THE BLUE SWORD

The Naval War College

and the

American Mission, 1919-1941

THE BLUE SWORD

THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

AND THE

AMERICAN MISSION, 1919-1941

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. Stock No. 008-047-00325-1
U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

HISTORICAL MONOGRAPH SERIES

No. 4

CDR W.R. Pettyjohn, USN, Editor

The Naval Historical Monograph Series was established in 1975. It consists of book-length studies relating to the history of naval warfare

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No. 1 John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf, The Writings of

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No. 2 Craig L. Symonds, Charleston Blockade: The Journals ofJohn

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U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I. 02840

First Edition
THE BLUE SWORD

THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

AND THE

AMERICAN MISSION

1919-1941

BY

MICHAEL VLAHOS

But when he has driven

The war and the shouting from the ships,

Then let him return

At the swift ships

Unscathed,

With all his arms and his comrades

That have seen close combat.

XVI, 246-248

NAVAL WAR COLLEGE PRESS

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND

1980
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Vlahos, Michael, 1951-

The blue sword.

(Historical monograph series/U.S. Naval War College; no. 4)

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. Naval War College (U.S.) —History—20th century. 2. United

States. Navy—History—20th century. 3. Naval art and science

History—20th century. 4. United States—History, Naval—20th

century. I. Title. II. Series: Historical monograph series (Naval War

College (U.S.)).

V420.V55 359\07'1173 81-9654

AACR2
TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i FOREWORD iii PART I: ETHOS 1

Chapter I: The Nature of Ethos 3

Ethos and World View 3

Culture and Personality 5

The Corporation of Ethos 6

Chapter II: The National Ethos 8

Images of America 8

American Personality: The Mask of Ethos 12

Chapter III: The Corporate Ethos 15

Rites of Passage: "Shipmates Forever" 15

The Call of the Sea: From Constellation

to Monongahela 19

"Sons of Gunboats" 21

A Band of Brothers 25

Chapter IV: Mission and Ethos 29

Defender of the Faith 30

The Legacy of Darwin 37

Law and Warfare 42

The World Island 47

PART II: MISSION 55

Chapter V: The Evolution of Mission 57

Chapter VI: The Course 63

The Lectures 67

The Bibliography 71

The Theses 75

The Doctrine 85

The Fraternity 91
TABLE OF CONTENTS

(continued)

PAGE

PART III: THE ENEMY 97

Chapter VII: The Callimorphosis of the Enemy:

RED 99

Chapter VIII: The Cacomorphosis of the Enemy:

ORANGE 113

Chapter IX: Behind the Mask 122

PART IV: THE GAME 131

Chapter X: The Game as Ritual: Expede Herculem ... 133

Chapter XI: The Game as Oracle: The Campaign 143

Chapter XII: The Game as Oracle: The Battle 147

Chapter XIII: The Game as Oracle: The Weapon 152

AFTERWORD 157

APPENDIX I: The Colors of the Rainbow 163

APPENDIX II: Abbreviated Titles 164

APPENDIX III: War Games Conducted at the Naval

War College, 1919-1941 166

NOTES 179

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 196

INDEX 212
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This essay could not have been conceived, much less realized,

without the full support of colleagues, teachers, and friends . . . and those "keepers of the flame," the archivists:

To Ruth Nicholson, C.F.W. Coker, and Charles Kelly, of the

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, for their patience in

handling my cartloads of inquiry;

To Anthony Nicolosi and Evelyn Cherpak, who not only gave

me the run of the Naval War College Naval Historical

Collection, but who listened, encouraging me to develop early

"discoveries" into a complete work;

To Captain Hugh Nott, Director of the Center for Advanced

Research, Naval War College, who gave me the official support

that made my work possible, and the personal support that gave

it strength;

To Commander W.R. Pettyjohn, who had enough faith to

give me the "push" I needed to get started; and who, as editor,

gave a rough stone some polish;

To John Bird, who found the time;

To Professor Alan K. Henrikson, who acted as my Virgil in

this journey;

And to my mother and father, who gave all.

Ill

FOREWORD

HISTORY is action recalled. Visible realities have their

memorial: the physical energies of an age are preserved in the

collective record of activity. How different the spirit of an age!

Behind the mask of ritual play, beyond the actors' fading

memory of a finished script, we remember the speeches and the

motion and the changes of set and scene. The theme, pervading

all, embracing all, can be but sensed. Spirit is an intractable stage

for history: a ghostly scaffold.

What follows is an unfinished canvas of the spirit of an age, a picture of a part of a world. This is not history in the manner of

narrative, nor a history of manners. This essay is simply a portrait of a fraternal institution: of several generations of

membership as they passed the span of two decades. There is,

within, no straight transcription of administration, of bureaucratic bickering, of battles lost and won. Ahead is a glimpse of a

society's collective sense of self .... The nature of their reality:

their world view .... The subtext of their behavior: their

ethos.

This fraternal society is the officer corps of the U.S. Navy.

This essay records their thought between the wars, from 1919 to

1941. If there is a story here, it is of the Navy's intellectual

cloister: the Naval War College, "the home of thought." This is

the story of the creation of an ethos.

As a warrior society in a quiescent era, among a martial people

who enshrined an unmilitary republic, the Navy lived on the

periphery of national life. Guarding the margins of American

security, it played out an isolated role. Yet the American oceanic

margins have always demarcated an open frontier. More than an

estranging perimeter- sanitaire, they have been an expansive

highway, compelling outward. As agent and as guardian of

transoceanic America, the Navy evolved into a central institution in national life. Sharing its identity with the outward facing

of America, the Navy came to embody the imagery of an

enduring motif in the American ethos.

As a culture within a culture, the Navy represented a distilled,

distinct subset of the aggregate of national beliefs and values.
IV

Naval thought was but one link of institutional continuity in the

American ethos. On one level, integral with the larger society,

the Navy reflected the immediate spirit of the age. On the

subterranea of institutional role, the generational lineage of the

corporate ethos preserved a stronger spirit through time.

Through the lean years, the "locust years" between the wars,

the Navy kept strong its vision of self, and of mission. From

generation to generation, the Service passed down both vision

and mission—of Navy and of nation. The expansive, outwardgazing symbols of a prewar era of "imperialism" were

transformed into a continuing awareness of, and readiness for,

the fulfillment of mission. From 1919 to 1941, the Navy,

indoctrinated at Newport, formed the institutional patterns of

kinship between two paradigms: what Frederick Merk called

"Manifest Destiny and Mission."

If, in our history, there have been links between the pendulum

swings of policy and of public mood—from expansive to

contractive generations—then these were forged into the

institutional cable that anchors society. From the "insular

imperialism" of the 1890s to the "global mission" of the 1950s,

the Navy, from its granite-girded Atlantic monastery—the

Naval War College—evolved such a connecting cable. From part

to whole: the corporate spirit of the Navy reflected and advanced

the spirit, not simply of an interwar era, but of an age.

The patterns of this essay unravel from the large to the small;

from catechism to ritual, ideology to action, idea to instrumentality.

The processes of cultural distillation, from the existential

postulates to the articulated behaviors of this society—the naval

fraternity—is replicated by the vertabral framework of this

work.

ETHOS describes the perimeter of their reality, and the

locus of its survey: Who are we, Where do we come from?

MISSION demarcates the expectational, and the expected; the vision of, and the behavioral response to, the

future: Where are we going?

THE ENEMY is the cast inversion of the values and the

belief system of their society: the evil mask, the symbiosis

supporting—and defining—Mission.
THE GAME is the ritual instrument of preparation:

setting Future's stage, and learning the actors' parts in

Future's play. The Game is the rehearsal of Mission.

PARTI

ETHOS

In Modern Greek H#oa implies character, disposition,

temper, and appearance. Its plural form, Hfior], suggests

customs and habits. 1 Today, in strict usage, ethos is inseparable

from the anthropological concept of culture. Usage has linked

ethos to the aggregate of normative values and behavior for all

of society. Whether or not the concept of ethos can usefully

describe groups and corporations within a society is important.

Are corporate variations of ethos strong enough to justify the

concept of a distinct Corporate Ethos?

A society is the sum of its groups and its institutions. Groups

both reflect and shape the ethos of a society. Some corporate

groups occupy barometric positions at the center; these act as arbiters of the normative. Others watch from the margins, and

seek only self-preservation. If, in the most salient of these

bodies, a distinct Corporate Ethos can be isolated, then, in the

examination of a single group, the passage of an entire society

may be illuminated.

Thus in the search for a Navy Ethos the nature of ethos, both

national and corporate, must be explored.

CHAPTER I

THE NATURE OF ETHOS

Ethos and World View

We make our world: we define "reality" through our sense of

self. "Man constantly imposes on this environment his own

constructions and meaning." 1 This is "the structure of things as man is aware of them,"2 the "cognitive view of life," 3 Weltanschauung, world view. Every culture possesses a set of

constructions and meanings that is distinct and variant.

In the process of defining the set of conceptual components

that defines world view, every culture "makes its own

assumptions about the ends and purposes of human existence."4 These assumptions are the "basic postulates" of culture. In that

these deep-running assumptions delineate the very nature of

things—of man, and of existence—they are called "existential

postulates." 5 In turn, they are the foundation for the superstructure of a

society's world view: the framework of formal beliefs and

commonly held values that shape identity. Within the literature

of a society, such is the essence of cultural "personality."

The nature of culture, however, cannot stop simply with the

creation of a formal, idealized belief system. Throughout the

graduated continuum of world view, from existential postulates

to the most complex symbology of creed, values are abstracted

that direct the behavior of a society. In corollary to the set of

existential postulates underlying world view is an equally basic

set of "normative postulates," the aggregation of assumptions

that "specify whether behavior is good or bad, proper or

improper."6 Custom and taboo, the "informal patterns of

culture," are shaped by these normative postulates. If existential

postulates are the bedrock of world view, then normative

postulates are the bedrock of ethos.

Culture has been described simply as "an integrated system of

learned behavior."7 On this basis, culture creates both horizontal
and vertical integration. Just as the belief system of world view

rises along a graduated continuum from basic to complex beliefs,

each level of abstracted value has its corollary in the behavioral

system, or ethos, of a society. Beliefs inspire and direct

behaviors. At the most basic level, existential postulates have

their normative corollaries. As the symbology of the belief

system evolves along a continuum of value, the abstraction of

value becomes more complex. Essential notions of the nature of

things are distilled into implicit creeds: the very essence of what

a society determines is good and right. As the set of beliefs is

progressively distilled to the essence of a society's world view,

these beliefs become both more complex and more valued. As

they are abstracted to the very highest level of symbolism to

which a society is capable, this narrowing set of beliefs can be

said to form the implicit creed of a culture. 8 This is the vision that a society holds of itself: a vision that not

only creates an ultimate sense of identity, but a vision that

shapes a society's collective purpose, or mission, within its own

world. Mission is the most highly abstracted behavioral directive

guiding a society. A graduated continuum of behaviors mirrors a culture's scale of abstracted beliefs. At bottom is the set of

normative corollaries defining the informal patterns of custom

and taboo. The scale of behaviors progresses through a series of

"moral imperatives" that guide individual action at increasingly

complex levels of societal organization.

At the apex of a complex structure of cultural behavior

patterns, statutory and implicit, formal and customary, is a society's collective sense of mission. Mission is the cultural

mechanism for translating vision into a correct and positive

pattern of action. Mission is the mobilizing agent of a society. In

complex societies it is the spur to that series of actions that has

created what we call "civilization." In such complex societies,

beliefs are abstracted to the level at which they mark the

conscious, symbolic passage of a whole people. The form that

this passage will take, and the manner in which it is chronicled

and remembered, defines the highest abstraction of behavior:

mission.

In a complex society, vision is the ultimate shared statement

of world view. Mission is the ultimate abstraction of collective

behavior in pursuit of vision. The more complex a society, the

greater is the variation of perceived vision, and the more

variable the accepted parameters of behavior, both individual

and institutional in the performance of mission.
Culture and Personality

Cultural "personality" exists on several levels of societal

aggregation. Personality is the translation of ethos into concrete

action: the performance according to the behavioral rules and

imperatives of ethos. From the Latin, persona, it is truly the

player's mask, and we all play our parts according to an

embracing script. 9 Or scripts. At the nuclear level, each man and woman accepts

and reflects the basic existential and normative postulates

underlying a culture. More complex sets of beliefs, and their

behavioral corollaries, are the product of higher levels of

aggregation within a society. The more complex the belief

system of an institution, the denser is the single societal actor's

personality. At higher levels of intellectual superstructure,

individual personality continues to reflect group personality.

Coexistent group membership, furthermore, multiplies the

number of societal scripts a single actor must assimilate.

Membership at the most basic level of social organization can

define only basic personality. The highest level of membership

to which one aspires marks the highest stage of cultural

personality and, by extension, the highest point along the

continuum of beliefs that define world view. The point at which

individual personality comes to reflect predominantly both

vision and mission is at the apogee of role-playing allowed by

culture. Such achievement is marked not only by membership in,

but by leadership of, the dominant institutions of society.

In the most complex societies, leadership is shared among

coexistent and often conflicting institutions. Variation in

perceived vision commonly results in a diffusion of mission and

a struggle between dominant groups for mastery of a society. In

modern Western civilization especially, military institutions are

often denied a leadership role in times of peace, while expected

to mobilize and inspire society in time of war. The cultural

personality of military leaders inevitably reflects both the

essential delicacy and the overriding, but latent, importance of

their role. To a degree beyond that of collegial leaders in other,

dominant, societal groups, a society's generals and admirals feel

an intense, rarified sense of mission. The more peripheral the

role they are forced to play in peace, the stronger must be their

collective vision of the role they will play in war. War becomes a shared expectation that, inevitable or not, creates their role as a central, indispensable institution in society.
By centering institutional mission around the process of war,

military groups tend to shape their perception of society's larger

mission within the context of war. Their historical vision marks

the progress of their society from war to war. In this sense, then,

military institutions are one of the most active groups defining

societal mission, delineating and extending historical traditions

with exuberant imagery.

In this context, a military institution tends to keep alive an

active and outward-facing vision of society, even in times when

such a tradition is in eclipse. In doing so, armies and navies

provide a strong sense of continuity for a specific historical

mission that, in Homeric terms, may be termed "heroic." When

the strategic situation demands or the public clamors, the

mission, like an old ember, is still alive.

The Corporation of Ethos

Ethos symbolizes a culture's inclusive set of behavioral/ moral

imperatives at every level of societal aggregation. The

translation of the imagery of ethos into the action of personality

must attend each manifestation of social organization as well. In

concrete terms, ethos is incorporated by every group in a society.

Institutional values and behavior patterns, to a degree, reflect

corresponding patterns throughout the larger society.

There are central institutions in every culture that dominate

the formulation and regulation of distinct aspects of a culture's

ethos. The range of variation in personality between the

dominant institutions of complex societies and the specific role a single institution may play in the evolution of ethos is a persuasive argument for the introduction of a concept of

"corporate ethos."

In complex societies, key institutions or corporations may

approach the definitional stage in the evolution of ethos. This

function is most easily achieved at the most abstracted level: that

of mission. In this civilization the performance of this function

is called politics.

Not all political groups are formal institutions, endowed with

a constitutional role, supported by the continuity of traditions,

inspired by shared emblems of identity, and strengthened by

ritual and very real ties of allegiance binding its membership.

They are, in fact, few. The U.S. Navy is one: a formal institution

whose structure and historical continuity have evolved into a true corporate ethos.
Like a culture within a culture, the Navy ethos has created a distinct set of values and behavior patterns within a complex and

sophisticated world view. The Navy ethos exists at every level of

social aggregation. For its leadership, especially, the Navy ethos

defines a kind of cultural personality at every membership status

within the Navy hierarchy. Unlike more informal corporations,

the Navy is a complete "way of life." The Navy ethos reflects the

national ethos at all points along the continuum of cultural

values: from normative postulates to moral imperatives to a perceived sense of mission. Although reflected, the national

ethos is also distilled.

The Navy ethos is. an intensification of the American ethos,

the product of the special role that the Navy has played and

continues to play in American life. The Navy is, to a measurable

degree, a society apart: a culture within a culture. Yet it has

remained a central institution in American society. As a rarified

part of America, it illuminates more clearly than any other

national corporation a unique set of values in the American

ethos. As an intensification of the national ethos, the Navy has,

in critical periods of our history, played a decisive, even

dominant, role in shaping of the passage of this society. Before

examining the Navy both as corporate and unique ethos, it is

essential to connect institutional with national world view.
8

CHAPTER II

THE NATIONAL ETHOS

Images of America

What is America?

Throughout our history, America has been defined in

inseparable contradistinction. Both in isolation and in

association; a part of European civilization, and yet apart.

Conceived as a New World, cast in the imagery of the Old,

America was first an idea for which a place was found. As J.H.

Elliott has confessed, "dreams were always more important than

realities in the relationship of the Old World and the New." 1 As secure sanctuary and as Utopian garden, America was safe

and fertile ground for the transplantation of successive liberal

visions evolving within the European oikoumene, a larger, more

comprehensive society. According to Vernon Louis Parrington,

these "germinal contributions were the bequests successively of

English Independency, of French romantic theory, of the

industrial revolution and laissez faire, of 19th century science,

and of Continental theories of collectivism." 2 Although "native"

American society evolved toward a complexity and organization

rivaling the seats of European culture, American thought has

never reached true autochthony. Convinced of their essential

uniqueness, Americans have stood for 350 years on the cultural

frontier, if not periphery, of the European world view. The

United States is a "national society." "American culture" is part

of a larger, ecumenical whole. America has both reflected and

reshaped European vision, and in the process created a special

mission, one that has had the historical effect of defining the

American personality, both in isolation from, and in association

with, Europe.

The symbolic agent of this definition was the concept of the

"American Frontier." The notion of a frontier is inescapably

geographic, rich in the social overtones of the soil: the yeoman

farmer, the Utopian garden, the agrarian virtues; and rich in
tradition: Hesiod, Cato, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and the latter-day

physiocrats were all called upon to sing the praises of the new,

noble society. The frontier and the agrarian myth are

inseparable in American folklore. 3 Even the slogans resound

through our history: Manifest Destiny, Continentalism, All

Mexico, 54-40 or Fight, Free Men and Free Soil. Modern

American historiography, from Frederick Jackson Turner to C.

Vann Woodward to Robin Winks have embraced, or wrestled

with, the enduring image of the American Frontier.

It is the central symbol of the American world view; its

mythology continues to shape the American ethos. The

American personality has, for 200 years of nationhood, defined

itself, and has been defined, in the context of the frontier

metaphor.

As a geographic metaphor, the American Frontier created a severe, and as yet unrealized, harness on the evolution of this

nation's perceived sense of historical mission. By focusing

primarily on a continental frontier-image, America chose a landlocked vision on which to posit its world view. The

American Frontier is inward-gazing. Our frontier mythology, in

a long process of historical accumulation of imagery, has tended

to define America and Americanism in isolated terms. The

original, New World images of "sanctuary" and "garden," in

their unity, forged a force of cultural fission, pulling America

from its membership in the oikoumene of this civilization. As

both C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter implied at the

height of the cold war, only the permanent historical loss of

"free security" could reverse America's societal desire to define

itself apart.4 Mythology has come to define the American world view

almost exclusively in terms of a continental frontier. Our

cinematic obsession with the American "West" is a testament to

our unquestioning acceptance of this myth.

Yet there is another frontier in the American tradition, a seaborne frontier.

There are, within our national world view, two Americas. One

is inward-gazing, one outward-facing. One looked toward the

wilderness of an untamed continent, one toward the wilderness

spray of the world ocean. One is based on agrarian philosophy,

one on mercantalist principles. One exalts the farmer, one

idealizes the sailor. One is limited to a continent. One is

implicitly global. The western frontier demanded an army to

keep the peace and fought campaigns on the level of police
10

actions. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans demanded a navy,

prepared to meet the demands of deterrence and diplomacy.

This twin tradition is deep-rooted. As Henry Nash Smith

wrote, in the year of Korea, 1950:

The early visions of an American empire embody two

different if often mingled conceptions. There is, on the one

hand, the notion of empire as command of the sea, and on

the other hand the notion of empire as a populous future

society occupying the interior of the American continent. 5

The agrarian vision is unmistakably Jeffersonian, while the

mercantile is just as indelibly Hamiltonian. Ironically, both

visions imply a separation from Europe, and both the creation of

an American Empire. Hamilton spoke of "erecting one great

American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic

force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection

between the old and the new world."6 This is a vision of equality, not disassociation. In that it

implied an equality of competition with European societies,

Hamilton's vision of America was one of identity with the

European oikoumene, as long as such relationship was on terms

of America's choosing:

Our situation invites and our interests prompt us to aim at

an ascendant in the system of American affairs. 7

Hamilton envisaged an American hegemony along European

lines and according to European political traditions. As Felix

Gilbert wrote, it was "the fitting of 'old policy' to the American

scene."8 In this sense, one of shared, transatlantic ethos, Hamilton's

vision was a force pulling America toward a closer ecumenical

membership with the Old World, while Jefferson's Louisiana

gaze and his vision of new American republics, like "eaglets"

hatching beyond the Mississippi, tended to reinforce the notion

of American separation and uniqueness.

Coexistent, the two Americas evolved in exclusion, divorced

until the fifth decade of the 19th century. With the continental

limits of the United States demarcated after the Mexican War,

America stood on the shores of the Pacific. Seafaring America,

by that time, was bringing the commerce of China to New
11

England and Yankee whalers hunted across the breadth of the

Pacific. In 1853, the U.S. Navy opened the door to Japan. The

American frontier at that moment, and just for a moment,

returned to the image of the "Passage to India." American

mission, in the eyes of Thomas Hart Benton, Asa Whitney, and

William Gilpin, was to extend the American empire across the

Pacific:

The untransacted destiny of the American people to subdue

the continent—to rush over this vast field to the Pacific

Ocean—to teach old nations a new civilization—to confirm

the destiny of the' human race—to shed a new and

resplendent glory on mankind 9

For a brief decade the two frontiers were fused. The exotic scape

of the South Seas brought by Melville to a hungry public in 1846-

47 was an extension of the frontier myth of the Utopian garden.

California, the newest state of the union, was tied to the

Republic by clipper, almost as if it were a faraway archipelago.

This unity of vision in the American world view was shattered

by the Civil War. Yet, once established, the image of a transpacific American frontier would remain as a latent

component in our culture. Four times in the future, this image

would come to shape America's perceived sense of mission: in

1898, in 1941, in 1950, and in 1964. As in 1853, the U.S. Navy

would play an instrumental role both in the translation of vision

to mission and in the performance of mission in action.

As Walt Whitman wrote, on the occasion of the arrival of the

first Japanese envoys to America in 1860:

For I too raising my voice join the ranks of this pageant,

I am the chanter, I chant aloud over the pageant,

I chant the world on my Western sea,

I chant copious the islands beyond, thick as stars in the sky,

I chant the new empire grander than any before, as in a vision it comes to me,

I chant America the mistress, I chant a greater supremacy,

My sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archipelagoes,

My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind,

Young Libertad! With the venerable Asia, the all- mother 10
12

American Personality: The Mask of Ethos

Before attempting to examine the Navy as a unique

corporation—a distinct society within a national society—it is

important first to describe the larger context of national

"personality." If the Navy ethos created a notional Navy

personality, then the Navy as a corporate identity should be

viewed both as a thematic and variational component in the

American personality.

The imagery that, in its complete set, comprises world view

along a vertical axis defines a corollary set of behaviors on a horizontal plane. This is ethos, the set of normative values that,

in its turn, is translated into actions. This, the collective set of

performances of a society's actors, is the fused form of persona—

the "personality" —of culture.

A culture must be defined in terms of the inclusive set of world

view, ethos, and personality along both vertical and horizontal

axes. By this definition, there exists no distinct American

culture. There is a national society, which is but a member of a larger association called an oikoumene. America shares so many

basic components of its world view with European societies that

it cannot claim a legitimate, separate, cultural identity.

In spite of original and reaffirmed ties of culture, American

society has preserved a self-proclaimed tradition of cultural

uniqueness. To sustain this perception, American national

society has created a set of cultural variations, lovingly preserved

in folklore and in mythology.

The core of American folklore is rooted in the image of the

Western frontier. From the moment of its political

independence from Europe, American personality has been

predominantly associated with an ethos that both American

"natives" and European observers announced as the product of a frontier world view. The notion of a society on the very rim of

civilization has created an expectation of cultural sensibilities

shaped by an untutored environment. Physical roughness begets

social roughness. Frances Trollope was not the first, and

certainly not the last, European visitor who would write of the

effect of a frontier environment on American mind and mores;

in 1832:

The "simple" manner of living in Western America was

more distasteful to me from its levelling effects on the

manners of the people, than from the personal privations

that it rendered necessary The total and universal want
13

of manners, both in males and females, is so remarkable,

that I was constantly endeavoring to account for it . . . there is

always something in the expression or the accent that jars

the feelings and shocks the taste In America that polish

which removes the courser and rougher parts of our nature

is unknown and undreamed of. 11 How ironic, that the heroic image of the American as a rough

and ready, straight-shooting, cigar-chewing Leatherstocking,

traceable to James Fenimore Cooper's stories of the frontier,

should have displaced the seafaring heroes of novels like The

Pilot. For Cooper, who wrote the first real history of the U.S.

Navy, America's oceanic tradition carried equal weight.

In his letters during the Mexican War Cooper revealed his

recognition of the triumph of continentalist over seafaring

America. 12 The Civil War, and the destruction of the Yankee

merchant marine, exacerbated this displacement. As America

turned inward in the aftermath of war and reconstruction,

Whitman's paean to Pacific destiny was discarded.

As a corporate tradition whose fortunes were bound to the

other half of the American world view, the oceanic rather than

the continental vision, the historical foundations of the Navy

ethos tended to create the personality of a society apart. By the

end of the 19th century the U.S. Navy was, in effect, a society

perceptively isolated from the main currents of American

society, as the American nation was, by its own admission,

separate from the European social order.

In essential thesis, this notion was an illusion but it was a cherished illusion, reinforced by historical folklore. In the case of

the Navy, its isolation from mainstream America from 1865 to

1895 was neither cherished nor illusory. It was a bitter fact and

permeated each naval officer's sense of identity and worth in

relationship to American society. As Alfred Thayer Mahan

wrote of the visit of a French admiral to an American warship in

the 1880s,

. . . one of these old war-horses, not yet turned out to grass or

slaughter, ship-rigged to royals, and slow-steamed. His gaze

was meditative, reminiscent, perhaps even sentimental. "Ou

sont les neiges d'antan?" ... he saw before him an historical

memento, sweeping gently, doubtless, the chords of

youthful memories. "Oui, oui!" he said at last; "I'ancien

systeme. Nous l'avons eu." 13
14

By 1890, Oscar Wilde could write of America, "You have your

manners and your Navy." 14 This age marked the nadir of the oceanic vision as an essential

component of the American world view. The Navy role

anchored at the very margin of American national life. Yet the

same year as Wilde's sneer, Mahan published The Influence of

Seapower Upon History. Within 8 short years the Navy, and

America's transpacific mission, would experience a remarkable

renaissance. Rehabilitated, the Navy, and Oceanic America,

would retain to the present era a coequal status with the

Continentalist School.

Although status had been rewon, the Second America had lost

the connective associations of historical mythology. Frederick

Jackson Turner had already, in 1893, codified the "Myth of the

American Frontier." 15 The long intermythologicum had broken

the spell of the American seafaring tradition, as it had flourished

before 1861. America was, in future, to be defined according to a single historical image. This awareness, certainly subconscious,

has had a depressive influence on the corporate ethos of the U.S.

Navy in the 20th century. The eclipse of the mythology of

seafaring America—as one of the central symbols of American

identity—has, indirectly, shaped the corporate "personality" of

the modern Navy. Now, in turning at last to face the subject of

this essay—the Navy as corporation and as ethos—this crucial

recognition must be remembered.
15

CHAPTER III

THE CORPORATE ETHOS

This is the body of basic beliefs, translated into patterns of

behavior, that define the Navy as a corporate allegiance. There

are functional analogues here to any corporate structure in

American society. In the classic period of this essay, the initial

processes of defining role and identity and the rituals of

membership were far more intense and all-encompassing in the

Navy than in other secular groups in national society. At

Annapolis, corporate indoctrination was extended to a definitional degree in individual personality and could be called a form of "acculturation." With its isolated environment, highly

ritualized and severe rites of passage, and demanding emphasis

on fellowship, the Navy created for its officer corps the

foundation of a separate society: an embracing ethos.

A man's sense of membership in this society, as one of its

leaders, was shaped by four kinds of experiences. These are

called here "Rites of Passage," "The Call of the Sea," "Sons of

Gunboats," and "A Band of Brothers." Each is native to the

Navy; together they create the sum of essential ethos, upon

which could later be laid the higher institutional calling of

mission.

Rites of Passage: "Shipmates Forever"

The manner in which an officer was brought into the world of

the U.S. Navy was, in its classic period, something like being

born again, and raised anew, and acculturated to an alien society.

As Albert Gleaves wrote:

Every officer of the United States Navy, whatever his own

antecedents, has the best of rearing at the most receptive age

and the honour of the Service to maintain. His best

ancestors are the men who have come before him in that

Service l
16

These italicized images reveal the implicit allegiances of a man

to his family or tribe.The "classic period" of America's Navy has

been applied as a societal definition: that era when the Navy

ethos was strongest and the process of its acculturation most

intense. This period, roughly from 1885-1945, marked the

closest translation of the body of Navy "traditions," or world

view, into a shared sense of mission. This was the time of

Annapolis and Newport; the heyday of the Academy and the

War College as functional institutions in the transmission of

"cultural" values.

For as a society apart, the Navy created ties of allegiance and

badges of identity that bound its officers for life. Membership

was awarded to a young man not merely as a diploma, signaling

the end of the initial period of acculturation. The course at

Annapolis was a structural, as well as symbolic, rite de passage. If

the War College instilled the mature elements of the Navy

ethos, the Naval Academy created the primal. An officer's sense

of mission was forged at the intellectual peak of his career; his

framework of meaning, his manners, his behavioral manual, his

cultural compass bearing, his personality, were hammered out at

the start, at Annapolis.

In this heyday time, the cultural laxity described so lovingly by

Mahan had been bred out. The oldsters of 1856 were gone and

the majority of midshipmen no longer tattooed right forearms

with "Goddess of Liberty."2 As he lamented:

I remember, in later days and later manners, when we were

all compelled to be well buttoned up to the throat, a young

officer remarked to me disparagingly of another, "He's the

sort of man, you know, who would wear a frock-coat

unbuttoned." There's nothing like classification. My friend

had achieved a feat in natural history; in ten words he had

defined a species. 3

"Respect for individual tastes" departed. "Hazing" arrived.

Hazing became a crucial component of the process of Navy

acculturation at Annapolis after the 1860s.4 Unpleasant as it always was, it was just as inevitably remembered with proud

fondness. Like "Jack Nastyface" during the Great War against

Bonaparte who refused to accept a messmate as a true brother

until his back bore the mark of "the cat," the American

midshipman accepted hazing as the natural and sole proof of
17

admission. Membership in a selective fraternity demanded, like

the sun dance of the Cheyenne, a physical rite of passage.

The test of Annapolis was severe. Julius Augustus Furer, class

secretary of '01 , would write of the 30 men in his class, out of 97,

who did not graduate. 5 Attrition by this time was the exclusive

product of academic and physical severity. Mahan's class, 1859,

graduated only 20 out of 49 entrants but his perspective revealed

an essential difference. "The dwindling numbers testifies rather

to the imperfection of educational processes throughout the

country than to the severity of the tests, which were very far

below those of today."6 By the 20th century, the Annapolis experience had created its

own body of folklore, enshrined in popular sentiment. The

extent of its permeation was revealed in a film produced by

Warner Brothers in 1935, Shipmates Forever. Although a standard "Hollywood" product, it represents an authentic

source. Not merely a barometer of national attitudes toward the

Navy in the midthirties, it is a remarkable paradigm of

contemporary Navy values. The film presents a rare historical

"window" to view the mythology of the Naval Academy and its

role in the creation of the Navy ethos. Research into the papers

of Dudley Knox reveals that the Navy worked closely with

Warner Brothers in the production of the film. 7 Bluntly put, it

was a magnificent, and sentimental, piece of propaganda.

In that Shipmates Forever encapsulates all the motifs of the

Annapolis mythology, the film presents a romanticized, but

emotionally authentic, description of the Navy's rites of passage.

Dick Powell, playing a young singer, is from an old Navy family.

His father is CINCUS, and about to retire. He desperately wants

his son to follow him but he will not force him. Finally, it is the

commanding adjuration in the portrait of his grandfather, a commodore from the old sailing navy, that propels Powell

toward Annapolis. At the Academy he does well academically

but he chafes under the hazing of upperclassmen, who tease the

ex-crooner mercilessly. He is forced to sing, night after night,

endless stanzes of "Abdul Abulbul Amir" to his everlasting

distaste. As the outsider, intellectually and temperamentally, he

cuts himself off from his classmates and rejects their appeals to

fellowship. He is redeemed from isolation only by risking death

in attempting to save the life of a shipmate when a boiler

explodes in an old battleship during a summer cruise. He falls in

love with Ruby Keeler, who is implicitly devoted to the Navy

even though both her father and brother had been lost at sea. In
18

the end, as commander of the Brigade of Midshipmen, he stands,

a hero and brother officer, as he receives his commission in the

U.S. Navy.

All of the basic, personal elements of the Navy ethos are

revealed in this film. Made during the halcyon period of the

Navy, before its greatest test of war, Shipmates Forever

captured the feeling, the sensibility, of a distinct ethos. Albert

Gleaves, also writing in the 1930s, called this the "background of

the Navy." Like the movie, he described the Navy ethos in the

authentic, unself-conscious language of a member when he

spoke of the men

who devote their whole lives to the steady, quiet

performance of duty, the rigours of discipline, the training

and welfare of the men trusted to their command, the tact

and good breeding that keep an efficient and happy ship and

a wardroom what a gentleman's should be, and above all, to

the faithful discharge of responsibility. All this on a salary of

from fourteen hundred to six thousand dollars a year, and

every married officer has the assurance from a grateful

country of a pension to his widow of thirty dollars a month

for the support of herself and any children they may have!

Nothing but love of the Service and pride in it can keep a man in such a profession, and nothing but love of her

husband and pride in his career can make a woman stand by

him and keep him in it. 8

Those qualities that so immediately describe the naval officer

of that era—duty, responsibility, devotion, steadiness, rigor,

faithful, good breeding, a gentleman, pride, and even love—are

spontaneous and autochthonous. They were the highly valued

creed of a special world view, the moral imperative of an ethos.

They are, by modern standards, all the more remarkable for the

conscious central role they played in the makeup of individual

personality.

This unbreakable identification of "character" with the larger

vision and mission of the Navy was the cultural product of postCivil War Annapolis; of a naval academy that may have lost a traditionally relaxed and individual style of training and replaced

it with a rigorous process of acculturation not unlike that found

in the leadership groups of separate and distinct societies. In

doing so, the Navy was able to "raise" a group of men who not

only created a unified institutional notion of national mission

but who had the drive to see it realized.
19

The Call of the Sea: From Constellation to Monongahela

WHEN, staunchly entering port,

After long ventures, hauling up, worn and old,

Battered by sea and wind, torn by many a fight,

With the original sails all gone, replaced, or mended,

I only saw, at last, the beauty of the ship.9

To see the old sailing ship, as Whitman saw her, was to sense

the sublime: this understanding was the central "mystery" of

man and the sea. The majesty of wind and sail, the discipline

demanded of survival under canvas alone, the integration of man

and ark, sea and sky, in interactive harmony and strife, was the

rhythm of the seafaring frontier. Even after steam had displaced

sail for a generation of navymen, they could not proudly call

themselves "sailors" until they had close-reefed topsails in a winter gale.

The tradition was immutable. Midshipmen who sailed to

England and Maderia in 1899 in the old Monongahela

recaptured the world of their naval "ancestors." At the Academy,

a midshipman was schooled in engineering, and given the

modern tools of his trade. At sea, hauling on sheets and stays

during his summer cruise, he was surrounded by continuity and

context, and given his identity.

In this baptismal ritual, the character and past of the ship,

etched in every plank, was a reminder and an adjuration. "Worn

and old," the ship was a reminder of those other generations of

officers who had paced her decks; "torn by many a fight," she

was an adjuration to the young midshipman to duty, to fall in as they had to the guns in defense of the Constitution. The old

Monongahela, last of the wooden sail training ships, had fought

at Port Hudson and at Mobile Bay with Farragut and bore the

battle scars of Confederate guns. The men who would make, in

Julius Augustus Furer's words, "the last cruise made by

midshipmen to Europe in sail," 10 would include one

COMBATFOR, one COMSCOFOR, one CINCUS, the president

of the Naval War College during World War II, the Commander

of the 14th Naval District on 7 December, and one COMINCH

for that same great war to be.

In the same manner, William Sowden Sims, in 1877, sailed as

a midshipman in Constellation which, although it had been

"rebuilt" in 1855, could trace its bloodline to the Quasi-war with

France and that fabled fight with Llnsugente in 1798. 11 Each
20

naval generation was able to reforge its own, personal links with

its ancestry. Sims, who would command all U.S. naval forces in

Europe during the First World War, was able, however

tenuously, to feel the Navy of Nelson and of Decatur; King, who

would serve as COMINCH during the Second, was able for a moment to cast back to Farragut and Porter.

How conscious was the awareness of this continuity? When

Mahan attended the Academy in the late 1850s it was with

wistful awareness of the passing of an age. His class, 1859, was

one of the last to sail in ships without steam when such were still

on cruising stations before the war; and serve under men,

veterans of 1812, who still scorned "funnel and screw." His first

cruise after graduation was in such a ship, the fated frigate

Congress. Of her he wrote, in reverence:

The "Congress" was a magnificent ship of her period. The

adjective is not too strong. Having been built about 1840,

she represented the culmination of the sail era, which,

judged by her, reached then the splendid maturity that in

itself, to the prophetic eye, presages decay and

vanishment. 12

If anything, the awareness of continuity was yet stronger for

an old crew than for an old ship. If there could be codified a collective memory of the Navy ethos in its most basic form—its

tradition—then surely its source would be the "Old Salt," and the

form of his transmission, the "spun yarn":

The gunner of the first ship in which I served after

graduation told me that in 1832, when he was a young

seaman before the mast on board a sloop of war in the

Mediterranean . . . that she stood into the harbor of Malta

under all sail, royal and studding sails, to make a flying moor.

Within fifteen minutes she was all in, the ship moored, sails

furled, and yards squared Now I dare say that some of

my brother officers may cavil at this story 13

In a way the image of the "Old Timer" was, among officers in the

20th-century Navy, a sentimental market-post, both as an

incarnation of ancestral tradition and as a reminder of the

wonder of youth. There is a famous photograph of four of these

men taken aboard Mohican in 1888. These graybeards, with

pipe, seated on ditty boxes, surrounded by coiled line and taut
21

rigging, evoked a special memory in senior officers of the 1930s.

Joseph Taussig, who served as Assistant Chief of Naval

Operations from 1933-36, wrote about the careers of these

staunch sailors for the 1937 Navy Day Annual:

The fine type of the old salt depicted here is now extinct so

far as our navy is concerned. It is fitting, therefore, to make a record of some of the things that are known of these men. It

is felt also that those of the old navy who were closely

associated with the wonderful sailor men of those days, as well as the modern navy who never had the pleasure of such

associations, will appreciate the quotations written by the

officers who were shipmates of these men. 14

This was more than unabashed sentiment. In the personal

papers of Albert Gleaves and Montgomery Meigs Taylor, both

commanders of the Asiatic Fleet in the interwar era, there are

preserved copies of this same photograph, with simple

comments about four old men in an old wooden ship:

remembered by admirals in their sleek steel cruisers. The

continuity was not simply conscious; it was enduring. 15 As Furer wrote of his transatlantic cruise in Monon in 1899,

"We worked the ship and had perhaps a dozen or so old salts to

show us the ropes." 16 There is a world of implication in that

statement. As Mahan admitted of his own midshipman's

experience, "for most of us the object was to acquire a seaman's

knowledge, not an officer's." 17 A man is a sailor before he is a naval officer; that conviction has never fully been lost. Those

lucky "young gentlemen" who sailed Monon to Europe and who

later led America's Navy in world war were the last "sailing

officers" of their service; yet the end of a tradition only. The

emotional role of the sailing ship in the Navy ethos remained as, for each new generation, "at last, the beauty of the ship."

