out of action soon, before 

the effects of even greater American aid made themselves felt.”89 

3. Since it took around two years to construct a U-boat and bring it to operational status, amassing the numbers the navy envisaged so as to achieve the necessary concentration of forces required plans to be made at a very early stage.90

While a numerically increasing U-boat fleet held out the prospect of German 

success, the naval staff had to take into account that the enemy, in view of the looming threat, would do everything he could to strengthen his ASW effort.

In October 1939, the naval command presented a U-boat buildup plan that set 

a monthly rate of twenty-nine boats. Hitler approved the plan; however, he refused 

to sanction priority, since he was at that time more concerned with the demands of 

the imminent land campaign against France.91 One year later, in November 1940, 

the navy had to realize that U-boat construction was being held up by shortages, 

and that the current building rate barely covered the current loss rate. The naval staff foresaw that there would be limits to the Reich’s material resources and 

production capacities. In December 1940, it viewed America’s growing support of 

Britain as a dangerous development “towards a marked prolongation of the war.” 

To the naval staff, this portended a “very negative effect on the overall German war 

strategy.”92 This statement expressed the simple, obvious fact that Germany could 

not win a prolonged war of attrition against the two Atlantic naval powers.

For this reason, in December 1940, Grand Admiral Raeder requested that Hitler “recognize that the greatest task of the hour is concentration of all our power 
against Britain.” To Raeder, this meant focusing air and naval forces against British 

supplies. The admiral was firmly convinced that U-boats were the decisive weapon 

to be used against Britain. Although Hitler did not reject Raeder’s view, he referred 

to the allegedly new political situation: the necessity “to eliminate at all cost the last 

enemy remaining [i.e., Soviet Russia] on the continent, before he can collaborate 

with Britain. . . . After that, everything can be concentrated on the needs of the 

Air Force and the Navy.”93 In Hitler’s eyes, Britain was not the enemy on which 

all weapons had to be concentrated, but a potential partner who might be made 

to “see reason” if an appropriate amount of military pressure were applied. Hitler 

also knew that a forced economic war could not lead to any marked success in one 

year. Furthermore, this kind of effort could increase the danger of the United States 

entering the war, something he sought to avoid at that point.94

In July 1941, after the first successes in the war against Russia, the naval staff 

tried to convince both the Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) Command and Hitler of 

the immediate strategic necessity to concentrate on fighting the Anglo-Saxon naval 

powers. Analyzing the threat to which Germany was exposed, the naval staff portrayed the dilemma of a European continental state that lacked the vital elements of 

a naval power but was forced to fight against the greatest naval powers: “While in 

World War I we had the second strongest battle fleet in the world but no appropriate operational base, we now dispose of a strategically favorable operational base, 

however, we do not have the required battle fleet to operate within the Atlantic.”95

The naval staff predicted that the two Allied naval powers would continue to 

fight, even if the Soviet Union collapsed, so they could reach their “final goal”: 

destroying Germany on the continent. The naval staff came to the conclusion that 

“the enemies’ prospect for the battle in the Atlantic for the year 1942 must be assessed as favorable.” For this reason, the naval staff advocated that Germany bring 

about a decision in the Atlantic by taking advantage of both political assets (the 

cooperation of Vichy-France and Japan) and military assets (the concentrated employment of all available forces, in particular the U-boats and air forces).96

From 1940 onward, Germany possessed a good geographical position for naval 

warfare in the Atlantic, but this basis could not be exploited fully, owing to insufficient weaponry. The U-boat provided an effective weapon in the fight against 

enemy shipping up to 1942, but thereafter wider war demands, especially the critical situations in the Mediterranean and on the eastern front, forced the naval command to employ its last remaining offensive capability like an “operational fire 

brigade.”97 This led to enormous attrition, which was counterproductive to the strategic concept of mass concentration in the Atlantic. As the Allies developed better 

ASW weapons, the concept of a “U-boat war” failed in 1943 because the submarine 

had lost its ability to escape from enemy surveillance.
, 

In fact, the concept of attrition warfare began to fail by the fall of 1942 in the 

face of the mobilization of Allied resources and industrial capacities, especially those of the United States. The German naval staff analysis at that time of the 

accelerating buildup of Allied maritime transport capacity already revealed that 

the U-boats could not increase the monthly rate of sinkings to a level necessary 

to win the “tonnage race.” The naval staff delivered a pessimistic prognosis: “If, 

. . . considering the enemy’s rising production output, Germany wishes to diminish 

the enemy’s tonnage from the end of 1942 onwards to the same extent as is currently 

being achieved, ship sinkings per month will have to be increased to approximately 

1,300,000 GRT. Given the current situation, it is doubtful whether such a high rate 

of ship sinkings will be feasible for a sustained period of time.”98 Recalling the historical argument that “no war in history . . . has yet been won by the use of one 

method of warfare,” the naval staff came around to an understanding that reflected 

actual conditions.99 By the end of 1942, German U-boats, as a realistic threat, had 

succumbed to the immense industrial capacity of the United States.

From 1943 onward, the navy had an officer at the helm, Grand Admiral Dönitz, 

who both was a charismatic leader and had close links to Hitler and Nazi ideology. 

Not until after Hitler’s death did he change “from the almost-blind tool of a criminal to the responsible soldier of the traditional Prussian school.”100 At that point he 

did everything in his power to end the already-lost war in a proper fashion and, at 

the same time, to evacuate as many people as possible across the Baltic to the West. 

The latter effort—the navy’s last wartime act—brought the service much positive 

postwar public recognition.101

Over the course of the twentieth century, Germany twice tried to force a strategic decision, in direct confrontation with the Anglo-Saxon naval powers, by cutting 

the Atlantic shipping routes. Both attempts ended in failure. The second defeat 

brought with it the end of the German Reich and the dissolution of all German 

armed forces.

BUILDING A NEW NAVY AFTER 1955

The Western orientation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) led to close 

integration of the new German armed forces into the Atlantic Alliance.102 Ten years 

after the surrender of Germany’s World War II forces, a new German naval force 

came into existence. The allied forces—especially the U.S. Navy, including its CNO, 

Adm. Arleigh Burke (1901–96)—supported its creation. During the first years of 

the buildup, a close cooperation and friendship developed between Admiral Burke 

and Vice Adm. Friedrich Ruge (1894–1985), the first head of the Federal German 

Navy (FGN).103
Burke created a basis of confidence with his firm conviction that allied forces 

could fulfill their common tasks only if their cooperation were based on openness 

and mutual trust. Vice Admiral Ruge succeeded in establishing this basis of confidence, which today is accepted as a matter of course.

This meant for the FGN, the smallest of the armed services within the FRG 

armed forces, that, for the first time in its history, the naval service was obliged 

merely to perform that function “which a German Navy can actually perform,” in 

close cooperation with the great maritime powers.104

At the same time the FRG joined NATO in May 1955, the German Democratic 

Republic (GDR) was integrated into the Warsaw Pact. The formation of light naval 

forces ensued, out of the Volkspolizei See (i.e., the national sea police force of the 

GDR) that had been in existence since 1950. In 1960, the GDR’s newly established 

forces were termed Volksmarine (People’s Navy), in commemoration of the 1918 

revolutionary tradition. This navy, which was strictly integrated within the ideological leadership claimed by the Communist Party, demonstrated little continuity 

with former German naval forces, whether in formation, structure, or mandate. 

Within the Warsaw Pact it evolved into an offensive naval force for use in confined 

and littoral waters. 

The two German naval forces exhibited great disparity until 1990. Each navy 

regarded the other as a potential military adversary in the context of the system of 

alliances. However, both were spared the necessity to prove their combat strength. 

With the reunification of the German republics in the fall of 1990, parts of each 

were incorporated into the German navy.105 

Today, the German navy has not only a lively interest in its history but a special 

relationship to it. A clear link can be seen between the historical self-understanding 

of its officers and the history of their service. In the past, this link often served only 

as an attempt to legitimize and secure the service’s position. The navy, which came 

into being in the mid-nineteenth century, often had to fight for recognition and 

even for its existence during a relatively short history. However, when historical 

interest is limited only to the navy and naval warfare, there is a danger that too little 

attention will be paid to the overlapping political correlations.

Nowadays the situation is different. Germany is one of the leading export nations 

in the world, and therefore extremely dependent on trade and the unhampered 

use of the high seas. This situation requires an understanding and an acceptance 

of the maritime domain as a vital Achilles’ heel for the prosperity of the German 

economy and society. This situation underlines the necessity for a well-balanced 

navy that is able to conduct demonstrations and to protect German maritime interests, in cooperation with alliances and partners. The situation for the German 
, 

navy is much more comfortable at present than in previous eras, reinforcing its selfconfidence; but a wider understanding of its roles is needed, now more than ever.

NOTES ©2017 by Werner Rahn. Reprinted by permission. 

This chapter appeared as an article in the Naval War 

College Review 70, no. 4 (Autumn 2017), pp. 13–47.

1 The first part of this article is based on my essay 

“Germany,” in Ubi Sumus? The State of Naval and 

Maritime History, Historical Monograph 11, ed. 

John B. Hattendorf (Newport, RI: Naval War College 

Press, 1994), pp. 137–57.

2 John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (London: Jonathan 

Cape, 1976), p. 29.

3 Ibid., p. 32.

4 Thomas Nipperdey, “Wozu Geschichte gut Ist,” 

Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 41, no. 1 (1987), p. 

9.

5 Statement of Rolf Johannesson [Rear Adm., FGN 

(Ret.)] to the audience, in Der Marineoffizier als 

Führer im Gefecht, ed. Deutsches Marine Institut 

(Herford, F.R.G.: E. S. Mittler, 1984), p. 242.

6 See Jens Graul and Dieter Hartwig, eds., Von den 

Historikern für die Flotte (Bochum, Ger.: Winkler, 

2011), esp. annex, pp. 141–200.