Sons of Gunboats

"Hurrah my lads! It's a settled thing; next week we shape

our course to the Marquesas!" The Marquesas! What strange

visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up!

Lovely houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nuts

coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny

valleys planted with breadfruit trees—carved canoes

dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands
22

guarded by horrible idols ... I felt an irresistible curiosity to

see those islands which the olden voyagers had so glowingly

described. 18

So Herman Melville began Typee, which thrilled literary

America in 1846. Like Whitman's Passage to India, he caught

the sum of imagery by which America would come to define the

exotic scape of the South Seas, and the fabled lands that lay

beyond: India and Cathay. At the end of the 19th century, the

Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine

Insurrection again created a sheen of romance around the

experiences of American sailors in China and the islands of the

Pacific.

When the big gray battleship South Dakota crossed the reef

into the harbor of Papeete, Tahiti, on an autumn noon in 1919,

Albert Gleaves, CINCASIATIC, spoke as Melville had in Omoo,

when Julia dropped anchor there 77 years before. The

descriptions are strikingly similar. In their shared imagery of the

exotic, Gleaves and Melville create a continuity in the language

of seafaring America. Gleaves' memory of a dance by Samoan

"maidens" echoes the prose of Melville in "Preparations for a Feast," from Typee:

The dance is considered the most graceful of all the South

Sea Islands, and the dress is just within the Law of Eden. A

fringe of banana leaves around the waist, the naked bodies

glistening with coconut oil, and a necklace of hybiscus and

tiny shells compose the costume de rigeur. The girls' figures,

beautifully formed, are like bronze nymphs. 19

Unlike the pictures of whaling ships and China clippers, this

experience was a Navy excursion, framed in the imagery of

white-hulled gunboats. The scene implied more than Yankee

adventure: the setting carried strong overtones of a young and

vigorous republic seeking its destiny among the decaying

empires of Spain and China. Within the image of the exotic lay a stronger theme.

For young naval officers, as brash ensigns or "passed

midshipmen" on their first cruise, gunboat service in China or

among the islands of the Philippine archipelago became the

remembered core of the romance of life at sea. They were

forever marked, as was Melville six decades before, by the lure of

those shimmering islands. Of those who graduated from the
23

Academy between 1898 and 1903, the majority saw early service

in the Asiatic Fleet. In 1902, the year J.O. Richardson left

Annapolis, 41 of 59 members of the class were posted to the

Asiatic Station. 20 Of the men who would come to dominate the

Navy between 1919 and 1941, Pratt and Standley and Yarnell

and Knox and Richardson, their early cruises had included a tour

in the Western Pacific.

Decades later, Harry E. Yarnell recalled his own adventures in

gunboat service, beginning with the origins of a certain

"society":

In May, 1900, a number of officers met on the U.S.S. Alava in

Manila Bay and organized a society under the somewhat

grandiose title of "The Ancient and Honorable Society of

the Sons of Gunboats." Admiral Dewey was elected

Honorary President 21

These gunboats were Victorian relics of the Empire of Spain,

patrolling the waters around such unimagined places as Zamboanga and Tawi Tawi and Sandakan. There were local

insurrections to be quelled, and Moro pirates gunrunning and

abducting Borneo women, and native regattas and celebrations,

and wily chieftains to be bargained with or outsmarted. 22 The young officers who would, late in their careers, shape

America's response to the Japanese imperial challenge, were

perhaps only dimly aware of an American Pacific mission when

they chased bandits through shoal waters in the Sulu Sea. The

formative impressions, however, that would come to shape their

personal sense of mission as American naval officers, were

implanted when they were but "Sons of Gunboats."

Some measure to which these young officers came to treasure

the memory of those first cruises in Chinese and Philippine

waters, charged with the anticipation of meeting Boxer or Moro,

or the spectacle of Slav facing Samurai in sea combat, can be

sensed from their replies to old shipmates.

In 1942 Martin Swanson, "Boatswain Mate, U.S.S. Yorktown,

1898-1901," wrote to Adm. Harry E. Yarnell:

So many things are happening to-day that seems to have had

its beginning back in the days of the Boxer Rebellion. I remember when Mr. Arthur McArthur, Jr. went on board a Chinese cruiser to hoist the American flag in order to save it from the Japs. That happened in Chefoo, I think! 23
24

To which Admiral Yarnell responded:

I was very glad to get the letter recalling the days when we

were shipmates on the Yorktown in China. I think you are

the first one of the Yorktown ship's company that I have

seen in many years. Most of the officers who served on the

Yorktown at that time are now dead.24 He went on then to talk about incidents in China during the

Boxer crisis and at some length. Even more evocative was the

exchange between Clifford Calfinch and Adm. Ernest J. King.

Calfinch wrote, in 1941:

Wonder if you remember the good old days on the Good ship

Cincinnati on the Asiatic Station, the Championship Foot

ball game between the Flag Ship Wisconsin and the

Cincinnati at Amoy China, when we followed the Russian

Cruiser into the harbor of Manila, and the trip to Chemulpo

Korea and up the Yalu River, and the many other

happenings, which I like to look back to with such fond

memories.25

King replied with a warmth that some would call

uncharacteristic:

I now wish to thank you for good wishes—it is fine to know

that an old shipmate of long ago keeps track of his old Navy

friends What memories your letter brings up about our

cruise in China in the old CINCINNATI, and the incidents

of the Russo-Japanese War. Some day we must meet up and

revive those old days. By the way, do you happen to have a copy of that picture of the First Division which was taken in

Shanghai one Sunday morning after inspection 26

. . . The mind drifts back, so clearly, each incident of those

times etched in a kind of sharp clarity, as though it had happened

just yesterday. Both Yarnell and King unhesitatingly reached for

the image of "shipmate," even though writing to former enlisted

men. For they were just that, before the climb to higher

command began to separate future admirals from the

associations of their youth. Perhaps this explains why King

signed his reply to Calfinch as "Sometime Ensign, U.S. Navy,

U.S.S. CINCINNATI." The corporate links connecting a man to
25

his service, be they sentimental, form a subtle, and not

insignificant, underpinning to ethos.

A Band of Brothers

When Adm. Albert Gleaves sat down to write about his life,

he began with what he called "The Background," which was

shared by every naval officer:

It has been formed by those who have kept honour clear by

risking and often giving their lives for others in the sea, or in

blazing turrets, or wrecked submarines, or standing by dying

comrades in obscure places of the earth, whether or not any

other men will ever know or "long remember" it. 27 He was describing the central mystery of the corporate ethos:

the basic recognition behind those rituals and badges of

association that define membership in, and allegiance to, a corporate group. In a society within a society, for the U.S. Navy

especially, this recognition of absolute commitment to the group

inevitably created a special sense of fraternity.

For the aspiring officer, the process of initiation involved a series of intense experiences. The demanding routine of the

Academy was an intellectual and corporate rite of passage.

Through 1900 at least, the midshipman cruises, with wind and

sail, offered not only context but continuity. "Gunboat" service

on the Asiatic Station, for those who would come to command

the Navy before Pearl Harbor, mixed authentic adventure with a personal translation of "mission" on the exotic frontier of

civilization. These experiences, in concatenation, both defined

and reinforced the basic postulates of identity. At the heart of

each was the recognition of responsibility to one's shipmates.

Since Shakespeare in Henry V—"we few, we happy few"

has worked its way like a sentimental teredo into the ark of naval

mythology. Before the Battle of the Nile, Horatio Nelson

referred indulgently to his captains as "a band of brothers." 28 This old English image, then, became the incarnation of naval

esprit de corps, the vital element in battle, the key to victory at

sea. In the First World War, Jellicoe's failure to recreate the

Nelson "touch" haunted the Royal Navy, and to the

superstitious—and what sailor is not? —became the unstated

cause of failure on the North Sea. That was whyJutland, and they"

would gravely shake their heads, was no Trafalgar, and not even

a Glorious First of June.29
26

A true fraternity of officers in the Nelsonic mold became, by

the 1890s, a naval article of faith. Mahan's adjurations on the

successful application of seapower in the pursuit of empire were

largely responsible for the renaissance of the Navy ethos. His

own double volume, The Life of Nelson, is a testament to the

American notion of the naval fraternity as a unified, highly

motivated, offensively minded corps of officers and men

inspired by a shared vision and mission: specifically after the

fashion of Nelson, and the British tradition. 30 The permeation of the notion of a naval fraternity can be

marked by several indicators. One is by the names shipmates

give each other. Mahan, in his reminiscences, speaks of "nautical

characters" he knew in the same breath as figures from the sea

stories of Marryat and Cooper: "Boatswain Chucks," "Gunner

Tallboys," "Jack Easy," "Boltrope," and "Trysail." 31 Nautical

literature both mirrored and reevoked for Mahan one of the

enduring traditions of the sea. This was a tradition renewed by young American naval

officers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The men who

held command in the U.S. Fleet between the wars called

themselves by names hearkening to the world of Cooper and

Melville and Dana. Rear Adm. Burrell C. Allen was "Buck," Rear

Adm. Percy W. Foote was known as "Commodore," Rear Adm.

Arthur S. Carpenter was "Chips," Adm. C.C. Bloch was "Judge,"

Adm. C.P. Snyder was "Peck,*' Adm. Harold R. Stark was

"Betty," Adm. E.C. Kalbfus was "Ned," Adm. Thomas C. Hart

was "Dad," Rear Adm. W.R. Furlong was "Dutch," and Rear

Adm. Julius Augustus Furer was "Dutchy." These were not

simply casual nicknames; this was the address of correspondence

by these men throughout their careers. 32 As a style it was nearly

unique; neither the naval "generations" before the First nor

after the Second World Wars had such a strong and conscious

brand of fellowship.

The sense of fraternity had another indicator in the

attachment of groups of officers to the ships in which they

served. This was true not only of shared service in each named

ship but of the common associations of larger groups of officers

with representative classes and types. To those who received

commissions at the turn of the century, the ships of the Armored

Cruiser Squadron, bristling with guns and four stately stacks,

embodied a raffish romance:

Here's to the cruisers of the Fleet

So goldurn fast, they're hard to beat,
27

The battleships, they may be fine,

But me for a cruiser every time.

The officers are a bunch of drunks.

They keep their white clothes in their trunks.

They stand their watches in their bunks.

In the Armored Cruiser Squadron. 33 Not so different in esprit were the stanzas found in Adm.

William Sowden Sims' papers, also from the first decade of this

century, entitled, simply, Destroyer Men:

There's a roll and pitch and heave and hitch

To the nautical gait they take,

For they're used to the cant of the decks aslant

As the white-toothed combers break

On the plates that thrum like a beaten drum

As the knife bow leaps through the yeasty deeps

With the speed of a shell in flight.

Oh, their scorn is quick for the crews who stick

To a battleship's steady floor,

For they love the lurch of their own frail perch

At thirty-five knots or more.

They don't get much of the drill and such

That the battleship jackies do,

But sail the seas in their dungarees,

A grimy destroyer's crew. 34 To those who served in the Armored Cruiser Squadron or the

Torpedo Flotilla, there remained a special feeling of kinship.

Like the"'Sons of Gunboats" remembered by Yarnell, these

distinct fellowships of officers celebrated their membership in

arduous or exotic service in poetry and in song, centering on the

remembered image of a ship type: the incarnation, both of the

moment recalled and their place in it, as though its shape and its

purpose had been a mirror of their own.

A spirit it was, not so very different from that of Nelson's fleet a century before. Then, the anthem of the British sailor was

"Spanish Ladies," the lyric of the Grand Fleet blockading Brest

in the last months before Trafalgar:

We'll rant and we'll roar like true British Sailors

We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt sea

Until we strike soundings in the Channel of Old England

From Ushant to Scilly is forty five leagues.
28

This version of the old song was found among the papers of

Rear Adm. Stephen B. Luce, the founder of the Naval War

College. When the U.S.S. Galena put in to Port Royal in Jamaica

at the end of 1888, Luce carefully transcribed the verses, "given

by English sailors." 35 The notion of a naval fraternity, drawing

both inspiration and continuity from a tradition endowed with

overtones of transatlantic ancestry, was a conscious model for

the American sea officer.

Finally, the corporate ethos of the U.S. Navy created intense

feelings of allegiance between officers and their service. A man

who had passed through the ritualized process of initiation and

acculturation and who then gave the measure of his mature life

became indivisible from the fleet. If he were, at the watershed

rank of captain, to be "passed over" for selection to higher

command, the rejection was emotionally devastating. A naval

officer in his early fifties, though still physically vigorous, had

accumulated too heavy a sea chest of associations to move to a new berth.

Capt. J.V. Babcock, after 2 years commanding the Naval

R.O.T.C. Unit at Yale University from 1931-33, was faced with

this final recognition. He wrote to Capt. Dudley W. Knox, the

Nestorian figure of the interwar Navy, on a Depression October

and ended his confession with this sad defiance:

/ am not giving up. 36 odd years connection with a profession to which one has devoted every effort and

thought, holding its best interests paramount to every other

consideration—personal, family—everything—is not easily

relinquished. Even if forced to retire, my inclinations—my

loyalty—would still be toward the Service. 36

The corporate ethos was the foundation for the

superstructure of mission that gave the Navy political and

strategic suasion in American national society. At the heart of

the corporate ethos was a feeling of fellowship among the

leadership of the Navy society. This fraternity was linked to a tradition and a "way of life" so ritualized, so all-embracing, that,

for the naval generation before Pearl Harbor, these patterns

could be represented as a set of behaviors approaching a distinct

ethos. The very intensity and autochthony of the Navy corporate

ethos was responsible for the symbolic power, and political pull,

in the Navy's higher sense of mission in American life.
29

CHAPTER IV

MISSION AND ETHOS

"Mission" defined the role of the Navy in national society. If

the corporate ethos demarcated institutional norms, mission

focused on the formulation of policy. One described the Navy as

a society, one as a polity. In the generation of political influence

through time, mission created both historical context and

expectation. As mission implied a role for the Navy in the

making of national policy, mission sought as well a role in the

making of national history.

"Mission" was a pliant doctrine, shifting its perceived

boundary posts with the prevailing public mood. The

parameters of military participation in American political life

yield not only to generations, but to the course of events.

Beneath the cant of doctrine, and the leash of public statement, is

the free run of private correspondence: the den of ethos. There,

the deeper continuities of mission were shared for generations,

and passed down, within the naval fraternity, from officer to

officer. For the U.S. Navy between the wars, the actor's mask of

public doctrine, worn annually for congressional shows, hid a despairing off-stage face.

"Mission," both as public doctine and as private heresy, was

the highest expression of the Navy ethos. The fraternity of the

sea provided both environmental and institutional context: the

corporate ethos was primarily turned inward. War and

diplomacy generated national and international commitment;

Navy mission in the 20th century reflected a nation's evolution

outward.

Mission in the Navy ethos can be explored from four

reference points: "Defender of the Faith," "The Legacy of

Darwin," "Law and Warfare," and "The World Island." Each

motif in the Navy mission was linked to a historical paradigm

coexistent in American national society. As national paradigms

were displaced by succeeding fashion, correspondent motifs of

the Navy mission were compounded. By the interwar era, the
30

Navy mission had evolved through successive admixture into a rich compound: a strong blend of variant attitudes of the Navy's

part in the making, and the future, of America.

Defender of the Faith

The first, and original, motif of the Navy mission was rooted

in the image of the Navy as "Shield of the Republic." This

metaphor was a response to the strategic insecurity of Young

America, a nation open to blockade and the bombardment or

seizure of all major ports. The course of America's first two wars

provided ample reason for such insecurity. The Civil War,

ironically, demonstrated America's continuing strategic

maritime vulnerability; although the blockading and

amphibious operations were initiated by the U.S. Navy. An

exchange of relative position, had America been placed in

conflict with the "predominant naval power," was hardly

beyond imagination. In fact, British preparations for war against

the Union in December 1861 exposed the weakness of the

American coast, North and South, to blockade by a navy

possessed of sufficient force and New World bases. 1 The

strategic equation of the 19th century supported Washington's

prediction that the United States, by 1812, could no longer be

successfully invaded. 2 Not until 1903 was the nation completely

free from the specter of blockade. 3 As the predominant metaphor of the Navy's role in national

strategy throughout the 19th century, the "Shield Paradigm"

claimed two "schools": one Jeffersonian, one Hamiltonian.

Traced from their source, the two schools, "Anti-Navalist" and

"Navalist,"4 represented the bifurcated branch of the American

ethos. Jefferson, supported by a party dominated by agrarian

Western and Southern interests, defined America's maritime

security at the limiting range of a 24-pounder coastal battery: 3

miles. His administration built 177 gunboats, incapable of real

seagoing operations. 5 As long as the nation's shores were free

from invasion and some shred of coastal trade survived, the

question of strategic blockade was irrelevant. Jeffersonian

concepts of national security did not extend beyond the iron yett,

bolted, in the sanctuary wall.

Writing as "Publius," Hamilton, in 1787, conceived of a divergent framework of national security. Linking America's

future growth, even its survival, to an "active commerce, an

extensive navigation, and a flourishing marine," 6 he
31

underscored "the necessity of naval protection."7 Far from

limiting its duty to the defense of American enterprise,

Hamilton envisaged the Navy as a tool of international

diplomacy: "a resource for influencing the conduct of European

nations towards us." 8 He called America's strategic position in

the New World "a most commanding one"; toward which the

accretion of a small battle fleet, "a few ships of the line," could

promote the United States as "the arbiter of Europe in America,

able to incline the balance of European competitions in this part

of the world as our interests may dictate." 9 In this context

Hamilton was perhaps the first American to forecast a strategic

policy of hemispheric security.

By calling for the United States "to aim at an ascendant in the

system of American affairs," by identifying naval power as the

critical means to the achievement of this end, Publius fashioned

the image of America's future national, and naval, policy. In his

prevision of the Monroe Doctrine, the Navy mission, although

defensive in motive, was a defensive posture on a hemispheric

strategic scale. Hamilton posited a security system tailored to

national economic strength. The modest battle force he

suggested appropriating during his generation would be but a

first step. Ultimately, to achieve "the ascendant" in the New

World, a "Federal" navy would require a battle fleet capable of

repelling sorties by the strongest squadrons of the Old. 10 Jefferson and Hamilton created two divergent constructions

of American naval policy, emanating from two visions of

America's future, set in a historical tense of inalienable

opposition. The debate did not slacken during the period

between the two great wars. In fact, the imagery ofJefferson and

Hamilton was consciously employed, like Latin homilies, to

justify the orthodoxy of the "true faith" of American foreign

policy and the nation's true strategic needs.

In a lecture entitled "The National Interest," revisionist

historian Charles Beard faced the assembled class of the Army

War College on a cold January morning in 1935 and informed

them, bluntly, "that the Hamiltonian conception of national

interest, however logical and charming and attractive it may be,

now lies amid ruins of its own making." 11 In Beard's indictment,

the "true faith" of the American ethos, which he called the

national interest, was "Jeffersonian." What the historian labeled

as "Hamiltonian," the search for international markets, was his

own shibboleth for the imperialism of private capital. Naval

power was the agent of its expansion: "unconditional supremacy
32

upon the sea is necessary to the enforcement of all private

interests, assertions, or claims against all other governments." 12 Unlike Hamilton's vision, which "lays emphasis on interest

rather than the nation, Jefferson emphasized the nation rather

than interest." 13 Beard viewed both Hamilton and the

maintenance of an oceanic navy as essentially British heresies:

"Our country is a continental power," and the nation's only

legitimate interest "to defend itself against any foreign power

that might break in upon its domestic security and peace." 14 Beard, the latter-day Jeffersonian strategist, also defined

"domestic security" according to a literal coastal cannon, no

doubt upgraded in range. Technology had not yet displaced

tradition.

Understandably, the U.S. Navy adopted a modified

Hamiltonian, or broad construction, of traditional images of

American naval policy. By the interwar era the Navy mission as originally conceived by Hamilton had evolved into a relatively

sophisticated argument, operating on several levels of

evidentiary support. These operated, although not consciously,

on three tiers: "The Lessons of History," "The Interpretation of

Scripture," and "The Handwriting on the Wall."

In opposition to Beard's paradigmatic representation of

Jefferson, the American ethos, and the national interest, the

Navy turned to one of its own, Capt. Dudley W. Knox, to

champion a countervailing paradigm. As chief of the Navy

Department's Historical Section between the wars, Knox was

something of a minister of propaganda for the Navy. Between

1930 and 1940 he wrote at least 44 major public addresses for

Charles Francis Adams, Ernest Lee Jahncke, and Claude

Swanson, Secretaries of the Navy, and Admirals Standley and

Stark, who held the CNO post during that decade. 15 Other

officers making public statements regularly sought him out for

advice and guidance. 16 The body of his writing and

correspondence provided a clear definition of the Navy's

mission within the traditional framework of American foreign

policy. As chief ideologue, he delineated the three tiers of the

Navy response to Jefferson, and Beard.

"The Lessons of History," appropriately, were cast from the

period embracing the publication of the Federalist Papers to the

Treaty of Ghent. The lessons of Hamilton's own era were seized,

again and again, to illustrate the need for a strong ocean-ranging

navy. In the seminal period of this nation's foreign policy, from

1788-1814, maritime questions played a central role in
33

decisionmaking. Without sufficient naval power, the issues

leading to the Quasi-war with France, the Barbary wars, and the

War of 1812 could not have been resolved; with sufficient naval

power, war in each case would have been unnecessary and

resolution achieved through deterrence diplomacy.

Knox drove home this point with especial strength in a "Memorandum prepared for the President at his direction."

Dated 13 January 1938, the short essay spelled out the lessons of

America's first naval wars to Franklin Roosevelt. The vital

center of Knox's thesis lay in a long quote from the ultimate

Hamiltonian document, "The Farewell Address." 17 Written

while Roosevelt was struggling for passage of the second

Vinson-Trammell Act, Knox's "lesson" was contemporary in

theme:

Throughout this whole set of experiences with the Barbary

Powers and France, weakness on our part was a strong

influence towards getting us into wars. The influence of

adequate naval force, used as a backing to diplomacy, well

proved itself to be the best instrument of peace. Time has

not changed these principles. 18

In close association with Roosevelt, Knox was directed,

beginning in 1933, to supervise the preparation and publication

of documents dealing with the Quasi-war with France and the

Barbary wars. Knox implied that there was more than a discrete

political purpose to the creation of the 14-volume set; the

project required congressional approval. Did Roosevelt wish to

post a subtle reminder of the "lessons of history" to a legislature

lapsing into traditional forgetfulness? 19 By 1939, the historical lessons of the early years of the

Republic, when the Navy was neglected, had become an

identifiable metaphor in every Navy Day speech and radio

address. For example, a radio broadcast by Standley of that year,

on the 18th Navy Day, highlights the function of the "lesson" in

Navy propaganda:

The war of the American Revolution marked the beginning

of our naval effort—it also marked the initiation of a habit

which is still with us—the failure of our people to profit by

the lessons of history. 20

By placing the vagaries of the contemporary scene in analogy

with the first years of nationhood, the Navy was able to link its
34

mission to the source of traditional American foreign policy: the

Farewell Address. By identifying original with immediate policy

issues, the Navy refreshed the words of Hamilton and

Washington with weight and context. Not only was the Navy,

then, wedded to tradition; tradition was made relevant and, in

becoming once more an authentic voice, was renewed.

"The Interpretation of Scripture" followed the reaffirmation

of historical source. Once the Navy mission had been bonded to

Hamilton's concept of the "national interest," and the vexations

of early America linked to the modern scene, the argument could

continue by connecting contemporary concepts of "interests" to

18th-century embryo. There were several mottoes: — "It is a proverb that a weak nation is a contemptible

nation." 21 Admiral Gleaves said this in a radio broadcast on

Navy Day, 1922, echoing Publius, and "a nation, despicable in its

weakness."22 America must be strong, to maintain even a shred

of dignity. — American neutrality can only be preserved through naval

strength.23 When Dudley Knox, in 1937, wrote that it was

"becoming increasingly obvious that moral suasion would not

deter" potential belligerents, he was only reviving Washington's

warning in the Farewell Address: "the most sincere neutrality is

not a sufficient guard."24 When Knox underscored "the futility

of weakness in preserving neutrality," 25 he restated Hamilton's

adjuration, that the unarmed nation "forfeits even the privilege

of being neutral." 26 — "An active commerce," wrote Publius, carried "in our own

bottoms," comprised the American "wings by which we might

soar to greatness." 27 In 20th-century reiteration, Knox wrote,

for the 1936 Navy Day address: "We turn more and more

towards overseas markets ... all of our trade contacts with the

outside world must necessarily be by sea. A merchant marine

capable of carrying a large proportion of our commerce is a necessity

" 28 Restating Hamilton, Standley, in August 1940,

reminded the radio audience that the Navy was the champion of

American commerce: "Our trade freedom depends entirely upon

seapower."29 — "An adequate Navy is the cheapest imaginable insurance

against future extravagance in blood and treasure." 30 Julius

Augustus Furer made this plea for "preparedness" in a 1927

Navy Day address in Pittsburgh. This theme traced its ancestry

to Washington. Knox, in his memorandum to Roosevelt, quoted

from Washington's annual address to Congress, 1793:
35

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we

desire to secure peace, it must be known that we are at all

times ready for war. 31

Navy leaders in the interwar era were fond of quoting both from

Washington and Theodore Roosevelt, who was remembered,

between the wars, as a kind of "Founding Father" of the U.S.

Navy. The coincidence of Navy Day and Roosevelt's birthday

was a recurrent motif in Navy Day speeches. Gleaves ended his

radio address for Navy Day, 1922, with a quotation of the 26th

President, almost identical to the words of the first:

We need to keep in a condition of preparedness especially as regards the Navy, not because we want war, but because we

desire to stand with those whose plea is listened to with

respectful attention. 32

These were the four pillars of the traditional Navy mission as "Shield of the Republic," holding lineage from Hamilton and

Washington. Each column had a shibboleth as capital, easily

recognized, employed again and again in the Navy's meager

interwar propaganda effort: "America must have a strong navy

to command respect"; "American neutrality requires naval

muscle"; "America's future depends upon an independent

marine"; and "Only preparedness can preserve peace." These

were the images chosen, subconsciously, from Hamilton's paper

number eleven from The Federalist; the bedrock of tradition, the

subliminal text of Navy scripture.

"The Handwriting on the Wall" was the Navy's collective

warning of America's potential fate if the "lessons" of its past

and the scriptual adjurations of the Navy mission were to be

ignored. Perhaps the most evocative and traditional warning

was made by Admiral Standley in his August 1940 radio address.

He began by prophesying that, with superior coalition, this

group would "wage a war of strangulation" against the

American economy. 33 In The Federalist, Hamilton warned of a similar fate, in which "national wealth would be stifled and lost,

and poverty and disgrace would overspread the country." 34 In

Standley's nightmare,

we should soon find ourselves driven from the markets of

the world. Our living standards would decline beneath

anything we had ever known. If we considered to live under
36

this form of economic tyranny, the least effort to live in any

degree of Political or Religious Liberty would bring down

upon us the specter of starvation or direct attack. The choice

would not be ours. 35

Standley's imagery was an unconscious, yet striking mimesis of

Hamilton:

It would be in the power of the maritime nations, availing

themselves of our universal impotence, to prescribe the

conditions of our political existence. 36

In the year of the Washington Conference, Gleaves revived

the imagery of "impotence" when he spoke of "a Naval Holiday

and an impotent Navy." 37 The results of the naval conference at

Washington had a devastating emotional effect on Navy

leadership. Watching the promise of American naval supremacy

hauled from slipway to scrapyard, gazing helplessly as a freeze

on Pacific base development wrecked the Orange war plan,

chafing at the ignorance of Congress and public to push for a fleet built to Treaty limits, officers could do little to halt the slide

of the Navy to second-class status. As early as 1922 Knox warned

in a fiery pamphlet of The Eclipse of American Sea Power}9, Sixteen years later, he wrote: "The failure to limit armaments by

international agreement is the greatest world tragedy since the

holocaust of the World War." 39 In 1922 Gleaves said that "the

United States got the full kick of the Conference Treaty";40 in

1938 Knox could agree that "America took it on the chin when it

came to a naval limitation."41 The relative erosion of American seapower between the wars

heightened the sonority of naval invocation of "The

Handwriting on the Wall." Furer's 1927 radio address rang

Cassandra-like:

Since the beginning of recorded history, no nation having

world contacts equivalent to those of the United States, has

long survived as a leading nation after losing sea power,

whether we consider the small world of Carthage, or the

ever larger worlds of Venice, Spain, Holland, Germany. All

declined because of lack of adequate sea power.42

By defining the Navy mission along a historical continuum

traceable to the very genesis of American foreign policy, the

Navy's leadership was able to cement an unbreachable
37

foundation for the interpretation of contemporary policy. Their

goal was to develop naval policy within the context of national

strategy. In doing so, these men—perhaps unwilling

ideologues—arrived at their own definition of national interests

and national strategy: their own vision of America.

The Legacy of Darwin

Social Darwinism had its heyday in the last decade of the 19th

and the first decade of the 20th centuries. As an explanation and

as an exculpation, it provided the "European World" with a doctrine at once more malleable and more modern than

traditional theories of "national interest." Used by American

leadership groups primarily to defend the necessity for what

Frederick Merk has termed the "Insular Imperialism" of 1898,

and its aftermath,43 Social Darwinism permeated the Navy

mission. Promoted by the writings of Mahan, the Navy's use of

Darwinian imagery had a profound, and traceable, influence on

the climate of political life. Decisions were made in an

atmosphere casually referrent to both Darwin and Mahan. The

Navy sensed "the spirit of the age," accepted its world view, and

reinforced its ethos. As Mahan said, at the Royal Naval College,

Dartmouth:

Man cannot escape the spirit of his age. It surrounds him as an atmosphere. It bears him as a current, sweeping him

continually into new conditions. These, which constitute his

changeful environment, even if they do not essentially,

though gradually, change his native character. 44

What may be said of a man may be enlarged to include a society.

The U.S. Navy embraced Social Darwinism in part because it embodied the prevailing spirit of the age, and so carried moral

imperative in national ethos; in part because it offered the Navy

a more expansive role in national life, and the making of

national future. The traditional motifs of the Navy mission as "Shield of the Republic" held scant appeal in an era devoid of

visible threat to established American interests and security.

Evolving overseas interests, cast in Darwinian market

metaphor, required naval protection. The generation of the

"Sons of Gunboats" could anticipate adventure in exotic scape,

and experience the sensation of status as agents of the American

variant of Mahan's paradigm: they felt themselves the cutting

edge of seapower in pursuit of empire.45
38

Social Darwinism as a moral justification of the Navy mission

began to recede after America's entry into war in 1917. The

German threat raised the stock of the "Shield" paradigm,

reviving traditional Hamiltonian perspective of the Navy's role.

After the armistice, the brief sway of the "Wilsonian" vision

created an expectation of the Navy as "Guardian" of a new

international order. Hughes and Lodge transmuted this

sweeping revision of the world political system into a more

strictly constructed set of international legal arrangements. The

limitation of naval armaments, as well as the four and nine

power treaties achieved at Washington, promised to usher in an

era of legal resolution to international conflict.

As cooperation replaced conflict as the perceived mainspring

of international relations, the postulates defining Social

Darwinism were discredited by example. Recent history had

produced a Great War that had seemed but the culmination of a process of "Darwinian" social evolution. Now, with peace and

justice triumphant, the prevailing mood among the recent allies

was one of relief. Civilization had been spared, the deadly cycle of

Darwinian struggle among nations had been broken. The world

had been given another chance. Social Darwinism, as a paradigm

associated with conditions before the Great War, no longer

simply described world dynamics; it created them. In order that

the world polity might move toward a bright future, shared

through cooperation and legal order, the paradigm of a natural

order rooted in struggle, founded on power, and principled

without mercy, must be forever interred.46

Postwar idealism buried the legacy of Darwin: a new age had

brought a new public spirit in American politics. To a degree, the

Navy ethos evolved to accept and reflect this new paradigm in

the national ethos. To a greater degree, the Navy kept alive the

vision, if not the politics, of Social Darwinism. In part, this

allegiance was because of the thorough indoctrination of the

works of Mahan to the leadership generation of the interwar era. Mahan's writing was infused with the imagery of Social

Darwinism:

All around us is strife; "the struggle of life," "the race of

life," are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their

significance till we stop to think about them. Everywhere

nation is arrayed against nation; our own no less than

others.47
39

By 1918, naval officers had grown accustomed to viewing the

"realities" of the international political system through a Darwinian lens. In this highly referent world view the legal

agreements of the Washington Treaty System were suspect, for

they in no way altered fundamental world dynamics. Nations

would continue to struggle for existence, to vie for supremacy;

and in this eternal competition, only the fittest would survive.

After the World War, three basic motifs of Social Darwinism

continued in Navy currency: the struggle for markets, the

struggle for living space, the struggle for racial supremacy.

On 28 July 1915, Rear Adm. A.M. Knight, president of the

Naval War College, presented a working definition of the

struggle for markets:

The present almost world-wide war appears to be a struggle

for industrial and commercial supremacy; or, more

concretely, for control of the markets and the carrying trade

of the world.48

In May 1918, only 6 months from the armistice, the Navy's

London Planning Section called "War the ultimate form of

economic competition." In their analysis, "the necessity for

markets" dominated "the national policies of the world" during

the 19th century. From their perspective, there was no doubt

that "the intensified economic struggle of the past fifty years has

led to the present war."49

Fifteen years later, even before the rise of the "revisionist"

dictatorships and the rearmament of the world, the Navy

leadership thought in terms of a world posited on a struggle for

economic advantage. In his annual lecture to the Naval War

College on "National Strategy," Dudley Knox, on 7 October

1932, spoke of a "titanic economic struggle." American national

strategy "must be predicted first of all upon the existence of

competition, especially in the economic field, as the fundamental

basis of national life." 50

Each of these pronouncements—prewar, war, and postwar

was privately expressed and confidentially held. Together they

represent as well a continuum of values expressed through time.

Knox was a student at the Naval War College in 1913, the same

year Knight took over as president. In 1918, as a member of the

Naval Planning Section in London, Knox drafted the

memorandum that spoke of history as "economic struggle." As

deliverer of the climatic lecture of the War College course of the
40

1930s, Knox handed a fully shaped world view to the future

leaders of the Second World War, as he had been given his by the

old generation of the War College before the First. A similar

continuity linked the other, salient motifs of Social Darwinism

through time, from generation to generation.

The Navy's vision of the struggle for living space was unrolled

by Capt. W.L. Rogers at a General Board meeting, 27 July 1915:

The world is now approaching a crisis of overcrowding

It is a reasonable belief that the present great war is one of a series to follow of comparable magnitude due to the

increasing population of the world As the world fills up

and strong and virile peoples find they must expand or

starve, the victors must finally challenge the United States. 51

The Naval Planning Section in London echoed this vision at the

end of the war, in Memorandum No. 21. Capts. F.H. Schofield,

Luke McNamee, and Dudley Knox, its authors, concluded that

"fundamental policies assume an aggressive aspect . . . with

nations having a great density of population, combined with a high rate of increase and a restricted area for expansion." 52 In a 1921 lecture delivered at the Naval War College, Capt. R.R.

Belknap characterized Japan as "an island power of prolific and

already crowded population," whose "teeming" people must

"gradually expand to the mainland." 53 Knox, writing in 1938,

came to much the same judgment: "Unquestionably, the

fundamental aspect of Japan's adventure on the continent is

economic. She seeks relief from overpopulation." 54 Rodgers was president of the Naval War College, 1911-13,

while Knox was a student, as well as Schofield. Belknap was

director of the Strategy Department at the War College, 1921-

23, and McNamee was its president from 1933-34. 55 Again, the

continuum of world view was linked by values transmitted

through the Newport nexus.

The material needs of societies have their corollary in the

spirit of peoples: what is called national character. In the Navy

motifs of Social Darwinism, the struggle for racial supremacy

was not only a causal factor in the struggle for markets and living

space, it was the key to success in material competition, the

mystical cipher of survival. In its international relations the

United States would inevitably face cultures, then called "races,"

possessed of the vital energy needed not only to survive, but to

surpass. These races were the natural enemies of America.
41

In 1910 Mahan compared both Japan and Germany to Sparta,

as "manifesting the same restless need for self-assertion and

expansion"; their national cultures, however unpleasant they

were made by possessing these qualities, were, "as an element of

mere force, whether in economics or in international polities,

superior." 56 Rodgers' memorandum of 1915 called nations like

Germany and Japan "strong and virile peoples," and, as "races,"

implied that they "are not altruistic but egoistic, and their

national policies are primarily selfish and are advanced only by

force." 57 Memorandum No. 21, in 1918, came to the same

findings: "when their racial characteristics are virile and

militaristic, and their form of government autocratic, strong

tendency towards forcible expansion must be expected.

Germany and Japan are nations which fulfill these conditions." 58

During the period between the two great wars, the Navy's

imagery of a coming struggle for racial, as well as economic,

supremacy focused primarily on Japan. Belknap, in 1921, spoke

of the possible "unification of the yellow race" under Japanese

suzerainty, "with effect too far-reaching on white civilization for

such a possible eventuality to be accepted. The outcome

threatens our race." 59 Twenty years later, Capt. W.D. Puleston,

biographer of Mahan and Director of Naval Intelligence, could

write of the Japanese character:

The basic cause of Japan's desire to obtain more territory is

innate and for that reason is more dangerous than if it had

been artificially created: it springs from the fecund, virile,

courageous and acquisitive Japanese people.60

This is a spiritual restatement of Mahan: the world view of a former age transplanted unaltered to another era. In similar

fashion, Adm. H.D. Yarnell's important 1938 memorandum,

"Situation in the Pacific," echoed almost word for word the

imagery of Memorandum No. 21, drafted in 1918. As a young

lieutenant commander, Yarnell served on the Naval Planning

Section in London; he was part of the writing of that wartime

document. Twenty years had not shaken Darwin from his world

view.61 The survival of "Darwinian" motifs in the Navy world view

created a texture of cynicism to the Navy ethos, and an

expectation of inevitable conflict in the Navy mission. The

combined triad of conflict over markets, living space, and racial

supremacy prompted the London Planning Section to conclude

that all national policies were rooted in two instincts:
42

(1) Self preservation, and

(2) Self interest62 as though nations were like enormous saurians, locked in combat

for survival in some Jurassic scene. This unstated sense of world

dynamics provoked a profoundly pessimistic definition of Navy

mission. Rodgers, in 1915, went so far as to suggest "that the

purpose of our Navy is to protect the nation from undue

economic pressure in the face of advancing populations."63 In

contrast to the Hamiltonian vision of the Navy mission, as the

agent of United States ascendancy in the hemisphere, the

equalizer of New World to Old, the Darwinian vision made the

Navy merely the agent of American survival in a spectral future

of successive world wars.

Law and Warfare

Before a victorious armistice thrust America into the ringcenter of the world order, the United States role in the legal

preservation and regulation of that order was narrowly

constructed. According to Hamilton's tetrarchal division of the

globe, America claimed ascendancy over the "hemisphere" of

the New World. The Monroe Doctrine created the legal

framework for a New World international system, or

oikoumene. By 1903, in the second Venezuelan crisis, the U.S.

battle fleet was able to sublimely cement Old World acceptance

of this concept on the fringes of international law. Within the

American sphere, the United States, ascendant, was able,

through the enforcement agencies of Navy and Marine Corps, to

act both as peacemaker and lawgiver.64

International global participation before 1917 was slight. The

active, though minor part played by U.S Marines in the Boxer

Rebellion was more an emblem of new-found American

membership in the "Imperial Club" than it was a sign of a policy

of legal and military "globalism."65 Succeeding transoceanic

displays of force—the cruise of the "Great White Fleet" and the

European cruises of 1910-13 —were unilateral forays, and

involved no legal negotiation. America's use of armed forces on

the world stage before 1917 was purely demonstrative.66

After Versailles, the United States, as an ex-member of a global military alliance, had accepted associations with the other

great powers, the traditional arbiters of the world order. As the

predominant postwar military power, the United States was

expected to take an active role in the legal preservation and
43

regulation of the international system: to arbitrate, to intervene,

to forcibly settle conflict between nations; not simply within the

American, but throughout the world, sphere. Between the wars,

the Navy's perceived peacetime mission diverged from this

expectation.

The mission of the U.S. Navy as peacemaker became a crucial

component of a mild propaganda effort. Between the

Washington Conference and the Munich crisis, Navy leadership

was reluctant to underscore the role of the fleet in general war. "I

believe that themes relating to the need of a Navy for possible

war will be harmful, and build up a widespread public opinion

against the Navy."67 So the Navy's chief interwar ideologue,

Dudley Knox, wrote in his instructions on the use of radio

propaganda. In Knox's opinion, "public opinion unquestionably

rules the country," and the Navy, in its public broadcasts, must at

all costs "studiously avoid" antagonizing "any American Society

devoted to the promotion of peace."68 Knox's propaganda

solution admitted of only two, public, Navy missions:

viz (1) the value of a Navy in promoting overseas

commerce, and (2) the Navy as a peacemaker. The Country

should know more of this diplomatic, peacemaking naval

function, and that the Navy is by far the greatest peacemaker

in its government.69

This was written in 1930. Throughout the 1920s, Navy Day

speeches reflected Knox's adjuration: to emphasize the Navy's

goal "to substitute law for war in the settlement of international

differences." 70 Those were also Gleaves' words in his Navy Day

broadcast of 1922. His role as recent Commander of the Asiatic

Fleet had required delicate, frontline diplomatic maneuvering in

Siberia. He did not hesitate to hammer home the Navy's part in

"the maintenance of order" in Vladivostock, or in stamping out

piracy in the China Seas, or in "protecting missionaries from

bandits," or in refugee relief and transportation from "the quay

in Smyrna," or in feeding the starving from Odessa to

Tienstien. 71 The Navy's peacemaking role was given pride of

place among Navy missions:

It is well to remind you that the Navy has never caused a war

or tempted the country to go to war. It has been a potent

factor in preventing war and in protecting lives and

property. The Navy has saved more lives and property than
44

it has ever destroyed. The Navy is a great constructive

force. 72

In casting for images of actual armed intervention by Navy and

Marines to enforce peace, Navy propagandists were forced,

during the interwar era, to call on ambiguous Caribbean

campaigns, most from the prewar age of "Dollar Diplomacy."

Any taint of "imperial" self-interest in these incidents was

ignored rather than denied. As Gleaves described these

expeditions "in Haiti and San Domingo; in Cuba and Nicaragua,

the Navy—and the Marines—has preserved law and order. It has built roads, school houses and hospitals and introduced

sanitation." 73 The missions of Law and Civilization, as Victorian

evolutionary throwbacks, survived as the Navy's phenotype of

the peacemaking mission. Within the Navy's world view, the

Latin American interventions of the gunboat era, and the

international uses of military force suggested after 1919, differed

only in degree. Unilateral or multilateral, the Navy's vision of its

peacemaking mission evolved from a notion of American

"idealism," and not from a strong belief in international law:

The United States is the first nation in the history of the

world to practice idealism in its international affairs. What

other nation can point to altruistic policies such as those

pursued by the United States toward the Philippines, Cuba,

Santo Domingo, Haiti, China? Perhaps if we become strong

enough at sea we can indoctrinate the world with American

idealism that unselfishness in international affairs will

become a habit and an accepted element in the morality of

nations 74

Tempered by the postulates of Hamilton, the Navy was

tempted to view the concept of an international legal order as another "instrument of European greatness" by which,

according to Publius, the European sphere, "by force and by

fraud," "extended her dominion over them all." 75 Furer's 1927

vision of "American idealism" revealed an almost Hamiltonian

mistrust of the European oikoumene. In assuming that

American values were inherently superior to those of other

cultures, Navy leaders implicitly rejected American submission

to an external framework of international conduct. This notion

was reinforced in the early 20th century by the "survival" and

"struggle" motifs of Social Darwinism. Not only, by tradition,
45

was the world run by a moral standard inferior to the American;

the remorseless conflict of nation against nation was beyond the

control of any supranational legal framework. The outbreak of

European war in 1914 merely confirmed these essential

postulates. To American naval officers, the external world was

as full of dangers as it was of cynicism. As W.L. Rodgers,

president of the Naval War College, wrote in 1915:

International Law, as a rule of conduct, is more practicable

today, than it will be in the near future. As the world fills up

with strong and virile peoples, the code of international

manners which we call "international law" will become as of

little force as is the code of individual manners in a panicstricken crowd. 76

The deep thread of pessimism in Rodgers' vision stemmed in

part from the gathering apocalyptic quality of the Great War. To

equate the law of nations with the vagaries of "manners," like

Erasmus regarding our folly, was to assume that the world order

possessed a natural state, unchanged by cycles of war and peace.

If the United States were to act as peacemaker, this mission

should be confined to its own sphere: America and the transPhilippine Pacific. Within that system, peace, and law, would be

American.77 After the Great War the Navy continued to define its mission

in terms of the defense of national interests. An equal mission

priority to enforce an international legal system was considered

a derisory role for America's Navy. For a brief moment,

immediately after the armistice, a small claque of officers led by

Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, William Veazie Pratt,

were swept away by the spirit of a victorious postwar world. On

11 November 1918 these men submitted a memorandum to the

CNO, "Proposed Plans for Establishment of League of Nations

Army and Navy." At its heart Pratt's concept was one of AngloAmerican world codominion, with supporting roles allotted to

the minor allies. A predominant English-speaking navy would

rule the seas and perform much the same maritime regulation as had the Royal Navy throughout the 19th century. The United

States and Great Britain would each contribute an equal share. In

this fashion, arms limitation would be assured. 78

Pratt's impulse was to replace international competition with

cooperation, realized through the instrument of superpower

collaboration. In 1919 this was a simple and realistic
46

arrangement, for the United States and Great Britain were the

only first-rank military and industrial powers and their

collective naval power could easily have dominated the globe.

The arms limitation agreement signed in Washington 3 years

later stopped short of real arms control and merely restricted the

most superficial index of seapower, the capital ship. The naval

treaties of 1922 and 1930 were the only movements the United

States made between the wars to participate in a formal, legal

framework of a world order. The nation was not ready for

anything approaching Anglo-American codominion.

The Navy was even less ready. Apart from Pratt and his

acolytes in the CNO's Office, Adm. William S. Sims, then

president of the Naval War College, continued to champion

Anglo-American friendship as he had since his famous Guildhall

speech in 1910. 79 Sims' was a minority opinion in the service.

His Anglophilia was mistrusted, especially so by Adm. William

S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations. 80 Benson still judged

British motives along Darwinian and Hamiltonian lines: they

were fierce competitors, and they had always destroyed their

commercial rivals, even those their allies:

It should be clearly and constantly borne in mind that a fixed

and continuous aim of British diplomacy ... is to further the

interests of British commerce at the expense of every other

nation, whether friend or enemy.81

At the same time that Pratt's group was discussing a future

world order based on Anglo-American codominion, the U.S.

Naval Planning Section was discussing a future war with the

British Empire. In Memorandum No. 67, dated 21 November

1918, Knox, McNamee, and Schofield concluded that the

"natural state" of the world had been unchanged by global war.

The United States and Great Britain were rivals whose interests

must inevitably conflict. Cooperation would never supplant

competition; and competition too often leads to war. "These are

the facts of the case irrespective of the state of the Entente

Cordiale existing between the two countries." 82 Navy, as well as nation, rejected an international mission after

1919. The Navy followed the prevailing public mood, and

emphasized its role as peacemaker and lawgiver within a traditionally demarcated American sphere. Beyond the

boundary posts of strategic interest, the Navy mission embraced
47

the active, though unilateral, defense of American commercial

interests, as on the Yangtze. As one of the twin naval

stanchions supporting an international legal system the United

States would have been forced to accept two revisionist

postulates in its world view: codominion with its traditional

rival and ancient enemy and the authority of an external ethos, a superior legal code. America, and its Navy, was unequal to such

subordination.

The World Island

"Mission" reached its ultimate evolution before Pearl Harbor

with the paradigm of the "world island." Autochthonous to the

Navy, it represented the final blend of motifs in the making of

the Navy mission before the watershed of world war. Borrowing

its imagery in part from each of three basic antecedent

paradigms, the "world island" was the most completely realized

metaphor created by the Navy to illuminate its role in an era

when the concept of a "national strategy" was publicly despised.

It was as the metaphoric hub of the Navy's concept of national

strategy that the paradigm of the "world island" was formally

developed. In 1932, 1933 and 1934, Capt. D.W. Knox delivered

an annual autumn lecture at the Naval War College entitled

"National Strategy."83 As the existential postulate of American

identity, the image of the "world island" was the centerpiece of

Knox's thesis. He attributed its invention to William Howard

Gardiner, although his language reveals roots extending far

below the topsoil of the contemporary scene, reaching down to

Humboldt and Hamilton:

. . . the United States is analogous to a great world island near

the middle of the single great world ocean, with natural

ocean routes radiating east, west and south to the three other

principal commercial regions of the world. 84

So America was favored by Destiny, like Rome and

Constantinople, to become the nexus of world intercourse, at the

center of a globe-girdling temperate zone: "the isothermal

zodiac." In unconscious echo of Publius, Knox divided the earth

into four spheres, with the United States at the hub, reaching out

in compass sweep, embracing the world periphery, as though

the great globe itself was but a flat projection, a Mercator-like

reality with America at its center. This was the "basic condition"
48

of world dynamics, the "cardinal predicate of external national

policy and strategy." 85 Here was the metastasis of the Navy mission that succeeded

the Great War. Gone was the sway of what W.L. Rodgers in 1915

mimetically called America's "splendid isolation," 86 by which

the United States would guarantee through its naval bulwark the

security of a fortress-like American system. Gone was the

London Planning Section's vision of the Navy mission "to

ensure our own preservation." 87 Knox, by a decisive inversion of imagery, turned both the

Hamiltonian and Darwinian interpretations of the Navy

mission outward. By redefining the context of American identity

from inward-facing to outward-gazing, he transformed the

implications of the Navy mission from the defense of the

American system to the global extension of intrinsic American

interests. His vision of America as a "world island" created an

essential corollary for national strategy: "It at once lifts us out of

that narrow smothering assumption as to the Navy's mission,

which is carried in the commonly accepted meaning of the term

'National Defense.'"88

By defining the United States as a "world island," and not

merely a separate sphere, a New World, an American island

irrevocably riven from Europe, Africa, and Asia, Knox

proclaimed that the time had come to fulfill the promise

inherent in the Hamiltonian vision of America, "to dictate the

terms of the connection between the old and the new world!"89

Now, the United States, and its commerce, need not simply be

defended. America, the triumphant economic giant, must extend

itself to the periphery of the planet. In proclaiming a rejuvenated vision of American Destiny, no less manifest for its

emphasis on "active commerce," Knox separated what he

named "national interests" from the traditional shibboleths of

foreign policy. At one rhetoric stroke, he detached the Navy

from its strict constitutional role of supporting government

policy, to a far-ranging mission of defending national interests:

all inclusive. National strategy, Knox argued, was the formal

framework for extending national interests through war and

diplomacy. If so-called "national policies" had become, through

twisted usage and tired convention, "more nearly fiction than

fact," then they must be discarded. Both the Monroe Doctrine

and the Open Door Policy were scrapped by Knox as realistic

bases for national strategy. The Navy had a calling higher than

the litany-like support of dead slogans:
49

To be sound, policies must be firmly rooted in national

interests; policies so based will permanently survive

irrespective of temporary vagaries of political theories; and

naval officers must base our national strategy on inherent

national interests, rather than on vaguely defined policies.90

As a world island, American national interests were

indivisible from American maritime interests:

The maintenance of these inherent maritime interests,

essential to national economic life, requires an adequate

American merchant marine and navy together with suitably

placed insular bases The Navy's mission is mainly linked

to the security of our maritime interests, and thus our

national economy.91

This was taking Hamilton's adjuration to create an "active

commerce" to its final extension: the rim of the world. Knox's

appreciation of "adequate" encompassed a U.S. Navy, at a minimum, 10 percent larger than the British and fully twice the

size of the Japanese Fleet.92 No less than a complete arc of bases

in the Western Pacific, including the Solomons as well as the

Philippine archipelago, providing alternate offensive axes,

would satisfy American maritime interests in the Pacific; in the

Atlantic, the acquisition of Trinidad and part of French Guiana

was necessary to secure these interests.93 A fully developed

network of forward bases was essential, in Knox's vision, for the

fulfillment of national strategy.

These specific requirements, ironically, did not differ in

degree from those of the General Board in 1915, nor of the

London Planning Section in 1918. The critical distinction was

one of world view. The Knox of 1932 had matured from the

Knox of 1918. Rodgers, to the General Board, drew a plan for an

American fortress, besieged by "strong and virile peoples." "The

duty of the Navy is to preserve the United States from

unendurable economic pressure."94 With equal emphasis,

"preservation" was the guiding image of Knox, McNamee and

Schofield in their 1918 memorandum to Benson.95 Fourteen

years later Knox offered to the students of the Naval War

College a different kind of promise. When he spoke of "insular

bases." their functional imagery no longer described a defensive

perimeter against Japanese and European "pressure"; he threw

out, with an expansive gesture, the phrase "a chain of islands,"
50

like a "broad highway" to rich markets and economic wealth.96

Like Whitman's vision:

I chant the world on my Western sea,

I chant copious the islands beyond,

thick as stars in the sky,

I chant America the mistress,

I chant a greater supremacy 97

Knox transformed Darwinian pejoration by infusing a tired

creed with the energy of a distinctly American brand of Manifest

Destiny. "The World Island" is a phrase redolent of early

America, of Benton and Whitney and Gilpin, as well as Humboldt and Hamilton. Knox united the notion of

international "economic competition," interwoven as it was into

the tapestry of the Navy mission, with a positive, expansive

promise of American destiny. As a commercial and maritime

realization of America's role in the world system, as an

"American entrepot," Knox drew unconscious inspiration from

Hamilton.98 Knox previsioned the United States as a world

leader through naval, as well as economic, strength. In this, he

extended America beyond the limits imposed by 19th-century

national strategy.

America must accept a realistic relationship with the rest of

the world, and scrap its distancing idealism, if ever it hoped to

achieve a predominant place. The United States, Knox

demanded, "must eliminate altruism from its national

strategy." 99 By this, he meant simply that America must, like all

other nations, look out for its own interests:

... it behooves our own government to play the game of

national strategy under the universally accepted rules if the

interests of America are to be preserved and world welfare is

to be truly advanced. The world will profit most from a strong America. 100

If the United States were ever to join a world order, it must do so

from a position of strength; by implication, superior strength.

In a single lecture, Knox managed to fuse all three coexistent

paradigms of a Navy mission into a single, alloyed image.

Reaction to his presentation at Newport can be gauged in part

by his return, 3 years in a row, to score the same points to

succeeding classes at the War College. 101 In 1934 Capt. Milton

Davis, head of the Department of Intelligence, wrote to Knox:
51

The only criticism I could see in your lecture was that you

approached the problem as an imperialist. Many of our

people are not imperialists and some look upon your views

as rather extreme. However, they were the views we were

brought up on under Theodore Roosevelt, and many of us

feel they are pretty good after all. 102

That teachers at the War College could still praise policies a postwar world had branded as "imperialist" reveals the

continuity of the Navy mission from the generation of Mahan,

through to the generation that would fight a global war at

decade's end.

Divergence between public mood and Navy mission between

the wars obliged the service to share its beliefs in strict privacy.

"National Strategy," submitted to the Naval Institute in 1933,

was rejected for the award of prize essay, or even of honorable

mention. In spite of the support of major voices in the Naval

Establishment, including Adms. Fiske, Jones, and Schofield, the

Board of Control of the Naval Institute hesitated to draw

controversy, especially at a time when the Navy was fighting for

its fiscal life. With the Vinson-Trammell Act not yet through

the Senate, the Navy hierarchy stopped short of sanctioning

Knox's exuberant portrayal of national strategy. To the

contrary, those essays awarded were, in Knox's excoriating

prose, plainly "defeatist," whose "weak-kneed advice is most

extraordinary as coming from a group of naval officers." 103

Even more symptomatic of the Navy's fear of forever

alienating public opinion was a rebuttal written by Knox in 1932

for the Secretary of the Navy. Answering an article by Charles

Beard for Harper's Magazine, "Our Confusion Over National

Defense," Knox was forced to take exception to the historian's

accusation that the Navy was attempting to create "a Navy

strong enough to defend American trade everywhere and to

carry on and win a major operation in any waters of the world

against any power or combination of powers." 104

In his reply, Knox averred unequivocally that "I am not aware

that any naval officer in recent times has seriously advanced such

an extreme view of our naval needs." 105 Yet Knox was, himself,

the very officer who implicitly described the Navy mission in

those terms. Beard, had he been able to attend Knox's

presentations at the War College, could not have drawn a better

summary.
52

Ultimately, no matter its public protestations and placatory

ploys, the Navy was with Knox. By Munich, if not earlier, the

Navy leadership was speaking publicly in imagery not far

removed from the thesis of that decisive lecture, "National

Strategy." 106 Privately, in confidential correspondence, leaders

sought ways to build up fleet strength. With the Washington

and London Treaties due to expire on 31 December 1936, the

Navy, in the perceptions of its leaders, would at last be freed

from the ropes of the ratios, cut to lengths of 5:5:3. In 1935

Standley, then CNO, wrote to the president of the Naval War

College, E.C. Kalbfus, concerning the post-Treaty naval building

program for the United States. Kalbfus unhesitatingly

advocated that the Navy "strive for a higher numerical ratio."

His advice regarding Japan revealed a continuity of mission

requirements:

The present treaty ratio is satisfactory in so far as a BLUE

defensive war is concerned, but it is considered inadequate

for a trans-Pacific offensive campaign. In the latter case, a ratio of at least 2:1 in favor of BLUE is indicated. We must

strive to create a national sentiment in favor of increasing

the navy: the opportunity should be seized to build up to a point at which war could be carried to ORANGE. 107

This was the same ratio recommended by Knox to the General

Board in 192 1. 108 Through a small irony of Fate, it was to be the

exact ratio needed by the United States to turn the tide of the

Pacific War in 1943- 1944. 109 The Washington and London

Treaties limited naval armaments; they were unable to curb the

Navy's sense of its mission, and the unalterable definition of the

tools necessary to its fulfillment. Kalbfus was writing in the

floodtide of national, public sentiment against embroiling

America in any future foreign war. The Navy mission, and the

men who held to it, marched to a different cadence, and with a more certain step.

In just 3 years the degenerative slippage of the world order

toward a repeat performance, in less than a generation, of its

former folly seemed a vindication of the motifs of the Navy

mission. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly, in 1938 Knox could

write of "a world seething with a spirit of great unrest and

aggression," as though the hostile forces of a former age were

again gathering to threaten America. 110 That same year, H.E.

Yarnell, as CINCASIATIC, wrote a long memorandum for
53

Roosevelt describing his plan for an allied quarantine operation

against Japan. The coalition of Great Britain, France, the

Netherlands, and China would be led by the transoceanic naval

power of the United States. As Knox renewed the legacy of

Darwin, Yarnell revived something of the spirit of America as leader of a world order, in law and warfare. 111 When Standley

spoke over CBS radio on 10 August 1940 and called for direct

military aid to Great Britain, he spoke of the ocean as "a broad

highway" for America in its intercourse with friendly nations;

and, equally, as an open path for the enemy to blockade America

and strangle its economy. 112 In unconscious litany, he intoned

the alembic imagery of Knox.

By the end of the interwar era, the image of the "world

island," America, reaching out across both great global oceans to

help its friends and hold at bay its gathering enemies, had

permeated the Navy mission, and subsumed the traditional, the

Darwinian, and the internationalist components that had

uneasy coexistence for a generation. The image of America as secure sanctuary, isolated and apart—a peaceful New World

removed from the turbulence of the old—had lost its last

adherents. As Furer said, on Navy Day, 1927:

The United States is helpless to withdraw from the world

and live in isolation, even if we so desired —It would be as impossible to pursue such a policy as it would be for you to

build a wall around your community and live out of contact

with the outside world. 113

Even if that defensive perimeter were to encompass all of Latin

America, as well as the trans-Philippine Pacific, it could not be

defended. Rodgers' and Knight's 1915 vision of America's future

had been recast on an external mold. Knox shifted America's

perceived place from periphery to center. By focusing for a generation on both Atlantic and Pacific war strategies the Navy

came to accept, and then to repeat, the outlines of a new world

view. The Navy, at the end of the interwar era, had come to

define America as the coming center stage toward which the

world's conflicts would be drawn, "as to a cockpit." 114 The

Navy's perceived mission became one of extension: east, west,

south; no longer simply to bar the oceans to the enemy, but to

secure their waters for America's passage. America could not

afford to wait; it must sally forth to meet the world on its own,

transoceanic, terms.

55

PART II

MISSION

Mission, between the wars, was created in "the mortar-andstone" 1 shell overlooking Narragansett Bay: the Naval War

College. Within its walls each year, officer classes were offered a course in indoctrination. This, the indoctrination of mission,

was the final stage in Command acculturation. An officer was

instilled with a body of basic beliefs, translated into patterns of

behavior that defined the Navy as a corporate allegiance, at

Annapolis. Ethos was forged in its elementary, corporate form

at the Naval Academy. Mission, the edge of Ethos, was tempered

at the War College.

Mission, the ultimate abstraction of collective behavior in the

pursuit of a shared vision, was reserved for future Command

leadership. In 1924, Capt. J.R. Poinsett Pringle wrote:

The Mission of the War College is to assist in the training of

officers for high command. The College aims to instruct

officers in the principles of Naval Warfare 2

This was the official line, the public verse. In informal effort the

War College achieved more. Yes, the course at Newport taught

middle-ranking officers "how to" fight a fleet; "how to" estimate

a situation; "how to" make command decisions; "how to" draw

plans and issue orders; even, "how to" avoid international

incidents

Beyond the Art of the Admiral, etiquette and estimate,

Newport inspired esprit. Command spirit infected the place; the

War College instructed less than it instilled. In transcending

"training," the War College indeed achieved more.

In effect, the War College, between the wars, was charged

with the evolution of Command identity, of escalation beyond
56

professional world view. If the course could not transform

engineers into envoys, gunnery chefs into marechals* Newport

at least enveloped the student in an atmosphere of historical

decision, redolent of moments when the fate of nation and of

empire was laid to the scales. From war games to lectures on

"National Strategy," from "The Estimate of the Situation" to the

drafting of a thesis, each man was sublimely freed to fantasize of

supreme command; for the first time in his career, urged

officially to link professional identity with national politics, high

policy, and grand strategy.

It was the education of the ideology of mission.

*Thus keeping Napoleon's promise that "every French soldier carries in his cartridge pouch

the baton of a Marshal of France." E. Blaze, La Vie militaire sous /'Empire.
57

CHAPTER V

THE EVOLUTION OF MISSION

The indoctrination of Mission was imbued on three levels:

three evolutionary branches developing three distinct, though

complementary, species of naval officer. These patterns of

acculturation evolved successively. By the end of the interwar

era, they formed a layered network on which the War College

student climbed, from lowest to highest branch. His personal

evolution mirrored the evolution of education.

"Navy, know thyself"; so Luce admonished in 1911, in his

"Delphian injunction." 1 The basic branch in the acculturation of

command was "the study of our profession—the art of war." 2 This was the first great task of the War College when Rear Adm.

Stephen Bleecker Luce, founder and first president, was the

Navy's Nestor.

We are told the naval officer of today is a "fighting

engineer," and this mockery of truth has been accepted by

the profession. On this pernicious theory, naval education

now concerns itself with the engine room and the battery

alone. There it stops. Naval education now concerns itself

with the training of arms or legs only. It takes no thought of

brains. 3

In an era when there were more applications to the new School

of Steam Engineering than to the War College, Luce's accusation

underscored a reality: the Navy of the early part of this century

was a profession of the technician. In order to create "competent

strategists," men able to command fleets as well as engine rooms

and 12-inch turrets, Luce championed the War College cause. Exclaiming: "We do not understand our own profession,!" his

warning was unequivocal. "Your profession is the art of war, and

nature will be avenged if you violate one of its laws in

undertaking to make a part greater than the whole." Nature, or
58

the enemy. No wonder that he should cry, at the total

subjugation of naval art to naval technology:

This is a total eclipse of the mental vision.

You cannot even see the grim humor in it! 4

First, the War College had to teach the Navy to fight: not as a machine, but as a military polity; a flexible force capable of

shaping strategy to suit political objectives in war. War was

taught as a complete process, not simply as a prelude to the

climatic clash of dreadnoughts. The first, and necessary,

evolutionary step was to teach officers to perceive of themselves

as potential strategists as well as seadogs.

This was the lowest of the branches, but the most basic: the

beginning.

If Luce was the Navy's nestorial figure, then Adm. William

Sowden Sims, a generation later, was its wrathful Achilles.

Returning triumphant from the European War, he refused the

CNO post and the higher fleet commands and retreated, sulking,

to his granite tent on Goat Island. More than he wished to lead

the Navy, he dreamed of its reform. Most desperately, he fought

to make the War College the cultural nexus of the Navy.

It is my conviction that the War College should be made the

principle asset of the Navy . . . my convictions are so strong

that I would urge that the needs of the College be given

precedence over all other demands upon the Department,

even if such a course can be carried out only by actual

reduction of the size of the Fleet 5

These were strong words. Where Luce advised, Sims adjured.

"Ships and equipment mean nothing," the modern Argive

declared, without "brains," without officers "trained in the art of

command and coordinated effort." 6 Luce pleaded for more

officers "to take up the study of the art of war"; Sims demanded

"a definite policy that hereafter no officer not a War College

graduate will be assigned to any important position, either

ashore or afloat." 7 As Sims sought to expand the institutional role of the War

College, he pushed to extend its indoctrinative role in the

making of ethos: vertical, as well as horizontal, evolution. In his

conception of the Course, he included, in the subject list:
59

3. The mission of the Navy. Which would include

the exposition of the Navy's role as related

to other functions of the Government.

4. History as affecting the above subject. 8 By 1919 'the art of war" and "the art of command" were

recognized as the fundamental, not the firmamental, objectives

of the War College Course. Sims perceived a higher mission for

his service than readiness for, and efficiency in, battle. This was

the intermediate branch: the forging of the identity of the naval

officer as an agent of policy formulation as well as execution.

Sims and the younger men under his tutelage, his "Band of

Brothers," stressed the role of the War College in preparing

officers for the formulation of war plans: the range of

operational option that extends the contingencies of National

Strategy.9 By expanding the horizons of America's perceived

military capabilities the Navy would, implicitly, propel policy

initiatives outward. In testing the limits of America's strategic

naval weapon, the War College could seat the scope on the barrel

of Washington's foreign policy, if not its political target.

The evolutionary mutation towards the third branch of the

indoctrination of Mission occurred in the early 1930s. The

officer to first insinuate this genetic watershed in world view

was Capt. D.W. Knox. In his seminal lecture, "National

Strategy," delivered in 1932, 1933, and 1934, he openly posited a revolutionary thesis: that the Navy should define "our national

strategic outlook upon inherent national interests rather than

upon vaguely defined policies." 10 The Navy must become the

dynamo of American strategy: advocate as well as agent and

advisor. As he expressed his concept under "confidential"

classification, he felt secure in skirting the behavioral canons of

the political sector of the Navy ethos:

. . . there should not be any shade of disloyalty on our part in

fully supporting the national policies as currently

interpreted with due authority.

But I conceive it to be equally our duty and solemn trust

that we should use for the benefit of the country the

knowledge and judgment which professional experience

gives us in regard to national policies. As an integral and

important element in the National Government, the Navy

is duty bound in the formulation of national strategy. 11
60

Not even Sims had come out so strongly in support of the

political mission of the Navy. How well Knox knew of Navy

leverage in Washington; for in early January 1915, he and

Bradley Fiske, Aide for Operations, hammered out their joint

plan for an Office of Chief of Naval Operations, and pushed it

through Congress over the protests of the teetotaling Secretary

of the Navy, Josephus Daniels! 12 In his maturity, Knox was able

to draw from his dedication to the Navy mission and lay his

vision clearly to the future leadership of his service. This was the

origin of the third branch.

Like wily Odysseus, Knox had insinuated the Navy into the

conceptual citadel of national decisionmaking. The mission of

the War College, and so, of the Navy, had evolved through three

strategic tiers: from Operations, to Planning, to Policy.

This pattern of supraimpositionary evolution was reflected by

the public imagery of Newport convocation and graduation

addresses at each stage. Rear Adm. Austin M. Knight, president

of the college, addressed the opening course for the Class of

January 1914, at the watershed between the indoctrination level

of operational strategy and strategic planning. Knight

instinctively defined the role of the War College in the

acculturation of ethos when he suggested that the course at

Newport "aims to teach not so much right living, as right

thinking,—from which it is believed that right living will

result." 13 This is a simple, but serviceable, demarcation of the

education of mission:

What the College aims to give you, then, is not a set of

precepts but a course of training; not rules, but principles;

not action, but preparation for action. 14

Here Knight departed from the education of the first branch,

"involving instructive principles of strategy and tactics." He

announced at this, the first full-year course ever to be offered at

the college, that "we shall soon be prepared to furnish officers

who can furnish war plans." In this, he implied that Newport

would become the campus of operational training and, soon, the

nursery of future naval policy: "Our hope is to furnish

Commanders-in-Chief [operational] and Chiefs of Staff

[preparatory] who will be well equipped to prepare such

plans ... an output of officers fitted to prepare plans." 15 An ex

officio member of the General Board, and a close associate of

Bradley Fiske, then Aide for Operations, Knight may well have
61

put a double meaning to the phrase, Chiefs of Staff; implying

that the War College would, in future, shape "the character of a General Staff." In precisely one year the Office of Chief of Naval

Operations entered the Naval Establishment through the

midwifery of Fiske and Knox. Not quite a full-blown General

Staff, the new office was still the first formal agency of the

service charged with the formal authority in the "preparation

and readiness of plans for use in war . . . ." 16 The second watershed of mission, from strategic planning to

the formulation of strategic policy: from naval to national, may

be glimpsed in the imagery of a 1932 speech. Intended for

Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams, the graduation

polemic was ghostwritten by D.W. Knox. The address stressed

the role of the War College in increasing the "efficiency of the

fleet" through "professional perfection" and "teamwork."

These objectives, Knox wrote, were "the indoctrination which

evolves at the War College, is taken to the Fleet, and is further

developed there." 17 This was only a reiteration of the first

branch of the ideology of mission. His argument for the role of

the War College in the Navy mission was extended, when "we

have also to consider the many political matters which have

inevitable naval relationships." 18 Adams, Knox's mouthpiece,

then came to the central thesis, resonant of the reasoning in

"National Strategy" delivered for the first time at Newport that

year:

While the prime purpose of the Navy of our country is to

support the national policies, it is obvious that the very

formulation of such policies must require naval

consideration Naval officers must be prepared, as a matter of duty, to give such assistance in the evolution of

national policies. 19

Knox reaffirmed the role of the college in the investiture of

mission, this mission, from generation to generation of officers.

The "mortar-and-stone" of Newport sheltered one of the key

intellectual components in the maintenance of American global

stature; for Knox, a "happy coincidence" that the institutional

role of the college took root in the service "at a time when our

country found its place as a leading world power."20

The role of the War College in the perceived making of

mission reached its apogee in the mid-1950s. Capt. Leonard

James Dow, head of the Course of Advanced Study in Strategy
62

and Sea Power from 1953 to 1956, addressed the War College

Class at its commencement that June. The imagery of his speech

marked the logical culmination of Knox's vision a quarter

century before. Now, openly and proudly, Dow put the concept

of training for higher command from naval to national

leadership: "It is not beyond conceivance that we might have a future President of the United States right here in our midst."21 No longer were the nation's armed services simply an integral

eccentric in the machinery of policy formulation:

A nation's military power has become the panacea to be

relied upon to settle all issues, A nation's military strength

has become the criterion of its ability to survive. Military

strength and war potential have become the stabilizers of

the peace. 22

The nation's armed services were now at the very center of

national strategy, and "the men who minister the National

Policy must thoroughly understand war and conflict, and the

meaning of military power." 23 In Dow's postwar equation,

"military and civil leadership" were now coequal partners. If

anything, neostrategic questions, those concerning nuclear

weapons, had unquestioned pride of place; and, by implication,

so had military leadership:

The United States has accepted the role of leader for the free

nations of the world. Our military leaders and our statesmen

must be properly trained to assume these grave

responsibilities. 24

So, the cresting of naval, and national, mission; with the War

College, for a brief cold war moment, regarded as an Imperial

Academy for Pax Americana. This was the product of an

evolutionary process. As the college matured, its perceived sense

of mission grew in sophistication. By 1941 successive

generations had demarcated an expansive potential role for the

Navy. The course of the world war but confirmed the gathering

expectation, within the Newport-indoctrinated service, of its

inherent centrality in the making of national strategy. When

America made its metamorphosis from great power to global

power, by inculcation as well as inclination, the Navy was

prepared for the displacement.
63

CHAPTER VI

THE COURSE

In the War College Course—the lectures, the reading, the

theses, the doctrine, the intellectual fraternity through

generations of classes—may be traced the patterns of evolution,

and the progressive mutation of the education of mission.

The Course was the structural center, the intellectual

ironwork of Newport. Before 191 1, the Course lasted only some

4 months: the annual "Summer Conference." Stripped of the

rigorous expectations of a formal term, the setting of the

Summer Conference never quite shed the sensations of a seaside

resort. Time was too short, the pace too relaxed, for the lasting

imprint of indoctrination. 1 With the coming of the "Long

Course" in 1911, the chance for a comprehensive curriculum was

created. The Long Course involved a few students only, who

stayed at Newport after the recess of the Summer Conference in

October. They used the extra 12 months for the study "of a much

fuller treatment of the subjects included in the existing Summer

Course," although it was admitted that the new course "involved

no new features." In its 3 years of coexistence with the Summer

Conference, the Long Course graduated only sixteen students, an

average of five a year. 2 Real academic approaches were not adopted until 1914. Then,

by order of the Secretary of the Navy, the War College Course

was organized into two annual classes, set to commence in

January and June of each year. At President Knight's request,

"officers in attendance were grouped in classes of fifteen each."

The essential components of what would become the traditional

War College curriculum were delineated by Knight. Fully six

times the number of officers would benefit from the complete

course. 3 No longer would the granite, Atlantic-washed walls serve

simply as a forum for the Navy's leadership, where they might

come, with the General Board in tow, to tackle a "strategic

problem" through a balmy ocean summer. After 1914, and
64

especially after the wartime intercollegium of 1917-1919, the

college achieved its primary mutation. From forum it was

transformed into a stoa\ the college passed from an era of open

dialogue and debate to a long period of rigorous, and rigid,

instruction. 4 After the birth of the War Plans Division in 1919,

the War College lost its informal, though important, influence

in strategic planning. Newport was no longer the "conference

center" for strategic planning: the preeminent, though muted,

operational function of the War College was removed to

Pennsylvania Avenue.

During the era of the summer conferences, discussion of the

"burning" issues of the day was the heart of the experience:

Should the new battleships be given all-big-gun armament

(1905), were armored cruisers obsolete (1907), should the Navy

put in for battle cruisers (1912)?5 The annual "strategic

problem" was the only real chance the service had each year to

plan for potential war, and test the consequences. The watershed

of war, real war, displaced this arrangement. Building programs

and war planning became the prerogatives of an expanding

Office of the CNO.6 The president of the college remained a member of the General Board into the 1930s, yet the Board was

to lose much of its advisory clout to the CNO.7 In origin and in purpose, Newport was never intended to

fulfill even a part of the function of a general staff. That it did so,

in conjunction with the General Board in the early part of the

century, was a necessity forced by the fears of Congress and

Secretariat, obsessed with the specter of an American brand of

"Prussian Militarism." 8 As Knight observed, when War College

president, there was but one proper role for Newport:

The College does not assume and cannot accept any

administrative functions, since administration is action, and

what the College stands for is not action, but preparation for

action.9

How well the college could dispense with operational,

"administrative" distractions! The sea change began in 1914;

after the Great War, the character of the War College Course

reflected a clear shift from consultation to indoctrination. In

growing complexity, the evolution of the curriculum highlighted

the postwar perception of Newport's role: the stoa of high

command.
65

Departmental emphasis on COMMAND, STRATEGY,

TACTICS, and INTERNATIONAL LAW topics remained

unaltered from an earlier era. In 1910, the last strictly "summer"

year, the 4-month Course was a relaxed menu. For the first time,

the "Estimate of the Situation" and the "Formulation of Orders"

were introduced, "adapted almost entirely from the German

Army system." This marked the first formal approach to

COMMAND methodology. STRATEGY was subsumed by the

"Main Problem," and TACTICS by a series of chart and board

maneuvers played on the game board. There were eight lectures

and five questions in INTERNATIONAL LAW. 10 In 1919 Sims

recast the "Staff Organization" from departmental emphasis

along informal faculty lines to a strict framework of academic

department and Chain of Command. The curriculum burgeoned.

COMMAND, as a Department, now embraced

Principles of Command

Estimate of the Situation

Formulation of Orders

Communications

Organization and Administration

Principles of Plan Making

Doctrine, principles of

Lecture Course

Combined Operations,

while the

STRATEGY Department focused on

Policy

Strategy

Logistics

Scouting and Screening

Chart Maneuvers,

and the

TACTICS Department

continued to run through series of Tactical Maneuvers and

Tactical Problems,

and the

INTERNATIONAL LAW Department expanded to suit the

spirit of an age imbued with the vision of an omnibenevolent

international legal order. 11
66

There were other gross indicators to measure the widening

scope of the curriculum lens. During the 1936-1937 term, for

example, the Class was presented 93 lectures, compared to the 8

heard in 1910. Compared with the single strategic "problem"

and a clutch of tactical games in prewar conferences, the War

College after the Armistice took up gaming on casino scale. In

1919 alone, the January and June classes racked up a total of 86

war games played through 442 mornings and afternoons. 12 Four

essays were now required of each student, a thesis in "Policy in

Its Relation to War," in "Strategy and Logistics," in "Tactics,"

and in "Command." 1 * When the War College reconvened on 1 July 1919, the

academic mission was preeminent; the operational, peripheral.

By 1922, the scheme of separate classes in January and June

ended, and was exchanged for a unified annual term. This

merger enhanced unit cohesion and association among students.

Class identity was encouraged and this created a subtle sense of

reinforcement and allied membership within an emerging high

command.

When the first mergered class, 1922, matriculated, it

numbered 45 officers. With the addition of a Junior Class, from

1924, class size rose to 75. After 1934, with the initiation of an

Advanced Course for rear admirals and senior captains, annual

classes began to top 90. 14 There was also a Correspondence Course, established in 1914.