7 The following material is based on my article 

“140 Years of German Navies: Their Defeat and 

Rebirth—from Confrontation to Co-operation,” 

in The Influence of History on Mahan, Historical 

Monograph 9, ed. John B. Hattendorf (Newport, RI: 

Naval War College Press, 1991), pp. 81–84, and my 

entry “Navies, Great Powers: Germany, 1848–1945,” 

in Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, ed. John 

B. Hattendorf (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 

2007), vol. 2, pp. 705–11. See also Werner Rahn, 

ed., Deutsche Marinen im Wandel: Vom Symbol 

nationaler Einheit zum Instrument internationaler 

Sicherheit (Munich, Ger.: Oldenbourg, 2005).

8 For details, see Günter Moltmann, “Die deutsche 

Flotte von 1848/49 im historisch-politischen Kontext,” in Rahn, Deutsche Marinen im Wandel, pp. 

64–80.

9 Adalbert [Prinz von Preußen], Denkschrift über die 

Bildung einer deutschen Kriegsflotte (Potsdam, Ger.: 

1848); reproduced in Jörg Duppler, Prinz Adalbert

von Preußen: Gründer der deutschen Marine (Herford, F.R.G.: E. S. Mittler, 1986), pp. 79–115.

10 For details, see Günter Moltmann, Atlantische 

Blockpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Vereinigten 

Staaten und der deutsche Liberalismus von 1848/49

(Düsseldorf, F.R.G.: Droste, 1973), pp. 150–56.

11 See Duppler, Prinz Adalbert von Preußen, p. 50.

12 Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig, Ger.: 

Koehler, 1920), p. 127.

13 Tirpitz was ennobled in January 1900. Latest biographies of him include Patrick J. Kelly, Tirpitz and the 

Imperial German Navy (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. 

Press, 2011), and Michael Epkenhans, Tirpitz: Architect of the German High Seas Fleet (Washington, DC: 

Potomac Books, 2008).

14 Cf. Holger H. Herwig, “The Influence of A. T. Mahan upon German Sea Power,” in Hattendorf, The 

Influence of History on Mahan, pp. 67–80.

15 Alfred von Tirpitz, “Taktische und strategische 

Dienstschriften des Oberkommandos der Marine, 

Nr. IX: Allgemeine Erfahrungen aus den Manövern 

der Herbstübungs-Flotte,” June 16, 1894 [hereafter 

Dienstschrift No. IX], app. doc. no. 2, RM 4/176, 

Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg, Ger. Cf. in 

this context Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan: 

Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II (Düsseldorf, F.R.G.: 

Droste, 1971), pp. 45–89; Ivo Nikolai Lambi, 

The Navy and German Power Politics 1862–1914

(Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984), pp. 68–86; and 

Rolf Hobson, Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic 

Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz 

Plan, 1875–1914 (Boston: Brill, 2002).

16 Dienstschrift No. IX, pp. 2, 5.

17 The Jeune École dominated French naval thought in 

the 1880s. It made commerce raiding a strategic priority and placed great reliance on new technologies, 

primarily the torpedo. Rahn, “Navies, Great Powers: 

Germany, 1848–1945,” p. 703.

18 For further details on his appointment, see 

Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan, passim.

19 “Allgemeine Gesichtspunkte bei der Feststellung 

unserer Flotte nach Schiffsklassen und Schiffstypen” 
[“General Considerations on the Constitution of 

Our Fleet according to Ship Classes and Designs”], 

June 1897. The German version of the complete 

document and a translation appear in Jonathan 

Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth 

of the German Battle Fleet (London: Macdonald, 

1965), p. 209.

20 Curt Freiherr von Maltzahn, Der Kampf gegen die 

Seeherrschaft (Kiel, Ger.: C. Schaidt, 1898). Ca. 

1971–72 I drew on a private copy of the original 

while consulting the papers of Admiral Behncke in 

the German Military Archive; some years later the 

original seems to be missing. Cf. John B. Hattendorf, 

“The Caird Lecture, 2000: The Anglo-French Naval 

Wars (1689–1815) in Twentieth-Century Naval 

Thought,” in Talking about Naval History: A Collection of Essays, Historical Monograph 19 (Newport, 

RI: Naval War College Press, 2011), pp. 83–103.

21 Maltzahn, Der Kampf gegen die Seeherrschaft, p. 15.

22 Cf. Wilhelm Deist, Flottenpolitik und Flottenpropaganda: Das Nachrichtenbureau des Reichsmarineamtes 1897–1914 (Stuttgart, F.R.G.: Deutsche 

Verlags-Anstalt, 1976).

23 Quoted in Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought 

to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 

1904–1919, vol. 1, The Road to War 1904–1914

(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 277. Cf. in 

this context Holger H. Herwig, “Luxury” Fleet: The 

Imperial German Navy 1888–1918 (London: George 

Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp. 76–77.

24 Marder, The Road to War 1904–1914, p. 286.

25 Admiral Tirpitz to Admiral Müller [Chief of the 

Naval Cabinet], February 26, 1912, in ibid. For Müller, 

see also ibid., p. 78 note 11 and pp. 223–24. In 1904, 

the United Kingdom and France formed the Entente 

Cordiale; in 1907 the United Kingdom and Russia 

formed their own entente; collectively this resulted in 

the so-called Triple Entente.

26 Cf. in this context Michael Epkenhans, “Technology, Shipbuilding and Future Combat in Germany, 

1880–1914,” in Technology and Naval Combat in the 

Twentieth Century and Beyond, ed. Phillips Payson 

O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 53–68.

27 Marder, The Road to War 1904–1914, p. 373.

28 Cf. Wulf Diercks, “Der Einfluss der Personalsteuerung auf die deutsche Seekriegführung 

1914–1918,” in Rahn, Deutsche Marinen im Wandel,

pp. 235–67. Cf. also Kurt Assmann, Deutsche 

Seestrategie in zwei Weltkriegen (Heidelberg, F.R.G.: 

Vowinckel, 1957), pp. 32–35, and Marder, The 

Road to War 1904–1914, pp. 412–13. Vice Admiral 

Assmann was head of the German naval archives, 

1933–43.

29 Cf. Paul Kennedy, “Maritime Strategieprobleme 

der deutsch-englischen Flottenrivalität,” in Marine 

und Marinepolitik im kaiserlichen Deutschland

1871–1914, ed. Herbert Schottelius and Wilhelm 

Deist, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf, F.R.G.: Droste, 1981), pp. 

178–210. See also Edward Wegener, “Die tirpitzsche 

Seestrategie,” in ibid., pp. 236–62.

30 Marder, The Road to War 1904–1914, p. 379.

31 Cf. Kennedy, “Maritime Strategieprobleme,” pp. 

197–98.

32 Quoted in Marder, The Road to War 1904–1914, p. 

382.

33 Quoted in German by William Michaelis, “Tirpitz’ 

strategisches Wirken vor und während des Weltkrieges,” in Rahn, Deutsche Marinen im Wandel, pp. 

397–425; also quoted (with a slightly different text) 

by Assmann, Deutsche Seestrategie, p. 30.

34 Arthur Hezlet, The Submarine & Sea Power (London: Peter Davies, 1967), p. 23.

35 For details, see Arno Spindler, Der Handelskrieg mit 

U-Booten, vol. 1, Vorgeschichte (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 

1932), pp. 148–76.

36 This section is based on my article “German Naval 

Power in the First and Second World Wars,” in 

Naval Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. N. A. M. 

Rodger (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 

88–100.

37 “Operations Order for North Sea Theatre, 30 July 

1914,” quoted by Otto Groos, Der Krieg in der 

Nordsee, vol. 1, Kriegsbeginn bis Anfang September 

1914, 2nd ed., Krieg zur See, 1914–1918 (Berlin: 

Marine-Archiv, 1922), p. 54. Cf. Paul G. Halpern, 

A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1994), p. 23.

38 Cf. Erich Raeder [Vizeadmiral], Der Kreuzerkrieg in 

den ausländischen Gewässern, vol. 1, Das Kreuzergeschwader (Berlin: Zweite, 1927), pp. 244–54.

39 Cf. Halpern, A Naval History, pp. 109–24.

40 Julian S. Corbett, History of the Great War: Naval 

Operations, vol. 1, To the Battle of the Falklands, 

December 1914 (London: Longman, 1920), p. 70ff.

41 James M. Morris and Patricia M. Kearns, eds., 

Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Navy (London: 

Scarecrow, 1998), s.v. “fleet in being”: “a naval force 

that acts as a deterrent to hostile action in an area 

because of its ability to inflict appropriate damage 

on an enemy.” Cf. Raeder, Das Kreuzergeschwader, p. 

81.

42 Hezlet, The Submarine & Seapower, p. 28. Cf. 

Halpern, A Naval History, p. 33.

43 Cf. Groos, Der Krieg in der Nordsee, vol. 2, Von 

Anfang September bis November 1914, Krieg zur See, 

1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1925), pp. 184–85.

44 Cf. Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: 

The Problem of Militarism in Germany, vol. 3, The 

Tragedy of Statesmanship: Bethmann Hollweg as War 

Chancellor (1914–1917) (Coral Gables, FL: Univ. of 

Miami Press, 1971), pp. 288–318.

45 Ibid., pp. 124–25.

46 Spindler, Vorgeschichte, p. 87. For translation, see 

Halpern, A Naval History, p. 293.

47 Naval Staff to High Seas Fleet, March 28, 1915, quoted in Hans J. Koerver, War of Numbers 1914–1916: 

The Kaiser’s Navy Gone Rogue (Steinbach, Aus.: LIS 

Rheinisch, 2016), p. 84 note 171.

48 Quoted in Koerver, War of Numbers, p. 78.

49 Cf. Spindler, Der Handelskrieg mit U-Booten, vol. 

3, Oktober 1915–Januar 1916 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 

1934), esp. pp. 85–153.