Two courses were offered; in Strategy and Tactics, and in

International Law. By 1926, 31 officers each month were

enrolling in the Strategy and Tactics course which required the

solution of 12 "solitaire" games of war. Perhaps these

"problems" were fun: commanding midnight fleets alone, in the

spare time of a late night lamp. They were certainly more

popular than the course in law; the legal conundrum attracted

only four officers each month. This simple disparity is eloquent,

in small but revealing insight, of the true passion of these

American seadogs. 15 The Correspondence Course was but one aspect of Newport's

campaign of indoctrination, on a basic level:

The object is to disseminate throughout the Service what

has been called the "War College Doctrine," that is, getting

officers to think along the same lines 16 The college was beginning to reach through the Navy

leadership. Sims' petition that the formal Newport Course be a
67

prerequisite of command equal to sea duty was given gradual

corporate acceptance. In 1919, 50 percent of all flag officers

afloat were graduates of the War College. In 1941, 99 percent of

all flag officers were graduates of the 12-month course. 17 Between the wars Newport was able to disseminate its

doctrine; to shape the thinking of the men who would plan for

and command in a Second World War. The instillation of the

ideology of mission can be traced through the ideology of the

Course: what these men heard and read and wrote and

catechized and the associations they made there. In the imagery

of the Lectures, the Bibliography, the Theses, the Doctrine, and

the Fraternity of classes, can this process be again unwound.

The Lectures

These were the formal address; the oral inheritance of

indoctrination. In the collective body of lectures given in

Newport between the wars, in the patterns woven by the

coloring threads of theme and topic and title, was the

embroidery of the education of mission: the visual index, the

most visibly superficial signpost, from year to year, of the thrust

and weight and emphasis of the War College Course.

Between 1919 and 1937, 18 years and 20 classes, 742 lectures

were presented at Newport. 18 The fewest number, 10 were

delivered in 1919; the greatest, 92, in 1937. The average was 41,

and the median, 43. Compare this to the average before the

Great War which, not counting the International Law course,

was on the order of six per year. Not only did the annual lecture

program expand postwar; so, too, did the range of subjects. In

the summer of 1910, out of eight lectures, one was on mines, one

on torpedoes, one on wireless telegraphy, one on engineering,

and three on battleships and their ordnance. Seven out of eight

focused on weapons and technology; but one single lecture, "The

Navy and the Press," ventured at all into the twilight zone of the

political.

After the Armistice Sims stretched the program to cover an

annual spectrum of seven central bands of subject concentration:

Policy, Area Studies, Weapons & Tactical Doctrine, Campaign

Studies, International Law, Command Organization, and

Societal/Racial Studies. Later, in 1926, Economics was added as a major concentration. By the end of this period, four of these

eight areas, Policy, Area Studies, International Law, and

Economics, accounted for 60 percent of the annual lecture

program.
68

Lectures on the subject of "Policy" comprised 10.9 percent of

all lectures. From 1919 to 1927, Professor J.O. Dealey was

responsible for the majority of lectures on the origin and

extension of American foreign policy. Typically, one

presentation would deal with the "Underlying Bases and

Theories" of National Policy, one with a survey or summary of

U.S. foreign policy, one with the Monroe Doctrine, and one with

"The Situation in the Far East." Some of these addresses had a much wider dissemination than the War College in murus. His

lecture, "National Policies in the Pacific," delivered before the

officers of the Atlantic Fleet in September 1921, was distributed

throughout the Service: 400 copies to the Atlantic Fleet, 500 to

the Pacific Fleet, 100 to the Asiatic Fleet, and down the line, with

six each to "All Bureaus." 19 In 1928, Professor L.M. Goodrich

inherited the Policy stewardship. He continued to cover the

same areas as had his predecessor.

Beginning in 1932 the emphasis on Policy lectures nearly

doubled. That year Capt. Dudley Knox delivered his essay

"National Strategy" for the first time. Professor J.P. Baxter, a close correspondent of Knox, also began a series of lectures in

the autumn of 1932. 20 The author of "The Introduction of the

Ironclad Warship" delivered two lectures each term for the next

5 years, "The Objectives and Aims of American Foreign Policy,"

and "The Navy as an Instrument of Policy." In addition, each

year, from 1934, Professor William Y. Elliott contributed yet

another lecture entitled "National Strategy." This sudden

redoubled concentration is significant. Before 1932, 8.7 percent

of the annual lecture program focused on national policy.

Suddenly, the figure was a cool 15 percent and remained at that

level. In 1937 there were eight lectures on Policy and,

remarkably, two addresses entitled "The Navy as an Instrument

of Policy." If the Navy crossed that great divide, the watershed

between naval and national strategy, planning and policy,

sometime during the decade of the 1930s, here was evidence of

that portage.

The subject band encompassing Area Studies was divided.

One moiety focused on the Far East, with especial emphasis on

Japan; the other embraced the remaining three-quarters of the

globe. Of the 23 percent of the lecture program devoted to

specific nations or regions, 11.4 percent, fully half, concerned

conditions in the Far East, with especial emphasis on Japan.

From 1921-1927, the era of strategic wrangling at the

Washington Conference and the Kuomintang upheaval in
69

China, the proportion rose to 60 percent of all area addresses. In

contrast, compared to an annual average of five East Asian

lectures, Latin America could claim one. The British Empire,

Western Europe, the Near East, and Soviet Russia each received

equal emphasis. The exception to this trend came in 1931-1932,

when no less than five essays were invited on the Soviet state,

indication enough of the strategic implications involved in

American recognition of the CCCP.

The statistical story reveals an unexpected trend. After 1927,

interest in East Asia declined. From a seven-lecture level from

1921-1927, the Pacific slice declined precipitously to a mean of

three from 1928-1935. Then, in 1936-1937, with the coming of

Sino-Japanese war, emphasis on East Asian affairs quadrupled.

In these divergences of concentration, world view at Newport

and among the naval profession shifted perceptual paradigms:

from postwar, to "peacetime," to prewar assumptions of the

Japanese "enemy."

Professor George Grafton Wilson gave his first law lecture at

Newport on the subject of "Insurgency" in 1900. He continued

to teach International Law there through the 1930s. His

presentations accounted for 15 percent of the lecture program,

an average of six per year. Focusing on practical applications,

Wilson still bore about him, decade after decade, the vision of an

international order based on law: "the betterment of Mankind"

through the agency of the League of Nations and the ultimate

displacement of what he called "the Law of War."21 If ever there

was a figure devoted to this ideal at the War College, it was that

of Wilson, commuting from Cambridge, seeking the subjugation

of war by law. For had he not drawn the petition, with Pratt, in

the late autumn of 1918, "Proposed Plans for Establishment of

League of Nations Army and Navy"?22 There were no lectures on Economics for the first 7 postwar

years. Then, in 1926-1927, there were seven. The average for the

next 11 years held at seven. During those years, Economics

captured 17 percent of the lecture slice. Almost half of these

were presentations on mobilization of industry and finance for

war, strategic raw materials, problems of trade and shipping,

and economic strategies in wartime. The remaining moiety was

less structural; these were presentations far more redolent of the

legacy of Darwin: "The Struggle for Raw Materials and

Economic Independence"; "Economic Conflict and Its Influence

on National Policy"; "Economic Penetration." Here were
70

harangues to reinforce a bold world view, as they echoed the

imagery of Knox in his contemporaneous "National Strategy."

In the 1920s, only 50 percent of the lecture program was

allowed to the subject geography of international relations:

Economics, International Law, Area Studies, and Policy. During

the decade of the 1930s, the proportion rose to 70 percent.

World view, as it was instilled at the War College between the

wars, began to acquire an enviable sophistication. The gray

granite of Newport, in the visible trappings of curriculum,

assumed the mien of Sims' ideal: an authentic university.

There are other signs of an alteration of course, a turning

away from the appearance of a service trade school. Normal

expectation would assign a substantial share of the lecture

program to technical topics, to weapons and tactical doctrine. In

the event, only 40 such lectures were delivered during the 18

years examined here: a proportional total of 5.3 percent. Threequarters of all weapon and tactics related lectures were

presented in the 5 years between 1921 and 1926, a time of

ferment in the Service over the introduction and evolutionary

potential of the aircraft and the submarine. Of those 30

addresses, 18, or 60 percent, focused directly on air and undersea

"weapons of the future." Even Brig. Gen. "Billy" Mitchell, the

interwar Navy's most dangerous foe, came to speak his piece.

No, the War College under Sims and Pratt faced the

revolutionary manifestors of new technologies squarely.

Accusations by some historians that there was "no incentive to

critically examine reigning ideas on the primacy of the

battleship" are, quite simply, empty.23

If interwar emphasis on weapons and tactics was minor, the

lecture slice for campaigns and battles was smaller still: 4.8

percent. Contrary to popular current cant, Newport did not

spend a generation refighting Jutland and Gallipoli; at least, not

in the lecture halls. For a twenty class span, there were only three

lectures on the North Sea bout, and one was presented by a German admiral who commanded a battle squadron in that

celebrated fight. There were nine Gallipoli talks, and why not?

There was no comparable example of combined, amphibious

operations for the whole of the Great War.24 The bulk of

campaign analyses between the wars was handed over to world

war continental strategy. There were twice as many Western

Front talks as the parcel of Jutland and Gallipoli combined.

Then there was Race. Thirteen lectures were given on the

"scientific" subject of Race. Cultural Anthropology had not yet
71

permeated the Navy world view, and so Newport missed a chance to hear from Boas or Kroeber or Malinowski. Traditional

assumptions were reinforced; and the existential postulates of

Social Darwinism remained uncontested by the Navy in an age

attempting, in new-found enlightenment, to have them

scrapped. The addresses of Dr. Lathrop Stoddard, from 1922 to

1936, had eloquent titles: "Present Race Conflicts in World

Affairs"; "Danger Points in World Affairs from a Racial Point

of View"; "Racial Aspirations as the Foundation of National

Policy." This last lecture was delivered annually from 1931

through 1937. Other presentations, such as Dr. Garfield's "The

Determinant of Advancing Civilizations," Professor

Thorndike's "Racial Psychology," and Professor Huntington's

"Relation of Geography to the Character of Far Eastern

Peoples" were, in their own way, signposts demarcating the

parameters of basic world view. How was the Navy's future

leadership, its war planners and battle commanders and

policymakers, to shed the racial biases of an earlier generation

existential postulates so deeply rooted and intertwined as to be

institutionally invisible—if they were deprived of exposure to

emergent academic disciplines? Throughout the interwar era

there were no more than five lectures given in psychology and

these were confined to the psychology of command or of

propaganda. The new social disciplines, and Anthropology

especially, were wholly neglected.

The distribution and shifting proportions of the War College

lecture program, then, is a small insight into the intellectual

objectives and limitations, of the Course. Far more

cosmopolitan, as it evolved in Economics and in Politics and in

Law, than in its prewar guise, the Course was unable to shed the

unstated, the unconscious, set of assumptions that continued to

limit the Navy's understanding of its world.

The Bibliography

There was less glitter in the reading. The lectures were public

events, imparting a high gloss to the transmutation of ideas and

the transmission of ideology. The reading was a collective, yet

private, experience: an innumerably repeated, muted

recognition. Still, the reading lists of the interwar Course remain

and, with them, the dust-filmed folders of student book reviews.

Unlike the lectures, the private discoveries went unrecorded; but

those lingering archival fragments dangle tantalizing clues.
72

In 1928, at the request of the Bureau of Navigation, the War

College prepared a "Professional Bibliography" for distribution

to "All Ships and Stations." Rear Adm. J.R. Poinsett Pringle,

War College president, detailed a descending order of subject

priority: Command, Tactics, Strategy, International Law, Policy,

Current Events, Literature, Psychology, Logic. The bibliography

was very basic.

Command was covered by the five popular biographies:

Mahan's Life of Nelson, Henderson's StonewallJackson, Liddell

Hart's Great Captains Unveiled, and Emil Ludwig's Bismarck

and Napoleon. Tactics received the majority share with five

works on the great age of "fighting sail," and six on Jutland.

Strategy was subsumed by Clausewitz, Foch, and Mahan, and

Policy relegated to text books: America's Foreign Relations,

Introduction to World Politics, American Diplomacy. No

mention of Perkins' or Pratt's just published works on the

Monroe Doctrine and the Spanish-American War.

This was, really, a remedial course for those men who would

never reach Newport and a preparatory taste of what was to

come for those who would. This impression was reinforced by

the assignation of coded numbers to each book: (1) for officers

below the grade of lieutenant commander, (2) for those between

lieutenant commander and commander, and (3) for grade of

captain and above. By this standard, Dennett's Americans in

East Asia and Hector Bywater's byline on contemporary naval

policy, Navies and Nations, were considered beyond the grasp of

junior officers; yet even these musings were no more than

foundationary, if not simplistic.25 By implication, the War College felt that intellectual

development of any depth could be denominated only within the

collegial environment of Newport. Pringle, in this

memorandum, was guarding a cherished monopoly of

indoctrination. Outside of the Order, acolytes were allowed only

an extramural glimpse. To become a part of the Navy's

intellectual brotherhood, an officer, if denied a Newport billet,

must begin with the Correspondence Course.

The reading at Newport, then, in expectation, required a

ballistic leap in sophistication. The breach is revealed in

comparison with the "Prescribed Reading Course" for the

Senior Class of 1935.

There were 72 books in the Reading Course, three times the

list prescribed by Pringle. Strategy clearly overruled tactics.

There were no narratives of Jutland. Beyond Clausewitz and
73

Foch and Mahan the lens of strategic thought focused on the

cutting edge of contemporary theory: Corbett's Principles of

Maritime Strategy and Richmond's thoughtful essay, National

Policy and Naval Strength. The War College produced the first

English translations of the "Continental Strategists": Assman,

Wegener and Roaul Castex. Allied and enemy accounts of the

Great War were given equal weight and European diplomatic

history was emphasized as much as American. There was an

entire section devoted to Propaganda Techniques and the

Psychology of War. Problems of Imperial Defense in British

Strategy were highlighted, almost as a conscious model for the

structure of American security.

Unlike the basic bibliography handed out to the fleet, the War

College reading course contained a special section; its focus, the

Far East. There were 24 separate titles, a neat third of the entire

list, dealing with Japan, or the specter of Japanese Imperialism:

The Influence of Sea Power Upon the Political History ofJapan,

Japan, Mistress of the Pacific? . . . not to mention detailed

strategic analyses of Japanese defense lines in the Pacific. "The

Nansei-Formosa Line," "The Guam-Bonin Line," "The

Marshall-Caroline Line"; there was no comparable concentration on any other of the Earth's strategic areas. This was not

simply "higher education of the naval officer." 26

It was a series of mental exercises in the preparation for war.

Not only do these reading lists remain, they are accompanied

by the typescript of student book reviews. The Advanced Class of

1935, in addition to reading some 72 assigned titles, individually

reviewed another 33. No less than one-third had "Japan" in the

title. The next year the proportion was eight out of eleven; in

1937, nine out of twelve.

The "List of Books Reviewed" by the Advanced Class of 1935

contained another disturbing insight. One-third of the books

dealt with Japan; and a sixth with the "Control of Raw

Materials." The remaining were works with Racial and Social

Darwinist themes. The titles, and publication dates, are redolent

of the last century: Race Psychology, The Instincts of the Herd,

Race and National Solidarity, The Rising Tide of Color, The

Racial History of Man, The Character of Races, Emotion as the

Basis of Civilization, and, yes, Spengler's Decline of the West.

All three Darwinian motifs were in place, seemingly intact, not

yet discredited. The struggle for living space was inherited by

The Population Problem, or Population Theories', the struggle

for markets by The Control of Raw Materials, or Raw Materials
74

in the Policies of Nations; the struggle for racial supremacy by a plethora of "scientific" tracts. These, inalienably linked to

Japan's Advance, Must We Fight in Asia, and The Menace of

Japan, bonded the theoretical to the experiential, the historical

to the expectational, in the Navy world view. The "List of Books

Reviewed" in 1935 contained not one authentic history or

ethnography. Implicitly, in aggregate, they served but to advance

the legacy of Darwin.27 The reviews also reveal by implication. None of the "critical"

officers atempted to write an approximation of an essay; their

responses can be gleaned only from form and language. Spengler

was reviewed by Rear Adm. W.S. Pye, later COMBATFOR and

wartime president of the War College. He was awed by

Spengler's density of thought: "there are probably not more

than a score of people in the world who could as they read the

book have a conscious opinion as to the correctness of his

assertions." Pye was fascinated by the compressed mass of

Spengler's thesis:

Spengler is the founder of a philosophy of history, from

which philosophy he derives the thesis that—Cultures rise

and wane in a manner similar to the life of an individual;

that each Culture passes through phases corresponding to

youth, maturity, old age, and death. 28

Pye considered The Decline of the West a draught too rich even

for the Advanced Class. So taken was he with its ideology that he

insisted on filling 20 pages of typescript with Spengler's fattest

statements. He could only conclude that "there are certain ideas

which have a definite bearing upon future world-history and are

of great importance to National Policies and National

Defense." 29 They were eager, open intellects, those officers who came to

Newport in the years between the two great wars. Like Pye, they

were ready to reach out and, as Renaissance explorers, extend

their horizons beyond the rim of the known world. Some of

these men had spent decades at sea, exiled to a world

encompassed by decks of caulked yellow pine, steel-gray

bulkheads, and sky and sea a nameless gray no paint could match.

Their training was unmatched in professional art; but in other

disciplines they were kept in poverty. In gazing back from their

future, one can only lament the meagerness of real guidance in

history or the social sciences. For the Class of 1935 to have
75

missed the counsel of A. Whitney Griswold or Samuel Flagg

Bemis, then at Yale, or of Franz Boas, at Columbia, was a palpable loss. In their place, officers were treated to year after

year of lesser historians, or to such pseudoscientists as Dr.

Lathrop Stoddard and The Rising Tide of Color, or they were

encouraged to review Dixon's Racial History of Man, and type

out long nights cataloging the distinctions between

Dolichocephalic and Brachycephalic skulls. 30 As a result, notional Social Darwinism still permeated the

Navy world view; "race" substituted for "culture," and in history,

slogans squeezed out substance. In this, both the Legacy of

Darwin and the Lessons of History subtly conspired to create a sheen of inevitability: of war with Japan.

The Theses

Their writing revealed this trend. The interwar classes at

Newport wrote four essays annually on the subjects of

Command, Strategy, Tactics and Policy. 31 For each essay, officers

were given sets of themes to choose from and checklist directives

of points to be made. In 1925, the thesis on Tactics permitted a choice between: Trafalgar, the Falkland Islands, Tsushima,

Jutland, or a dissertation on the tactical employment of Air

Forces, Destroyers, or the "Big Gun" in a Fleet Action. 32 On the

subject of Policy, officers were asked to "develop a National

Naval Strategy," "delineate the interdependence of strategy and

tactics," "cover the historical bases of American Naval Strategy,"

"investigate the concept of winning a victory with inferior

force," and "produce original thoughts on the utilization of

financial power in war, and the use of the Merchant Marine in

the conduct of a war." These impossible demands could hardly be

satisfied in a short essay. J.O. Richardson, future CINCUS, was

so frustrated as to exclaim:

The student is so confused by the multiplicity of tasks, and by

the realization that an industrious and gifted writer might,

inadequately, cover the subject in a lifetime, that what

follows can be nothing more than a few random ideas on

American Naval Strategy 33

That was, precisely, the result. The student theses of the

interwar era were poorly researched, unadvised, hastily written

agglomerations of notional slogans and shibboleths; lifted from
76

a basic reading list and bracketed by quotation hatches. Sketched

to prescribed form, unchanged from war to war, these were not

original works of scholarship.

In all fairness, in counterpoint to revisionist contention, they

were not "canned." 34 These essays, over 4,000 of them submitted

between the wars, were sincere statements. Collectively, they

reflected and echoed the War College world view and its

interpretation of the Navy mission. Individually, each expressed

a subtle, yet distinct, variation of a higher corporate theme. For

every "canned," mimetic piece there was a thoughtful, incisive

counterpart. A few even were passionate. Rereading them it is

possible to test the mettle of intellect of those men who would

take command in war.

As insight into the elusive ontology of mission, the Newport

Thesis, especially regarding Policy, is key evidence.

In the 1920s the thesis on Policy was, typically, a discussion of:

1. Policy and its Relation to War.

2. Foreign Policies of the United States in the Pacific with

special reference to the Far East. 35

By 1931 the thesis was entitled "The Inter-Relation in War of

National Policy, Strategy, Tactics, and Command."36 After 1933,

this was simplified to "The Relationship Between National

Policy and Strategy in War." 37 These essays shared four common

themes, appearing like leitmotiv throughout the era:

1. An orthodox and strict interpretation of Clausewitz as the

foundation of the Service world view of war and policy.

2. A rejection of "Altruism" as the basis of National Policy.

3. A casual emphasis on the tenets of Social Darwinism in

the struggle for economic markets, living space, and racial

supremacy.

4. A vision of American "Manifest Destiny" across the

Pacific and, within it, the paramountcy of an inevitable clash

with Japan.

Each imparted trace elements of the motifs of the Navy mission:

Defender of the Faith, The Legacy of Darwin, Law and Warfare,

and the World Island.

So imbued with his vision of War and Society had the Navy

become by 1919 that the Service world view could be called

"Clausewitzian." Every interwar thesis on Policy and Strategy

chanted his concepts like a litany:
77

War and Policy

Strategy and Policy

Absolute War and Real War

Friction in War

The Offensive

The Engagement

The Theory (The Game)

The Spirit of the Age.

No student thesis failed to restate Clausewitz' basic dictum:

"War is an act of policy, a continuation of political intercourse,

with the addition of other means." 38 No officer neglected to

paraphrase what has by now become le grand cliche. Many did

not stop at incantation but followed Clausewitz to his more

recondite conclusions. Not only was war an extension of policy,

it was the arbiter of diplomacy. Given the American strategic

situs, the Navy was the ricasso as well as the rapier point of

National Policy. As Capt. T.C. Hart concluded in 1922:

Policy and War are most intimately connected, for War is

the final and ablest servant of policy. Diplomacy is an

efficient servant only when supported by Preparedness for

War—which is really a part of war, and can win before the

war itself begins. 39

By underscoring the political nature of war, the officers at

Newport never hesitated to link "the statesman and the

warrior"; and the role of the Navy in policy formulation. In an

emphasis on the intrinsic political function of naval force, these

officers echoed something of the Hamiltonian vision of a navy as defender of American (New World) neutrality, American

commercial intercourse, and American honor. From Publius'

squadron of "a few ships of the line" to the interwar battle fleet,

the Navy was a political instrument: of deterrence as much as of

decision.40

They were equally adamant about the role of strategy in the

schema of policy. Although agreeing with Clausewitz "that

despite the great variety and development of modern war its

major lines are still laid down by governments";41 War College

opinion disjoined political arbitration from operational actions.

They adhered to Clausewitz' injunction that "the strategist must

maintain control throughout." Cdr. C.W. Nimitz, Hart's

classmate, advised that political "intermeddling with the control
78

of fleets can only result in disjointed action and possible

disaster." 42 How similar to Clausewitz' warning, that it was an

"unacceptable custom to settle strategy in the capital, and not in

the field." 4 3 They looked to Clausewitz to define the intensity of a war. In

his discussion of "Absolute War and Real War," Clausewitz

admitted:

War can be a matter of degree. Theory must concede this;

but it has .the duty to give priority to the absolute form of

war, so that he who wants to learn from theory becomes

accustomed to measuring all his hopes and fears by it, and to

approximating it WHEN HE CAN or WHEN HE MUST.44

This logic drove Navy war planning, and the potential allocation

of war resources, what King called "Ways and Means."45 They

accepted Clausewitz' reservation that, "to discover how much of

our resources must be mobilized for war, we must first examine

our own political aim." 46 Yet in seeking the engagement, and the

decision, in war, no such fine calibration of a sufficiency of

victory was possible. There was but one measurement of an

objective gained, one guarantee of victory:

This is unlimited war. Measures short of complete

destruction of the enemy's power of resistance may be

sufficient, but they must not be allowed to confuse strategy.

Our military preparations should always be directed toward

the complete destruction of the enemy. 47

A.J. Hepburn's 1931 thesis reflected a collective feeling in the

interwar Navy. In calling for war preparation visibly capable of

trouncing the most powerful potential enemy, the War College

implicitly inscribed the first American doctrine of strategic

deterrence. Going beyond both Clausewitz and Hamilton, the

Navy defined itself as the mainspring of National Policy. By

extending American interests across the Pacific, the ideologues

of Newport projected the Navy's role far beyond the New World

Sphere. By claiming identity with the continuity of Policy in

exchange for the periodicity of War, the Navy inverted

Clausewitz: policy was a form of war by other means, achieved

through deterrence diplomacy.48

Those key concepts of Clausewitz—Friction in War, the

Offensive, The Engagement, and the uses of Theory in planning

for war—concerned with the conduct of operations, appeared in
79

Policy essays. They were reiterated in full in the theses on

Tactics; and through the rounds of war gaming, the staff and

student solutions, they were the predominant imagery of all

action. 49 The inconography will appear again, at the ritual heart

of the War College Course: The Game.

They looked to him, as students of war, as to the master,

"whose philosophic insight into the nature of war is transcendent." 50 They recognized his most sublime caution, the

most constrictive limitation to the practice of theory:

We can only say that the aims we adopt, and the resources

we employ, must be governed by the particular

characteristics of our own position; but they will also

conform to the spirit of the age —51 The American public mood between the wars was simply

opposed to the Navy's "Clausewitzian" construction of "The

Relationship Between National Policy and Strategy." The War

College was, in essence, a school of Realpolitik. Drawing from

the model of the Kriegsakademie, Newport had, by the interwar

generation, outdistanced the Prussian system. 52 No matter how

sophisticated the War College Course, the postulates of

Newport's world view contradicted both the traditional, and the

contemporary, American "spirit."

They rejected "altruism" in their collective thesis on Policy;

yet they cast off subtly, by inference more than accusation, in

muted tones. Cdr. R.A. Spruance remarked, almost wistfully,

that "the foundation of American foreign policies in the past

was always self-interest"; 53 now, as Capt. J.W. Greenslade

lamented, the "idea of war as part of the 'ordinary intercourse of

nations' and as 'inevitable as commercial struggles' has been

temporarily banned." 54 For the peace was, for the Navy leadership groomed at

Newport, no more than temporary. As Kimmel concluded, also

in 1925, "the millenium is still a long way off." 55 In the year of

Locarno, at the cresting of international optimism, when an

informal international legal order seemed the surest guarantor

of peace, Kimmel and Greenslade each abjured the prevailing

desideratum: To Greenslade, "as long as there is Policy there is

War." 56 Kimmel saw war as but a generation away:

History shows that it generally takes a nation a generation

to get over "war weariness" and forget the lessons learned.
80

The present "spirit of Locarno" is due to "war

weariness 57

Nimitz threw out statistics to support his adamantine opinion.

In 3,357 years of recorded history, he wrote in 1922, civilization

had enjoyed 227 years of peace. In that span, 8,000 "eternal"

treaties of peace and friendship had been broken. In somber

voice, he concluded

. . . that the time for the abolition of war has not yet arrived,

nor may we expect such a Utopian condition In the

community of nations there is no court of international

justice whose edicts can be enforced. We cannot therefore

neglect our preparations Until war is abolished, FORCE

AND RIGHT WILL JOINTLY RULE THE WORLD.58

There was no shift in sentiment during the next decade. King,

in 1933, accused "our peace policy, based of altruism supported

by sentimentalism (sometimes called polly-anna-ism)," of

"depleting and weakening our own 'ways and means' of

upholding and enforcing our national policies and our vital

interests." 59 J.O. Richardson was even more bitter. In his

judgment, from his 1934 thesis, a nation would "resort to war

rather than renounce its vital interests." Given this postulate,

the United States, alas, held no external interests as vital:

On this basis, the American people are concerned only with

domestic affairs, and have no desire to participate in World

Politics or World Affairs beyond expressing moral

sentiments and altruistic aims which they like to talk about

and wish for, but are unwilling to support by force.60

The correspondence of imagery reflected a unanimity in naval

leadership. By the middle 1930s, the U.S. Navy was in rapid

relative decline. America's sole strategic weapon was rusting

into desuetude. Both King and Richardson agreed that, even

were the "American people to demand war with Japan," the fleet

would be incapable of "western movement across the Pacific." If

war came the Navy would be impotent to bring it to a successful

end.61 This state of enervation was perceived at Newport and

throughout the Service as the direct product of "altruistic," blind

faith in international law and organization. In neglecting

America's strategic deterrent, the nation opened itself to "the
81

steady increase in global brutality, of terrorism and disregard for

both life and justice." This, thought Capt. R.L. Ghormley, was

"an age of dissolution," brought on by "the failure of the League

of Nations": "is the characteristic of altruism as well respected

now as the characteristic 'might is right'?" 62 Kimmel's

Cassandra-like warning was to be borne out after all. The Navy world view was not rooted in Clausewitz alone; the

most primordial network of existential postulates was rooted in

the imagery of Social Darwinism. Interwar essays reveal casual

as well as causal connection to Darwinian motifs. Greenslade,in

attempting to trace the origin of national policies, compared the

vital interests of modern nations to the elemental needs of the

primitive family: food and shelter:

As the social organization developed through stages, from

family to tribe to clan to nation and empire, so "shelter"

might shade into safety, security, independence, and

political freedom, and so also might the term "food"

successively change to substance, subsistence, livelihood,

welfare, commerce, and world relations. 63

This assumption of evolutionary determinism in human society

was echoed on a biological plane. A.J. Hepburn drew from the

social behavior of wolves and dogs the logical notion that

"Animals may be observed to apply all the 'Principles of War.'"64

Without grounding in the emerging disciplines of Physical and

Cultural Anthropology, naval officers of that era were forced to

retreat to 19th-century catchwords to explain the nature of Man.

Within this schema, modern, complex societies were driven by

"instincts" identical to primitive "tribes" on the social, and

animal "herds" or "packs" on the biological, plane. Their theory

of the structural dynamics of international politics was a reductionist metaphor, linked to the assumed behavior of

ancestral and animal groups. Capt. C.P. Snyder forged the

connecting ring between natural and metaphorical selection:

The law of life has always been the same from the

beginnings—ceaseless and inevitable selection and rejection,

ceaseless and inevitable progress.65

These permeable notions encouraged a ready acceptance of a "Darwinian" theory of the "behavior" of modern states and

advanced cultures. From this point of departure it was easy, even
82

comforting, to translate the contemporary scene to conform to

existential postulates; on the nature of man and the structure of

reality. For the thesis on Policy, it became commonplace to

enumerate "the conditions governing the formation of varying

national policies" on the basis of social, economic, and racial

"antagonisms." Several essays, including those of Reeves and

Nimitz, even listed the motifs of "Darwinian" struggle in that

order.66

Geographic and climatic conditions were viewed as the

determinants of national vigor and expectation. As Nimitz

insisted, "climatic conditions of temperature, humidity, seasonal

changes, prevailing winds, all have an important part to play in

determining the physical and mental vigor of a nation." 67 Island

nations invariably "enforced strong international policies," to

sate the "need for more land to accommodate increasing

populations." 68

Economic antagonisms centered around the struggle for the

"control of natural resources and raw materials," of which "each

nation desires a monopoly."69 "The competition among the

great commercial nations" to secure the markets of the world

was "becoming keener every year." 70 The Navy had not yet

discarded the antique notions of Hobson and, ironically, of

Lenin, when they resurrected "the need for foreign markets to

absorb excess foods, raw materials, and manufactured goods." 71 The specious image of a dangerous surplus among industrial

nations, a glut of goods, lingered on, as ineradicable as it was

iniquitous.

"Racial features also have their effect on policy." 72 A serious

effect, judging from the prominence awarded this theme in the

standard interwar thesis. Snyder cautioned that, "in arriving at

policies, statesmen should be careful to distinguish between race as a biological fact and race as a state of mind!' 11 As "biological"

verite, the Navy's concept of race was predicated on two

conditional postulates: that some races, if not innately superior

to others, were measurably stronger; that mixed, or

"conglomerate racial populations" were inherently weak. This

ratiocination produced two normative corollaries: that the

Japanese—"a yellow race" —were "virile" and "expansionist,"

and a danger to America; that "racial distinction" in America

was approaching the "evil condition" of Austria-Hungary,

toward a fatal erosion of national unity and national will. 74 In

their theses, officers reflected this sense of a shifting "racial

balance" between the United States and Japan and this nearly
83

subconscious notion promoted an expectation of a precarious

ultima ratio of race; and an uncertain future.

If Social Darwinisn equipped the Navy world view with the

language of behavioral determinism it was natural, then, to

describe Japanese/American relations in terms of historical,

inevitable conflict. Geography and climate created a "virile"

people "circumscribed by insular limitation." 75 "National

poverty of natural resources" forced the Japanese into "keen

economic competition." 76 As a race, the Japanese were a "warlike people," endowed with "an irrepressible martial

temperament," who gloried in "death on the battlefield." 77 Overcrowding, poverty, and belligerence were perceived as the basis of Japanese national policy as well as national

character. National behavior mirrored that of the individual:

"Japan is frankly imperialistic and faces the future with the

confidence of an ambitious youth." 78 The atavism of the Samurai

was a familiar theme in the interwar thesis. 79 Japanese

expansion: societal, commercial, and martial, was inevitable.

"We will come into conflict with Japan if she pursues an

imperialistic policy." 80 So Kimmel wrote in 1926, at the interwar

trough in Japanese/American antagonism. Even then, the

policies and interests of both cultures seemed tracked to

insoluble opposition. The United States could not surrender the

"Open Door," the Philippine Base; nor could the Federal

Government force California to recant on Asiatic exclusion. No

one expected of Japan more than a gesture of restraint in the

drive for East Asian domination. Accelerating through the

interwar era, a developing dogma in the War College preached

the historical inevitability of war with Japan. This was taught,

consciously, and the trend is revealed in the lectures and the

reading and the theses. The evolution of the Japanese "enemy" is

the subsequent theme of this essay: an exploration into the

imagery of perception, highlighted by the comment in Nimitz'

1922 thesis:

It is small wonder that Japan should prepare feverishly her

army and navy for the struggle that is certain to come the

moment she finds herself strong enough to stop by force our

continual obstruction to her policies. 81

Inevitable war with Japan was a corollary of inalienable

interest. "The present interest of the United States in the Pacific

is great; in the coming years it will increase enormously."82 This

was Puleston's prophecy in his 1914 thesis. Between the wars
84

the United States stake in "The Orient" was treated at Newport

as authentic national policy, genuine as the Monroe Doctrine.

Commercial intercourse through the "Open Door" in China was

defined as a "vital interest," as was the retention of a Philippines

forward base. Seaborne commerce was the foundation of

national prosperity, and the Asian market was clearly traced as the growth sector of America's economic future.83 From this

perception, the Policy thesis usually underscored the Navy's role

as guarantor of transpacific policy. Essays submitted during the

1930s excoriated "isolationism" from this vantage: theTydingsMcDuffie Act and acquiescence to Japanese assaults on China

would be disastrous, not only to American principles, but to

American prosperity. 84 As Capt. C.C. Bloch despaired in 1931:

"Isolation will destroy us—our culture will only persist through

commerce, commerce can only exist through Sea Power

"

85 There was a progressive pessimism in interwar essays. In

1926 Capt. E.C. Kalbfus began his thesis with an exuberant

paean, in spirit consonant with Whitman's "Passage to India":

It is proposed to outline the history of our [national]

growth, because of its direct bearing upon our "Manifest

Destiny" The spreading of our national domain has been

a natural evolution Reflection causes us to believe that

this nation has been favored by Divine Providence 86

Just 8 years later, J.O. Richardson's gloomy vision of a contracting American sphere drew an unwilling finish line to

America's westward movement. The Navy, he confessed, would

never again be wielded by national policy as the cutting edge of

transoceanic interest; never mind "destiny":

The Open Door policy is essentially a kind of intervention

policy and since the American people are unalterably

opposed to entanglement in European affairs, they will not

support entanglement in Asiatic affairs The American

Government has made such intervention impossible An

American Naval Strategy that would be in keeping with

present public opinion would be a purely defensive

strategy The Hawaiian Islands would be a defense

outpost rather than a stepping off place for our westward

movement across the Pacific. 87

In his bitter sarcasm, he goes on to call any future naval building

unnecessary, for the United States already maintained an

"adequate" coast defense force.
85

His was the only thesis to shade with such brutal chiaroscuro

the contrast between the spirit of the Navy mission and the

"spirit of the age." In their essays, the officer-students of

Newport shared and defended a common vision of America.

More than an aggregate set of values and postulates, this vision

was a synthetic symbol of cultural passage through time: from

America's history to America's future. Based on a complex cage

mast of existential postulates, moral imperatives, and historical

cliches, the War College world view preserved more than a sensation of naval role in American national life. The Course

spelled out an expectational plan, involving inalienable interest

and inevitable war. The central role of the War College was to

prepare the Navy for this war, to indoctrinate future leaders

with professional, as well as historical, readiness.

In the teaching of "The Doctrine," then, was the source for the

concept of, and readiness for, this predestined war.

The Doctrine

Doctrine was the catechism of Newport. Sonorously chanted

through the interwar era, "The Estimate of the Situation" was

the incanted actualization of Mission. War College doctrine was

the lubricant between the theory and the reality of war; through

ritual, the training set of the collective synapses of Command.

Let us learn to think in the same way about fundamental

truths. 88

So wrote Lt. Cdr. D.W. Knox, early in 1915. This was the

motto of his revolutionary essay, "The Role of Doctrine in Naval

Warfare," the ideological red banner of reform raised in that

critical year. In that watershed spring of 1915, Congress created

the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Naval Institute put to

press "The Estimate of the Situation." The Manifesto, the

Command, and the Doctrine: a triple signal that the inert age of

leadership heterogeneity was passing. Knox was behind all

three. With Eiske, he forged an organization plan for the CNO's

Office. With Knight, Schofield, and Vogelgesang, he hammered

the framework of "The Estimate of the Situation."89 "The Role

of Doctrine" was the manifesto for both Command and

Doctrine: it was the Idea. Knox must be acknowledged as Chief

Ideologue of the interwar Navy: in a single, short argument he
86

redefined ethos. The Service was not a corporation, an

administration, a set of ships and yards and docks and depots and

barracks and bureaus: the Navy was a society, whose only normal

intercourse was war.

They must learn to imitate the choices of war in ordinary

patterns of thought: they must inculcate a methodology of

decision. Collective thinking must become commonplace, so that

any problem would spark among officers a spontaneous

solution. War demands a unity of action, a common response to

the chain of decision inspiring command. A shared process of

decision is rooted in something more than a shared profession; it must evolve from a formal pattern of behavior: a military

doctrine. Leadership in war flows from a common doctrine;

"common doctrine gives birth to harmonized methods, rules,

and actions." 90 Common behavior means unified action, and

this, the essence of Command, the equation of victory.

Command is dependent on doctrine, and "concrete doctrine

flows from a conception of war."91 This was his argument. His thesis was the need for

indoctrination; his premise was that military doctrine, a pattern

of behavior, was founded on a concept of war, an existential

postulate. Command—a set of actions—is based on doctrine—

a

behavioral model. Doctrine, in turn, is predicated on a set of

shared premises—"a particular alloy of principles."92 The key innovation lay in the concept. Doctrine was not the

set of applicable principles: it was the set of "teachings which

have been reasoned from principles; doctrine flows from

principles as a source."93 This causal dynamic was established

from principles—existential postulates—that described war as a progression of choices, a process of decisionmaking. To Knox,

"principles" did not imply a categorical list of maxims, the

cliches of a successful campaign. War was not a formula. The

concept of war was the unfolding process of exerting means to

an end. If war was a process, a concatenation of choice, then

doctrine was the behavioral training for the making of decision,

and Command simply the moment of application.

To translate idea into action, Command demands "common

understanding": the simultaneous, learned reflex to a situation,

transcending the transmission and execution of orders. A fleet's

officers "must be welded into a body" by a torch of "common

will." Organization was simply a physical tool; like the very

ships of a fleet, the concrete expression of a common esprit.94
87

Like Hobbes in De Corpore Politico, Knox sought in the

human body metaphor what he called "the officer-body," the

central symbol for his theme.

Organization cannot alone produce unity of action. It is little

more than a bony skeleton which must be augmented by

flesh and sinew and infused with spirit before it can

accomplish its mission.95

As ideal, the leadership of the Navy would act as a single

organism, infused with a single spirit. Unity of action

mechanical harmony—derives from a "common conviction"

harmony of will—just as in the Renaissance metaphor of "the

body natural."96

Knox demarcated a metaphysical dimension to war. To a service obsessed with a notion of war as a series of logistical

displacements, Knox created a metaphor for Operational Ethos.

He seized the personality of the Corporate Ethos, the set of

behaviors that regulated normal activity, peacetime

administration, and made them subordinate to the Operational:

the behavioral patterns of battle. By developing a mental ritual, a behavioral rehearsal for combat, Knox distilled identity.

Indoctrination was no less than combat thinking. To define war

preeminently as a decisionmaking process, from which physical

action is natural outgrowth, is to give not only war, but

preparation for war, a spiritual center.

The teaching of this doctrine became the nexal task of the

War College. Formalized as a set of behavioral instructions, the

doctrine was first published in June of 1915 as "The Estimate of

the Situation." In translation from manifesto to official articles,

the indoctrination lost the sense of esprit so enjoined by Knox.

Operational Ethos as routine doctrine was transformed, like the

body metaphor in Leviathan; to mere mechanism: an

Enlightenment engine stripped of its Renaissance soul. 97

As structured by Knight during his presidential term, the

"Estimate" was a concise 18-page essay delimiting the process of

Command behavior into a recognition manual for the

elimination of choices. He described a four-step progression:

1. The Mission;

2. The Enemy Forces: Their Strength, Disposition,

and Probable Intentions;
88

3. Our Own Forces: Their Strength, Disposition,

and the Courses of Action Open to Us;

4. The Decision.92,

By 1929 Knight's advisory sketch of basic concepts had

experienced a metamorphosis. "The Estimate of the Situation"

had been transmogrified into a rigid primer, including the

formulation of plans and orders. The process of decision was

refined to five steps: Own Mission, Relative Strength of

Opposing Forces, Enemy's Probable Intentions, Courses of

Action Open to You, and The Decision. The instruction of

decision was starkly described:

Formulate your Decision as follows:

WHAT is to be done;

HOW (and, if necessary, WHEN and WHERE) it is to be

done; and

WHY it is to be done (that is, invariably, in order to

accomplish the Task of your Mission).99

What had begun as simple, essential structure of doctrine was

reduced to a set of rote procedures. Knight's essay was a practical

corollary to Knox's manifesto. Linked to the generation of

Operation Order Forms, Battle Order Forms, and Despatch

Order Forms, the 1929 pamphlet imparted nothing of the

essence of decision: Operational Ethos. By the middle years of

the interwar era, "The Estimate of the Situation" could be

expressed by a "Diagram to show sequence of derivation."

There was little in this iconographic skeleton to inspire the

spirit that must animate the framework of common doctrine

with the conviction of "common will." "The Estimate of the

Situation" was in danger of vivisecting itself, exchanging ethos

for a corpselike formula:
89

I. Relationship of surface, Task and Course of Action. 100

Mission.

Decision. Purpose.

Task.

What to do. How to do it /

Specific Course of Action.

II. Selection of Specific Course of Action.

Task.

Alternative

a b c General Courses

Specific of Action

Courses "What to do."

of Action

12 12 3 "How to — _ do it."

This had been Knox's warning, implicit in 1915: Operational

Ethos, or "Common Doctrine," was a process of shared

reasoning; it could not be described, much less applied, by

diagrams or flow charts.

The resurrection of Knox, and the synthesis of manifesto and

of doctrine, was the achievement of Rear Adm. E.C. Kalbfus.

During his first tenure as War College president, from 1934-

1937, he reprinted "The Role of Doctrine in Naval Warfare,"

and put the press run at the head of the reading list. For Kalbfus,

the appearance of this essay marked a spiritual turning point for

the U.S. Navy. In establishing its debt to Knox, Kalbfus declared

in preface, the Service must grant that, in consequence of his

idea,

. . . there is now, throughout the Service, a common

conception of the peacetime objective of the Navy readiness
90

for war from the standpoint of command as well as of

logistics. It remains for this generation and for those that

follow to continue in his path 101

Kalbfus made possible this objective with the publication in

1936 of Sound Military Decision. Combining the "Estimate of

the Situation," the "Elements of Planning," and the

"Formulation of Directives," the pamphlet stretched to 107

pages, incorporated and expanded the concepts of Knox, and so

completely delineated the Operational Ethos that it soon earned

the image of a scriptual text. Called for its cover the "Green

Hornet" of Kalbfus, this verdure treatise was the testament of a society: the prescriptive text of an ethos. 102

If the members of the naval profession have a common

viewpoint, their reasoned beliefs may be expected more

nearly to approach unanimity. Unity of effort is more likely

to ensue if the operations of all forces have their basis in a common indoctrination whereby all individuals have been

trained to think on the same plane. 103 As well as he could, Kalbfus in this single declaration

approached the essential definition of ethos. Sound Military

Decision did not encompass the broad behavioral spectrum of

the full Navy ethos, in the sense of societal corporation or

abstracted mission. This was but the directive for operational

behavior, distilled from the world view of war. Mission, within

the context of command decision, "is expressed as a task and a purpose," set by the "ultimate objective" of the war. 104 This was

not mission within the context of cultural definition, the

transcendental task and purpose demarcating a society's

ultimate sense of identity.

Yet the Navy's abstracted identity flowed from a basic

behavioral source. By exposing this source as Operational, not

simply Corporate, Ethos, Knox and Kalbfus established the

officer corps as leaders of what was at the center a warrior, not a bureaucratic, society. The role the Navy would play in American

national society welled from the role of the Service in war.

Combat mission in the defense of the State and its Policy created

the behavioral point of departure for the extrapolation of a Navy

political mission. Successful strategy in peace is predicated on

the process of strategic thinking for war.

The indoctrination of Operational Ethos was the pivotal

function of the Newport Course between the wars. War College
91

training, even at the level of rote formula, was the hinge that

saved the Navy from a regression to the 19th-century tradition

of the Bureaucratic Ethos. Senior officers, like J.O. Richardson,

who would lead the fleet on the eve of Pearl Harbor, reflected

this decisive turn in their thesis-writing:

The Navy is primarily maintained for war purposes, but

during long periods of peace Administration, the less

combatant function of Command, acquires a dominant

position. The Navy becomes material minded, and officers

become administrators rather than leaders The failure

to indoctrinate subordinates during peace may give us future

leaders who will fail under the trial of war. The only time

during the past twenty years when I have been conscious of

any effort to so indoctrinate me has been at the Naval War

College. 105 The Fraternity

The War College has been the central source from which we

have been getting our ideas about the Navy, as a whole, and

that War College has imbued the Navy with what we call a certain indoctrination It is the kind of spirit that was

maintained among Nelson's captains. It is said they were a band of brothers. 106

This was the fraternity of Command. Beyond the sense of

fellowship felt by all officers in the Service, those who went to

Newport imbibed a draught of expectation. If, in some

precarious future, an American Grand Fleet sortied to give

battle, as had another on that bright and almost windless

autumn afternoon in 1805, its gray battleships would have them

as captains. An American band of brothers, in association

bonded at the Naval War College, would lead Fleet, and Fortune:

an inner circle of Command, trained to lead in concert, to think

and act as one. This was the transcorporation of the Doctrine;

from printed ideology to living membership.

So spoke Rear Adm. Bradley Fiske to the Senate in 1920. His

words are not taken from transcript. They are a reminder, a quotation from a letter to Fiske from Adm. W.S. Sims. This

tribute, from the president of the War College to a retired senior

and friend, is a signpost in the continuity of Command

fraternity. In the larger naval fraternity, the transmission of the
92

Corporate Ethos followed a traditional flow, formalized from

junior to senior, from generation to generation. The fraternity

of Command had nothing more than coincidental lines of

association. Each young Telemachus had to seek out his Mentor.

Sims sensed, in this primitive pattern for the inheritance of

Operational Ethos, the essential, ancestral backwardness of

American naval training. If the Service were ever to evolve

potential war leadership, a Command fraternity must be formed,

coexistent with the War College Course. Membership within a Command Society would reinforce identity to the indoctrination

of mission. Sims sought so to instill the need for personal

membership in this Command fraternity, within the leadership

hierarchy, as to posit a new moral imperative to the Navy Ethos.

An accelerating recognition of this need through the interwar

era made of the War College the perceived passageway to high

command. By 1941, 99 percent of all flag officers had so passed

through Newport. 107 Sims' advocacy had inspired a moral

imperative as strong as any Departmental regulation: he had his

fraternity of Command, at least in framework. This was his

enduring achievement.

The social coordinates, to create continuity as well as

contiguity, demanded a fraternity membership plotted along

both vertical and horizontal axes. A network of associations

must be able to transmit, not simply maintain, shared values. A

fraternity must preserve a historical as well as a contemporary

identity; it must enshrine through living lineage the constant

process of becoming:

It was my good fortune to be a member of the Naval War

College Senior Class that graduated in June of 1923. Admiral

Sims was President, and Departments of Strategy and

Tactics were headed by Captain Reginald Belknap andJ.M.

Reeves—both splendid leaders 108

So Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz could write to a new president

at Newport, Adm. Charles Melson, in 1965. As he gave his

counsel to the younger officer, did he cast back for a moment to

that first June morning in 1922, when as a junior commander he

waited intently for the words of the great Sims, just as Sims must

have, as a student in the summer of 191 1, for the opening lecture

of Mahan? So this, the "vertical axis" of generational

association, created an enduring process, which took strongest

root under Sims' presidency and remained ascendant. During
93

the early postwar years, 1919-1923, NcNamee, Pringle, Laning,

held staff positions when Standley, Stark, Hart, Taussig, and

Nimitz were students. Pringle was president from 1927-1930

and his student list reads like a battle report: Hewitt, McCain,

Lee, Oldendorf, Kincaid, Fletcher. The Class of 1933, when

Harris Laning was President, included both King and Halsey,

with Spruance as a staff member. In 1934, with Luke McNamee

as President, Richardson, Carpenter, Zacharias, and Wilson

Brown were all at Newport. 109

This is one way of tracing the lineal descent of the associations

of the Command fraternity from generation to generation: the

vertical axis. In just three instances—McNamee, Pringle,

Laning—three proteges of Sims at Newport carried on his

vision to a later generation, as future presidents. Some of the

leaders of the Second World War era—Nimitz, Standley, Stark,

Hart, Taussig—were in Newport during the Sims' presidency.

Others applied for membership from Sims' disciples. All of

them, all those who would fight in future war, carried from

Newport to the fleet a small piece of Sims' vision modeled on the

embryo of his own experience.

From this rollcall of names can be sensed the historical

realization of Sims' fraternity of Command, shaped from 1919-

1923. Pratt, Belknap, Laning, Yarnell, and Knox were each a member of Sims' informal "band of brothers" in the prewar

Atlantic Torpedo Flotilla or on his wartime staff. After the

Great War, he brought them to Newport. 110 They dominated

their staff positions and left their stamp: Knox in Command,

Belknap in Strategy, Yarnell in War Plans. Pratt and Laning

each served as president. Sims took the personal fraternity he

had forged, through North Atlantic gale and wartime

diplomacy, and made of it an institution.

Men who had worked closely with Sims, Pratt, Laning,

McNamee, Pringle, or, in the case of Kalbfus, trained under

Pratt, controlled the War College presidency through the

interwar era. The inheritance of Sims was passed down almost

uninterrupted from 1919-1941. As Belknap, in tribute, wrote to

Sims in 1923:

In any war within fifteen years our naval leadership would

be in the hands of those who served under you at the War

College.... 111 In retrospect, perhaps his predication should be recognized as prophecy.
94

Even in peace, the fibers of Sims' Command fraternity began

to penetrate the depth of Service administration. By the early

1920s, War College men were already beginning to dominate

both the CNO's Office and the General Board, in another

triumphant Belknap message to Sims:

Since [1920] the influence of War College trained men in

the Navy Department has steadily grown. In the War Plans

Division up to May last were six who received their

diplomas from you. Admiral Rodgers, Pratt, Schofield, and

the President of the War College, on the General Board; the

Director of Naval Intelligence and the Attaches in England

and France; the last two and the new Assistants to the Chief

of Naval Operations—all are War College Men. 112

In the statistics of association is no convincing evidence of

comaraderie, the unspoken measure of a fraternity. Those

personal allegiances, and private oaths, are not revealed by lists.

But there are some fragments of verse. They were found in Sims' papers, a memory that "Blue

Ribbon" class, the War College Summer Conference of 1912.

With W.L. Rodgers* as president; sims and Knox and

Schofield** and Pratt, and Capt. E.H. Ellis of the Marines, the

Elijah-like prophet of the Pacific War, it was a class to

remember, for their doctrine and their leadership would define

the course of interwar Newport. How high was their espritl

Witness

There's a chap by the name of Schofield,

With two sides to his logical shield.

This shield's a doctrine

That's made of tough skin.

It is all of one piece

And is slippery with grease.

If you punch either side

The blows slip off the hide.

You can hit it a crack

On the front or the back,

But you can't make the cussed thing yield! ***

•Author of the portentous memorandum to the General Board, July 1915. ••Chief of the London Planning Section, 1918; both predominant in Chapter IV, "Mission and

Ethos."
95

Why is Commander Pratt like a fleet of 50 vessels in a single

column?

Because he has a very bad disposition for either attack or

defense.

*#*

There's a certain young chappie named Knox

Who is terribly heterodox.

There's no tactical rule

That he don't ridicule;

He's got something loose in his box.

**#

There's a frisky marine they call Ellis

Whose ability makes some folks jealous

He's a soldier all right

But a tactical blight.

He can plot on the board

So your fleet's always gored.

He can hand you a whack

From a torpedo attack,

And with gleeful elation he'll quell us. 113

This collection of War College "verse," entitled, "War is a Terrible Thing," laughing at the idiosyncrasies of the

"confreres," the absurdities of war gaming, the abstruseness of

doctrine, an archival shard of humor, a forgotten document of

fun; this pastiche of limericks, parodies, and bad puns is a central, significant evidence of esprit.

In laughing at themselves as well as their teachers and

courses, they reveal Newport as more than a "happy ship." This

playful "roasting" is the surest signal in any group of good

fellowship: of confidence in shared identity, of reveling in the

solidity of fraternal membership. Their humor was a symbolic

expression of common faith, con fidentia, in their unity of

mission, and in themselves. If anything, it was a kind of

celebration:

What is the difference between an Estimate of the Situation,

a Mission, a Decision and an Acceptable Solution?
96

An Estimate is what you think

A Mission is what you blink

A Decision is that from which you shrink

An Acceptable Situation is always punk. 114

A generation later, in 1925, the jesting out of class still held

sway. "Slides Made By and Shown to Classes of 1925 U.S. Naval

War College" had more than a trace of the prankish spirit of

Annapolis. If these slides were ever slipped into a regular

lecture

Joint Course, NWC 45-min. Silent Lecture No. 2

Glossary of Synonymous Terms Used in This Lecture:

Estimate of the Situation

Conference

Staff Solution

The Orange War ~^ ~ BULL

Joint Staff —-—

Army and Navy Cooperation11

There is continuity here, too, and of humor, almost as though

in the interweaving of the filaments of the education of mission:

the lectures, the bibliography, the theses, the doctrine, the

fraternity; they should at last be spliced in laughter, a starshell

sign of success. For Mission's spirit, and not its doctrine, drove these men.

Almost unspoken, it left no files and no records; and its measure

is yet beyond the storage capacity even of immortal archive.
97

PART III

THE ENEMY

By all the canons of American policy and American tradition,

there was no enemy. The United States was a peace-loving

nation; after 1919, by all declarations of the ascendant public

mood, victory had delivered a peace-loving world. In the dawn of

a new age, the very preservation of the concept of a national

enemy was an act of atavistic hostility. Like the untouchable

image of "secret diplomacy," a war plan with a list of dramatis

personae was a Doric throwback to the Bronze Age behaviors of

the prewar world: an ethos of arietation and inevitable war.

Unlike the new Bolshevik regime, the United States after 1919

would entertain no principles of realpolitik, no "primary

antagonist" to guide the formulation of foreign policy. But

To the Navy, the enemy was all. Before the creation of the

War Plans Division, Newport spent its summers in the drafting

of potential war "situations." From the early years of this

century, America's oceanic antagonists were challenged and

fought in chalk on the floors of the War College. Out of

convenience and courtesy, the cast of characters was color-coded.

The British Empire was RED, the German, BLACK, the

Japanese, ORANGE. The United States was always BLUE.*

Between the World Wars, Newport no longer generated war

plans. The gaming—the tactical and the strategic and the

logistical "problems" thrashed out in a hundred sessions in the

"cockpit" —was still the testing of Washington's war plans. In

those endless engagements, to the thundering guns imagined in

still morning light, the War College still stretched the canvas for

the next war. As Belknap knew, the War Plans Division and the

General Board were run by Newport men. 1 Pratt called the War

College "the home of thought." 2 The Navy drew its sense of

Mission and of Command from the War College, and war

planning reflected the higher ethos instilled there. On the

finished canvas, it reflected a sharp vision of the future.

*See Appendix I.
98

It reflected the face of battle, and the mask of the enemy.

The image of the enemy was fashioned at Newport. Not only

in war games; it was etched in each of the components of the

War College Course. The image of the enemy was vital to the

Navy: the oceanic enemy defined the Navy's role, its mask

defined the Navy's life. Between Versailles and Pearl Harbor,

there were two enemies: RED and ORANGE.

RED was the color of tradition, and of common blood. RED

was the sentimental yardstick of the Navy's coming of age: to

measure its growth against the wall marks left by an elder, rival

brother. By all Navy allegiance of the heart, RED was like a family antagonist: the clashes of Anglo-Saxon battle fleets off

the Grand Banks were rematches in fantasy from an old

competition, with all the gallantry of Hull and Dacres at the

surrender of Guerriere.

ORANGE was the pigment of Fate. As two destinies, two

racial comets whose orbits must inevitably, intersect so BLUE

and ORANGE would one day do battle for command of the

Pacific. So many dry runs of this campaign, so many pitched

battles in miniature, so many lectures and strategy sessions and

Cassandra pamphlets that this became an unstated Navy creed.

The mask of the enemy as a general scale against which to assess American strategic capability was lost. The mask of the enemy

was lost to the thing behind the mask. Japan became the real

enemy, in part creating, in part justifying, the Navy Mission:

Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects,

man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the

living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but

still reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of its features

from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike

through the mask! 3
99

CHAPTER VII

THE CALLIMORPHOSIS OF THE ENEMY: RED

For the first American century, England was the incarnation

of the oceanic enemy. In 1814, a British squadron had caused the

Capitol to be burned. In two early wars, their wooden battleships

had blockaded our coasts and reduced our marine. Duels ship to

ship with his Britannic Majesty's cruisers streaked the Navy's

folkloric tradition with unforgettable glory. The Royal Navy was

the only external force able to disturb directly the American

"way of life." The British battle fleet and its bases was the 19th

century's sole strategic weapon: it was the critical chink in the

myth of American security.

The Navy looked forward to the prospect of war with Britain

by looking backward. With 1812 as an enduring model,

Americans thought of naval strategy through ancestral lenses,

like a Roman of the late Republic contemplating a rerun of the

Samnite wars. British battleships would blockade American

ports from snug harbors: Port Royal, St. George, and Halifax.

Swift, powerful Yankee cruisers would sortie, broaching the

Atlantic sealanes. This is what would have attended a declaration of war in December 1861, when the Admiralty

assembled half the battle fleet to rush the northeast coast of the

Union. 1 Throughout the century, the United States never once

attempted to follow Hamilton's strategic equation, to balance

the New World against the Old: to create a strategic lever, a squadron of battleships built to sail as a single unit. America

built many capital ships in the 19th century; battleships

operating as cruisers. They never sailed together. There was no

fleet doctrine, no training in squadron battle tactics. Strategy,

unnamed, was unknown. For most of a century, America

possessed in its handful of battleships the embryo of a strategic

weapon and could not give it life. 2 By 1815, the American shipbuilding industry with ease might

have served as midwife to the birth of a strategic system. During

the Civil War, the Union laid down 56 ironclad warships. With
100

two exceptions, this monitor armada was little better than a battery of blockships drawn across a harbor mouth. They could

not fight at sea. American industry might have launched a fleet

to rival England's, and had the imagination but to apply steam

and iron technology to the Jeffersonian vision, and a clutch of

glorified gunboats! 3 America was unable to discard the ethos implied by the

Jeffersonian vision. For more than a century, the American

Navy was built and operated as though this nation was no more

than a fledgling continental polity, incapable of challenging the

maritime powers. This was, after 1815, illusion. The stagnation

of American thought on the strategic usage of a navy has an

important context in this thesis. Nineteenth-century stagnation

severely limited 20-century strategic thought. A primitive

paradigm of American naval strategy, entrenched in the

experience of 1812, stunted the growth of America's nascent

strategic system. Even when the appropriation sluices were

opened at the beginning of this century, the Navy was unable to

employ its flow effectively.

When American battleships finally, formally began operating

as a unit, in 1903, the Service passed the strategic watershed.

Jeffersonian myopia was exchanged for Hamiltonian exotropia.4 When the Atlantic Fleet was formed, in 1906, the New World

had its arbiter.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, the Navy's

strategic vision was truly Hamiltonian. There were three

common motifs between 18th and 20th-century battle murals.

There was an identity of combat theaters. The American was the

second fleet. The enemy was often the British Empire. War with

Britain, as envisaged by the Naval War College in 1912, read like

a passage out of MacCauley:

Twenty-two thousand troops are rushed to Canada, and

arrive off Quebec on D plus 6. The Main Red Fleet, all 46

battleships, anchors at Halifax on D plus 9. Control of the

Pacific is established by Red on D plus 31. A Red

expeditionary force of 80638 assaults New York on D plus

26, and 79927 reinforcements embark on D plus 56. On D

plus 30, 37782 ANZACs assemble at Suva for an assault on

the unfinished Panama Canal. The Blue Fleet, inferior to

Red by more than half, must avoid battle and blockade. 5

Instinctively, the Navy accepted Hamilton's world along with

his world view, and grafted 18th-century grand strategy, as
101

though it were still living tissue, onto a world transformed,

unrecognizable in its mutation. The scenario of the 1912 War

College drama suggests a rematch of the American Revolutionary and Seven Year's War combined. "Black Dick" Howe

anchors off New York with a fleet of dreadnoughts, and

Burgoyne marches down the Hudson Valley equipped with

Vickers machineguns and 18-pounders. The American Fleet,

like Conflans racing to Quiberon Bay, flees before the British

Channel Squadron. The curse of the Hamiltonian strategic

equation was that it, too, was cast in antique images. Unlike the

Jeffersonian, it was an outward-facing vision, posited - on

strategic leverage, with a battle squadron as fulcrum. Yet it was

poured into a defensive mold; its final shape was confined to the

historical parameters of a world that no longer existed.

This was the pernicious inheritance of arrested evolution.

When America and its Navy elevated Mahan to the strategic

priesthood during the 1890s, one 18th-century model was

exchanged for another; for Mahan was, at heart, an 18th-century

man. He exalted in the struggle for empire, he reveled in the age

of fighting sail. A naval generation was weaned at Newport on

English battles and English victories: Anson, Rodney, Nelson,

Howe, Blake; these were the Command models. England was

the only authentic seapower: Tridens quondam, tridens futurus.

In all paradox, Mahan was of more use to the British than to his

own service. He created, within the American Navy, a subliminal sensation of maritime inferiority. At the end of the

19th century, having forged in steel the world's first economy,

America felt that ambitions beyond the world's second fleet

were historically undeserved.6 The first 20 years of this century marked the last resurgence of

British seapower. Mahanian anglophilia and astounding British

battleship programs linked historical and contemporary images

of eternal English naval supremacy. Only irony can characterize

the process: as American naval officers admired the Royal Navy,

so they to that measure lost confidence in themselves. So it was

with the Hochseeflotte, Britain's avowed rival. Both the

American and the Imperial German Fleets of the prewar world

were haunted by unspoken feelings of inferiority. The image of

the Royal Navy was invincible.

This is the essence of the callimorphosis of RED. By

transforming the image of the Atlantic enemy into positive

form, from foe to rival, antagonist to competitor, the Navy was

able to keep faith in its own destiny. As long as the Royal Navy
102

remained supreme, the American Navy must aspire to the image

of an equal engagement. Britain's battle fleet became the

absolute scale. If the U.S. Navy could create strategic stalemate

in a campaign with even the greatest navy

Hamilton had offered such a vision: a deterrent force, a defensive disuasor in a clout of capital ships. Using America's

"commanding position," such a force would with ease "incline

the balance" in the New World. What Hamilton urged in 1787

was fulfilled in 1895 and 1903. American battleships were the

arbiters of the Hemisphere, "to dictate the terms of the

connection between the old and the new world!" 7 This was their limit as well.

By adopting a Hamiltonian strategic vision, the Navy

described a defensive operating theater. The "cockpit" lay in the

sugar islands of the West Indies, as in the days of Rodney, Hood,

and De Grasse. The "key to the continent," Halifax, was but a day's sail from the legendary fortress, Louisbourg. This strategic

seascape stunted the development of transoceanic seapower.

Tabletop battles with BLACK, the Imperial German Fleet,

invariably ended in reruns of the Saintes, 1782. As Bradley Fiske

remarked, in 1915, transatlantic enemies "violating the Monroe

Doctrine will come to us, and we will then have the strategic

advantage."8 Only Japan and the reaches of the Pacific could spur the

impetus to the offensive; and, before 1919, ORANGE was a pale

hue in the rainbow of potential foes.

This pattern of prewar evolution is crucial to an

understanding of the interwar mutation of RED. As a conditional concept of the Atlantic enemy, RED between the

wars was the strategic scale in the measured viability of

American security. Two perceptual displacements were

responsible: the callimorphosis of RED, and the accession of the

Hamiltonian strategic vision.

The process of callimorphosis, from 1895-1917, permitted

the U.S. Navy to discard the image of the Royal Navy as a potential enemy, while still retaining the context of a strategic

balance. As the world's strongest fleet postwar, the Royal Navy

was a precise scale, a standard for measurement. By creating the

positive antagonism of a school or family rivalry, just enough

emotion was injected into the war gaming process to lend the

exercise the patina of reality.

Hamilton's strategic vision, the yet unrecognized ricochet of

Mahan, demarcated hemispheric security along a rigidly
103

defensive sea frontier. The concept of the Atlantic enemy,

whether British or German, RED or BLACK, was rooted in an

18th-century conceit: until the spring of 1940. A unilateral

Atlantic offensive by America on a European or African axis lay

beyond thought. A vigorous "forward defense," embracing the

amphibious seizure of Iceland or the Azores, lay uncontemplated

through the interwar era. 9 Through the callimorphosis of RED, the Navy was able to

wrestle with the challenging, if spectral form of a superior

maritime power in game, though amity reigned in reality. The

classical tradition of an antique strategic vision was in part a corollary postulate to the image of a BLUE-RED war. The U.S.

Navy, interwar, was incapable of placing the fantasy of a sea war

with Britain in the context of an Atlantic offensive. The sublime

emotional weight of historical imagery could not be shrugged:

the Navy simply could not imagine American warships in

combat off the coasts of Italy and France, or even in the stormgray mid-Atlantic.

"The Strategy of the Atlantic," as it was christened at the War

College, became a ritual interwar abstract: of classical combat

with the British battle fleet, off Trinidad or the Georges Bank.

Yet as a measure ot growing self-confidence, the continuing

callimorphosis of RED between the wars offered a series of

perceptual benchmarks. For the U.S. Navy, it was a graph of

growing strength.

Cdr. Holloway Frost was the interwar seer of "The Strategy of

the Atlantic." His lectures at Newport on Jutland, and his

briefings on the course of a BLUE-RED war, outlined the

attitudes of his service toward a traditional foe. Beyond imagery,

his analyses precursed the Navy Department's formal war plan

against the British Empire.

"The Strategy of the Atlantic" was his seminal lecture, first

delivered before the General Staff College, in the capital, on 9

September 1919. Frost's panorama was inspired by the first

postwar suggestion of Anglo-American war drawn, ironically,

by Americans in London. Knox, McNamee, and Schofield, of the

U.S. Naval Planning section, in Memorandum No. 67, were

discussing the causes of conflict between former allies just 10

days after the Armistice. 10 Memorandum No. 67 used the impostumate image of war

with one's ally, voiced in his capital, as a rhetorical means of

expediting the American battleship building program, then

stagnant. Frost's motives were more dispassionate. Each essay
104

saw the surest source of conflict in "trade rivalry": "Successful

trade rivalry strikes at the very root of British prosperity, and

threatens even the existence of the British Empire." 11 Frost

echoed the judgment of the London Planning Section:

No nation, which bases its prosperity on trade can exist with

a major adverse trade balance A nation doomed to

commercial defeat will usually demand a military decision

before this commercial defeat is complete The British

may be forced into a war to maintain their commercial

supremacy, which is essential to the existence of the British

Empire. No one could blame them for starting such a war. 12

This is less of a Darwinian smear of "survival of the fittest" than

it is an unconscious reimaging of the sugar and spice wars of the

18th century. Frost, Knox, McNamee, Schofield, the emerging

intellectual leadership, tended to follow the steepened prejudice

of the first Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. William S. Benson;

as he, in turn, dimly mirrored the fears of the young Federalists.

For 400 years, England had disposed a determined sequence of

maritime rivals: Spain, Holland, France, Germany. Would

America be next? 13 Before the watershed of the Washington Conference, the

officers of the American Navy paid tribute to their own,

unalloyed image of the Royal Navy. To them, in lineal descent,

the Grand Fleet of 1918 was envisaged through the same glass by

which another generation awaited the Grand Fleet of 1812. The

Royal Navy was something big, heroic, even immortal. The

British Empire, flushed with victory, was a historical force. Like

Frost, they knew the British economy was exhausted, its finances

wrecked; American officers recorded Empire unrest in Ireland

and India, they watched Dominion allegiance recede. 14

Still they looked for the resolution of Pitt, the temerity of

Nelson, to emerge from the adversity of postwar Britain. Surely

Britannia would meet the challenge of Wilson's big battleships;

if war ever came between England and America, surely the

offensive initiative would be seized by the Grand Fleet. This was

Frost's thesis: America could not openly oppose the British

battle fleet, clotted with dreadnoughts, 42 to a Yankee 15. In

Frost's war plan, the United States must assault and seize

Halifax and Louisbourg in 6 days, Bermuda in 7, and Jamaica in

17, if our hazardry was to have any hope of victory. Were the

Grand Fleet to arrive in the New World before the leathernecks
105

had secured Halifax, then the campaign would be all but lost.

Unless an amphibious blitz cut RED communications with

CRIMSON (Canada), English shipping would soon pour a freshet of veteran divisions, hardened in the Great War, into the

St. Lawrence Valley, as they had in 1814, to bring stalemate on

the Canadian frontier. 15 The canvas of this "modern" strategy should have been

commissioned for Benjamin West. In the capture of Louisbourg,

he could have used the first assault, in 1745, as model, with

William Pepperall and his New Englanders. Jeffrey Amherst's

1760 campaign down the St. Lawrence Valley could characterize

the Canadian campaign. How like the siege of Havana in 1762,

was the image of American Marines assaulting the defenses of

Kingston! 16 So rooted was the 18th-century association of AngloAmerican war with a classical combat theater, not even the

spectral strategy of global war could tear up its tracery. As long

as the British and Japanese Empires remained in transoceanic

alliance, America was forced to plan for the gauzy contingency of

a two-front sea war. The occasion of the Navy's first crystalgazing into global war was, again, a lecture by Frost, delivered

before the General Staff College late in 1920. "The Naval

Operations of a Red-Orange Campaign," like "The Strategy of

the Atlantic," was the conceptual text for the first War

Portfolios of the War Plans Division. 17 Copies of both were

relayed to the War College from the War Plans Division. 18 Nine months before the Imperial Conference informally

ensured the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Frost

assumed that in a war with ORANGE, intervention by RED was

improbable, for the same cause that would scuttle the alliance:

the hostility of the White Dominions. In a war with RED, Frost

countered, "it seems practically certain that ORANGE would

immediately declare war on BLUE." 19 Frost had grasped the

concept of a "Two-Ocean War." The context was fantastic; the

problem it posed, prophetic.

There was a chance, then, to test, with 20 years' grace, the

texture and the theory of simultaneous naval operations along

America's sea frontiers. By defining Britain as the primary

opponent, the Navy confined its perception of the problem to a predicate of associations of the Atlantic enemy. This process

limited basic assumptions of the possible to a strategy of

hemispheric defense. Frost's RED-ORANGE campaign was a replay of "The Strategy of the Atlantic," with Japan thrown in as
106

a sideshow. Again, Halifax and Kingston must be assaulted, and

Trinidad too, if there is time. The Asiatic Fleet is stranded to

hold the Philippine fort, if it can, while the Pacific moiety of a divided U.S. Fleet struggles to hold Hawaii.20 Frost permitted an abject American defense. Although he

admitted "that in the second year of the war the BLUE fleet in

the Atlantic will be superior to the RED fleet," Frost was

disinclined to offer an oceanic offensive. This is a paradox, and

the essential historical recognition in the essay. Frost was

perhaps the single interwar officer in his service most imbued

with the "offensive spirit":

I hope that I was able to emphasize the necessity of our

officers being infused with the offensive spirit; it is

necessary that we develop what might be called "Offensive

Minds" in the service; and to instill in all the idea of thinking

about what we can do to the enemy rather than what the

enemy can do to us.

21

This plea for a combat ethos, relayed to Sims from China in

1923, seems to contradict the strategic spirit of his earlier essays.

There is no contradiction. The truth is that, through the 1920s,

the U.S. Navy was only slowly to cast off the hackles of heroworship, and the still subliminal sensations of inferiority to the

Royal Navy. In 1920 there was every prospect of a renewal of the

Anglo-Japanese alliance, in name if not in spirit. Britain's battle

fleet equalled in number those of the next five powers

combined. 22 His Majesty's Government had announced its

readiness to lay down new capital ship keels to keep that

margin.23 No Navy could match their combat experience, save

the squadrons of the vanquished scuttled at Scapa Flow.

This incredible, indefinable moral suasion, what Frost called

"an imponderable moral ascendancy"; this measureless asset

was liquidated at Washington in 1922. 24 American officers, like

Knox, who saw a vision of emerging New World naval

supremacy dismantled on the ways, railed bitterly at "The

Eclipse of American Seapower." 25 They failed, in their anger, to

see that something far greater had been given up by Britain.

Having measured 4 years in blood to hold a historical primacy,

they meekly surrendered with mere ink four centuries of

strategic tradition. Ten years were needed for the U.S. Navy to

feel the full fact of this abdication.
107

This was the second stage of the callimorphosis of RED. The

first, from 1895-1917, transformed the Royal Navy from an

enemy to a useful and instructive rival, a model to strive against

in game, not in combat. From 1919 to the mid-1950s, American

naval perceptions of RED, the Atlantic rival, endured a deeper

metamorphosis. Britain accepted the principle of parity with

America at Washington. During the 1920s, tactical games and

studies developed at Newport diagnosed from the principle of

parity, the promise of reality. In accepting the implications of

equality, the U.S. Navy impelled a metamorphosis of self.

The gestation was drawn out over a decade. At Washington,

Britain was granted a dreadnought edge of 22 : 18 over America: a political concession to save the Lion's face. To American naval

officers, this was a decisive edge; and Britannia had saved more

than pride by treaty. Capt. J.M. Reeves was Chief of the

Department of Tactics at Newport in 1925. His analysis, "A

Tactical Study Based on the Fundamental Principles of War of

the Employment of the Present BLUE Fleet in a Battle Showing

the Vital Modifications Demanded by Tactics," for all of its

tendentiousness, was stark animadversion. The thesis was

troubling:

The foregoing study makes it evident that the BLUE Fleet as

it exists today can not engage the RED Fleet in gun action

with any prospect of victory. Every recent tactical exercise,

or war game, at the War College has shown this in the most

emphatic manner. In the last tactical exercise four RED

capital ships were eliminated before the action began in an

effort to give the BLUE Fleet some slight chance of victory.

The result, as usual, was decisive defeat for BLUE.26

There was no skirting this assessment. In all battleline

encounters between the RED and BLUE fleets on the game

floor, between 1923 and 1925, BLUE lost. In Tactical Problem

IV (Tac. 94), fought by the Class of 1923—"The Battle of the

Emerald Bank"—BLUE lost all 18 battleships to RED gunfire.

RED Dread-casualties were less than 40 percent. 26 The only

combat victory over RED was achieved in 1924: Tactical

Problem II (Tac.lO/Mod.9). RED lost eight capital ships in

"The Battle of Sable Island," and BLUE but one. BLUE's

battleline was spared by a successful, and sacrificial, sortie by

massed BLUE destroyer squadrons. A torpedo rush with such

luck was beyond Scheer's skill at Jutland, and BLUE could not
108

throw away dozens of destroyers in the hope of saving their

precious battlewagons.28 BLUE must rely on its "primary

weapon" for victory.

The capital ship was the "primary weapon" and, in 1925, "it is

evident the BLUE Commander cannot win victory by means of

his primary weapon alone." 29 This was Reeves' litany of BLUE

inferiority:

RED Vital Factors of Materiel Superiority

1. Superior Fleet Speed 5.5%

2. Superior Numbers of Ships 22.2%

3. Superior Gun Power 15%-230%

4. Superior Effective Fire 35%-400%

5. Superior Types of Guns 40%

6. Superior Thickness of Deck Armor 15

7. Superior Ability to Penetrate Vitals 4l%-81'%

RED has superiority in every vital factor of materiel

strength for a modern gun engagement. 30 By Reeves' definition, the American Battle fleet was committed

to an antique image of high seas combat, fought at short, standup, high noon ranges. Long before then, at long ranges, 24,000

yards and more, the Yankee battlewagons would be sinking:

The BLUE Fleet can not, under such a handicap, enter the

fatal zone to engage in a gun duel and hope to escape. Once

in the fatal zone the BLUE Fleet can not escape by means of

her speed, nor fight off the RED Fleet by means of her

guns. 31

There was but one solution. Plaster the decks with steel plate,

crank up gun elevation, and learn to shoot and hit hard at 30,000

yards. Between 1926 and 1934, New York, Texas, Nevada,

Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Mississippi, Idaho, and New

Mexico were brought up to standard. 32 Shooting at long range

was tested with West Virginia in 1925, using airplanes for

spotting over the horizon. 33 By 1937, Admiral Reeves, now

CINCUS, could report with pride to the Secretary of the Navy

that the battle fleet could smother the enemy at 30,000 yards;

and that this tremendous reach, the power to hit the enemy in

the "Outer Zone," was the "greatest advantage the United States

Navy possessed." 34
109

The balance was tilting. In London, 1930, Britain accepted

1 5 : 1 5 in dreadnoughts, 50: 50 in cruisers. Perhaps MacDonald, in

Washington in the autumn of 1929, wished to set an early

precedence in appeasement. American officers sensed the

immutable shifting of forces. Through the 1930s their service

shared materiel equality with the old rival. To this fresh

sensation was added then a gathering recognition of moral

superiority.