50 See “Denkschrift des Reichskanzlers von BethmannHollweg,” February 29, 1916, quoted in Spindler, 
, 

Oktober 1915–Januar 1916, p. 98. See also Ritter, The 

Tragedy of Statesmanship, p. 164ff.

51 German note to U.S. government, May 5, 1916, in 

Spindler, Oktober 1915–Januar 1916, pp. 145–49, 

quotation at p. 148.

52 For details, see Spindler, Oktober 1915–Januar 1916,

pp. 154–245.

53 Three of the ships were from Britain, one from 

Norway, and one from the Netherlands. For details 

of this visit, including pictures, see Wellington 

Long, “The Cruise of the U-53,” U.S. Naval Institute 

Proceedings 92/10/764 (October 1966), pp. 86–95; 

Jan Heitmann, Unter Wasser in die Neue Welt: 

Handelsunterseeboote und kaiserliche Unterseekreuzer im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Kriegführung

(Berlin: Berlin-Verl. Spitz, 1999), pp. 227–250; 

Hans Rose, “U 53 fährt nach Amerika,” in Werner 

von Langsdorff, U-Boote am Feind: 45 deutsche UBoot-Fahrer erzählen (Gütersloh, Ger.: Bertelsmann, 

1937), pp. 158–85; and David Kohnen, with Nicholas Jellicoe and Nathaniel Sims, “The U.S. Navy Won 

the Battle of Jutland,” Naval War College Review 69, 

no. 4 (Autumn 2016), pp. 136–37.

54 Ernst von Weizsäcker, diary entry, September 27, 

1916, quoted in Die Weizsäcker-Papiere 1900–1932,

ed. Leonidas E. Hill (Berlin, F.R.G.: PropyläenVerlag, 1982), p. 215. Cf. Holger H. Herwig, The 

German Naval Officer Corps: A Social and Political 

History, 1890–1918 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. 

Press, 1973), p. 188.

55 Cf. Ritter, The Tragedy of Statesmanship, pp. 

288–318.

56 Ibid., p. 334.

57 Cf. Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram

(Edinburgh, Scot.: Constable, 1959), and Patrick 

Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18

(London: Hamilton, 1982), pp. 204–24.

58 For details, see Spindler, Der Handelskrieg mit UBooten, vol. 4, February until December 1917 (Berlin: 

E. S. Mittler, 1941; repr. London: Putnam, 1964).

59 Cf. Spindler, Der Handelskrieg mit U-Booten, vol. 5, 

Januar bis November 1918 (Frankfurt, F.R.G.: E. S. 

Mittler, 1966), esp. attachments at pp. 343–98.

60 Cf. Werner Rahn, “Die Kaiserliche Marine und 

der Erste Weltkrieg,” in Ringelnatz als Mariner im 

Krieg 1914–1918, ed. Stephan Huck (Bochum, Ger.: 

Taschenbuch, 2003), pp. 39–89, esp. table p. 72.

61 For details, see Gerhard P. Groß, ed., with the assistance of Werner Rahn, Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918:

Der Krieg in der Nordsee, vol. 7, Vom Sommer 1917 

bis zum Kriegsende (Hamburg, Ger.: 2006), see esp. 

documents as attachments, pp. 423–64.

62 This section is based mainly on Jost Dülffer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine: Reichpolitik und Flottenbau 1920–1939 (Düsseldorf, F.R.G.: Droste, 1973); 

Werner Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 

1919–1928: Konzeption und Führung der Marine in 

der Weimarer Republik (Munich, F.R.G.: Bernard 

& Graefe, 1976); and “German Naval Strategy and 

Armament, 1919–39,” in O’Brien, Technology and 

Naval Combat. Cf. Wilhelm Deist et al., eds., “The 

Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” pt. 3 in Germany 

and the Second World War, vol. 1, The Build-Up of 

German Aggression (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. 

Press, 1990), pp. 372–540.

63 Cf. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow,

vol. 5, Victory and Aftermath (London: Oxford Univ. 

Press, 1970), p. 258, and Stephen W. Roskill, Naval 

Policy between the Wars, vol. 1, The Period of AngloAmerican Antagonism 1919–1929 (London: Collins, 

1968), p. 92.

64 Cf. Roskill, The Period of Anglo-American Antagonism 1919–1929, p. 100.

65 Cf. Andreas Krause, Scapa Flow: Die Selbstversenkung der wilhelminischen Flotte (Berlin: Ullstein, 

1999).

66 For details, see Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 1919–1928, pp. 13–50.

67 Cf. ibid., pp. 35–42.

68 “Annual Report on Germany for the Year 1928,” 

March 25, 1929, p. 33, FO 311/1364, National Archives, Kew, U.K.

69 Cf. Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 

1919–1928, p. 245ff.

70 See ibid., pp. 144–46.

71 The May 1929 document “Does Germany Need 

Large Warships?” is included in Rahn, Reichsmarine 

und Landesverteidigung 1919–1928, pp. 281–86.

72 Translation is from Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 1919–1928, p. 283ff.

73 Quoted by Andreas Hillgruber, Germany and the 

Two World Wars, trans. William C. Kirby (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), p. 57.

74 For details, see Siegfried Breyer, Schlachtschiffe 

und Schlachtkreuzer 1905–1970: Eine geschichtliche 

Entwicklung des Großkampfschiffes (Erlangen, Ger.: 

Karl Müller, 1993).

75 See Dülffer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine, pp. 

204–334.

76 Cf. Allison W. Saville, “The Development of the 

German U-boat Arm, 1919–1935” (PhD dissertation, Univ. of Washington, 1963).

77 Dönitz joined the IGN in 1910. During World 

War I he commanded UB-68, which was sunk in 

1918; he became a prisoner of war. From 1934 to 

1935 he commanded the cruiser Emden. He served 

as Chief, U-boat Command from 1935 until January 1943. Dönitz was promoted to captain in 1935, 

rear admiral in October 1939, and grand admiral 

in February 1943. From 1943 to 1945 he was commander in chief of the navy. In October 1946 he 

was sentenced at Nuremberg to imprisonment for 

ten years, and in October 1956 was released from 

prison. Dönitz died on December 24, 1980. Cf. Clay 

Blair, Hitler’s U-boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942

(New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 35–49; Peter 

Padfield, Dönitz: The Last Führer; Portrait of a Nazi 

War Leader (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); and 

Dieter Hartwig, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz: Legende 

und Wirklichkeit (Munich, Ger.: Schöningh, 2010).

78 For details, see Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 1919–1928, p. 127.
79 Cf. in this context Michael Salewski, Die deutsche 

Seekriegsleitung 1935–1945, vol. 1, 1935–1941

(Frankfurt, F.R.G.: Bernard & Graefe, 1970), pp. 

32–33; Dülffer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine, pp. 

435–36; and Carl-Axel Gemzell, Raeder, Hitler und 

Skandinavien: Der Kampf für einen maritimen Operationsplan (Lund, Swed.: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1965), 

pp. 49–51.

80 Cf. Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung 1935–

1945, vol. 3, Denkschriften und Lagebetrachtungen

(Frankfurt, F.R.G.: Bernard & Graefe, 1973), esp. 

pp. 27–63. Note document no. 1, “Seekriegführung 

gegen England.”

81 Deist et al., “The Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” 

p. 474.

82 Ibid., p. 475.

83 For details, see Dülffer, Weimar, Hitler und die 

Marine, and Salewski, 1935–1941.

84 Cf. Hubert Jeschke, U-Boottaktik: Zur deutschen UBoottaktik 1900–1945 (Freiburg, F.R.G.: Rombach, 

1972), pp. 63–65.

85 Stephen W. Roskill, The War at Sea 1939–1945, vol. 

1, The Defensive (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), pp. 35–36; Karl Dönitz, Zehn 

Jahre und zwanzig Tage: Erinnerungen 1935–1945

(Koblenz, F.R.G.: Bernard & Graefe, 1985), p. 26; cf. 

the translation, Karl Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and 

Twenty Days, trans. R. H. Stevens (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1990).

86 This section is based mainly on my contribution, 

“The War at Sea in the Atlantic and the Arctic 

Ocean,” in Germany and the Second World War, ed. 

Horst Boog et al., vol. 6, The Global War (Oxford, 

U.K.: Clarendon, 2001), pp. 301–466. Cf. my articles 

“The Atlantic in the Strategic Perspective of Hitler 

and Roosevelt, 1940–1941,” in To Die Gallantly: The 

Battle of the Atlantic, ed. Timothy J. Runyan and Jan 

M. Copes (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), pp. 3–21; 

“The German U-boat Campaign in World War 

II,” in Commerce Raiding: Historical Case Studies, 

1755–2009, Newport Paper 40, ed. Bruce A. Elleman 

and S. C. M. Paine (Newport, RI: Naval War College 

Press, 2013), pp. 187–207; and “The Atlantic in the 

Strategic Perspective of Hitler and His Admirals, 

1939–1944,” in Strategy and the Sea: Essays in Honour of John B. Hattendorf, ed. N. A. M. Rodger et al. 

(Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2016), pp. 159–68.

87 “Reflections of the C.-in-C. Navy, on the Outbreak 

of War, September 3, 1939,” Brassey’s Naval Annual 

1948, reproduced in Fuehrer Conferences on Naval 

Affairs 1939–1945 (London: Greenhill, 2006), pp. 

37–38. For another translation, see the U.S. Navy’s 

seven-volume typewritten edition: Fuehrer Conferences in Matters Dealing with the German Navy

(Washington, DC: Secretary of the Navy, 1947). 

Cf. also Werner Rahn and Gerhard Schreiber, eds.,

Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung 1939–1945, Teil

A [War Diary of the Naval Staff, 1939–1945, pt. A], 

vol. 1, August/September 1939 (Herford, Ger.: E. 