America's battle fleet, rebuilt and reinvigorated, could now

outrange the British bulwark by 10,000 yards, and sink them

before they came within fighting reach. The reversal was

complete. As Yarnell averred in 1930:

Personally I consider that the United States Battle Fleet is

superior to the British Battle Fleet. At least I would not

trade. 35

This American Navy was losing its awe of legend. At the War

College, regular reruns of "The Battle of Sable Island" were

rescheduled for 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1938. In Operations

Problem VI (Tactical), played by the Senior Class of 1938, BLUE

lost four big ships; RED limped away with twelve dreadnoughts

awash.36 The New World was testing its mettle. In the

metronymy of naval supremacy, American officers were

beginning to see the substitution of the Old World by the New

an easy envisage.

From enemy to rival to ward: the callimorphosis was

complete. At the end of the Great War, the American Navy was

still wrestling with the figures of myth, celebrated by Mahan,

that as Titans confronted a generation of Newport classes. What

better emblem of assumed inferiority than the American change

of uniform, ordered in April 1918. In a despairing protest, Rear

Adm. Hugh Rodman, commanding Battleship Division Nine,

operating with the Grand Fleet, accused the Navy Department

of exchanging a "respected, distinctly American blouse" for a British "rig," "only to gratify the whims of those who want to

copy the English":

I can see no earthly reason for abandoning our own uniform

and adopting one that cannot be told from the British and

thus lose our identity as Americans 37 By aping the British "monkey jacket," we not only paid homage,

we humbled ourselves, genuflecting before a false god. This was
110

Rodman's remonstrance, revealing, at the last crest of British

victory at sea, how fragile still was America's emerging naval

identity.

Even after Washington, the Royal Navy held moral sway in

the minds of American officers. At mid-decade, British

battleline predominance was the prevailing postulate

throughout the service. Not only at Newport, where Reeves was

collecting his damning data, but in Washington. As a body, the

General Board solemnly advised the Secretary of the Navy that

"the British Fleet has approximately twice as effective fire as our

own at long ranges. We cannot assume a moral superiority. The

more the question is analyzed, the more nearly the answer

appears to be a certainty of defeat for us

"

38 If any innate

"moral superiority" was assumed by American officers, it was

assigned to RED. As the American Naval Attache in London

wrote to Dudley Knox, at O.N.I. , late in 1923:

The essence of the matter may be summed up that the

British have never had any intention at any time of agreeing

to an equality in Sea Power with any other nation I have

no hesitancy in stating that the British Navy has never been

as efficient as it is today, and that the British Battle Fleet is

markedly superior to that of the U.S. 39

These passages shelter the latent, still strong, sense of moral and

materiel inferiority in the uncertain imaginations of American

naval leadership.

Reeves' escape clause, and the steady modernization of the

battle fleet erased the materiel factor. MacDonald's submission

at London in 1930 marked a receding moral tide: from myth, to

the merely mortal. As Knox judged in March 1931:

The BLUE Fleet is now able to meet the RED Fleet on equal

terms. 40

Perceived equality was recognized at the interwar pivot. From

there, for Britain, it was to be a downhill slide. Flaccid foreign

policy, and a fast eroding strategic balance at sea, were seen as sure signs of decay. In 1933 King commented in his Senior

Thesis that "our growth and our strength have virtually reduced

Great Britain to second place Truly, Great Britain must be

considered a potential enemy, not in questions of security, but as

to matters involving our foreign trade, financial supremacy, and
Ill

our dominant position in world affairs." 41 No longer a strategic

threat to America, Britain was of interest only in terms of the

conflicts inevitably arising from the transfer of power, and the

legitimation of a new world leader.

American impressions did not improve as war tensions

stretched. At the preliminaries to the second London Naval

Conference in 1934, Adm. William H. Standley was shocked at

the permeation of "Pacifist influence" throughout the British

leadership. American armament, not Japanese, seemed the

critical concentration of the English Camp: "It was evident from

the beginning that the British were levelling their pacifist guns

at me."42 The burnt offerings of appeasement did not sit well

with American naval officers. Adm. J.O. Richardson spoke for

his service:

The willingness of the British to appease the Italians and the

Germans came as an unpleasant surprise to me. These

actions . . . led me to question whether Great Britain could be

relied upon to fight, with arms, for a moral cause.43

As their government "lost markedly in moral stature," so in

equal measure did their navy. Procrastinative rearmament, so

very ginger naval deployment in the Abyssinian Crisis, and

naked haste to deliver a renascent Hochseflotte through the

midwifery of treaty, disturbed American officers. The temple

was gutted; the gods had departed.

So unseemly was their collapse that American officers,

instinctively, began to revise recent history. How, in a single

generation, could a people so willingly discard the naval

instrument of their tetrakosaria of greatness? Had the Grand

Fleet, in armistice ascendancy, carried within its bunkers the

seeds of decay?

Holloway Frost's dissection of the last, whipping clash of

battlelines —Jutland—appeared in 1936. His polemic, as in the

Greek rrokefioo, or war, cruelly stripped the Royal Navy of its

last tatters of historical pride. The appearance of victory in the

Great War was a mask, hiding the shameful failure of the Grand

Fleet to achieve decision in battle. What the Royal Navy

surrendered at Washington in 1922 was the physical shell,

without virtus. That ineffable spirit had departed 6 years before,

at Jutland:

... a "Trafalgar" on May 31, 1916, would have reestablished

British naval supremacy for a long time to come. Such
112

ascendency depends as much upon moral as upon material

factors, and the British lost that imponderable moral

ascendency at Jutland. Never again would American or

Japanese sailors be overawed by the powerful, even

overwhelming force of British naval tradition. The sequel

was that in 1922 Great Britain conceded parity to the United

States . . .

.

44

In the 1920s, Frost's judgment would have earned derision. The

Naval Institute would not have considered publishing his

massive essay. In the year of the Abyssinian Crisis and the

Anglo-German Naval Agreement, Frost's big work was hailed

by his service. He was historian, not heresiarch. He reflected the

"spirit of the age"; the Royal Navy, and the empire it served, had

sold its soul in the present. For this, it was damned in the past.

Suddenly, to the U.S. Navy, H.M.S. "had grown old." 45

This chronicle of callimorphosis suggests more than the sum

of changing perceptions of RED. Callimorphosis implies a changing toward the good. As the American Navy shed its

layered store of historical imagery—of 18th-century provincial

strategy, of hero-worship, of instinctive inferiority—and looked

hard at modern Britain, it was set free.

Free to believe in itself: as the best, the most battleworthy

fleet on the world ocean. Free to contemplate its own, incipient

ascendancy.
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CHAPTER VIII

THE CACOMORPHOSIS OF THE ENEMY: ORANGE

In the No play of America and Japan, the second part, as tradition decreed, was played in full armor, in martial masks.

This, the tragic center of the trilogy, from 1906 to 1945, was

acted in naval battle dress. In the time of sailing ships, when

America's only trans-Kurile connection lay with bluff-bowed,

frigate-ported, whaling brigs, the navy of Biddle and Perry

opened the doors of Japan to "amicable intercourse." With the

coming of coal and steel, and the forging of two Pacific battle

fleets, the scenes, and the masks were changed.

The cacomorphosis of ORANGE evolved within two

perceptual spheres. In the world of professional behaviors the

Navy responded to the slow estrangement of two cultures with

the preparation of war plans: the dispassionate duty of the

Naval Establishment. Administrative bureaus within the

Corporate Ethos attended to the task: scenarios and

contingencies ritually proferred to the policymakers on the

Capitoline. This was the structural mission of the service, the

visible role of the peacetime Navy within the Federal

framework, the domestic mask. This the Navy wore in the

performance of its assigned part, as it faced a potential enemy as well enmasked, each playing its role in the pursuit of antebellum

policy.

Beneath the mask of peacetime planning, of managerial

mission; beneath the formal face of routine role were the

stronger features of subcutaneous identity. Operational Ethos

articulated the abstracted imagery of meaning: the symbolic

sense of self so central to the survival of the Navy Ethos. The

Navy was a warrior society; distilled to essence, it existed for

combat. Management was a means to war preparation, not an

end. The Navy mission was not bureaucratic; it was Homeric. In

peace this was easily forgotten, and this oblivion encouraged

within the American political arena. To keep mission, and

identity, alive, the enemy was made real. Beneath the mask of
114

the enemy, and the Navy's public, dispassionate, persona, was

the emotional characterization of combat. In the dual

cacomorphosis of ORANGE, strategic planning was the cool

medium: the mask. The escalating ORANGE war portfolio,

through this century, mirrored in memorandum-imagery the

visceral subcurrents of hostility, and the readiness to strike

through the mask.

The Naval War College was the surgical instrument in this

transformation of service perception: Japan's evil

metamorphosis. Strategic planning for war with Japan began at

Newport; through the interwar era it was the operating theater

of the War Plans Division. In war game and postmortem

analysis, Washington's plans against ORANGE were tested and

measured, purified and recast. Newport was the laboratory.

War planning was the formal, superficies of this mutation.

It began, innocently, in 1897. A quick essay by Newport's

"Board of Defenses" —"War with Spain and Japan"—was

prompted by the Hawaiian crisis, and the tense visit of the

cruiser Naniwa to Honolulu. This was the dim, embryonic image

of the "Two Ocean War"; and a sorry tale. Japan's navy seizes the

initiative, striking across the Pacific to Juan de Fuca:

... it is admitted that the Japanese might take temporary

possession of Puget Sound for the purpose of coaling ... it

would be necessary for us to abandon the Sandwich Islands

temporarily and with our fleet fall back to the support of San

Francisco. 1

Here is a world view worthy of a minor navy; the operational

ethos of a Scandinavian coast defense force. Even the president

of the War College, Capt. Caspar Goodrich, offered few

propitiations to the Assistant Secretary, Theodore Roosevelt,

eager to "smash up" the Japanese Fleet. "Our marked numerical

inferiority" would preclude an offensive into Japanese home

waters, he confessed, and "the College regrets that facts seem to

forbid a rapid, vigorous, successful war." 2 This skirted simple strategic truth: in five decades of

commercial and diplomatic intercourse, had relations between

America and Japan been breached, both powers would have been

physically hard put to prosecute a war. Without battle fleets and

forward bases, even the stakes of "interest" could not have

compelled a decision. Yet, ironically, this was the indivisible

kernel that would defy the theory of American transpacific
115

strategy, all the way to 1941. Japan would keep pace. Throughout

the interwar era, the Battle Force and its Advanced Base never

managed to merit more than gamblers' odds.

In 1900 Japan was not yet enmasked. Lt. J.M. Ellicott produced

another fantasy scenario in the manner of the 1897 studies. With

the American battle fleet gestating on the Atlantic, Ellicott toyed

with the specter of a Japanese invasion of California via Santa

Barbara. These idle daydreams were an outgrowth of general

Pacific insecurity. America in 1900 held little ironclad leverage

in that ocean; Japan was a useful yardstick to measure American

needs. 3 Before Port Arthur and Tsushima, Russia wore the mask of

the Pacific enemy. Ellicott wrote a more serious memorandum

in 1900 than his "Fall of Los Angeles" script. From Newport, he

addressed the General Board on the prospect of a Russian

descent on the Philippines, and urged alliance with Japan.4 Rear

Adm. George Remey, Commander of the Asiatic Squadron, took

the same stance in 1902 at the height of Russian-American

rivalry in China. 5 That summer after Remey's initiative, the War

College "Problem of 1902" fulfilled this spasm of premature

Russophobia with a complete "campaign." A "Triple Alliance"

of America, Britain, and Japan face France and its Ursine ally.

The war lacks zest, and Allied armies get stalemated in Korea

around the 38th parallel, 50 years too soon.6 Mahan was the first to see the Pacific as the arena of naval and

national destiny. When the Navy reflexed in the Venezuelan

crisis, and found a new enemy in the German Reich, Mahan

made instant exception. The Newport summer conference, the

"Course of 1903," urged that the battle fleet be kept undivided in

the Atlantic. 7 Mahan, like "stern Achilles, shaded by his sails, On

hoisted yards extended to the gales; Pensive he sat":

To remove our fleet—battle fleet—from the Pacific would

be a declaration of policy and a confession of weakness. It would mean a reversion to a policy narrowly American, and

essentially defensive, which is militarily vicious The

American question, the Monroe principle, is as nearly

established as is given to international questions to be. The

Pacific and Eastern is not in that case, and is the great

coming question.8

The War College was seduced by the mesmeric image of

Teutonic ironclads striking across the North Atlantic, ravishing
116

the Caribbean, violating the Monroe Doctrine. Prewar

Darwinian imagery labeled a "virile" Germany as the new,

emotional enemy. From 1903 to 1919, the Navy placed the Reich

in the Hamiltonian strategic theater, RED's traditional harbor.

Germany wore the mask, in the sinister code-color: BLACK.

Monroe was still stronger than Mahan, and Atlantic

iconography still held sway in Service world view.9 Diplomatic crisis with Japan led to rushed war planning at

Newport; and the first Pacific War Portfolio, ORANGE, was

codified by 191 1. 10 This was important: before 1919, the Atlantic

Enemy, calligenic (RED) and cacogenic (BLACK), was

predominant. Japan was still an exercise, not an enemy.

In sudden recognition, at the end of the Great War, the Navy

was confronted with the operational specter of a Pacific war.

What had been a contingency without seniority between 1907

and 1917 became, even as they sprinkled sand on the Versailles

Treaty, the conditional priority of the next war. No longer in the

process of becoming, Mahan's "question" had arrived.

In 1906 war postulates against ORANGE held a leisurely

pace. Without the Panama Canal, the itinerary of war opposed a vigorous timetable. The "Conference of 1906, Solution of

Problem" was the War College document that spawned the

General Board's advisory plan: cryptically entitled, "In Case of

Strained Relations with Japan." 11 A curious prescriptive. Battle

strategy is reduced to three pages, listed in recitation like the

"principles of war" from an academy text. The long journey of

the BLUE battle fleet, to battle rendezvous off the Trojan shore,

needs forty. 12 Like Rojestvenskiy's fated fleet, the U.S. "Combined Fleet"

was to steam bravely out of Chesapeake Bay, make for Morocco,

then the Mediterranean, then the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the

Indian Ocean, the Java Sea, and, at last, the Macassar Straits and

the gateway to Mindanao. After 87.64 days and 220,994 tons of

coal, a tired fleet, in narrow straits, making for a beleaguered

base, would face the fresh ironclads of ORANGE, confident

ship-killers, cleared for action. 13 Now that America had her own imperial jewels in the

Orient—the Philippines—more than commercial interests

called for transpacific suasion. An interservice "Joint

Committee," incorporating officers from the Army General

Staff and the Naval War College, strove to solve the conundrum

of a successful war. Their assessment of the "Special Situation"

was bleak:
117

When the United States Force shall have arrived [in the

Philippines] it will have no home coal mines and no naval

base in those waters The Japanese should be able to

approximate equality in numbers "Command of the

Sea" will thus not be established the moment our Atlantic

Fleet reaches the Philippines Our situation will be well

nigh desperate 14

Sailing around the world to relieve the Philippines was an

operational exercise with a single virtue: it offered the promise

of a short war. Before 1919 Manila was not worth a long mass.

All would be well, the Joint Committee concluded, were America

but to carve a fortified base by Subic Bay, strong enough to hold

out for 3 months, and the weary Atlantic Fleet. If only "Subic Bay

can be defended to the last," the war could be quickly, painlessly,

won. 13 Mahan's single bitter reply:

That we should have a stronghold impregnable as Port

Arthur Absit omen!

The omen would not be heeded. A short-war illusion lingered

on into the interwar era. Even when ORANGE donned the

mask of the primary enemy, planning still echoed hopes for

quick conflict. The vastness of the Pacific could not yet be tamed

by Victorian technology. Manila was close to Japan; the Main

American fleet was in the gray Atlantic, half a world away. A

coal-stoking, triple expansion navy could not hope to rescue an

embattled base on Luzon. This was the hard truth:

The BLUE Fleet, arriving at Manila via Suez . . . would be

expended. That would end the war. If we call the time three

months, the route via Suez means a short war, totally

unsuccessful for BLUE. 16

Through the 1930s many hardly relished the alternative.

A long, grimy war, island to island, across the Pacific. A nice,

fastidious campaign, in image more a sortie than a siege; capped

by a sharp, climatic engagement: this was the desideratum of

domestic politics. Those policymakers constitutionally charged

with the defense of America's Pacific spoils prayed for an easy

defense. A long war was an expensive fantasy. There were too

many unjustifiable preparations to protracted conflict.

Spasmodic scenarios were attractive, and cheap; it was
118

"sensible" security. In the narrative evolution of war planning

and the cacomorphosis of ORANGE, such subtle pressure

shaded the perceptions of American officers. In high command,

there was never an absolute standard of war readiness, or in

national security, as J.O. Richardson discovered on the eve of

Pearl Harbor. 17 When Cdr. J.H. Oliver, in a short memorandum to the

president of the Naval War College, 20 April 1907, forecast the

true axis of the future Pacific War, he offered no more than

"blood, tears, toil, and sweat":

Upon the outbreak of war in our present state of

unpreparedness, we must regard our oversea Pacific

possessions as temporarily lost, and proceed resolutely to

their re-conquest . . . through advance across the Pacific

upon a broad strategic front. The initial loss must not deflect

our true course. 18

Four years later, 15 March 1911, Rear Adm. R.P. Rodgers, then

president of the War College, adopted this approach in the first

full, formal war plan for ORANGE. Newport's "Strategic Plan

of Campaign Against ORANGE" was simple, and remained all

but unchanged for 30 years: —The Fleet would sortie from Hawaii, and anchor

at the end of the line: Okinawa. —The axis of advance would cut the Central

Pacific, and incur the island-hopping seizure

of the Marshalls and Carolines. —Manila would be re-captured. —The Fleet would hike out with its own, mobile,

advanced base. —Japan would be brought to its knees through

blockade: economic strangulation. 19

There would be no short war; there was no certainty even of a climatic, setpiece sea battle: aTrafalgar-like'decision. Drawn on

a canvas of early dreadnought technology, sans radar, sans Zero,

sans B-29; it was a remarkable picture of "the shape of things to

come." Rodgers even suggested, in clairvoyance of Nimitz, "that

BLUE forces should be employed in the capture of the Lu Chu

Islands [Okinawa], and the reduction of the Pescadores

[Formosa] than to begin extensive land operations for the

recapture of Luzon." 20
119

When, in 1919, Japan became the primary antagonist, the

notional components of a transpacific offensive and a prolonged

naval war were set and solidified. The endless interwar analysis

of the ORANGE Plan was file and brush work: a polish job. In

1911 war with Japan was imaged on a realistic operational

procedure. The reworking, step by step, over the succeeding 30

years did not improve the basic plan. Conditions changed.

Advancing battle technology was an incremental bonus; the

Washington Treaty, a premature handicap a generation before

the race. Continuity of concept was never broken. Through 30

years, an entire society of officers passed through Newport and

faithfully memorized the vision of the ORANGE Plan. Modern

revisionists claim that this was not "creative." 21 They scoff at

Nimitz' tribute to Newport's indoctrination of ORANGE:

"... the courses were so thorough that after the start of WWII

nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or

unexpected."22 They should read Rodgers' prophetic picture,

one he never lived to see. Those others at Newport that year,

who worked in the drafting of that first plan—Sims, Pratt,

Oliver, Schofield, W.L. Rodgers, and Mahan—were also dead, or

too old for command in that far future war. The strategy they

shaped, and the mission that drove them all, they transmitted,

from Mahan's 19th-century premonition, from generation to

generation, to ultimate, startling reality. 23 The permeation of the 1911 plan can be traced through time

and through the naval society.

Between 1914 and 1920, the Navy accepted the initial fall of

the Philippines. As Bradley Fiske admonished Josephus Daniels

in 1914, "we cannot prevent the Japs from taking the

Philippines." 24 In 1920 Sims told Daniels that the War College

"has long held that the retention of Manila Bay cannot be

counted on and that any plans based on its retention are in

error." 25 The concept of a complete, self-contained mobile base,

capable of drydocking and fleet repair of capital ships, was

pioneered by Knox and Furer at Newport in 192 1. 26 By the end

of 1927, a "Synopsis of a Preliminary Technical Study—Basic

Orange Plan, Advanced Base." This, the fabulous "Western

Base," was to encompass 17 floating docks, 3 miles of piers, three

125-ton cranes, 500,000 tons of fuel oil, 4,000 hospital beds, and

37,600 officers and men.27 Strangulation of the home islands was the agreed objective of

operations by the 1930s. "The influence of ORANGE Economic
120

Factors on BLUE's Strategy in War" was developed by the

ORANGE Economic Committee at the War College in 1933. In

this prescient memorandum, Okinawa is the key to the blockade

of Japan. To cut ORANGE trade by 80 percent, "Okinawa must

be taken." 28 Short war serendipity died hard. "Strategic Problem

Pacific" was drawn up late in 1916, at the request of Secretary

Daniels. After the passage of the 1916 Naval Building Program,

and before the Washington Conference, it was easy to fantasize

of a powerfully fortified Philippine base and of an awesome

American armada, 60 capital ships, 84 cruisers, 199 destroyers,

steaming the breadth of the Pacific as a body, a juggernaut of

dreadnoughts. 29 Treaty restrictions in 1922 stripped this

illusion. By the early 1920s, Sims, Fiske, Frost, and Yarnell were

speaking at Newport of a war of 2 to 4 years. Fiske thought it would cost more in blood and treasure than the recent "Great

War." 30 Yarnell's vision of war hardly changed through 20 years.

As CINCASIATIC, he wrote to CNO in 1938: "The war will be a naval one of long duration

"

31 By the mid- 1930s, studies at Newport insistently confirmed

that, in a short, spasmodic war, with the BLUE battle fleet

rushing to Manila, "success is not only uncertain but is actually

unlikely." War with ORANGE required a massive

concentration, and a deliberate offensive, like rolling thunder:

Success is practically certain provided the war effort is

maintained through the period of at least three years which

would be required before the Fleet could reach the Western

Pacific. 32

History kept to this schedule. Marines landed at Leyte almost 3

years to the day after Pearl Harbor.

In the heyday of "Navy Basic Plan ORANGE, WPL-8-16,"

1929 to 1938, the pioneering postulates of 1911 were spun into

an 800-page operational code. 33 The ORANGE Plan was the

instrumentality of ethos. If Operational Ethos extracted from

the embracing Corporate Ethos of the Navy Society its sense of

abstracted mission, of ultimate identity, then the ORANGE

Plan was the talmudic text of mission. WPL-8 and its successors

corporealized mission: from unstated, sensated vision of the

Navy's role in the making of national policy to the dim imagery

of national destiny, the massive, all-consuming, all-contingent

tracery of directive made of the word, law:
121

NATIONAL MISSION: To impose the will of the UNITED

STATES upon ORANGE by destroying ORANGE Armed

Forces and by disrupting ORANGE economic life

MISSION FOR THE NAVY: To gain and to exercise

command of the sea, and to operate offensively against

ORANGE . . .

.

34

WPL-8, the mask of the Japanese enemy, created a set of

enduring postulates that defined not only the context and

texture of the next war but that, in and of themselves, inspired

an encompassing expectation of future war with Japan. More

than this, even, the ORANGE Plan generated, in the irrevocable

weight of SECRET text and the ritual acting-out of a thousand

war games, an escalating imagery of tradition. Japan became

agent as well as enemy. The longer that Japan wore the mask,

the more generational tiers within the Navy Society

simultaneously shared the essential postulation. From 1911 to

1941, incremental layers of officer classes, from admiral to

ensign, held the world view of the ORANGE Plan. The

Commanders of '41 had spent their entire professional lives

preparing to enact THE MISSION:

War with Japan. National Mission was then indivisible from

the defeat of ORANGE. National Destiny, like the mask of the

enemy, was an image transformed. The Atlantic enemy, the

Hamiltonian strategic theater, the defense of the New World;

these had been the inseparable shibboleths of the U.S. Navy.

They conscribed the traditional world. After 1919 the old

slogans were discarded. Over 30 years, the hallucinogenic sway

of Pacific war planning conjured an expectational tradition. So

intense was the concentration on ORANGE, so hypnotic was

the ritual rehearsal, repeated in unnumbered war games at

Newport, that historical reality flowed naturally, effortlessly,

necessarily.
122

CHAPTER IX

BEHIND THE MASK

Late in the year 1901 Rear Adm. Stephen B. Luce wrote to the

Minister of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Vice Adm. Yamamoto

Gombei. He, the Grand Old Man of the U.S. Navy, had enclosed

two cracked and faded daguerrotypes, the substance of a memory: the first formal visitation of Americans to Japan. They

were the images of the sailing battleship Columbus and the

sloop-of-war Vincennes, commanded in 1846 by Commodore

James Biddle:

Crude though they may be, they commemorate the initial

step in the series of international events which may have led

to the friendly relations now so happily existing between the

two countries. As such, I trust they may be accepted from one

who had the honor of serving, as a midshipman, under

Commodore Biddle, on that occasion; and who was then

deeply impressed with the high character and noble bearing

of the Japanese. 1

In 1900 a survey of Japan commissioned by the Naval War

College did not spare praise for the Japanese, who "possess the

characteristics of courage, endurance, intelligence and

patriotism." 2 Two years later the Newport summer conference

even encouraged the vision of a "Triple Alliance" of the United

States with Great Britain and Japan. 3 How far had the passage of mutual relations descended that,

in early January 1939, Yarnell, As CINCASIATIC, would write

to the president of the War College, of another Japan:

Their mission is to impose their culture and domination on

the world. This is to be done by force. They worship the

sword and rely on it to fulfill their destiny .... When there

are nations who believe only in the sword, peaceably

inclined nations must go to war to defend themselves, or accept
123

domination. I cannot see how we can escape being forced

into eventual war against Japan.4 Tentatively, in 1906, Newport and the Navy began to plan for

war with Japan. By the next year, war-planning memoranda

began to refer to the potential enemy as "Japs." From amity to

enmity, the Navy's emotional imagery of Japan was harnessed

to the war-planning process in tandem devolution. Like a team

of good draught horses, they worked well together. A strong

level of professional preparation for war was sustained by a satisfying emotional subtext. Between the wars, as the Britannic

enemy experienced its callimorphosis, both professional and

emotional combat expectation focused on Japan. ORANGE

alone became the object. By the end of the 1930s Japan had

become an inevitable enemy, an essential schema of the Navy

world view.

When Yarnell spoke of Japanese destiny he was, in

implication, linking two nations. Japanese destiny became the

objective agent of American destiny in the Pacific. The image of

ORANGE, within the U.S. Navy, came to transcend the

oscillations of American public and American policy. Notions of

racial antipathy and inevitable war, indoctrinated at the Naval

War College, created an intraservice continuum of value. This

was the spine of the Navy mission: the incorporeal sense of

corporate purpose was endowed, in the objective of the Japanese

enemy, with osseous substance, a vertebral rallying point.

The emotional image of the enemy did not spring, full-blown,

from the covers of the first ORANGE War Portfolio. Before the

Great War, Service opprobrium was reserved for the Atlantic

Enemy, and especially for BLACK. In the heyday of Social

Darwinism, the German Reich seemed the supreme competitor.

In spite of encroaching encirclement, American officers enjoyed

the image of a Teutonic threat to the New World, after the

manner of Homer Lea, and the popular Day of the Saxon}

Germany and America, with equal navies, and the world's

dominant industrial economies, were well-matched. Within the

traditional American strategic theater, an Anglo-Saxon bout

conjured a satisfying scene.

Japan, in pre- 1914 contrast, was less threatening and less

tractable. Before the Panama Canal passed its first ship, even

war games against Japan played at Newport were a chore. Actual

operations from the Atlantic coast would have been so awkward

as to make a campaign inconceivable. The cruise of "The Great

White Fleet," as demonstrative support for Far East detente,
124

was the realistic limit of American battle fleet utility in the

Western Pacific. 6 A war in the Caribbean, and battle with the

Hochseeflotte, would have been a comfortable campaign by

comparison.7 With the gathering of tensions before the European War,

American officers began to draw invidious connections between

Germany and Japan. Mahan, in 1910, indelicately linked the two

"restless" states to ancient Sparta, and the source of the modern

definition of "tyranny." 8 Bradley Fiske, as Aide for Operations,

wrote that "the Japanese really admire and like the Germans

more than any other people!" 9 ORANGE, not yet even principal

potential enemy, was being drawn into the net, to be dressed in

the German mode.

This trimming was undertaken at Newport, with gusto.

Archival evidence reveals a subtle displacement of emotional

imagery after 1913. Trace elements of the War College Course

remain, to highlight the making of the enemy: ORANGE. The

lectures, the reading, the theses: each worked in weaving the

pattern.

The image of inevitable war was first voiced at the summer

conference of 1913. Professor John H. Latani ended his lecture,

"The Relation of the United States and Japan," with this

warning:

. . . peace with Japan does not rest on traditional friendship,

but on Japan's present inability to finance a war, and on our

inability to defend the Philippines. With either condition

eliminated, war would be the probable outcome. 10

In 1914 and 1915 —for the first time, almost in echo of this

sibylline vision—O.N.I, reports "Re ORANGE Strategic Plan"

appear in the Naval War College Archives. Their redolent titles

were capped by the imagery of "War Between Japan and

America: A Picture of the Future." 11 O.N.I, claimed these as authentic intelligence intercepts: the dialogues of war planning

in the Imperial Naval General Staff. These formal rumors,

avidly read, could only have embroidered the image of inevitable

war. Latani was right: America was not yet able, andJapan could

not afford, to send their battle fleets into mortal West Pacific

combat. War was forecast for the future; the expectation had just

been born.

1915 was the hinge, the turning point. Shortly after the new

year Lt. Cdr. L.A. Cotton returned from Tokyo where he had
125

served as naval attache. On 9 and 10 February, Cotton spoke to

Bradley Fiske, Aide for Operations, and Josephus Daniels,

Secretary of the Navy. On 26 February he spoke at Newport. His

lecture, "Far Eastern Conditions from the Naval Point of View,"

was to become the Navy's inclusive manual of cultural

stereotype: its seminal ethnography of Japan.

In crisp analysis, Cotton succeeded in assembling in a single

essay all the commonly held, informally voiced racial notions of

Japan then etherous in the Navy. In characteristic list, he drew a portrait of the Japanese that American officers responded to as revelation. As Fiske confided in private journal, Cotton "spoke

so very interestingly and intelligently about Japan that I asked

him to go to SecNav, and tell him all." 12 Cotton's racial primer isolated six primary identifiers in

Japanese national character:

A WARRIOR ETHOS: "Militarism is developed to its

highest level in Japan . . . they are possessed by military

spirit, which dominates their existence, and with it a readiness to undergo hardship, suffering, and death

"

13 NO INITIATIVE: "The Japanese people are most amenable

to discipline . , . this attitude quickly develops into a blind

obedience ... it results in almost entire absence of initiative

of the subordinate." 14 NO ORIGINALITY: "A most pronounced characteristic is

the absence of originality The Japanese are very

progressive in their extreme readiness to adopt an idea, but

are equally Oriental in their frequent failure to assimilate

it 15

DECEITFUL: "Secretiveness seems inborn to the

Japanese ... no other people in the world can preserve a collective secret to the degree of the Japanese." 16 RUTHLESS: "A Japanese has no concept of abstract justice,

and no idea of fair play. His conception of justice is met only

when he gets all he desires, and his idea of fair play is for

every factor to favor his side." 17 ARROGANCE: "The Japanese is possessed by what can

only be characterized as colossal conceit. Their attitude is
126

that they do not have to prove their superiority—they freely

admit it. The effect of this trait on military character is to

produce boldness

"

18

Cotton did not invent these shibbolethic images; they were

shared throughout the Service. Commodore Mathew Galbraith

Perry was the first to call the Japanese "deceitful," recorded

again and again in his private journal. 19 By creating a formal

schema, a concrete set of catchwords, Cotton cast a cultural lens

for the Navy: a tinted glass through which to regard the enemy,

darkly.

Between the wars, in the age of the ORANGE enemy, lectures

and memoranda on Japan offered at Newport instinctively

sought the cultural vocabulary of Cotton. Yarnell's 1919 address,

"Strategy of the Pacific," included an indictment of Japanese

culture, called "Japanese Characteristics," that in identic articles

mirrored the Cotton precedent. Some imagery was exchanged

"warlike" for "militaristic," "dissimulation" for "deceit" —yet

the list was the same. 20 In 1927 a report from O.N.I.,

"Memorandum Regarding Japanese Psychology and Morale,"

was circulated at Newport. Updated by a decade, it was no more

than a rewrite-facelift of Cotton's doctrine. 21 In 1939, at the end

of the era, another ex-naval attache offered his "Notes,

Comparisons, Observations, and Conclusions" on Japan to

Newport. There was no change. Then, at the end of his rambling

discourse, Capt. Edward Howe Watson revealed the key to

continuity.

As long ago as 1915, while taking a course at the Naval War

College, I had the privilege of hearing the late Captain

Lyman Cotton lecture here on his return from Japan.

He estimated the situation correctly, and furnished this

information 24 years ago, to Washington. But even he,

foresighted as he was, would have been astounded and

appalled at the growth of Japanese ambition, and at the

hardihood and success with which she pursues it. 22

Full Circle. Cotton described the vocabulary of the emotional

subtext of the ORANGE enemy. He did something more; he

struck a remembered prophecy. He said, in 1915:
127

The future ambition of Japan favors expansion to the

southward through the many islands situated there, and

where rice grows so bountifully and a supposedly lower race

of men live and can be made to work for their rulers. This

idea leads to America as the future enemy —23

Cultural and racial deprecation of the enemy worked like

strongback shoring to support the bulkhead of Navy mission:

against the sea pressure of inevitable war. The U.S. Navy,

between 1915 and 1921, came to face the vision of ultimate war

with Japan, a vision that would not recede with the transfer of

the battle fleet to the Pacific that year. Emotional acceptance of

war, even in a fighting service, must be earned. The "Mission" of

the ORANGE Plan was an operational end-run: the final,

physical product of a more penetrating preparation. Newport

had instilled the service with a vision of the Navy role on a vast

stage, in a triumphal American drama. The Navy was the cutting

edge of American policy, and it was more. American policy was,

ultimately, an extension of a larger historical force.

In hypothetical war with Japan, rerun at repeat performances

for 30 years, the Navy Mission was not simply "To gain and

exercise command of the sea," as National Mission was not "To

impose the will of the United States on ORANGE." War with

Japan was cast as crusade. Racial metaphors were the subliminal

props; they enrobed the image of the ORANGE enemy in evil

cloth, and BLUE in stainless raiment: a surcoat of purest white.

The year the fleet crossed the Canal, and the proscenium of

Pacific destiny, Professor J. O. Dealey addressed the officers of

this armada, at Newport:

If Japan is allowed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, it means

ultimately a war of races, the struggle of the Yellows and the

Browns against the Whites, under the leadership of a Prussianized Japan.24

The racial context codified by Cotton, directed against Japan

in specific vocabulary, was supported by the general language of

behavioral determinism. Working from the embracing

expectational postulates of Social Darwinism, the Navy simply

transposed theoretical concepts to perceived realities. Cotton's

lecture provided the glossary of terms with which to define the

contemporary "struggle of races."
128

A generation before its outbreak, those who would be caught

in its blast had accepted the inevitability of war. Cdr. Chester W.

Nimitz wrote of "the struggle that is certain to come." 25 Capt.

Thomas C. Hart thought it "likely" that Japanese-American

policies "will conflict so seriously that mutual adherence will

lead to War." 26 Cdr. Husband E. Kimmel said, simply, "We will

come into conflict with Japan

"

27 Social Darwinism created

an expectation of struggle. Racial imagery, in defining absolute

biological barriers between peoples, made that struggle seem

irresolvable.

"There is a great deal of value regarding Racial Factors." 28 So

began one student's review, in 1935, of Roland Dixon's Racial

History of Man. By breaking the relations of the United States

and Japan into a clash of biological forces, the Navy injected the

will of natural selection into the war-planning process. By

placing racial distinction on a scale of good and evil, the Navy

added a pinch of crusading spice to the prospect of "an inevitable

struggle." 29

By the middle years of the 1930s, Japanese atrocities in China

served to intensify the racial metaphor of good and evil, BLUE

and ORANGE. Where Cotton, in 1915, described a set of

pejorative traits, his imagery had, in 20 years, evolved into what

Ahab called "an inscrutable malice." As Cdr. Ellis Mark

Zacharias wrote, in his Newport thesis, 1934:

The various cruel and vicious acts committed in the name of

patriotism appear only as a revolting reversion to barbarism

still in the Japanese Race. The plain truth is that Japan

cannot be regarded other than as an Oriental race, and a policy that does not keep this in view is committing an error

fraught with grave consequences 30

As examination of the components of the War College Course

revealed in this essay, Newport was the source indoctrination of

antipathy and inevitability. From 1915 the lectures, the reading,

the theses placed increasing emphasis on Japan, "that

inscrutable thing" behind the mask.

Both Yarnell and Puleston, as young officers, heard Cotton

speak of the Japanese on that February morning in 1915.

Puleston's thesis, submitted in June, offers a clue to the influence

of nascent, racial imagery, on the suggestive imagination of the

young lieutenant. He ended his essay, "Blue Strategy in the

Pacific," with a warning to America:
129

. . . And we would ask these teachers of eternal peace not to

make the task of the military in this country too hard with

their false teaching. Lest in the future some Yellow historian

recall the present day exploits of the Japanese like we recall

those Germanic tribes that overran Rome. Lest these

teachers be called with their mental calisthenics to while

away the leisure of the warlike Jap. Lest they be forced with

supple finger to preserve in bronze the bullet-headed

conqueror. Or with deft strokes of the brush produce his

yellow face on canvas, while with ingenious but specious

thought they invent a new philosophy to solace their fellow

citizens whose ancestors perhaps were not so highly

civilized but who did know how to wield a sword. 31 When his popular commentary, The Armed forces of the

Pacific, was published by Yale 26 years later, ripe imagery and

rhetorical indignation had been long excised from his writing.

His perception of Japan was unchanged. His summary of

Japanese character listed the shibboleths of Cotton's lecture in

instinctive reiteration. His descriptive modifiers: "fecund,"

"virile," "acquisitive," "zealous," "chauvinistic" with which he

had, like Tacitus in Germania endowed the barbarian samurai of

his youth, remained. 32 Like his friend, Puleston, Yarnell's codewords of racial

perception kept continuity, from War College lecture to

CINCASIATIC correspondence, 1919 to 1939. 33 Letters they

exchanged later in their careers highlight a synonymity in their

vision of Japan. 34 This link is underscored by Yarnell's preface to

The Armed forces of the Pacific.

The Personal Nexus is crucial to the transmission of world

view. In the unerring response of Yarnell, Puleston, and

Watson, 20 years after, to the remembered imagery of youthful

indoctrination, is a diagrammatic cro: jction of the

mechanism of culture. In this instance, the postulates passed

down were central to the definition of the Navy mission.

They defined the enemy: not on the articulate level of policy

and operational planning, but on the subconscious tiers of

emotional expectation. As has been argued here: this process,

though but dimly understood, was a cultural necessity; necessary

to sustain the authenticity of war planning in a peacetime world,

necessary to justify service sacrifice in the event of war. The

enemy, the real enemy, the opponent that "puts forth the

moulding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask";
130

this was the mirror of the Navy's own identity. At last, the

manager's role, the professional mask, was not enough to

inspire even corporate, let alone operational, ethos.

Behind the mask was a worthy foe: equal and opposite. In its

undoubted strength, courage, and cunning, the ORANGE Fleet

was a bracing challenge. In its evil incarnation, cruel, ambitious,

and proud, the ORANGE Fleet defined BLUE in stark contrast,

good arrayed against evil, and so imparted a sensation of

righteous strength.