S. Mittler, 1990), pp. 7-E–17-E. For details on this 

edition, see the review: John B. Hattendorf, “The 

War Diary of the German Naval Staff, 1939–1945,” 

Documentary Editing 18, no. 3 (September 1996), 

pp. 58–62.

88 Cf. Salewski, Denkschriften und Lagebetrachtungen,

pp. 64–69. Note document no. 2, “Gedanken über 

den Aufbau der U-Bootswaffe.”

89 Rahn and Schreiber, eds., Kriegstagebuch der 

Seekriegsleitung 1939–1945, Teil A, vol. 16, Dezember 

1940 (Herford, Ger.: E. S. Mittler, 1990), p. 238.

90 See Kurt Assmann [Vice Adm.], “Why U-boat 

Warfare Failed,” Foreign Affairs 28, no. 4 (July 1950), 

pp. 659–70, esp. pp. 665–66.

91 Cf. Salewski, 1935–1941, pp. 131–32.

92 Rahn and Schreiber, Dezember 1940, pp. 233, 238.

93 Cf. Fuehrer Conferences, pp. 160–63. See also Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegführung 1940–1941 (Frankfurt, F.R.G.: Bernard & 

Graefe, 1965), pp. 352–77, and Bernd Wegner, “The 

Road to Defeat: The German Campaigns in Russia 

1941–43,” in Decisive Campaigns of the Second World 

War, ed. John Gooch (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 

pp. 105–27, esp. pp. 106–107.

94 See Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 144–78; and 

Michael Salewski, “The Submarine War: A Historical Essay,” in The U-boat War, ed. Lothar-Günther 

Buchheim (New York: Knopf, 1978), n.p.

95 “Denkschrift zum gegenwärtigen Stand der 

Seekriegführung gegen England Juli 1941,” July 21, 

1941, quoted in Salewski, 1935–1941, pp. 195–96.

96 Ibid., p. 196.

97 Rahn, “The War at Sea in the Atlantic and the Arctic 

Ocean,” p. 405.

98 Cf. ibid., p. 331.

99 “Stand und Aussichten des U-Bootkrieges,” Naval 

War Staff memorandum, October 20, 1942, annex 

1, quoted in Salewski, Denkschriften und Lagebetrachtungen, p. 303. Cf. Rahn, “The War at Sea in the 

Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean,” p. 337.

100 Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung 1935–1945,

vol. 2, 1942–1945 (Frankfurt, F.R.G.: Bernard & 

Graefe, 1975), p. 552.

101 Cf. Rahn, “140 Years of German Navies,” p. 83.

102 Cf. Johannes Bertold Sander-Nagashima et al., 

Die Bundesmarine 1950 bis 1972: Konzeption und 

Aufbau (Munich, Ger.: Oldenbourg, 2006).

103 For details, see Arleigh Burke, “Fred Ruge, My 

Friend,” in Seemacht und Geschichte: Festschrift zum 

80. Geburtstag von Friedrich Ruge, ed. Deutsches 

Marine Institut (Bonn, F.R.G.: MOV, 1975), pp. 

29–38.

104 Dieter Hartwig, comment in Günter Fromm et al., 

Die deutsche Flotte im Spannungsfeld der Politik 

1848–1985, ed. Deutsches Marine Institut and Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Herford, F.R.G.: 

E. S. Mittler, 1985), p. 197.

105 Cf. three essays published in Rahn, Deutsche 

Marinen im Wandel: Knut Eckstein, “Die Volksmarine im Kalten Krieg,” pp. 615–31; Hans Ehlert, 

“Vom Matrosen zum Admiral: Theodor Hoffmann 

und die Volksmarine der DDR,” pp. 633–56; and 

Dirk Horten, “Erfahrungen im deutschen Einigungsprozeß: Die Auflösung der Volksmarine 

1990/91,” pp. 657–72.
The Hattendorf Prize for 

Distinguished Original Research 

in Maritime History

to Geoffrey Till, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., F.K.C.

The President, U.S. Naval War College, takes great pleasure

in awarding

For your life-long contributions as an assiduous historical researcher, distinguished author, 

and accomplished professor, it is particularly appropriate to honor your achievements here 

at the Twenty-third International Seapower Symposium, where the world’s naval leaders are 

gathered. Most, if not all, of the navies represented here today have made extensive use of your 

publications and have benefited from your insights. Recognized as one of the world’s most 

widely known and highly respected students of contemporary maritime strategy and naval history, you have been a coveted teacher and lecturer. As testimony to your stature, you have authored or edited 33 books, 101 chapters in published books, and 109 journal articles all of which 

reflect your original research and innovative analytical thinking about naval strategy, doctrine, 

and history. Having served as a guest lecturer at defense and naval staff colleges in more than 30 

countries, coupled with your writing being translated into a dozen languages, you have made 

an incalculable intellectual impact on professional naval thought not only in Britain and the 

United States, but around the globe. At the same time, you have served as an amazingly effective 

scholarly liaison between the academic community and policymakers as well as an important 

advisor to navies, think tanks, and institutions of professional military education. You have 

made an immense contribution in your roles as a university examiner for doctorates on naval 

topics, as editor of the largest series of scholarly naval monographs, and as a distinguished member of editorial boards, book review editor, book reviewer, and manuscript reviewer for books 

and journals. In all of these undertakings, you maintained the highest standards of scholarship 

and literature while remaining a jewel in the academic crowns of many colleges and universities throughout the world. This award honors you and your work, expressing appreciation for 

your distinguished academic research, insight, and writing that contribute to a deeper historical

understanding of the influence of sea power on international history, and the rise and fall of 

great powers.

Presented this 20th day of September 2018

at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.

Jeffrey A. Harley

Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy
Why in this age of constant technological, economic, social, and political 

change should navies actively concern themselves with the naval past? 

Herein I will try to answer this question, one often asked by skeptics 

anxious to insert into the developing courses of professional military education 

(PME) material that seems so much more relevant to the contemporary problems 

they face. The result easily can lead to efforts to cut history out of the syllabus 

or, more insidiously, to reduce it to the level where it becomes little more than a 

means of socializing new entrants and developing team spirit, necessary and laudable though those aims might be. After all, it has been said, with some justice, that 

a navy that does not know its history has no soul.1

I will start by reviewing some of the basic problems that today’s navies face. 

Then I will consider the contribution that naval history might make to dealing with 

those problems, first as a quarry of processed experience and second as an intellectual exercise. Finally, I will seek to show the particular value of history in developing naval professionalism in a challenging social media age. By way of conclusion, I 

will look at some of the responsibilities that all this lays on historians.

CONTEXT: SOME CURRENT PROBLEMS FOR NAVIES

The basic point is that navies need to understand their function.2 This isn’t easy, 

these days. The potential tasks of navies have expanded, have grown more complex, 

and increasingly are seen as relatively more important, as the burgeoning navies 

of the Asia-Pacific region so amply demonstrate. For the navies of the twenty-first 

century, it is no longer enough to understand the war-fighting and deterrent warprevention roles, analyzed by the likes of Mahan and Corbett at the beginning of 

the last century, as they are affected by the international, technological, and social 

realities of this one. That is difficult enough.

Now we have to add a whole series of nontraditional, “postmodern” tasks associated with Maritime Security (with capital letters). These include the challenges 

presented by drug runners, trafficking in illegal migrants, international terrorism, 

humanitarian action, disaster relief, environmental protection, search and rescue, 

History, Truth Decay, and 

the Naval Profession

IV

GEOFFREY TILL
, 

capacity building, security sector reform, and so on. In many cases, early and effective engagement in these so-called Phase 0 activities will head off the need to 

exercise traditional war-fighting skills later on.3 But preparing for what the British 

military currently calls contingency is an inherently complicated business.4

One problem in the pursuit of guidance for making unavoidably difficult decisions about relative operational priorities is that of having to “see through a glass 

darkly.” It is uniformly and intrinsically difficult for foreign ministries, treasuries, or defense and naval staffs to predict the future or to gauge its requirements. 

This difficulty is demonstrated by the problems that all navies face these days in 

getting their kit because the lead times normally required to produce sophisticated naval weapons, sensors, and platforms and their probable service lives are 

likely to be very long. A great many of the ships of the fleets of the 2030s are already at sea or at an advanced stage of design.5

 This, together with rising costs 

and reduced budgets, makes the acquisition of naval matériel increasingly difficult. 

One set of victims of the procurement process (taking a leaf out of Jane Austen’s 

book) have remarked recently, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that defence equipment acquisition is one of the most challenging of human activities . . . 

a uniquely demanding bureaucratic morass littered with military, technological, 

economic, and political pitfalls.”6

Future-oriented procurement strategies tend to suffer badly from the unpredictability of the future economic, budgetary, and strategic environments. All too 

frequently, this development risk produces cycles of boom and bust that make sustained planning over, say, a thirty-year period almost impossible for manufacturers 

and their customers. Typically, this will result in constant delays, cost increases, 

and iterative tinkering with original specifications—and eventually in the failure or 

chronic delay of the program in ways that mean that the navy tends to acquire new 

matériel in a piecemeal, opportunistic way rather than as part of an overall strategic plan. This manner of acquisition may undermine a navy’s capacity to perform 

its present roles, not to mention its future ones. No navy has shown itself immune 

to such pressures and constraints; all navies need to be encouraged to think about 

how best to get around, if not to overcome, such difficulties.

Another problem is that, to some extent at least, the requirements of these possible contingency tasks conflict with those of the more familiar war-fighting ones. 

The funds expended on a carrier, for example, could generate any number of capable offshore patrol vessels. Again, the more sailors train for things such as the 

detection and apprehension of drug runners, the less they can train for antisubmarine operations. Given that resources, both human and material, are finite, choices 

have to be made.

Paradoxically, this is partly an unexpected product of success. Because of the 

fundamental flexibility of sea power, navies can deliver everything from bombs to 
, , 

babies, so they often are called on to do more or less everything at sea and quite 

often on land as well. Since the world’s navies thus have shown themselves to be of 

such utility across the full spectrum of possible maritime operations, their success 

has increased the painful matter of operational and strategic choice dramatically in 

the setting of priorities for which they prepare. This is not an entirely new problem 

for them, of course, since navies always have had to take on functions other than 

those of simply obliterating one another, but there is a strong argument for saying 

that their resulting dilemmas of choice are much greater now than they ever have 

been before.

Worse still, all these possible roles and requirements are in a state of constant 

change. A force at sea, even one already engaged in prosecuting its dedicated mission, can find itself also having to confront and respond to a whole host of different high- and low-intensity challenges across the spectrum, especially when, as 

they usually do, events combine to confound initial expectations about the nature 

and almost certainly the length of the original mission. As is so often said in such 

dynamic situations, it is unwise to assume your plan’s survival once contact with 

the problem is made. Thus when a number of Western powers thought they were 

intervening in the civil war in Libya in 2011 merely to avert a humanitarian crisis 

in Misrātah and elsewhere, the situation morphed into something much more demanding, which has yet to be resolved.

Mahan and Corbett do not seem to have much guidance to offer on such matters, because the focus of their thought was largely on higher-intensity operations, 

although they were perfectly well aware of the requirement for, and the potential 

challenge of, lower-intensity ones. They assumed that once a navy’s major high-end 

tasks were dealt with satisfactorily, the rest could look after itself. But now the “rest” 

quite often has become the major focus of concern.

This is because today’s situation has become more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA, for short!), partly because some of today’s leading states want it to be, and so pursue “a multidimensional and multidisciplinary 

strategy that consciously blurs the classical distinctions between warriors and 

non-combatants, front and rear, peace and war, state and proxies, and fact and 

fiction; and which employs a variety of tools—military technology and operations, information and cyber, economic pressure, ethnic bridgeheads and 

sensitivities—in order to manipulate both rival societies and [the states’] own.”7 

Although such techniques are certainly not new, the extra attention they warrant 

today creates an ambiguous, confusing, and, frankly, potentially demoralizing situation. But if understood, they provide opportunities as well as challenges.

So how can the study of past events in naval history, as part of a well-rounded

package of PME, possibly help navies prepare for the issues they will face? We 

will look at this from two different angles: naval history as a quarry of potentially 
, 

relevant data and—arguably more important, especially these days—naval history 

as an intellectual process.

THE POWER OF EXAMPLE FROM THE PROCESSED PAST

History is processed experience. Naval history is a source of innumerable examples 

of the way things have been done in the past. For all the historians’ reluctance to 

think of the lessons of history, or even their norms, the past is a source of previous 

experience that might well help present practitioners in comparable but not identical situations to understand their problems better and to think through what they 

should do to solve them.8 Although, as frequently has been said, history does not 

repeat itself—it rhymes.9 As Michael Howard reminded us back in 1962, there are 

patterns: “Wars still resemble each other more than they resemble any other human 

activity.”10 Naval professionals, arguably, should know those patterns, but in their 

search for what the Russians call the “norms” of military experience, or what they 

generally should expect, it is vital that they also should spot the differences as well 

as the similarities between their situation and perhaps only superficially similar 

ones in the processed past.

Looking at something such as the sinking of the Royal Navy’s Prince of Wales

and Repulse off Malaya by Japanese aircraft in December 1941, for example, teaches 

us all sorts of things about the need for interservice cooperation, sustainable balances between resources and commitments, not underestimating your adversary, 

and so on. For all its dangers, not least the evident danger of mythmaking, there is 

much to be said for the simple notion of seeing the past as providing previous examples of the problems of the present and future.11 Such historical case studies are 

also ideal means for advancing understanding by way of counterfactual questions: 

What would have happened, for example, if the British in the autumn of 1941 had 

sent hundreds of tanks and aircraft to Singapore instead of to Russia? Why didn’t 

they?12

The point also can be exemplified by reverting to the problems of naval procurement already discussed. While the past is indeed another country, today’s planners in the defense procurement field are facing problems and issues that are not 

that dissimilar from those faced by their predecessors. Those responsible for the 

design and procurement of today’s Queen Elizabeth–class aircraft carriers in the 

United Kingdom hardly can fail to have been aware of the demoralizing experience 

of their predecessors in the 1960s. This second time around, at the broadest level, 

the needs to be sufficiently clear about the projected roles of the ship, to keep unavoidable interservice competition down to manageable limits, and not to get too 

far away from what would seem to be financially viable in the circumstances of the 

time all seem to have been hoisted in.13 The difficulty of their task, though, clearly 

provides an incentive for growing the smart customer, and it is hard to avoid the 
, , 

conclusion that study of the way in which such difficulties were handled in the past 

will provide at least some guidance for the present and the future.

Another area in which history as processed experience—a source of 

example—can be argued to have something to offer is in leadership. Leadership, 

of course, varies enormously in its character and its function. On the face of it, the 

kind of leadership required to command in battle is not necessarily the same as that 

required to lead a design team in a submarine-acquisition project or to run a shore 

establishment. But is that true? Again, looking at past examples of these kinds of 

leadership at the very least should encourage discussion and increase understanding of this otherwise very slippery concept.14 In short, looking at previous examples 

of a campaign, problem, or issue enables people at least to ask the right questions 

and so to develop a broader understanding. It cannot be said too often that the dissimilarities between the past and present cases are likely to be at least as important 

as the similarities in this process.

One of the reasons for this is the crucial role of the broader context in determining outcomes. For this reason, Michael Howard emphasizes the importance of 

studying history in context as well as in width and depth.15 Naval history can be a 

powerful way of reminding professionals of the importance of context, so it should 

be designed to encourage them to take a wider view of the impact of the international, technological, social, and financial backgrounds to their operations. “Was 

the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 lost on the beaches of the peninsula or around the 

conference table in London?” is the sort of question that, as historians, we should 

be getting students to think about if they are to understand not only the purpose, 

planning, and conduct of operations but the management of defense more widely. 

Getting people to look above the parapet and not to be focused exclusively on the 

all-too-demanding problems of their part of the ship (to meld a few analogies, in 

the spirit of jointness) is, or should be, an essential objective of PME.

As an aside, it is also hard to think of an approach better designed to encourage reflection about the three levels of war—tactical, operational, and strategic—

and the manner in which they interact. Encouraging students to track the consequences of the strategic decision-making process in London all the way down to 

the deficiencies in preparation on the landing beaches of the Gallipoli Peninsula 

(such as the lack of sufficient medical facilities, water supply, and so forth) and then 

to follow the tactical consequences back up through the hierarchy of decision to 

those ultimately responsible for making strategic-level decisions hardly can fail to 

help develop a more rounded understanding of military operations.

The list of areas like this in which naval history as processed experience can 

provide helpful examples for constructive reflection by today’s warriors of course 

could go on almost indefinitely, but there’s also another aspect to history as a quarry 
, 

of illustrative, if not explanatory, material to be noted. That aspect is to consider the 

past as prologue to the present, and maybe to the future, too.

History helps us to understand the context and explains how we have arrived at 

where we are today, and therefore it also helps us to understand the present rather 

better, and from that to design sustainable policies for the future.16 Take, for example, the increasingly contentious issue of the historic freedom of navigation for 

warships. Naval activity is, and always has been, framed by contemporary interpretations of the law, and vice versa; understanding the background to those changing 

interpretations is an essential part of the professional sailor’s intellectual kit bag. 

Or at least it should be, if sailors are to hold their own in the expressions of differences of opinion at sea and in the defining of operational priorities. Arguably, the 

ability to comprehend, to deploy, and to make use of the law of the sea has become 

an ever-more-crucial component of twenty-first-century sea power. At all levels of 

command, understanding its development and its importance confers advantage.

At the moment, some aspects of this remain matters of contention as the U.S. 

Navy and other Western navies try to defend the basic notion of freedom of navigation against what they see as a continentalist tide that is seeking, in effect, to territorialize the sea by insidiously claiming more and more jurisdiction over what once 

was regarded uniformly as the high seas. This has given rise to a host of regrettable 

incidents. All concerned in the matter of freedom of navigation, most particularly 

of warships, really need to understand the issues—what’s at stake, in other words—

and how this situation has arisen.

Knowing what the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea says, for 

example, about the rights of warships in others’ exclusive economic zones is not 

enough, because the wording of the convention (being a political bargain) has 

enough ambiguity in it to allow (just about, and at a stretch) different interpretations—and there are strong operational and emotional reasons why some countries 

seek to exploit, or even ignore, vague or unhelpful provisions of the pact altogether. 

International law, after all, is nothing more than a set of political agreements that 

apply to a certain time and place, and is in any case susceptible to change through 

subsequent state practice. As one of its leading experts has remarked, “The history 

of the law of the sea has been dominated by a central and persistent theme—the 

competition between the exercise of governmental authority over the sea and the 

idea of the freedom of the seas. The tension between these has waxed and waned 

through the centuries, and has reflected the political, strategic, and economic circumstances of each particular age.”17

For this reason, simply knowing and enforcing the law are not enough. What 

navies ought to be doing as well is not just pontificating about what they think the 

law says on freedom of navigation for warships but explaining why upholding it is 
, , 

a good thing for everyone. This task cannot be left to lawyers alone. Only naval history can show us exactly why this apparently arcane principle is important enough 

to risk lives for, and all concerned need to know it, not least those whose lives might 

in the present or future be in question because of it.

The same kind of developmental approach can be applied, of course, to all other 

aspects of sea power, in which knowing how we got to where we are provides probable guidance to where we should go next; although sadly, but perhaps inevitably, 

lessons identified are not necessarily learned. This approach also has been lampooned by skeptics who liken it to trying to drive down a twisting country road 

while peering through the back window of the car. This overstates the point. The 

truth is that when driving, while we look through the front windscreen most of the 

time, it’s good to keep an occasional eye on the rearview mirror as well.