If, from the soft Scandinavian armchair of a more modern

world view, we are tempted to sneer at their backward vision,

remember this. The mirror they made of the enemy at Newport,

from 1915 to 1941, reflected only another mirror. At the Kaigun

Dae Gakko, at Tsukiji, Tokyo, officers in the Imperial Japanese

Navy had created, over the span of a contemporary generation,

their own "inscrutable malice": The American Enemy. In the

shimmering irony of dual cultural reflection, they erected an

identical set of racial imagery on which to posit an assurance of

inevitable war. 35
131

PART IV

THE GAME

While their country was at peace, they played at war.

Autochthonous to the American Navy, and the granite Globe

of Newport, "The Strategic Naval War Game" was the

Elizabethan instrumentality of the Service: "The brightest

heaven of invention." Through "mysterious dispensations," a most marvelous suspension of disbelief, a mere lieutenant might

command a mighty battle fleet; the tiled floor be as the blue

waters of the Pacific, the gray swell of the Atlantic; and galleried

gameroom encompass the destinies of nations at war. When

Capt. William McCarty Little, like the conjuring Chorus, said:

The

William McCarty Little, like the conjuring Chorus, said:

game offers the player the whole world as a theatre . . - 1

he called for an "imaginary puissance," as in ancestral voice, to

ask:

. . . Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?2

In their ever empty sea theater, where on each tile "eight

inches is equal to 2,000 yards and a sea mile," 3 officers rehearsed

the parts they would play in future, combat performance. These

men, the actors of a yet unwritten war, prepared their scenes on

a blank stage, with only colored chalk and cast lead tokens as props. "Prologue-like," they prepared, and made "imaginary

forces work," to ready themselves for a harsher testing.

As ritual, the Newport war game was not a game at all:

In the game of war, the stake is life itself, nay, infinitely

greater, it may be the life of the nation; it certainly is its

honor. We are its champions 4
132

What McCarty Little revealed, in chivalric imagery, was the war

game as behavioral preparation, the ritual of role: "What the

jousting field was to the knight, the War Game is to the modern

strategist

"

5 More than simple stage direction, the game was

the audition for combat, the runthrough for Operational Ethos.

Ritual, and Oracle. The annual casts of young commanders

were not celebrating, in remembered verse, old victories, like

Virgil over Actium. In each of 300 volumes, the "History of the

Campaign" was the hopeful, incremental submission to the

Sibylline Canon: the script of future war. As each game

unraveled, move by move, to prophetic die-cast, with umpires as vates, it was almost as if the lines had been spoken at Cumae.

For some, there was true portent. Willis A. Lee and Jesse

Oldendorf were the last American admirals to bring

battlewagons into action against the dreadnought species of the

enemy: 14 November 1942, and 25 October 1944. On 11 July

1928, at Newport, both men received an invitation regarding the

combat maneuvering of a battleship division. How could they

know, maneuvering paper BatDivs on a summer's day, that they

would bring the big ships, "BLUE Fleet," into the last thunder of

the guns:

SENIOR CLASS OF 1929

Department of Operations

TACTICS

Period 19 July-24 July (incl.)

First Day. Assemble in East Game Room at 0930.

Bring:

Pad

Pencil

Drawing Instruments

Maneuver Rules

Chart and Board Maneuver

BLUE Fleet6

Let the Game begin!
133

CHAPTER X

THE GAME AS RITUAL: EXPEDE HERCULEM

The Latin phrase Expede Herculem fully expresses the idea:

from the foot of Hercules can be constructed the entire body:

from a part of a thing we may infer the whole. On the tactical

board, opposing fleets may be maneuvered at will—in

miniature. 1

So spoke the Navy's Nestor, Rear Adm. Stephen Bleecker Luce,

at Newport, in 1909. To command The Decision: simply, "to

learn what to do with a fleet in battle," the fledgling admiral

must first learn to master "the tactical board." Combat command

must first be demonstrated with ships of lead, before essaying

same in steel incarnation. To Luce, Tsushima was first fought,

and won, "on the tactical board, long in advance of the RussoJapanese War." 2 Ten years later Sims echoed Luce and set the place of the

Game in interwar ritual:

The principles of the war game constitute the backbone of

our profession. All other kinds of nautical knowledge and

experience will avail us nothing when it comes to war if we

have not learned the game, that is, if we do not know how to

handle naval forces.

The game can be learned only by playing it. 3

Play it they did: through the duration of each annual course, day

after day, in pursuit of what Sims called "the practice of war." 4 In

the Archives at Newport, 318 recorded game histories remain,

brittle and dust-filmed, for the entire interwar era, 1919-1941

(See Appendix II). The gaming of the Senior Class of 1932 can

be taken as typical. Placed midway between the wars, that year

was the first to achieve a standard game schedule. Three species

of war game were played, in finalized evolution: the Operations
6

3

11

Days

17

// 110

// 124 // 17

// 8

//

7

"5

134

Problem, the Tactical Problem, and the clutch of Quick Decision

Problems. From 2 July to 20 May, 304 out of 326 days were

devoted to the Game. This was how that time was spent, those

endless forenoon sessions:

Tactical Presentations

Search Problem

Demonstrative Tactical Exercise

Demonstrative Strategical Exercise

Tactical Problems I-VI

Operations Problems I-V

Critiques

The Battle of Jutland (Board Maneuver)

Quick Decision Problems (A,C,E)

The first month was simply instructive. Tactical

presentations on essential fleet components—Battle Line

Tactics, Light Forces, Submarines, Aircraft—served "to refresh

students' knowledge." Scouting procedures were reviewed in the

Search Problem, those esoteric applications now forgotten: the

"In-and-Out Method," "Relative Movement Method 'A'," the

"Sector Method," the "Radial Double-Bank Method," the

"Limited Ellipse." 6 The Demonstrative Exercises were pure

Bible study: instruction in both Chart and Board Maneuver,

Order Writing, and the Maneuver Rules, chapter and verse. 7 Operations Problems were conducted as a "Chart Maneuver, a substitute for actual Strategic Maneuvers of the Fleet." 8 These

marked the mutual fleet movements of a simulated oceanic

campaign. All took place on paper. From move to move, each

fleet "staff" plotted the moment-to-moment tracking of

multitudinous, three-dimensioned armadas: ships, aircraft, and

submarines. Umpires kept an omniscient "Master Plot" as imagined fleets, ponderous and inexorable, crept in colored lines

on tracing "flimsies" toward awaited clash of battle fleets. The

campaign choices facing rival commanders echoed the catechism

of doctrine: the pas de deux of battle fleets followed, in each step,

the choreography of "The Estimate of the Situation": —Statement of the Problem —Section I "The Mission" —Section II "Survey of Opposing Forces" —Section III "Enemy Courses of Action" —Section IV "Commander's Own Courses of Action"
135 —Section V "Determination of Commander's Best Course

of Action" —Section VI "The Decision" —Determination of the Details of the Directive9

War's rituals were played out in suspended authenticity: only the

sea and sky and open bridge were missing. Orders were written,

directives issued, commands dispatched. Separated only by

screens, rival commanders called their critical choices and

groped toward battle, jockeying their battlelines for position.

The Contact Officers watched for the clash. When fleets'

tracings intersected, "when contact becomes general, the chart

maneuver terminates, and the final situation may now be used as the basis for a tactical maneuver." 10 The battle had begun.

With mortal combat, the Board Maneuver begins:

Thus with imagin'd wing our swift scene flies,

In motion of no less celerity

Than that of thought.

Tactical problems were the visceral distillation of battle,

"simulating the realities of War." 11 With the materiel of the

Pen, the War College sought to recreate the experience of the

Sword; and in the rarefaction, to measure its essence: to know it,

to reap its bitter truth. Even in that precomputer age, the

complexity to which their model strove is revealed, in this list,

"Material of the Board Maneuver":

1. Maneuver Board.

2. Chalk or crayon for plotting.

3. Model ships.

4. Strips for forming groups of ships.

5. Turning cards.

6. Torpedo Fire cards.

7. Protractors.

8. Range wands.

9. Plotting table, tracing paper, drawing instruments.

10. Screens.

11. Ditto machine. (Dispatch Blanks, S-5).

12. Fire Effect tables and diagrams.

13. Message blanks (F-5).

14. Aircraft Flight form (S-10, Mod. 1).

15. Umpire's Communication Record (S-12) (Blueprint).
136

16. Fire sheet ("Instructions for Scoring Gun Fire").

17. Fire Distribution and Move Date (T-4).

18. Umpire's Damage sheets (T-6(a) to T-(l)).

19. Torpedo Fire blanks (T-7).

20. Mine Laying blanks (T-8).

21. Information blank (T-10, Mod. 1).

22. Submarine Information blank (T-10, Mod. 2). . 23. Damage Reports (Minor and Capital Ships (T-ll)).

24. Bombing sheets (T-12).

25. Umpire's Torpedo Fire Record (T-13).

26. Expenditure Record (Torp., Mine and Depth

Charge (T-14)).\

27. Ammunition Expenditure (T- 15) (Blueprint).

28. Aircraft Casualty forms (T-16).

29. Tactical Plotting sheets.

30. Plane Service forms (Form S-ll).

31. Fire Distribution sheet (Form T-2). 12 Complexity, and naivete. In defining battle according to formula,

no matter how intricate, how empiric, reality became a mirror of

ritual. By necessity, life came to reflect art. Chance, and even

luck, came to operate within the limits of the language of

imagination. Having imagined a measured vision of future war,

mock war was forced to play according to the rules.

The rules were a formidable codex: for a mere game. At their

highest evolutionary stage, the "Maneuver Rules," the historical

labor of the War College Department of Operations, ran to 160

pages. There, 310 coded articles, or rules, each backed by a coalition of sections and subsections. Space and emphasis reveal

not only the ritual weight attached to the components of combat,

their proportions hint at the intractable nature of a physical

metaphor of war:

Conduct of the Maneuver 6.8%

Speed and Fuel 9.4%

Visibility, Audibility,

and Smoke Screens 16.3%

Communications 17.5%

Gunfire 8.8%

Torpedo Fire 4.3%

Mines 5.6%

Submarines 3.1%

Aircraft 25.0%

Chemical Warfare 3.2% 13
137

"Speed and Fuel" ruled on questions of the effect of sea

conditions on speed, on fuel consumption, refueling at sea, and

the effects of damage on speed. In an age innocent of radar,

nature and artifice yielded cloaks of concealment to stalking and

fleeing fleet alike. So the concatenation of regulations for fog

and smoke, twilight and dawn, flare and starshell and

searchlight. "Communications" strove to recreate the frustrations of ship-to-ship transmission in a still hall whose acoustics

would echo a whisper. "Gunfire," the emotional climax,

delivered by the decisive weapon at the decisive moment at the

decisive battle of the war, was given double the game weight of

the subsidiary systems: destroyer and submarine-launched

torpedoes and mines. The emphasis on aircraft is unusual. Can

the revisionists, who cliam a hide-bound Navy where innovation

was inadmissible, explain this anomaly?

Yes, the battleline, en puissant, was yet the premiere weapon.

By the 1935 edition of "Maneuver Rules," the role of aircraft in

battle was envisaged in a special context. Such crucial support

had seaborne air come to provide the battle fleet that, like the

barbarian cavalry of the Late Empire, it was the essential auxilia.

No legion could take the field, at last, without equestrian mask.

So with the battleline, aircraft were the critical factors in

scouting, photoreconnaissance, fighter cover, artillery spotting,

smoke screening, and antisubmarine patrol. The bomb and

torpedo striking power of the aircraft carrier was fully

recognized in the "Maneuver Rules." 14 These rules encouraged

the concentration of force in battle; and en masse, by all

standards of that age, the battleline was still the supreme

instrument of seapower. Technology had not yet enthroned the

carrier. This truth the game reflectd, as its vision of war echoed

the spirit of the age.

The Game was the central ritual of Newport, and the interwar

Navy.

But what was it like to play?

There were two teams: two fleets: two Commanders in Chief.

Strict secrecy, and team segregation, were sworn: "Radiator

contacts" were taboo. 15 "Preliminary to a maneuver," the

"Special Situation" was issued: the assignment of mission, and

the last, prewar intelligence intercepts from the enemy. Final

positions were outlined, plans and orders run off by ditto. 16 The masters of Maneuver Staff were the Olympian overseers;

they ruled the movements of mortal fleets as did the gods over

Ilium. Like the gods, they even found time to quarrel. The
138

Assistant Director, Poseidon game shaker, held sway over time

and tide: "the length of moves and weather conditions." 17 The

Assistant for History was the verseless bard, his chronicles today

unread. The Assistant for Plotting "supervised the master plot,"

the reality, preserved in elegant blueprint, of fleets' onrush and

collision. 18 The Move Umpire, like Hermes, the go-between,

transmitted "flimsies" from man to god. "Flimsies" were

gridded sheets of tracing paper, printed by the Hydrographic

Office, showing the track of every ship, move by move. As each

armada moved in independent pattern, their combined tracks

were correlated by plotting draftsmen. When contact was

revealed on the Master Plot, the Contact Officers advised the

opposing teams of the impending imbroglio. When contact

became general, as fleets approached the visual horizon, the

scene shifted from chart to board, from Master Plot to tiled floor.

The Director of the Maneuver Staff called the battle. Like Zeus,

he was the final arbiter. 19 White chalklines traced the battlefield grid. "The tracks of the

BLUE force are drawn in blue; those of the opposing force are

drawn in red." 20 Model ships followed this color cue. They were

cast in three sizes, and were too small in scale to represent

specimen ships. For the Mark III Game Outfit, even battleships

measured less than an inch. 21 To form line of battle, these lead

totems were fitted to metal strips, "jointed to permit a close

approximation to the tracks of the ships." 22 In the great galleried hall of the game room, the little lead

squadrons approached, snaking across the waxed tiles, each

leaving like Theseus a colored trail behind, searching ahead for

their foe. Each move marked 3 minutes of game time, and the sea

distance a fleet could cover at varying speed. 23 When visual contact was made between rival battle fleets, the

wooden screens, the instrumentality of the unknown, were

abruptly withdrawn. The face of battle was unmasked. 24 Now, to the flash of gunfire and the white wake of torpedo

track, the shock of decision drew near: in a single 3-minute

move, the course of battle could make irrevocable change. The

game took on an imagined intensity, ferocious action suspended

in time as teams and umpires frantically measured speed and

range, and bargained for better visibility. In the blueprint

chronicles of combat, the plates of battle describe an insane shift

from the tracks of orderly approach to the boiling welter of

invariable melee. Those battles, had history given them life, and

the ocean a watery grave, would be remembered now in
139

immortal image: for carnage, intrepidity, and cran. In the limbo

of game time, 3 minutes could attenuate into an hour. Rival

commanders in game possessed a leisure impermissible in

battle. They used their bonus well and crammed heroic intensity

into a short, and savage, mock arena.

Game complexity allowed no more realistic alternative.

Instrumental simulation could be achieved, sans microcircuitry,

in slow motion only. Simultaneity and "real-time" combat could

not be modeled. With turning card templates, model ships could

be moved quickly. The infliction and assessment of battle

damage, in contrast, was laborious, a painstaking process of

calculation and arbitration.

"The Fire Action of the Battleline" was the most intractable,

interminable calculation of all. If the gun was the decisive

weapon, its fire was also the most difficult to deliver. Bombs and

torpedoes were, essentially, pointed in the right direction and

released. Battleship heavy artillery, to place an armor-piercing

shell in an opponent's innards at 25,000 yards with any prayer of

success, enslaved the compressed energy of a full ship's

company. So it was with the war game. A set of torpedo fire cards

and fire blanks could launch a successful spread, and a simple

bombing sheet could press home an aerial assault. 25 In a 3-minute move, "the delivery of fire effect" involved 45

distinct and incremental calculations, derived from 15 penalty

tables and 200 pages of "Fire Effect Tables." To assess staying

power—resistance to battle damage—combatant "life value"

was measured on a scale of equivalent 14" hits. A battleship was

expected to be able to absorb 15-20 hits before sinking. Cruisers

were rated from three to five hits. A destroyer would be lucky to

survive one. Both fire effect and life value were converted to a standard scale. 26

As forenoon slipped away, hieroglyphic battlelines blazed

away in soundless fury, separated by the tiled expanse of inches.

Range wands and protractors drawn, teams bent over their

squadrons as colossi, fretted in concentration:

How many ships are firing? How many guns?

Broadside or end-on?

What method of fire control: Direct, indirect, barrage?

Likewise the lay of the guns:

Pointer, Director, Stable Zenith Director?

What spotting: Top Spot, Plane Spot, or Local Control?

Had the target a new bearing?
140

Old range, or new? Was it fixed?

Quick, the target angle!

Find the fire effect tables: Down the series rows of .000's!

Now, the first correction, gun damage from the last move.

The first multiplier, and this move's normal fire effect.

To continue:

Are we under effective fire, or less than normal fire?

Is our fire masked? Is there surprise?

Are we under fire concentration from the enemy?

Have ships changed course, are our guns out of train?

What is the spray,

the smoke,

the roll and pitch and yaw?

Night battle interference? Now a second correction:

The second multiplier, depreciated in tenths,

Our remaining normal fire effect.

Now what is left?

Sun's glare and silhouette,

Course changes during play, and speed; is there a change

of range?

At last, the third correction factored in,

The third multiplier, and normal fire effect now

Fire effect delivered, fire effect inflicted.

Three minutes of battleship battering must be assessed. 27

"The Fire Action of the Battle Line" was the Eleusinian

Mystery of the Game, as the game was the central ritual of ethos.

Sims called the game "the backbone of our profession"; he also

said:

Of course, you know that the usefulness of the War College

depends chiefly upon keeping the game up to date,

particularly in reference to gunfire 28

To the interwar Navy, the concentrated fire effect of the dozen

battlewagons of the BatDivs, BatFor, was the very fulcrum of

American seapower. This was clear at Newport as early as 1909,

when Luce addressed the class:

The Fleet—by which is meant the fleet of sixteen

battleships recently brought home—the Fleet, I say, stands

for the Sea Power of the United States. 29
141

The cultural programming of every officer-student adjured a classical clash of capital ships, an American Trafalgar. In the

game play, every unstated subliminal urge echoed the doctrine of

operational ethos: the ritual incarnation of the offensive, of

decisive battle. Through interminable weeks of board play,

arguments with umpires, and chalk-stained hands, the link

between quiet hall and splinter-naked bridge—the spasmic

intensity of combat leadership—must have come close to

snapping. As Luce apologized, "the tactical board does not

develop nerve, it is true; but no one has ever claimed that it should

"

30 To some, the game seemed "theoretical," as if theory was the opposite of reality, and so ineffably inculcated

attitudes inimical to combat. Even Frost fell into the snare of this

logic, and wrote Sims, in his worry that theoretical training

might promote a "defensive attitude." 31 The bloody theater of the game preserved in megahistoria an

eloquent rebutment. Of those 318 surviving chronicles, there is

combat action enough for a score of great wars. In the unfolding

of campaign and battle, and in the usage of the decisive weapon,

the charted chronicles describe not only the Navy's vision of

future war; but belief, bordering on obsession, with the

offensive. As the ritual investment of operational ethos—the

doctrine—within the (\>ikori\±ia* of each man who played it,

the game seved this Navy well. To cultural instrumentality, the

superficial imagery of the next war was irrelevant. A fighting

service in peace cannot afford to choose between bickering

Cassandras: no man can forecast future war. In peace, it is

enough to keep alive the <$>CkoTi\iia of combat; through careful

rehearsal, to maintain the behavioral patterns of strategic

thought. In waiting for war, as in all endeavor: "The readiness is

all."

This readiness was an ultimate function of learned instinct.

The game, in the image of Expede Herculum, instilled the

</>iAori/Lua of war within the subconscious. As Clausewitz, the

seer of Service world view, wrote of theory and of the game:

...it can give the mind insight into the great mass of

phenomena and of their relationships, then leave it free to

rise into the higher realms of action. There the mind can use

*In Modern Greek, sense of honor, self-respect, self-esteem.
142

its innate talents to capacity, combining them all so as to

seize on what is RIGHT and TRUE as though this were a single idea ... a response to the immediate challenge rather

than the product of thought. 32

This was the teaching of the game.
143

CHAPTER XI

THE GAME AS ORACLE: THE CAMPAIGN

Of course, the game-board presents only a picture But

the more it is used, the more accurate the picture will

become, and the more accurately we shall learn to read it. 1

To Rear Adm. Bradley Fiske, the game was a clouded crystal, a dark glass with which to steal a glimpse of the future. As the

vates of the next war, the game integrated Clausewitzian

postulates of operational ethos with an evolving test of

operational limitation. Idealized behaviors, both in the heat of

combat and the ether of strategy, were constantly tested on the

game floor.

The ideal, the objective, was the reduction of Japanese

seapower. Of 136 strategic games, or chart maneuvers, extant,

127 made this the mission. ORANGE was the enemy in 127

imagined marches; 127 times the battle fleet crossed the Pacific,

to free the Philippines, and to do battle with the Japanese fleet.

This ocean was the obsessive cockpit of future war.

To grasp the objective, to make the mission, BLUE game play

must reconcile two estranged states within the schema of

Clausewitz' theory: the offensive, and friction in war. Between

the wars, campaign action on the Newport game floor mirrored

an escalating struggle between strategic impetus and strategic

entropy.

. . . defense has a passive purpose: PRESERVATION; and

attack a positive one: CONQUEST But we must say that

the DEFENSIVE FORM OF WARFARE IS

INTRINSICALLY STRONGER THAN THE

OFFENSIVE. This is the point. . . . 2

So Clausewitz underscored the conundrum faced by the BLUE

strategist, in universal postulate. With the Philippines hostage
144

to Japan, America and the BLUE Fleet were committed to

trans-pacific offensive. Enter friction:

Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is

difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing

the kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has

experienced war. . . . Friction is the only concept

that . . . distinguishes real war from war on paper. 3

For the U.S. Navy, friction was the stretch of 4,767 nautical

miles separating Honolulu and Manila. Each sea mile was a step

into an agonistic trail of attrition: submarine sniping, night

destroyer rushes, dawn bombing runs. At the end of the odyssey,

with Corregidor, an Ithaca invested, there would be no hospice;

no haven safe from storm to dress the wounds of listing

battleship or bomb-blackened cruiser.

Never was there a war game so ungreased. As codified in "The

Conduct of Maneuvers," the game encouraged the action of

friction. In Tac. 96, in 1923, the BLUE Battle fleet anchored at

Dumanquilas in Mindanao, with 15 capital units still active.4 In

OP. IV, 1928, just 10 BLUE battleships "were afloat in Southern

Philippines at end" of game. 5 By OP. IV, 1933, only 7

battlewagons survived the Pacific run unscathed.

OP. IV was the critical game, the turning point. Two massive,

full-force ORANGE night torpedo attacks pressed home into

the heart of the BLUE Battle fleet and erupted into melee so

titanic that the night Battle of Guadalcanal seems but skirmish

by comparison.6 As a battered BLUE armada limped toward Mindanao

anchorage, the ORANGE battleline, uncommitted and so

unmarked by combat, waited, rested and ready, for the

propitious moment of descent. This was an unendurable image.

In their post mortems, many players balked at the continuing

setup of the "short war" sortie. A rush to the Philippines by the

massed American Fleet was pure fantasy, "unfeasible": "it could

not be done." 7 So by the grace of the game was the Navy's "short war"

illusion at last interred. By OP. Ill, in 1935, BLUE was advancing

by hop, skip, and jump through the Mandates, and building an

advanced base at Truk.8 For OP. V, 1938, the itinerary had been

established: Eniwetok to Ponape to Truk.9 OP. VII, 1938,

continued the advance to Yap and Peleliu (Palau), and then on to

Jolo, just South of Mindanao. 10
145

Scenarios began to branch out from bilateral BLUEORANGE war. Both OP. VII, 1938, and 1939, posited BROWN

(Netherlands) as an ally of America. 11 The 1939 strategic canvas

did not even begin at the beginning. The game begins in the

third year of war between ORANGE and BLUE. Forcing its way,

atoll by atoll, across the Central Blue, the "Main Fleet" of

America is anchored off northern New Guinea, not far from the

Biak strategic springboard of 1944. Over three million

Americans are under arms; 400,000 are in cantonments in Java,

awaiting the final, amphibious assault on the Philippines. 12 So many interwar rehearsals prepared an assured

performance. OP. IV, 1929, was a "Joint Army and Navy

Operations Problem with Forced Landing." The script, 463

pages, contained the most minute stage directions for a simultaneous four-division amphibious assault on the beaches of

Balayan, Batangas, and Tabayas Bays, four score miles south of

Manila. "The Estimate of the Situation and Decision,"

"...involves placing about 450,000 men, and about 1,750,000

tons of Army supplies in the PHILIPPINES by 1 November " Fifteen years early, a game would call for an October amphibious

landing in that jeweled archipelago. 13 Amphibious techniques pioneered, in charted imagination,

patterns familiar to 1944, on familiar beaches. In OP. IV, 1929,

landings were given distant cover by more modern capital ships,

with direct bombardment support delegated to older armored

ships. Escort Carrier Groups—yes—were focused on a single

task: close air support over the beachhead. 14 Twelve years before

the first Higgins lighters began to roll off the production line,

armored, motorized landing craft designs were blueprinted at

Newport, for the great assault on Luzon, October 1929. 15 Logistics were not shrugged; they alone could atlas the burden

of the offensive. To keep the BLUE BatFor in WestPac, OP. IV,

1929, chartered the service schedules of 470 train auxiliaries. 16 The Pacific War was always, for BLUE, the main event,

demanding the maximum effort. OP. IV, 1929, called for no less

than 137 fleet oilers (AO and XAO); by 1933, OP. IV critiques

urged refueling major combatants at sea, as routine procedure, 6

years before operational tests were authorized. 17 All the pieces of future war were deployed on the interwar

game board. From gambit to checkmate, the spectrum of

campaign symbiosis with ORANGE was imprinted on a generation of service leadership. Incessant scene-building of

BLUE-ORANGE campaigns created a visceral ease of
146

expectation. "Island-hopping" across the central Pacific,

multidivision amphibious assaults on Luzon and Okinawa,

blockade of the Japanese home islands: an aggregation of

gaming created familiar doctrine and familiar geography for

gestant war. Newport developed a rehearsal program, through

the game, that reconciled the offensive necessity of transpacific

war with the friction inevitable in an oceanic campaign.

By 1941, the Navy was primed for Pacific passage. This argosy

was expected to end well before the beaches of Kyushu.

No war game of that era ever broached the image of an

invasion of Japan. Objective mission ended with the seizure of

the Ryukyus and economic blockade. Even in the U.S. Navy, still

imbued with archaic notions of civilized warfare, there was a growing interwar awareness of the tyranny of modern fashion.

Total war, in 1914-1918, had returned after a long leave of

absence. By the time the "spirit of Locarno" was quite dead, the

Navy was beginning, at Newport, to enlarge its expectations.

War with ORANGE was certain to drag into a 4-year campaign.

After 1932, with Japan comfortably ensconced on the Asian

mainland, war might not end after a fleet battle, nor after

retaking Luzon, nor after the fall of Okinawa, nor after drawing

the noose of blockade. More might be needed. In December 1933

a discussion held after the bitter finish of OP. IV, drew a prophetic scene:

It was said that in a war with ORANGE we were holding on

to the old idea of economic strangulation of ORANGE in the

crossing of the PACIFIC, and urged thought on ways of

conducting a more successful war with ORANGE It was

brought out that ORANGE is very much worried about air

attacks on her cities . . . . 18

Only a fleet could seize those islands, to carve out airstrips —
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CHAPTER XII

THE GAME AS ORACLE: THE BATTLE

Battle is the catharsis of war.

The battle, as played at Newport, was the denouement of the

game. In game metaphor, the image of decisive combat—The

Big Battle —coexisted on parallel planes: professional and

spiritual.

The battle as professional denouement was the climactic

proof-test of the theory of war: of the inculcated teachings of

Clausewitz. Within his Hegelian vision of war,

. . . the concept of the engagement lies at the root of all

strategic action, since strategy is the use of force, the heart of

which, in turn, is the engagement. So in the field of strategy

we can reduce all military activity to the unitary concept of

the single engagement ... all threads of military activity lead

to the engagement; if we control the engagement, we

comprehend them all. 1

The key scriptural texts of The Battle were "The Fire Action of

the Battle Line," "Cruisers and Destroyers in the General

Action," and "The Naval Battle." This triteuch described in

diagrammatic detail the structure of a decisive encounter at sea,

"the supreme effort of men and material." 2 The central concept

was simple:

The primary objective is the breaking up of the enemy battle

line . . . and to turn the advantage gained into a decisive

victory. 3

Echoing Clausewitz, War College president Harris Laning wrote

of the objective imperative of all command at sea:

Those to whom the handling of forces in war is entrusted are

in duty bound to so handle them that those forces will exert
148

their maximum power in the battle that is the campaign's

crucial and decisive point.4

In theory, war was resolved in a decisive encounter, "the single

engagement," that would itself hinge on "the decisive point of

the engagement": the clash of battlelines. 5 Recent history, at

Tsushima and at Jutland, offered ambiguous confirmation of

wisdom's convention. Tradition, codified by Mahan, was a litany

of precedence: Quiberon Bay, The Saintes, The Nile, Trafalgar.

The American Navy, above all, dreamed of extending the list.

"Decisive victory" was more than a professional objective: it

was the moment of grace as much as the moment of truth. As

"the supreme effort of men," so the battle was the supreme test.

Each of the texts of the battle stressed the spiritual nature of

battle, and of victory:

The moral factor in battle is predominant.6

Such must be the will to win that nothing short of complete

victory will be accepted. 7

The moral factors to our benefit lay in the spiritual reaction

with the enemy. 8

As the decisive moment of the decisive action of a war, the battle

created an aura of historical gravity.

By historical implication, the battle fleet came to be perceived,

at Newport and throughout the Service, as the physical

instrument of American victory in future war: the agent of

national destiny. As national champion in a decisive arena,

operational ethos, in the course of the interwar era, was refined

into a sublime rarefaction of perceived national ethos. The

gaming of the battle provided an expressive ritual for future

commanders, to intensify their commitment to victory, so that

their "will to win" might mirror the full force of national will:

Our country's largest and most vital team is its naval battle

team—the most nearly perfect team of its kind in the

world.9 We officers have a tremendous work before us to prepare

ourselves and our fleet team to be always invincible in

battle. 10
149

In physical structure, the battle "plan approximates the general

plan and ideas followed by both fleets at Jutland." 11 As spiritual

symbol within the span of America's history, the battle was a nearly transcendent test of naval and national character. Victory

in so profound a contest would be a sign of historical grace. For

this inheritance, the Navy looked not to the soiled image of

Jutland but to the shining shibboleth of Trafalgar. In the battle,

Nelson is evoked again and again. In "The Fire Action of the

Battle Line," the first diagrams are of Trafalgar and of the Nile,

to illustrate the existential postulates of decisive victory. 12 The pursuit of the battle on the game floor of Newport

between the wars was the spiritual quest of the U.S. Navy for an

American Trafalgar. For Great Britain, Trafalgar was the

physical and moral agent of 19th-century supremacy. More than

any modern battle, Trafalgar forged the spiritual strength of the

British Empire. At Newport, this navy cherished that single

recognition. As the climax of Mahan's thesis, Trafalgar was the

influence of seapower upon history: this truth indoctrinated at

the War College had become part of the Navy world view.

The battle, as played at Newport, was an attempt to lay the

spiritual foundations of an American Trafalgar in the next war.

The Board Maneuver Chronicles support this sensation.

Of 106 pure tactical games, 49 were fought against ORANGE,

5 against a BLACK-SILVER coalition in 1940-1941, and 52

against RED. In contrast to the record of strategic gaming,

where 93 percent of all problems were framed in BLUEORANGE colors, RED was the enemy in 49 percent of all

tactical situations. Not all of these situations involved general

actions; only 71 tactical games involved a clash of battlelines.

From this sum of 71 battleline board maneuvers, fully 48 called

for decisive action against the RED battle fleet. The proportion

of BLUE-RED potential Trafalgars rises to 68 percent.

There were two motivations behind this board maneuver

obsession with the Royal Navy, when all strategic expectation

favored war with Japan. Britain's battleline was the force to beat;

the toughest challenge, the class opponent, the match game.

Then, as the service descendants of Nelson, the officers of the

modern Royal Navy wore the moral mantle of victory. To be

capable, even in game, of meeting and besting an opponent

physically equal and morally superior would mark a turning

point. This was the importance of the games highlighted in the

callimorphosis of RED. America fought 50 Jutlands against the

British Battle fleet: 50 battles played to the rules ofJutland, with
150

the texture of that North Sea fight. There the resemblance

ended. Spiritually, the U.S. Navy did not "refight the battle of

Jutland" on the game floor of the War College, as some have

claimed. 13 These were reruns of Trafalgar, fought with modern

weapons: the youthful challenger against the aging champion:

Personally, we believe that the whole attitude of the British

Navy had changed since the days of Drake, Hawke, Jervis,

and Nelson. Then it was young; now it had grown old Its

national policy was defensive, rather than offensive. That

affected its naval strategy and turned the British Navy to

thoughts of defense, rather than offense. 14

So the judgment of Commander Holloway Frost, writing on

Jutland, in 1936. The causal and inseparable link between naval

and national character is clear: the invidious comparison, of

Nelson with Jellicoe, of Trafalgar with Jutland, of triumph with

despair. Even in the 1920s, before the epoch of appeasement, the

commentary of American naval officers was harsh. In his thesis

on tactics, 1923, Cdr. H.R. Stark said simply that, at Jutland, the

Grand Fleet "lacked the fighting edge, the offensive spirit, the

will to win." 15 These phrases, by contrast, were the fighting

commandments of the War College Course, and made up the

concept of the battle:

There is only one successful way of going for the objective in

battle, and that is the offensive way Let us not forget that

though defensive tactics sometimes prevent defeat, only by

offensive tactics can a decisive victory be gained. 16

Trafalgar and Jutland became the symbolic moral examples of

greatness and of decline.

The battle was the epiphany of the ritual of the game. Like the

combat of two champions who fight in place of whole armies,

the big battle was a metaphoric enactment of the full activity of a war. As a dramatic encounter in which the moral qualities of

each opponent cry for open evaluation, the very image of a decisive battle implies an exhibition of spiritual strength.

If realistic tactical simulation were required, it was injected

into combat modeling in the Pacific theater. There, in a war with

ORANGE, no one forecast a classic clash of battlelines. Newport

anticipated a messy, awkward war of attrition. The majority of

tactical games played against ORANGE involved detachments:
151

groups of battleships, cruisers, or destroyers tangling at night or

in narrow waters; on shipping raids or convoy defense or

screening operations. The art of the engagement was a process

of daily combat, not a single showcase. Sharp, bloody, and

confused, the ORANGE tactical problems often seem to mirror,

in grimy reality, the coming war.

Those epic contests, given titles like "The Battle of the

Emerald Bank," and "The Battle of Sable Island," fought off the

fog banks of Nova Scotia as if in an ersatz North Sea, served a special purpose. They taught the future commanders of the

American Navy, as Laning adjured, "to be always invincible in

battle."

The game was, in the guise of the battle, the oracle of Victory.
152

CHAPTER XIII

THE GAME AS ORACLE: THE WEAPON

The battleship is the backbone of seapower. 1 Battleship, Battlewagon, Ship of the Line,

Dreadnought, Ironclad,

The Big Ships, the Heavy Ships,

called, after the Washington Conference, through the interwar

era, the Capital Ship. 2 From the embryonic Naos of Vasco da

Gama, Europa embarking as Os Lusiadas, to conquer the Indies,

the concept of the capital ship had evolved into the first

independent strategic system, encoded into legal language,

enshrined by international treaty.

By 1922, law legitimized in limitation the triumphant

creation of Victorian technology: the dreadnought battleship.

The capital ship concept was that of an ark, a vessel transformed

into the ultimate instrumentality of power achieved in the

interwar era. As such standard, the 20th-century battleship

embodied an operational potential that transcended all

contemporary weapons systems:

THE greatest deliverable weapons payload, both in terms of

destructive power and of accuracy, over time, of any

contemporary weapons system.

THE greatest endurance, in terms of time on station in the

pursuit of operational objectives, of any contemporary

weapons system.

THE greatest staying power, in terms of defensive,

protective, and damage-control systems, of any

contemporary weapons system.

THE greatest strategic mobility, in terms of the most direct

deployment, at the highest initial state of readiness, of the

most concentrated form of applied military power, of any

contemporary weapons system. 3
153

The battleship was the key to American global power.

Between the wars, limited by treaty to 18, and then to 15, capital

units, the U.S. Navy still posited transpacific fleet movement on

the battleship backbone. As "the rallying point of all forces in

the fleet," the solid rock foundation of offensive planning, the

American battleship was both the instrument and the symbol of

national will. 4 All battleships, in the design process, were constrained by hull

size. At Washington, size was limited to 35,000 tons standard

displacement. Within this margin, a balance must be struck

between the four core components of operational capability

weapons payload, endurance, staying power, and strategic

mobility—and calibrated to national strategic needs. The great

gray ships of the American battleline, between the wars,

emblemized American strategic goals.

They were built for transoceanic combat. Tough, belted and

"buttoned up" against mine and torpedo, strong-armed with

hollow engines long and round

Thick-rammed, at the other bore with touch of fire

Dilated and infuriate, shall send forth

From far, with thundering noise, among our foes,

Such implements of mischief, as shall dash

To pieces, and o'erwhelm whatever stands . .

.

the American battleship inspired confidence. The gun was the

decisive weapon, and 16 inches, in the Navy, was the decisive

caliber. As H.R. Stark exclaimed, in 1937, as ChBuOrd:

AT LAST we have the decision on the gun caliber for the

capital ships and thank the Lord it is 16". 5

With such "devilish enginery," American battlewagons might

knock at the gates of Heaven. In earthly pride, crossing the

Pacific unscathed would prove to be task enough.

The American capital ship of the interwar era traded tactical

for strategic mobility. This was the crucial design compromise.

Topped off with 4,570 tons of oil, the New World dreadnought

could range halfway 'round the globe at 12 knots; 2 months'

steaming before her tanks ran dry. 6 This comfortable oceanic

reach prompted the image publicized by Puleston, of the

offensive, on the eve of war:
154

The American Fleet would cross the Pacific at about the

speed of translation of a cyclone—between 10 and 15 knots.

It would resemble the cyclone in a more important phase,

leveling everything in its path except a stronger fleet—and a stronger fleet does not at present exist. 7

In private game post mortems at Newport, the vision was less

certain. After OP. IV, 1933, Capt. R.B. Coffey admitted, in his

critique:

BLUE, in this advance across the Pacific, has undertaken one

of the most difficult operations of war. His success rests,

above all else, on the maintenance of the battle line in

strength superior to ORANGE.8

Both images, confident and questioning, rooted the reality of an

American transoceanic offensive on the battleship backbone.

Only through the capital ship concept, embodied by the

battleship, could the interwar Navy hope to operate offensively

in the Western Pacific. Only the battleship could venture

sustained operations, accept sustained punishment, and offer

sustained "impetuous fury" in return. In the mortal combat of

that age, only a battleship could overthrow a battleship.

If the American Battle Force were the source of strategic

thinking, the agent of transoceanic national will, the battleline

was in aggregate as well the "decisive weapon" of the "decisive

point" of the "decisive battle" of a war:

The modern sea battle is still centered around the main gun

action.9

The fire action of the Battle Line, by reason of its power,

dominates. 10

The dominating phase in battle is the gun fight between

heavy ships. 11

The foundation around which the battle play of any fleet is

built is its heavy battle line 12

This evocative thunder, the "devilish enginery" of Paradise Lost,

permeates the subconscious of the vision of future war versified

at Newport. In the symbolic Big Battle, the hopes and fortunes
155

of two nations, two peoples, would be weighed in the single,

spasmodic clash of battlelines. If national destiny could be

reduced to the outcome of a single battle; battle distilled to a climactic shock of battlelines; and the American line held by less

than a score of heavy ships

A dozen battlewagons were the Shield of the Republic.