Christopher Andrew, the historian of the British Security Service, has drawn 

attention to the lamentable consequences of such people not knowing their own 

history and identifies what he calls a “historical attention-span deficit disorder” 

(HASDD, for short) as the root cause of the problem. Hal Brands and William 

Inboden recently have done the same for those who would practice statecraft, arguing the unwisdom of neglecting “a fount of information and insight for leaders 

grappling with the challenges of statecraft in a messy world.” But this argument 

should not be overdone either, for all but the most obsessive of historians would 

admit that history isn’t the only thing that matters.18

NAVAL HISTORY AS AN INTELLECTUAL EXERCISE

The second angle on the value of naval history for PME is not as a quarry of data, 

material, and example, but more as an intellectual discipline that encourages the 

development of thinking and of analytical, and very possibly behavioral, skills that 

should help make naval professionals smarter. As a former commandant at the U.K. 

Joint Service Command and Staff College (JSCSC) used to say, the modern airman, 

soldier, and sailor have to respond to perhaps unprecedented levels of strategic ambiguity. They have to improvise creatively, as jazz musicians do around a central 

theme, responding dynamically to changes set by others and to the effects of contingency, chance, and general chaos. No more can they fall back on the laboriously 

choreographed musical scores set by the kind of constantly rehearsed operational 

plans that characterized, for example, the Cold War.19

Instead they have to be prepared for surprise; as Mike Tyson once graphically 

remarked, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”20 Hence the 

need for what is described gruesomely as the end state of a student at the JSCSC: 

“to have developed a mind that is flexible and able to analyse and conceptualise in 

a military context in order to make timely and logical decisions in all types of subsequent appointments.”21
, 

To cope with a complex and often bewildering future in which you easily can get 

punched in the mouth by unexpected events, those students will need the capacity 

to analyze incomplete and ambiguous data. They need to be able to think through 

problems and their consequences, and, most importantly, to keep thinking them 

through, long after their staff course, or indeed their latest operation, has ended. 

They need to be independent learners. Some at least of what is taught in a one-year 

staff course certainly will have a limited shelf life, because the world moves on. Accordingly, students have to be encouraged to develop the independent interest and 

the habits of thought and of continuing inquiry that animate the best historians. 

This helps produce that very necessary characteristic that some would call insight.22

This can, and should, include as a “golden thread” a continuing interest in the naval 

past and its developing relationship with the naval present and the naval future.

Charles Darwin indeed reminds us that it was not necessarily the strongest but 

the most adaptable that won the evolutionary race. Naval history helps develop 

an openness of mind to uncomfortable ideas that confound and upset one’s own 

emerging conclusions. This really amounts to an early acceptance of the notion 

that there is no final and complete answer to anything. To paraphrase Napoléon, 

we have to tie knots and carry on, always progressing hopefully to what some have 

called a higher level of ignorance.23

In this, naval history can help, or maybe it should help, elevate thinking from 

the empirical to the conceptual—from the concerns of the tactical, technological 

nitty-gritty of yesterday’s or today’s battle to that wider, shaping context that links 

the levels of war and conflict. All the same, both the empirical and the conceptual 

are necessary parts of the mix. We should not, however, allow the perpetual fascination with the drums and smoke of battle to obscure the more-abstract realities 

that in many cases determine outcomes. Naval history, in short, can and should 

help us understand the critical business of strategy and policy making.24

Using history in this way is a much more widely practiced activity than is often realized. By the time strategists and policy makers have reached such elevated 

positions, they have engaged with history, absorbing views about the relevance of 

the past, even if only through a process of osmosis. Either consciously or unconsciously, they use history as a guide for how to think about future policy in a whole 

variety of ways.25 The design teams developing the Royal Navy’s Type 26 global 

combat ship or those responsible for shaping a navy’s training programs cannot insulate themselves from the past, however hard they may try. They adapt and adopt 

its conceptual consequences as they both reflect and help create strategic thinking, 

in a continuous iterative cycle of reflection and action. It is quite likely that in many 

cases they do not realize they are doing it! Internet bloggers and the young naval 

enthusiasts who come together to create online think tanks such as the Center for 

International Maritime Security, on the other hand, do so quite consciously, aiming 
, , 

to study the past as a guide to the future, and their influence undoubtedly will seep 

out in all directions. History, in short, is unavoidable, and it shapes not just conclusions but also approaches and ways of thinking. The real question is not whether to 

admit its relevance to today’s problems but how to make the best use of it.

For all that, unfortunately, a sizable constituency of thought in the United Kingdom felt bound to react to what they considered to be Britain’s frankly embarrassing Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) of 2010 with the fear that 

the country was no longer capable of “doing” strategy, or even thinking about it 

constructively—an impression apparently confirmed, in their minds at least, by the 

experience of the later stage of the second Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This concern 

was triggered initially by the Royal United Services Institute address of December 

2009 by the outgoing Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, 

in which he claimed that Britain had lost the habit of making strategy.

But one thing that’s struck me in my present role, and that I think requires urgent action 

over the next year, is the degree to which we seem to have lost an institutionalised capacity 

for, and culture of, strategic thought. I’m not saying that we don’t have people who can think 

strategically, or that we haven’t evolved a proper strategic basis for our actions. But we’ve 

seized on ability where we’ve found it, and as a result our formulation of strategy has been 

much harder than should have been the case. We’ve been hunter/gatherers of strategic talent, 

rather than nurturers and husbandmen.26

It was followed up through a series of inquiries by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee and highly critical articles from a large number of academics. Their concerns were reinforced by the uncertain consequences of 

Britain’s engagement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The suggestion was that the 

United Kingdom had not thought through what its involvement in these wars was 

supposed to achieve, nor the requirements or likely consequences of this involvement, largely because it had lost the habit of consulting the rearview mirror and 

developing the agnostic and questioning ways of thought that develop from that. 

Did anyone ask for evidence that Britain’s intervention in the intense factionalism 

of Afghanistan would be any more successful this time than it had been the first, 

second, and third times that Britain had tried it?27

While the urgency of the need to cut government expenditure and to require the 

Ministry of Defence to start filling in the “black hole” in its finances perhaps offers 

some excuse for the failings of the SDSR, this is less true of Britain’s operational failings. These are hard to explain except in terms of the speed of events to which the 

United Kingdom felt it must respond (allowing insufficient time for consultation 

and strategic reflection) and, perhaps, the lack of defense experience among the 

political class. Nor is the quality of the advice that the military offers to ministers 

exempt from academic and insider criticism.28

Nor, sadly, is this inability to do strategy all that uncommon. A good case can 

be made that it applied to the Germans and especially the Japanese in the Second 
, 

World War; they managed to combine tactical and operational brilliance with a 

strategic insouciance in a manner that now appears quite breathtaking. The point is 

that failing to take full advantage of what the historical approach has to offer means 

missing a chance to reduce the prospects of strategic failure.

But once again, how, more exactly, can history help? Such help probably lies 

much less in the delivery of the facts, or answers, and prescriptions for the future 

than in identifying the questions about strategy that those conducting it, or those 

trying to understand it, should ask. A brilliant recent review of four very good 

books about the causes of the First World War (a subject one might think conclusively studied for a century now) found that “they [did] not even come close to 

agreeing . . . [and that] historical consensus on the causes of the First World War 

appears no closer than it was 50 or 75 years ago, nor does it appear a shared view 

will ever be achieved. . . . This means we must be both cautious and humble when 

generalizing about war and peace and making policy recommendations based on 

our understanding of the conflict.”29 Much the same, if on a less elevated plane, still 

could be said about interpretations of the course and consequence of the Battle 

of Jutland and a host of other such familiar naval subjects. The Dutch historian 

Pieter Geyl made the essential point that “history is argument without end.”30 But 

this is not an apology. In the training it provides for the kind of intellectual dialectic of argument and counterargument that deepens understanding, history makes 

a major contribution to our capacity to analyze.

Lawrence Freedman, in his recent magisterial book on strategy, makes a similar point.31 The intrinsic diversity and ambiguity of our subject—the conduct of 

military operations, not least at sea—mean that it is very easy to get things fundamentally wrong, but it is sadly hard to get them right, and harder still to achieve an 

overall consensus on what is right and what is wrong. Analyzing past examples to 

see whether we can work out why some things went well and some did not at least 

should identify the questions that we, or anyone else trying to do strategy or to 

make policy in the naval realm, should be asking. In this, the process of naval history—the asking of questions, the analysis of data, and the testing of hypotheses—

is more important than the product, the answers. Making the journey, in other 

words, can be more useful than arriving at the destination. This is what Dwight D. 

Eisenhower meant when he famously observed regarding preparing for battle, “I 

have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”32

TRUTH DECAY

There is now—in the age of all-pervasive social media—one final justification for 

naval people to have more than a passing familiarity with the disciplines of naval 

history. That is the contemporary phenomenon of what some have called truth 

decay.

33 By this they mean the impact that easy accessibility to and the potentially 

overwhelming power of social media is having on people’s trust in authority and 
, , 

in traditional forms of expertise. Imperfectly controlled, this platform empowers 

cranks, bigots, and those who willfully would deceive by according them the same 

apparent status as experts. “Don’t you see,” asks one of the characters in George 

Orwell’s novel 1984, “that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of 

thought?”34 It is increasingly difficult for people, deluged with showers of contradictory information, deliberate misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories, to know what to believe, which encourages them to fall back on that very 

human trait of believing what they want to believe and forming up into dissonant 

tribes, unable to relate to, or even understand, the others.

Collectively, this threatens the social order. Some would go further: “We are 

facing nothing less than a crisis in our democracy based on the systematic manipulation of data to support the relentless targeting of citizens, without their 

consent, by campaigns of disinformation and messages of hate.”35 In the words 

of the recently released European Union code on dealing with disinformation, “open and democratic societies depend on public debates that allow wellinformed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes.”36

As citizens, naval personnel and navies in general are as vulnerable to this as any 

other social group—perhaps more so given their generally very high level of computer literacy and the stringent time demands of their profession. As ordinary citizens, they too have an interest in the general well-being of the society in which they 

live and that they try to protect against more-traditional forms of threat. Moreover, 

whether they like it or not, they are living in a world of competing narratives than 

can often be state directed.37

Illustrating the point, in 2009 the Kremlin established the “Commission to Prevent the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests” to counter 

Baltic and central European narratives about Soviet occupation and wartime collaboration.38 For its part, Singapore has established a “Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods,” thinking it is important to support social cohesion by 

cultivating an informed public and encouraging a culture of fact-checking.39 Staying afloat in this whirlpool of conflicting currents requires a continued capacity for 

independent judgment. Navy people (whose basic job is to defend the states and 

the societies that pay for those navies) also may be thought to have an even greater 

incentive than ordinary citizens to be at least aware of, and ideally able to help to 

defeat, these insidious challenges to domestic stability.

Moreover, navies themselves are vulnerable to such campaigns of targeted disinformation. Their missions and activities can be traduced by adversaries, with deleterious impacts on public esteem and their operational effect.40 More sinister and 

dangerous still, sailors—often living a tight shipboard life, even ashore—always 

have proved vulnerable to the effects of uninformed gossip. In these continuing 

circumstances it is easy to imagine the possibilities of greater access to social media 
, 

morphing into a kind of mega-scuttlebutt, with possibly disastrous consequences 

for a navy’s cohesiveness and morale. For the same reason, this could be a significant target of opportunity for imaginative adversaries, both foreign and domestic. 

Thus, it does not seem unreasonable for navies to regard this possibility as a new 

battleground for them to take seriously.

Once again, how might a familiarity with naval history, both as processed experience and as an intellectual discipline, offer some modest help against these potentially ominous developments? It will be modest, because in an age when most 

people get their news from Facebook and Twitter feeds, and in which traditional 

journalism may well be in terminal decline, this is a fundamental problem way 

beyond easy solutions.41 But nonetheless, for naval personnel, history may help a 

little. First, perhaps history can show that this is an old, almost-familiar problem, 

now reappearing in a new and potentially more virulent form. This could be done, 

for example, by looking at the role of misinformation in naval mutinies and other 

such disasters, as a way of alerting naval personnel to the dangers they confront, 

and maybe to ways of dealing with them—or even employing them against their 

adversaries.42

More importantly, perhaps, the discipline of history itself encourages openmindedness, the careful weighing of evidence, and the asking of questions, and it 

provides other such intellectual defenses when confronted with purported information and what very well could prove to be fake news. Any kind of serious study 

could serve this function, of course, but naval history is more accessible and, for 

other reasons discussed earlier, is especially relevant to the naval profession.

While much of what has been said may be true for all disciplines and subject areas 

and for all types of history, for national leaders, strategic decision makers, and operational commanders, the obvious salience of specifically naval history for sailors, 

given the undeniable continuities of operations at sea over the centuries, means 

naval history is particularly useful in this regard. Moreover, for sailors at all levels, 

naval history, whether conscious and constructed or not, is unavoidable. Whatever 

historians might think of it, naval students, strategists, and policy makers will go on 

using what they at least think is history as a guide to future behavior.

This being the case, it lays considerable responsibility on naval historians. First, 

as John Hattendorf has reminded us, historians need to recognize that their subject 

does not end in 1945 or with the closing of the Cold War (assuming that conflict 

has even ended!).43 History is yesterday as well. This poses unavoidable evidential 

problems. Analysis, therefore, has to be preceded by the availability of primary material. In any case, much of what in the past would have produced survivable paper 

copies (or much less survivable photostats) now appears only as transitory e-mails, 

exchanges in chat rooms, and so on. Since “recovering the unrecorded past” is at 
, , 

least as important as it was, tomorrow’s historians and their naval students will 

need their twenty-first-century skills as well as the more traditional ones employed 

by yesterday’s historians.44

Second, historians need to encourage their navies to be receptive to the past, to 

preserve and process the records (or what these days passes for records) of what 

they have done to build a bank of experience for the future. They need to nurture 

those veterans who actually had that experience and are willing to talk about it, if 

they only had the encouragement to do so. The results of this testimony need to 

be preserved in accessible form and made available for appropriate use. Today’s 

practitioners need to know that something similar to their current preoccupations 

probably has happened before.45

Third, historians need to encourage thinking about things in the round: paying 

due regard to context and avoiding narrow fixations on monocausal explanations. 

They need to understand the technological and logistical realities of what it is actually like to be at sea—hence the particular value of ex-sailors who are also historians. They also need to avoid unconscious hindsight and to sympathize with their 

subjects, who clearly could not enjoy its advantages.

Fourth, they need to ensure that what they deliver is accessible, interesting, and 

even enjoyable. My experience at a variety of service educational establishments is 

that naval students usually do rather enjoy doing naval history—or at least freely 

concede that they found that engaging in a modicum of historical research was 

worthwhile. In this, historians are likely to be pushing on an open door; at the very 

least, they should do everything possible to stop it from shutting. One way of doing 

this is to ask the speculative “What if?” counterfactual questions referred to earlier. 

The process of isolating and altering one variable in the historic equation invites 

speculation about the difference it could have made to some past and completed 

event, and often will stimulate both insight into and enthusiasm for the subject.

Finally, they should make their subject policy relevant, wherever possible. For 

some this will be difficult. Some historians, knowing how their findings can be 

distorted to suit a different time, seek—for the best of professional reasons—to 

insulate their discipline from the contaminating fingers of strategists and policy 

makers and would have nothing to do with their world. However understandable, 

this purist approach is unwise for all but a few keepers of the sacred flame.

The pressure of other urgent PME requirements means the default position of 

those responsible for its implementation is all too likely to reduce the teaching of 

history as much as possible. The long and generally depressing story of the Royal 

Navy’s neglect or misuse, or both, of its own really rather spectacular history (and 

its sometimes dire operational consequences) unfortunately illustrates the point.46

Historians need to counter this modernist tendency to the extent they can.
, 

In sum, history, similar to the poor and taxes, is always with us, whether we like 

it or know it or not. We cannot avoid it. This being so, it is plainly the duty of naval 

historians to do their best to ensure that what they deliver is valid as both processed 

experience and an intellectual discipline. They owe this to the future as much as to 

the past.

NOTES This chapter appeared as an article in the Naval War 

College Review 72, no. 4 (Autumn 2019), pp. 5–20.

1 Glenn Davidson [VAdm., Canadian Maritime Command], “After the War—Canada’s Navy Post 1945,” 

RUSI Journal 152, no. 3 (June 2007), p. 88.

2 It needs to be said that many of these issues also apply to the other services and to many other agencies 

of the state.

3 U.S. Army Dept., Army Support to Security Cooperation, FM 3-22 (January 2013), p. 3-1.

4 For a U.S. view on this subject, see Scott D. McDonald, Brock Jones, and Jason M. Frazee, “Phase Zero: 

How China Exploits It, Why the United States Does 

Not,” Naval War College Review 65, no. 3 (Summer 

2012), pp. 123–35.

5 Thomas Rowden [RAdm., USN], “Building the 

Surface Fleet of Tomorrow,” U.S. Naval Institute 

Proceedings 140/1/1,331 (January 2014).

6 Ken Hambleton, Ian Holder, and David Kirkpatrick, “Ten Chronic Challenges in UK Defence 

Acquisition,” Defence Studies 13, no. 3 (September 

2013), pp. 361–71.

7 Ariel E. Levite and Jonathan (Yoni) Shimshoni, “The 

Strategic Challenge of Society-centric Warfare,” 

Survival 60, no. 6 (December 2018), pp. 91–118.

8 Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford, 

U.K.: Clarendon, 1991), chap. 1.

9 A remark often attributed to Mark Twain—probably 

incorrectly.

10 Michael Howard, “The Use and Abuse of Military 

History,” RUSI Journal 107 (February 1962), pp. 4–8.

11 Ibid.

12 Paul Schuurman, “What-If at Waterloo: Carl von 

Clausewitz’s Use of Historical Counterfactuals in 

His History of the Campaign of 1815,” Journal of 
, , 

Strategic Studies 40, no. 7 (November 2017), pp. 

1016–38.

13 No doubt, once the records have been made available future historians will be engaging in exercises 

in detailed contrast and comparisons between these 

two case studies!

14 Charles Steele, “Don’t Give Up the Ship: The Continuing Need for Naval History in the Education of 

Young Leaders of Character (an American Perspective),” Naval Review 99, no. 1 (February 2011); 

reprinted as “In Praise of History (Again),” Naval 

Review 105, no. 1 (February 2017), pp. 65–70.

15 Howard, “The Use and Abuse of Military History.”

16 John B. Hattendorf, “The Past as Prologue: The 

Changing Roles of Sea Power during the Twentieth 

Century,” in Talking about Naval History: A Collection of Essays, Historical Monograph 19 (Newport, 

RI: Naval War College Press, 2011), p. 272.

17 D. P. O’Connell, quoted in James Kraska, Maritime 

Power and the Law of the Sea: Expeditionary Operations in World Politics (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. 

Press, 2011), p. 1.

18 Christopher Andrew, “Intelligence Analysis Needs 

to Look Backwards before Looking Forward,” History and Policy, June 1, 2004, www.historyandpolicy

.org/; Hal Brands and William Inboden, “Wisdom 

without Tears: Statecraft and the Uses of History,” 

Journal of Strategic Studies 41, no. 7 (2018), pp. 

916–46.

19 Brian Burridge [Air Vice-Marshal, RAF], “Postmodern Military Education: Are We Meeting the 

Challenge?,” Defence Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2001).

20 Quoted in Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History 

(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), p. 238.

21 Unsurprisingly, this is closely in line with the 

definition of understanding to be found in successive 

versions of U.K. Joint Doctrine Publication 04 (JDP 

04), sec. 2-1, available at www.gov.uk/. 

22 Spartacus, “Command and Leadership: A Rational 

View,” British Army Review 106 (April 1994).

23 The reference is to the wise words of Professor 

Bryan McL. Ranft (1917–2001).

24 Lukas Milevski, “Revisiting J. C. Wylie’s Dichotomy 

of Strategy: The Effects of Sequential and Cumulative Patterns of Operations,” Journal of Strategic 

Studies 35, no. 2 (April 2012), pp. 223–42.

25 These have been explored thoroughly by William 

Inboden in “Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the 

Varieties of Historical Experience: A Taxonomy,” 

Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 2 (2014), pp. 

291–318.

26 Sir Jock Stirrup [Air Chief Marshal, RAF], “Chiefs 

of Staff Lecture at the RUSI” (December 3, 2009), 

available at www.rusi.org/.

27 This is not to suggest that Britain’s intervention was 

wrong, merely that its requirements deserved greater consideration, and that knowing a bit of history 

might have helped.

28 Michael Clarke, ed., The Afghan Papers: Committing 

Britain to War in Helmand, 2005–06, Whitehall Papers 77 (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge Journals, 2011).

29 Francis J. Gavin, “History, Security Studies, and 

the July Crisis,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 2 

(2014), pp. 319–31.

30 Quoted in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A 

Political Life (New York: Viking, 2017), p. 623.

31 Freedman, Strategy, p. 104.

32 Quoted in William W. Blair, “President Draws Planning Moral,” New York Times, November 5, 1957.

33 Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth (London: 

William Collins, July 2018).

34 George Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker & Warburg, 

1949).

35 Damian Collins, Chair of the House of Commons 

Select Committee on the Digital World, Culture, 

Media, and Sports, quoted in The Guardian, July 30, 

2018.

36 Quoted in Paul Chadwick, “This Fake News 

Crackdown Could Be an EU Gamechanger,” The 

Guardian, October 1, 2018.

37 Mathew Luxmore, “Poles Apart: The Bitter Conflict 

over a Nation’s History,” The Guardian, July 13, 

2018; Reuters, “Propagandists in Myanmar Rewrite 

History in Book on the Rohingya Crisis,” The 

Guardian, September 1, 2018.

38 Angela Stent, review of The Long Hangover: Putin’s 

New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past, by Shaun 

Walker, Survival (August–September 2018), p. 193.

39 Stephanie Neubronner, “Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods: After the Recommendations; Now for the Hard Part,” RSIS Commentary, 

no. 160 (October 2, 2018), available at www.rsis

.edu.sg/.

40 Gerrard Cowan, “Fact or Fallacy? Fake News and 

the Military,” Jane’s Defence Weekly 17 (October 

2018).

41 Alan Rusbridger, Breaking News: The Remaking 

of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (London: 

Canongate, 2018).

42 Daniel Horn, The Private War of Seaman Stumpf

(London: Leslie Frewin, 1969), for example, offers 

useful and salutary insights into the mutiny of the 

High Seas Fleet in 1918, in which unfounded rumors of a doomed foray against the much superior 

British fleet played an important part.

43 John B. Hattendorf, “Strategy, Tactics, and Leadership: The Legacy of Trafalgar in Professional Naval 

Thought around the World,” in Talking about Naval 

History, pp. 137–38.

44 Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London: 

Macmillan, 1930), p. 349; Geraint Hughes, “Iraqnophobia: The Dangers of Forgetting Operation 

TELIC,” RUSI Journal 157, no. 6 (December 2012), 

pp. 54–60.

45 Andrew, “Intelligence Analysis.”

46 For an excellent summary of this, see Dr. Harry 

Dickinson, “Teaching Naval History,” in Dreadnought to Daring: 100 Years of Comment, Controversy and Debate in the Naval Review, ed. Peter Hore 

(Barnsley, U.K.: Pen and Sword, 2012), pp. 284–98.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 

Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University. He 

obtained his BA at Newcastle University and his DPhil at the University of Oxford. 

He is a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, and 

of the Alexander von Humboldt–Stiftung, Bonn. He holds many honorary degrees, 

and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, 

and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was made Commander of the 

Order of the British Empire in 2000 for services to history and was elected a Fellow 

of the British Academy in June 2003. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, 

including The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, The Rise of the Anglo-German 

Antagonism, and Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. His best-known work is 

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which provoked an intense debate on its publication in 1988 and has been translated into over twenty languages. Currently he is 

writing a book about sea power and global transformations during World War II.

Werner Rahn is a retired captain in the German navy, a leading German naval 

historian, and the former director of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office. He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg in 

1974. Among his critically acclaimed works is the sixty-eight-volume, annotated, 

facsimile edition of the War Diary of the German Naval Staff, 1939–45, which 

has been called the single most important resource for understanding the decisions of the German naval high command during World War II. In addition, Rahn 

contributed the major naval sections to the monumental, multivolume series Germany and the Second World War, produced by the German Armed Forces Military 

History Research Office, published in English and German.
N. A. M. Rodger is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. 

He was educated at University College, Oxford, earning his DPhil in 1974. He then 

served for seventeen years at the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) 

as assistant keeper, during which time he published a number of books, most notably The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. From 1992 to 1998 

he was Anderson Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, and 

from 1999 to 2007, professor of naval history at the University of Exeter. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is engaged in writing a three-volume Naval History 

of Britain. The first two volumes, The Safeguard of the Sea and The Command of 

the Ocean, covered the period 660–1815 and won numerous awards, including the 

British Academy Book Prize.

Geoffrey Till holds the Dudley W. Knox Chair for Naval History and Strategy at 

the Naval War College. He is also Emeritus Professor of Maritime Studies at King’s 

College London and chairman of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies. 

Since receiving his PhD from King’s College London in 1976, he has taught at well 

over forty national staff colleges and a large number of other such defense establishments and academic institutions around the world. He has written dozens of 

books on maritime security and naval development, most recently the revised and 

updated fourth edition of Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century. He is 

the series editor of Cass Naval Policy and History with Routledge, and has written 

several hundred journal articles and book chapters on various aspects of maritime 

strategy and defense policy.

Evan Wilson is an assistant professor in the John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime 

Historical Research at the Naval War College. He received his BA from Yale, where 

he studied with Paul Kennedy, and his DPhil from Oxford, where he studied with 

N. A. M. Rodger. He coedited the Festschrift for John Hattendorf, Strategy and 

the Sea. Winner of the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History, he has 

published articles in the English Historical Review, Historical Research, Journal for 

Maritime Research, and other journals. His first book is A Social History of British 

Naval Officers, 1775–1815. He previously held positions at Yale University and the 

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, United Kingdom.
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE HISTORICAL MONOGRAPH SERIES

1. The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, edited by John D. Hayes and John B. 

Hattendorf (1975).

2. Charleston Blockade: The Journals of John B. Marchand, U.S. Navy, 1861–1862,

edited by Craig L. Symonds (1976).

3. Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval 

Profession, Ronald Spector (1977). 

4. The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919–1941,

Michael Vlahos (1980). 

5. On His Majesty’s Service: Observations of the British Home Fleet from the Diary, 

Reports, and Letters of Joseph H. Wellings, Assistant U.S. Naval Attaché, London, 

1940–41, edited by John B. Hattendorf (1983).

6. Angel on the Yardarm: The Beginnings of Fleet Radar Defense and the Kamikaze

Threat, John Monsarrat (1985).

7. A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, compiled by John B. 

Hattendorf and Lynn C. Hattendorf (1986). 

8. The Fraternity of the Blue Uniform: Admiral Richard G. Colbert, U.S. Navy and 

Allied Naval Cooperation, Joel J. Sokolsky (1991). 

9. The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking 

the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, edited by John B. Hattendorf (1991). 

10. Mahan Is Not Enough: The Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, edited by James Goldrick and 

John B. Hattendorf (1993). 

11. Ubi Sumus? The State of Naval and Maritime History, edited by John B. 

Hattendorf (1994). 
12. The Queenstown Patrol, 1917: The Diary of Commander Joseph Knefler Taussig, 

U.S. Navy, edited by William N. Still Jr. (1996). 

13. Doing Naval History: Essays toward Improvement, edited by John B. Hattendorf 

(1995). 

14. An Admiral’s Yarn, edited by Mark R. Shulman (1999). 

15. The Memoirs of Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, edited by Evelyn Cherpak (2004). 

16. Three Splendid Little Wars: The Diary of Joseph K. Taussig, 1898–1901, edited 

by Evelyn Cherpak (2009).

17. Digesting History: The U.S. Naval War College, the Lessons of World War Two, 

and Future Naval Warfare, 1945–1947, Hal M. Friedman (2010).

18. To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923–1940, Albert A. 

Nofi (2010).

19. Talking about Naval History: A Collection of Essays, John B. Hattendorf (2011).

20. New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Naval 

History Symposium Held at the United States Naval Academy 10–11 September 

2009, edited by Craig C. Felker and Marcus O. Jones (2012).

21. Blue versus Orange: The U.S. Naval War College, Japan, and the Old Enemy in 

the Pacific, 1945–1946, Hal M. Friedman (2013).

22. Major Fleet-versus-Fleet Operations in the Pacific War, 1941–1945, Milan Vego 

(2014).

23. New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Seventeenth 

McMullen Naval History Symposium Held at the United States Naval Academy 

15–16 September 2011, edited by Marcus O. Jones (2016).

24. Blue versus Purple: The U.S. Naval War College, the Soviet Union, and the New 

Enemy in the Pacific, 1946, Hal M. Friedman (2017).

25. New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth 

McMullen Naval History Symposium Held at the U.S. Naval Academy 19–20 

September 2013, edited by Lori Lyn Bogle and James C. Rentfrow (2018).