Advancing across the Pacific, a dozen dreadnoughts forged the

offensive blade of American foreign policy: The BLUE Sword. In

the "Maneuver Rules," the text of the game, and in the triteuch

of the battle, the 12 champions of the battle force, girded in

adamantine armor, armed with "Hollow engines ... in triple

mounted row," were the ultimate arbiters of war. If, on meeting

the battleline of the enemy, the American BatDivs

. . .can hit that line a blow at the earliest possible moment

and keep hitting it with its full sxrength as long as the line

exists . . . then the enemy's battle line will be broken and

destroyed, and his whole fighting structure will

crumble 13

As an autopsy of the future, the game judged the fate of nations

on "The Fire Action of the Battle Line"; on a bloody instant of

battle that might, on a clear day, last only 21 to 84 minutes. 14 Strategic systems, the instrumentality of ultimate decision in

war, tend to promote the expectation of immediate decision. In

theoretical circumstance it was possible to annihilate the

battleline of an enemy in single battle; a la Trafalgar, it was

possible to "lose the war in an afternoon." Similar imagery

reigns today; it is all the fashion to blithely proclaim the tenure

of nuclear war in minutes . . . perhaps 21 to 84?

These shared assumptions give strength to deterrent theory

in time of peace. An instrument of decision seems more

formidable if the threat of its employment promises immediate

result. In the shock of war, strategic systems cannot be

squandered: reality is not so ready as the dramatic fantasy of

deterrence imagery. As the "backbone" of theater pressure, the

physical prop of campaign strategy, strategic systems, in war,

tend to be judiciously used.

In the BatDivs of the BatFor, the U.S. Navy developed

America's first strategic system. As the "backbone" of American

seapower, these dozen battlewagons were critical to the rigorous

campaign modeling at Newport, in strategic problems played

against ORANGE. As the champions of the battle, the band of
156

American battleships became the emotional symbols of the

Navy's perceived role in national destiny. With only 12 in the

BatFor, and on the game floor, each ship was invested with an

animus. Named after states of the Union, each ship became a regional microcosm of America: as in ancient epic, a rollcall of

champions, of heroes, would summon men from every island

and every polis:

Maryland, Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi, California, West

Virginia, Tennessee, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania,

Oklahoma, Arizona

Full fifty ships beneath Achilles' care,

The Achaians, Myrmidons, Hellenians bear;

Thessalians all, though various in their name;

The same their nation, and their chief the same. 15
157

AFTERWORD

When war came, the Navy was ready to realize, in

synchronous realities, the remembered ritual of combat leadership. The prophecy of the Game had come to pass. The battle

fleet, the proud instrumentality of expectant destiny, lay

wrecked in the fires of Pearl; but it rose again, as steel-clad

phoenix, to finish the job. A new fleet of fast carriers and sleek,

AA-bristled battleships wrested the Pacific from the Teiheyo

Kaigun, forcing their battered big ships back to the naked

harbors of the Japanese homeland.

The campaign in the Pacific lacked none of the components of

the great Board Maneuver, save one: The Battle, the American

Trafalgar. Midway was enshrined, but as a terrific, defensive

turning point in the fortunes of war. TheJapanese Fleet escaped.

In the emotional search for a decisive battle, the big fleet battles

of 1944 missed. Philippine Sea and Leyte were, at last,

disappointments. Twice, the battlewagons of the Combined

Fleet squirmed away from the eager denouement fantasized by

three generations of American officers. How hard we tried to

make of Leyte the stuff of legend! When Samuel Eliot Morison

brought to history the specter of missed opportunity, the chance

to bring the "Jap Fleet" to battle, the judgment, even in 1958,

was almost too much for poor Bill Halsey to bear:

»• Ham Dow came in to see me last Friday and we discussed a son-of-a-bitch named Morison. 1

This, the beginning of a tirade to Adm. Robert B. Carney,

ex-CNO. Carney, attempting to placate the old seadog, agreed

that "the battle's outcome was favorable and completely decisive

from the strategic viewpoint—and the effectiveness of Japan's

sea power was ended . . . . " 2 So it had been with Jutland: and the unstated comparison

carried little comfort. The fighting had been magnificent, but

Halsey had thrown in "Ching" Lee's battleships too late: the

promise of the enacted ritual of the game, and the making of
158

Nelsonic myth, was lost. The victorious American Navy was left

with a nagging frustration, and the historical usage only of

images like "effectiveness" and "favorable": a qualification of

the anatomy of glory.

If, in that last clash of arms, the Navy missed a certain ritual

catharsis, the Service realized, through the experience of the

Pacific War, the full geas of the Newport mission, and the

indoctrination of Sims and of Knox and of Kalbfus. In doing so,

they achieved not only the narrower objective of war, but the

unstated sense of destiny implicit in the Navy ethos. The Navy

collected its ships, and pushed the perimeter of this nation—its

invisible oceanic frontier—as though it were a palpable thing,

across the Pacific. The vision of Benton and Gilpin and

Whitman, like an ineradicable American verse, was planted on

the littoral margins of Eurasia. There it has remained.

As agent, the Navy achieved this tectonic displacement

through the instrumentality of the capital ship: not the old

BatFor, shattered at Pearl, but the sleek "task forces" of carrier

and fast battleship. Today, the imperial alliances and client

states of the American oikoumene are guaranteed by the

enduring emblem of the battleline: no longer the dreadnoughts

of the BatFor, but the carrier "battle groups" of the world island.

Forward deployed in Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, and

Indian waters, these 12 Brobdingnagian arks, three times the

bulk of a basket-masted battlewagon, remain the oceanic sinew

of the association of kindred states —this globe-spanning Delian

League—that we call The West. 3 Yet there was something more, something almost instinctual,

something in the very mortar of the War College. The abiding

purpose of the War College was—and is —to teach the "art of

war." Not simply the usage of war's instrumentalities, but the

meaning of its operational art. The college was created to

inculcate 0iAori/zta, the philotema of combat. Through the

ritual of the game, Newport taught generation after generation

the behavioral spirit of operational ethos. "The readiness is

all " In the decade following our self-inflicted Asian debacle, the

American military services have, unthinking, turned away from

the philotema of combat, and the training of operational ethos,

as though it were a barbaric atavism, a primitive ancestral

throwback to another, harsher age. As Richard Gabriel and Paul

Savage lamented, in their soul-searching autopsy, Crisis in

Command:
159

. . . the British sense of "the military way" and the French

sense of "elan" are qualities that escape definition ... a similar "sense of the legion" is lacking in the American

military in general and the officer corps in particular .... It

is this quality, the discovering of a sense of community, a sense of honor, a sense of the "way of the legion," which we

must attain. 4

The manager came, almost consciously, to eclipse the warrior;

for the philotema of the warrior—his operational ethos—and

the fraternity of his service—his corporate ethos—have been

forged in current argot to the evil image of an imperial mission,

and the "shameful" memory of Vietnam.

For the Navy, and its "home of thought," this judgment has

created a decade of dismantlement. The Estimate of the

Situation was abjured, and tours at the college became redolent

of "ticket-punching," a racking-up of career points. Management courses became dominant fashion: costing methodology

triumphed over battle tactics. A swarm of petty assignments

greeted the middle-managing students of the new navy, ready

and armed to do battle in the grade-point melee.

Somehow the old doctrine evaded extinction, and may yet

prevail. Vice Adm. James Stockdale, as president, hammered

home a single theme, over all others, to his students:

Wars cannot be fought the same way bureaucrats haggle

over apportionments. The toll in human life in battle does

not lend itself to cost/benefit analysis .... As we follow

the peacetime horde down the prescribed track, let us not

adopt a false sense of security .... Have you thought it

through? When the whistle blows, are you ready to step out

of your business suit with both the philosophy and the belly

for a fight? 5

Like Luce, in 191 1, crying in the wilderness, Stockdale saw the

central meaning of his service, and the object of all endeavor:

Your profession is the art of war, and nature will be avenged

if you violate one of its laws in undertaking to make a part

greater than the whole. You give two years to marine

engineering and but seventy-eight days to the study of the

art you pretend to profess. This is a total eclipse of the

mental vision. You cannot even see the grim humor of it! 6
160

In the voices of these two men the lineage of mission at the War

College holds unbroken.

And there remains the game. As Stockdale writes:

We've made a conscious shift to war gaming in the Naval

Operations course, and our students participate to an ever

greater extent in major CINC-level games during the

year .... The reputation of the Naval War College was

built largely on the tremendous impact gaming had on

World War II.

7

Like an iron thread of continuity, the game goes on. At the

Center for War Gaming, SACLANT/CINCLANTFLT still

holds quarterly games: called now "Tactical Command Readiness War Games." Begun in 1976 by Adm. Isaac Kidd, they share

kinship with the 1921 convocations of the Atlantic Fleet at

Newport. There, far from the politicking of the Capital, the

Navy, under Sims' tutelage, thought hard about battle. Now,

instead of the BatFor in the Philippine Sea, they play carrier

"battle groups" in the waters north of Iceland, extending

American seapower to the lair of "the enemy." When Kidd

would address his officers, in the pristine new gameroom in

Sims Hall, clotted with state-of-the-art electronics, his message

might have echoed in the galleried chamber of another age:

I don't want anyone here who isn't prepared to bleed for his

country .... When war starts, we're going to have to go to

work .... I don't want to go into the Norwegian Sea, but

we might have to ... . We've got to be prepared for

staggering losses . . . but we've got to go north where the

battle is .... I don't know what's going to happen when

war begins . . . that's what we're here for, to prepare for

war . . . . 8

In such men, the old ethos lives. They talk of mission, and

there is fire in their eyes. And then the game begins, as it has for

something like a finished century, by the waters of the gray

Atlantic; and the trappings of this age cannot obscure

ineluctable tradition. Though the fleets move on electronic

board, the squadrons of the enemy glow ORANGE. The

American battle groups move north of Iceland, as Kidd insists

they must, burning BLUE, like a sword in that computer fantasy.
161

In such men, the line of descent is clear. The young men, the

junior officers who exalt the shallow spirit of their age, must

discern the imprint of this ancestry. Now they mirror, more

than any earlier naval generation, the spirit of contemporary

society: an American society in search of mission. They must

seek within themselves the esprit, the "way of the legion," the

philotema of those who came before, those who fought for their

unyielding vision of America. For the Navy, and its young

officers, this means no less than a rediscovery of self. They must

be able to come to Newport and search out, once again, their

sense of higher mission in American life, and in this nation's

uncertain future.

163

APPENDIX I

THE COLORS OF THE RAINBOW

BLUE U.S.A.

BLACK Germany

ORANGE Japan

RED Great Britain

CRIMSON Canada

SCARLET Australia

GARNET New Zealand

RUBY Indian Empire

GOLD France

SILVER Italy

OLIVE Spain

GREEN Mexico

BROWN Netherlands East Indies

PURPLE U.S.S.R.

LEMON Portugal

CITRON Brazil

YELLOW China

INDIGO Iceland

EMERALD Eire

GRAY Azores

TAN Cuba

VIOLET China Intervention

WHITE U.S.A. (Domestic Contingency)
164

APPENDIX II

ABBREVIATED TITLES

Title

Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet

Commander Battle Force

Battle Force

Commander Scouting Force

Scouting Force

Commander Submarine Force

Submarine Force

Commander Base Force

Base Force

Commander Battleships, U.S. Fleet

Battleships, U.S. Fleet

Commander Battleships, Battle Force

Battleships, Battle Force

Commander Battleship Division

Battleship Division

Commander Cruisers, U.S. Fleet

Cruisers, U.S. Fleet

Commander Cruisers, Scouting Force

Cruisers, Scouting Force

Commander Cruisers, Battle Force

Cruisers, Battle Force

Commander Cruiser Division

Cruiser Division

Commander Destroyers, U.S. Fleet

Destroyers, U.S. Fleet

Commander Destroyers, Battle Force

Destroyers, Battle Force

Commander Destroyers, Scouting Force

Destroyers, Scouting Force

Destroyer Flotilla

Commander Destroyer Division

Destroyer Division

Commander Aircraft, U.S. Fleet

Aircraft, U.S. Fleet

Commander Aircraft, Battle Force

Aircraft, Battle Force

Commander Aircraft, Scouting Force

Aircraft, Scouting Force

Written

CinCUS

ComBatFor

BatFor

ComScoFor

ScoFor

ComSubFor

SubFor

ComBaseFor

BaseFor

ComBatsUS

BatsUS

ComBatShips

BatShips

ComBatDiv

BatDiv

ComCrusUS

CrusUS

ComCruScoFor

CruScoFor

ComCruBatFor

CruBatFor

ComCruDiv

CruDiv

ComDesUS

DesUS

ComDesBatFor

DesBatFor

ComDeScoFor

DeScoFor

DesFlot

ComDesDiv

DesDiv

ComAirUS

AirUS

ComAirBatFor

AirBatFor

ComAirScoFor

AirScoFor
165

Commander Carrier Division

Carrier Division

Commander Minecraft, U.S. Fleet

Minecraft, U.S. Fleet

Commander Minecraft, Battle Force

Minecraft, Battle Force

Commander Mine Squadron

Mine Squadron

Commander Mine Division

Mine Division

Commander Training Squadron

Training Squadron

Commander Submarine, U.S. Fleet

Submarines, U.S. Fleet

Commander Submarine Squadron

Submarine Squadron

Commander Submarine Division

Submarine Division

Commander Train Squadron

Train Squadron

Commander in Chief, Asiatic Fleet

Commander Yangtze Patrol

Yangtze Patrol

Commander South China Patrol

South China Patrol

ComCarDiv

CarDiv

CoMinUS

MinUS

CoMinBatFor

MinBatFor

CoMinRon

MinRon

CoMinDiv

MinDiv

ComDrillRon

DrillRon

ComSubUS

SubUS

ComSubRon

SubRon

ComSubDiv

SubDiv

ComTrainRon

TrainRon

CinCAsiatic

ComYangPat

YangPat

SoPatCom

SoPat
166

APPENDIX III

WAR GAMES CONDUCTED AT

THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE, 1919-1941 KEY

(Drawn From Descriptions Used in Game Histories)

Situation Key

BO BLUE/ORANGE

RB RED/BLUE

RCB RED-CRIMSON/BLUE

BB BLUE/BLACK

Game Motive Key

CM Chart Maneuver

DA Daylight Action

NA Night Action

TA Torpedo Action

SP Scouting Problem

CP Convoy Problem (Fleet Train/ Advanced B< Transports) ss Scouting and Screening Problem

RI Raider Interception

CON Concentration of Forces

COM Battle Communications

DAA Defense Against Aircraft

EST Estimate of the Situation

SP Strategy of the Pacific

N Northern Route

H-P Hawaii/Panama Defense

W WesPac through Carolines Base

SA Strategy of the Atlantic

C Caribbean

ow Order Writing

BP Battle Plans

MPA Maneuvering for a Position of Advantage

QD Quick Decision Problem

A Approach and Deployment for Battle

E Engagement Problem
167

NM Night Maneuver Problem

LOG Logistics Problem

LOC Operations Against Lines of Communication

LO Landing Operations

BL Battleline/Fleet Action

CS Cruiser Screen/Scouting Operations

DS Destroyer Screen Operations

FS Fleet Submarines in the Engagement

SO Screening Operations in the Engagement

AO Aircraft Operations in the Engagement

G Gun Tactical Employment in the Engagement

T Torpedo Tactical Employment in the Engagement

M Mine Tactical Employment in the Engagement

FO Fleet Organization
168

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

6/19 T.75 XI BO/BL DA/TA/COR

6/19 T.74 X BO/BL DA/DAA/COR

6/19 S.56 VIII BO SP/OW/EST

6/19 T.49 IX RB/BL EST/FS/COR

6/19 S.40 V BO EST/OW/SP

22 S.57 VII BO EST/OW/SP

6/19 T.21 VII RB/BL QD/MPA

6/19 T.7 V RB/BL G/T/M

6/19 T.7 VI RB/BL DA/SS/COR

6/19 T.2 III RB/BL MPA/EST

6/19 T.2 I RB/BL BP/EST/MPA

22 S.57/T.91 VII-X BO/BL

22 S.66 V BO OW/EST/SO

22 S.67 VI BO SP-N

6/19 Tac.2 IV RB/BL EST/BP/SS

6/19 S&S.20 IV

o BO/C-D-F-80

S

BO/C-D

CP/OW/EST

6/19 S&S.5 II CP/SO

6/19 S&S.9 III BO/C-D CP/SO

6/19 T.53 VIII RB/BL EST/COR/DS-110

6/19 S&S.la I BO CP/SO

6/19 T.76 XII RB/BL A/NM

6/19 T.77 XIII RB/BL QD/MPA

12/19 S&S.l I BO SO/CP

12/19 S.57 IX BO EST/OW/SP

12/19 S.58 VII BO/BL EST/SP-W

12/19 S.40 VI BO EST/SP

12/19 S.36 V BO EST/SP-H-P

6/20 S&S.9 III BO CP/SO

6/20 S&S.5 II BO CP/SO

6/20 S&S.l I BO CP/SO

6/20 S.57 IX BO EST/CP/SP

6/20 S.56 VIII BO EST/OW/SP

6/20 S.40 VI BO EST/OW/SP

6/20 S.49 IV BO LOG

6/20 S.43 I BO EST/CP/SP-H

6/20 S.35 III BO EST/SP

12/19 S&S.20 IV BO CP

6/20 T.77 XIII RB/BL QD

6/20 T.78 VII RB/BL EST/FS/DS

6/20 T.27 VI RB/BL COR/SS/AO

6/20 T.26 V RB/BL M/COR/EST

6/20 Tac.12 IV OB/BL BP/DS/EST

6/20 T.10 I RB/BL MPA/EST

6/20 T.49 IX RB/BL BP/OW/EST

6/20 T.81 X BO/BL CP

12/19 S.43 I BO EST/CP
169

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

12/19 T.27 VI RB/BL COR/DA/SS/DS

12/19 T.26 V RB/BL G-T-M

12/19 T74 X BO/BL COR/DA/EST/BP

12/19 T.79 XI RB/BL EST/M/CON

12/19 T.71 VII RB/BL QD/MPA

12/19 T.81 XIV OB SO/CP

12/20 S&S.l I BO SO/CP

12/19 T.10 I RB/BL EST/MPA/BP

12/20 S&S.21 IV RB/CS-FS EST/LOC

12/20 S&S.9 III BO EST/OW/CP

12/19 T.13 III RB/BL MPA/EST

12/19 T.14 II RB/BL EST/Red Superior Skill

12/20 T.10 I RB/BL EST/MA

12/20 S.63 VI RB SA/EST/OW

12/20 S.62 V RB EST/CP/LO

12/20 T.14 II RB/BL EST/Red Superior Skill

12/20 T.26 IV RB/BL EST/COR/BP

12/21 T.27 V RB/BL SS/COR-D-B

12/20 T.78 VI RB/BL EST/DS/ASN

12/20 T.77 VII RB/BL QD

12/20 S.35 III RB SA/EST

12/20 S.44 II RB ow

12/20 S.43 I BO EST/SP-H/CP

6/20 T.82 XV RB/SP SO/AO/D-C-S

21 T.49 VIII RB/BL EST/A

22 S.68/T.88 V-VII BO/BL

22 S.57/T.91 VII-X BO/BL LO

21 S.64/T83 BO SP

22 T.86 V BO CP/D-C-S

6/19 S.49 VII BO/LOG LOC/CP/Fuel

22 S&S.5 II BO/CP LOC/C-S

22 T.86 V BO/SP/CP D-C-A-S

12/19 S.49 IV BO/LOG LOC/CP/Fuel

22 T.87 VI RB/BL QD-Based on Jutland

22 T.85 IV BO/FO FS/A

6/19 III S&S.9 BO/CP C-D-F-S

22 S&S.l I BO/SO CP/C-D-S

22 T.84 III BO/BL Fleet Standing Order

MPA/BP/COR-C/D/B

22 T.89 VIII BO/FO QD/A-M-S/Treaty Navy

22 T.90 IX BO/CP SO/D-A-C-S

22 S.65 III BO/ EST/COR-Army SP-P

22 S.44 II BO/ OW

22 S.49 IV BO/LOG Trains Ops

23 T.96 V BP/CP-BL SO

"Battle of the Marianas"

21 S.35 VII BO/ EST/SP

21 S&S.5 II BO/SO CP

21 S.35 VII BO/ pcnr/.SP
170

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

12/20 S.49 IV BO/LOG

23 S.71 I BO SP/BP-A

23 S.70 B BO EST/OW/SP

23 S.72 II BO/SO A-C-D-S

23 S.74 III BO SP/BP-A

23 S.75 IV BO SP-Formosa

23 S.76 V-A BO SP/BP-A

23 S.76 V-B BO/LOG Fleet Supply Schedule

23 T.92 II RB/BL EST/BP-A-D-E

23 T.93 III RB EST/FS & BL

23 T.96 V BO/BL &

Train

EST

23 T.94 IV RB/BL Battle of the Emerald

Bank

(w. essentially same nos. as Sable Is. , Blue lost ALL BBs in action, and Red had 1

1

BBs and 1 CC at end.)

24 S.79

combined

VI BO SP-14 day prep,

from H

24 T.79 IV BO SP-G-M-T-A

24 S.75 V BO SP-NJaps in

Petropavlovsk

LO Avacha Bay

24 8.74

A&B games

IV BO

24 S&S.5 III BO/CP Base Screening & SO for

CP

24 S.72 II BO/Search

Ops.

24 S.77 "B" BO EST/OW/SP

Low visibility

24 T.10/Mod.8 I RB/BL EST/A/MPA/COM

24 T.10/Mod.9

"The Battle of

Sable Island"

II RCB/BL BP/A-D/DS-CS

24 T.96

"The Battle of

Siargao"

III BO/CP-SO DS-CS/FS-M-AO

25 T.96 III B-O Convoy

Exercise

CP/SO

25 T.98 II RB/BL C (Trinidad)

25 S.80/T.101 J/P.I BO

25 S.74/Mod.l V BO (Anti-Landing Phil.)

25 S.76/Mod.2 IV BO/LOG Fuel Sup. Schedule

25 S&S.5/Mod.7 V BO/CP Base SO & SO for CP

25 S.77 "B" BO EST/OW/SP

25 S.72/Mod.2 II BO/SO Jap. Home Waters

26 S.72/Mod.3 II BO/SO

26 S.69/Mod.2 "A" B-B/SA

26 S.77.Mod.2 "B" BO/SP EST/OW
171

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

26 S&S.1.2 I BO/CP SO/CS-DS

26 S&S.5.8 III BO/CP Base SO & SO for CP

26 S.74.2 BO/SP

26 JP Ops. 1.2 I BO/SP

Los Visibility

26 T.10.8 I RB/BL EST/A.MPA/COM

26 T.101 III BO EST/Convoy attack/

CS-DS

26 T.102 IV BO/BL BP/M-AO

27 S.72.4 I BO/SO

27 S.77.3 "B" BO/SP EST/OW

27 "C" BO/CP EST/OW/SP-H

27 Ops.I

(ex-S&S 5.9)

BO/CP SO (Base & CP)

27 Ops. II BO/SP

27

27

T.104

Chart Man.l

(S&S 1.3)

I BO

BO

EST

29 Sr. QD Problems:

// II OB/BL

// III OB/BL

// IV OB/BL

// V RB/BL

ft VI OB/BL: Offenj>ive screen 3CC/3BB

30 Sr. QD Problems:

// "B" RB/BL: Part 3 Blue BBs/5 Red BBs

// "A" OB/BL: Van forces 4-3BBs

// "D" OB/BL: melee

// "C" OB/BL

31 Sr. QD Problems:

// "A" OB/van/3/3

// "B" RB/van/3/5

// "D" OB/BL

28 Ops. 3 III Sp.Sit.BLACK LO (Newport,N.Bedford)

28 Search

Problem

BO/SO DS-CS

28 S&S 1.4 C.M.I. BO/CP SO

28 Ops 2 Sr. II BO/CP SO-Base & CP

28 Sr. Ops. 5 V BO/SP

28 Sr. Ops. 4 IV BO/SP (Trans Pac: S & T)

28 Sr. T. 104.1 I BO/BL EST

28 Jr. II 29 Sr. Ops. 3 III BO/Blue LOC/SO/Orange Bases

(S.II, T.IV) flanking

29 Sr. Ops. 2 II BO/SO/CP EST/OW

29 Sr. Ops. 4

(S.IV/T.VI)

IV BO/Phil.def. Joint A-N COR

29 Sr. Ops. 5 V BO/Initial Phase:

(S.V/T.VII) Bases for TransPac Advance
172

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

29 Sr. Ops. 6

(NWC/AWC)

VI BO/LO-forced, Phil./M-AO

29 Sr. T.104.1 I BO/ EST/Chart & Board

Maneuver of TE 1 29 Sr. T.2 II BO/QD

29 Sr. T.4 IV BO/BL

29 Sr. T.5 V RB/BL

29 Sr. S.7 VII RB

30 Sr. Ops. 4 IV RB/-C & Panama Transit for BL

30 Sr. Ops. 3 III BO/-Phil. battle O-North/B-South

(w.Jr. iifter one mo. play)

30 Sr. T.l I BO/CP B leaving Truk

30 Sr. Ops. II RB

30 Sr. Ops. I OB/Asiatic Fl.-Phil. Def.

30 Sr. Tac. I OB/BL EST/BP & battle

30 Sr. QD:

"A" Tac.2 OB/5

// "B" Tac.3 RB

n "C Tac.4 OB

31 Sr. Tac. I OB/BL EST/BP & battle

30 Sr. Sect. V OB/SP

30 Sr. Ops. VI OB/LO-Support Group

31 Sr. Ops. IV OB/SP

31 Sr. Ops. Ill RB/SA

31 Sr. Ops. I OB/SP

31 Sr. Ops. II OB/SP S. Phil. CP

31 Sr. Ops. Ill RB/SA

32 Sr. Tac. I OB/CP

32 Sr. Tac. II OB

32 Sr. Tac. Ill OB

32 Sr. Tac. IV RB/B superiority 3:2 BL

32 Sr. Tac. V RB/BL

"The Battle of Sable Island"

32 Sr. Tac. VI OB

32 Sr. Ops. I OB/Asiatic Fl.LOC/Phil.Def.

32 Sr. Ops. II OB/Suez LOC

32 Sr. Ops. Ill RB/R-SLOC in Indian S.Atl./SA/Plan

changes in course of play

32 Sr. Ops. IV OB

32 Sr. Ops. V Revision of IV Movement Trans-Pac

32 Sr. QD:

"A" OB/ 3 Blue BBs/5 Orange BBs

// "C" OB/4 Blue BBs/6 Orange BBs

rt "E" RB/6 Blue BBs/4 Red BBs

33 Sr. Ops. I BO/Trans-Pac

33 Sr. Ops. II BO/S.Phil.def. Area control/LOC/LOG

33 Sr. Ops.IV/Tac.V BO

34 Sr. Ops. V BO/Trans-Pac 1 yr. after host.
173

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

34 Sr. Ops.IV/

Tac.IV

RB-2nd phase-EastLant

34 Sr. Ops. II OB/Asiatic Fit:. EST/Ops.Plan

34 Sr. Ops. Ill OB/2nd stageconvoys LOC

BF awaiting Ind.O.

34J.&S. Ops. I OB

34 Sr. Tac. I OB

34 Sr. QD:

"A" OB/3 Blue BBs/ 3 Orange BBs

// "C" OB/7 Blue BBs/9 Orange BBs

// "E" RB/11 Blue BBs/9 Red BBs

34 Sr. Tac. VI OB/U.S. & U.S.S.R. vs. Japan

(Java Sea/Kamchatka)

34 Sr. Tac. V RB/WestLant, Sable Is.(BL)

34 Sr. Tac. Ill (Ops.III)

OB

34 Sr. Tac. II OB CP 4 Blue BBs/ 5 Orange

BBs Detachment N. of

Truk

33 Sr. Ops. Ill RB SLOC attack on Red

(Azores)

33 Sr. Tac. I OB BL-0-CCs(3)

B-BBs(3)

33 Sr. Tac. II OB BL/EST/BP-0(7)

-B(5)

33 Sr. Tac. Ill RB BL(MainBodies:12-12)

33 Sr. Tac. IV RB BL/Full MB: 15-15

"Battle of N.Atl.springtime

Sable Is." condition

35 Sr. Tac. II OB BP/EST (Truk, B base)

Blue-5BB;Orange;4 BBs

35 Sr. Tac. Ill RB EST/OW/BL (Halifax

15-15)

35 Sr. Strat. II OB CINCAF prob./EST

35 Sr. Tac. I OB Relief of Phil. (Manila)

linked to Strat.I BL detachments

(3 Orange CCs;

3 Blue BBs)

35 Sr. QD: Blue Orange

&Jr. "A" OB 3 BBs 5BBs

// "B" OB 6 BBs 9 BBs

/• "C" OB 6 BBs 6 BBs

t? "D" OB 4 BBs 6 BBs

// "E" OB 4 BBs 6 BBs

// »F

» OB 6 BBs 6 BBs

// "G" OB Night Raid

35 Sr. Ops. I OB SP/CP/begins after

advanced base in

Dumanquilas
174

CLASS PROBLEM NO.

35 Sr.

35 Sr.

36 Sr. 36 Sr.

36 Sr.

36 Sr. 36 Sr.

36 Sr.

36S&J

36 Sr. 36 Sr.

36 Sr.

36 Sr.

36 Sr.

36 Sr.

36 Sr.

37S&J

37 Sr.

SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

Ops. II

Ops. Ill

Tac. IV

Strat. II Tac. I

RB

OB

OB

RB

OB

Tac. II

Tac. Ill Tac. V

QD:

"A"

"C"

"D"

"G"

OB

RB

OB

OB

OB

Blue vs. Blue

OB

(Night Light Force/Orange attack)

T RB

Raid on U.S. Coast

"K"

Night Light Force attack

on BLUE MB & Train

"L"

Ops. I 1 mo.Ops.by Blue against Orange

commence in Brown area & SE Asia

Ops. II OB

RB

OB

OB

Ops. Ill OB

Ops. IV OB

(Blue MB as Dumanquilas; 3 convoys to

Suez; Orange to intercept)

Strat. I OB

Strat. II RB

Crimson Neutral/Red

Carib. Off.

TransPac/EST/OW/

Strat.Areas/Fleet

Composition

Blue MB from Truk to

Phil.

Cruiser action (San

Bernardino Str.) escort

force for convoy to

Manila/ 3 Blue BBs/

3 Orange BBs

CP (5 Blue BBs, 9 Orange

CAs) near Truk

EST/OW/BL Fleet Battle

U.S. Fleet divided,

Orange Off. TransPac

before Blue can reunite near CZ

Blue Orange

3 BBs 5 BBs

7 BBs 6 BBs

8 BBs 8 BBs

12 BBs 6 LCs & 12

DesDivs./49 DDs

CA/DD scouting forces

Blue Red

13 DDs 3 CAs/ 3 BBs

Blue Orange

9 BBs 3 CLs/35 DDs

West Pac: Flt.comp.

EST/OW/Strat.areas

AB in East or South

China Seas/cut Orange

SLOCS

Same as Ops. I & II Battle off "Pellew" as Blue MB nears Phil.

Same as Ops I/II/III

arrive from U.S. via

Same as 1936 Ops.

Blue raiding of Indian

Ocean SLOCs weakens

Flt;Red assumes

offensive
175

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

37 Sr. Tac. II B-White (a hypothetical Fit. like

Orange to Blue, but

larger)

37 Sr. Tac. Ill OB CP N. of Truk/Orange

(Orange Superior: 7:5 BBs) force Truk to

Dumanquilas

37 Sr. Tac. IV RB Red MB on offensive to

keep Blue from taking

Halifax

37 Sr. Ops. I OB Same as 1936 Ops. Blue

CA raiding Orange

SLOCs in S. China Seas

37 Sr. Ops. II OB Same as Ops.I; advance of

Blue MB on Truk

37 Sr. Ops. Ill OB Purple called pot. ally of

Blue/Blue MB from Truk

to Phil.

37 Sr. Ops. IV OB Blue MB convoy prot.

Dumanquilas to Suez

route

37 Sr. QD:

"A" OB Orange 5 BBs/Blue 3 BBs

plus fort. 37 Sr. "B" OB Orange 9 BBs/Blue 7 BBs

scattered by fog

"C" OB Orange 6 BBs/Blue 6 BBs

scattered by fog

"D" Indigo 8 BBs/Pink 8 BBs

(all Blue 48 type BB)

"J" RB Blue 5 CAs/Red 7 CAs,

3CCs

"M" OB Orange 6 CCs, 39 DDs/

Blue 12 BBs, Night Torp.

action

"P" OB Orange 4 CLs, 36 DDs/

Blue 10 BBs

"N" RB Blue 6 CAs, Red 2 CCs

convoy, raiding force

38 Sr. Ops.I(Tac) OB Aleutians; 3 BBs each

38 Sr. Ops.II(Strat) RB SA Caribbean

BP defensive campaign

38 Sr. Ops.III(Strat) OB SP Indian Ocean/

S.China Sea/EST/Ops.

Plan

38 Sr. Ops.IV(Tac) OB BP Truk area familiarization, safeguarding of

Oahu-Dumanquilas route
176

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

38 Sr. Ops.V(Strat.) OB

-sub-problem: Defense of Atoll

Advanced Bases

Ponape -sub-problem: Attack on Isalnd

Advanced Base

38 Sr. Ops. VI (Tac.) RB

38 Sr. Ops. VII OB

SP Central & West Pac

Control of West Pac

US to capture (1)

Eniwetok (2) Ponape

(3) Truk

Battle off Sable Is. 4 Blue BBs over 60%

damage

12 Red BBs over 60%

damage

SP/control of Phil./

China Sea

(Silver & Black aiding Orange)

sub-problem: defense of an Island Group

(Yap)/when Blue Fit. passes meridian

134°E., Brown ally of Blue

38 Sr. Op.VIII (Tac.) OB Blue: 6 BBs, 8 CAs

covering

AB: Staring Bay in

Celebes

Orange: 9 BBs, 7 CAs

seeking decisive action

38 Sr. QD:

"A" OB 4 Blue BBs, 6 Orange BBs

Blue coastal fort.

// "B" OB 8 Blue BBs, 9 Orange BBs

// T RB 5 Red CAs, 5 Blue BBs in

WestLant

^/ "€" OB 6 Blue BBs, 6 Orange BBs

rr "M" OB Blue BatFor, 6 CLs,

39DDs

Orange convoy 12 BBs

SP/Night Torp. attack

38 Sr. Strat.QD RB U.S. assualt on Trinidad,

Problem S-l Br. attempted simul.relief

each 3 BBs, 4 CAs, 2-3

CVs in covering & escort

forces

38 Sr. Strat.QD OB Relief of Wake by U.S.,

Problem S-2 appr.complete MBs both

Fits

39 Sr. Ops. I (Tac.) OB SP Aleutian (D.H.)

Unalaska Base CP

39 Sr. Ops. II(Strat.) RB SA-Carib.control of

39 Sr. Ops.III(Strat.) OB Raid on Orange SLOCs

Blue CAs & 1 CV

Indian Ocean, China Seas

39 Sr. Ops. IV (Tac.) OB BP/Truk
177

CLASS PROBLEM

39 Sr. Ops. V(Strat.)

39 Sr. Ops. VI (Tac.)

39S&J OPS. VII

39 Sr. QD

"A"

rr

"B"

"N-1" low

visibility

"S-1"

NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

OB SP-Cent.&W.-control of. Orange holds atolls-MB

at Saipan;Blue MB at Pearl

RB EST/SCS/To familiarize

w/N.Atlantic Area

OB/Have been at war 2 yrs. Blue-Brown Secret Alliance

OB

OB

OB

RB

British w/20,000 troops in 4 fast

(25 kt.) liners, 3 CCs, 2 CVs, 4 CAs

attempting to reinforce Trinidad,

which already has 7,000 troops

40 Sr. Ops. I (Tac.) OB

40 Sr. 40 Sr. Ops. II (Strat.)

Ops.III(Strat.)

RB

OB

40 Sr. Ops. IV (Tac.) OB

41S&J Ops. I (Tac.) OB

41 Sr. Ops. II(Strat.) Blue/

BlackSilver

41 Sr. Ops. Ill (Strat.)

(one-sided)

OB

41S&J Ops. IV (Tac.) OB

Orange 5 BBs, Blue 3 BBs

and fort, port

6 BBs each

Blue 9 BBs, Orange 4 LCs

39DDs

Amphib.assault on

Trinidad: 2 CVs, 3 BBs

covering force/

4CAs support attack force

of 10 XAPs w/20,000

troops.

CP/Unalaska, Dutch

Harbor EST-Aleutians

EST/Carib Control of

Raid on Orange SLOCs

EST/WestPac, China Sea

5 Blue BBs, 6 Orange BBs

EST/Truk/BP

EST-Aleutians/CP

Unalaska, D.H.3 BBs/

Orange Interception

3 BBs

Black in N.Atl.,Narvik,

Iceland; Silver-Gold in

Med. to sortie to S.Amer.;

Gold bases in Cairb.

Monopoly of S.A. Trade

SP-minus new Atl. Fit.

Orange threatening

Aleutian-Wake-Samoa

line/ Blue must take

Eniwetok (C & M)

SP-EST-Mid-Pacific

Defense of Truk/Commitments in Atlantic-Brazil

prevent Blue offensive/Blue losses high, Japanese

low/Jap.attack w/BBs, 2 Blue BBs
178

CLASS PROBLEM NO. SITUATION GAME MOTIVE

41 S&J Ops. V(Strat.)

41S&J

Command

Class

Aug/

Dec 41

OB EST/WestPac, China Sea

Raid on Orange SLOCs

Blue fully committed in Atl., unable to force decision

in Pac. Red neutral. Blue has Truk to hold line to Aus./4 CAs,

1 CV from Truk to Java Sea

Ops. VI (Tac) Black- Raider Warfare/CP

Silver

Blue-Red

Black holds Eire, has "High Seas Fleet" of 5 BBs

1 CV at Trondheim/Blue has 3 BBs in Atl.

Ops.II (Strat.) Blue-Red/ against a Black-Silver-Gold Coalition

Black monopoly of Argentina/Uruguay/Brazil trade

Blue 3 BBs, 1 CV in So. Atl. "Brazilian Focal Area"

Black-Silver-Gold coalition 3 BBs, 1 CC, 2 CVs

41 CC Ops. II (Tac.) OB Truk defense against

Orange 4 BBs, 2 CV, 9

CAs/Blue 2 No. Carolina

Class BBs, 4 CAs, 1 CV,

27 DD, 6 SS

41 CC Ops.III(Strat.) OB Raid on Orange SLOCs

Rendezvous 19 June, Coral Sea: destination, 1 July,

50 mi. SE of Singapore/Blue 4 CAs, 1 CV in Java Sea

41 CC Ops. IV (Tac.) Blue-Red/Balck No. Atlantic/CP

Blue-Red convoy, 40 ships, 5 BB cover/Black 5 BB, 1 CV

Night search & attack

Blue 9 BB/Orange 4 CA,

32 DD (low visibility off

Truk)

Blue 3 BBs, 4 CAs, 1 CV

Command &

QD

"N-l" OB

Prep.

Staff

Class

"S-l"

continued in

Blue/

Silver-

"S-2" Gold

Blue/

SilverGold

"Deny Axis bases in

E. Carib." Silver, 1 BB,

6 CA/Gold 1 CC, 1 CV
179

NOTES

PART I—ETHOS

1. Carroll N. Brown, Greek-English Dictionary (New York: Enossis Publishing, 1924).

CHAPTER I-THE NATURE OF ETHOS

1. E. Adamson Hoebal, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains (New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, I960), p.87.

2. R. Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1953), p.86.

3. E. Adamson Hoebal, Anthropology: The Study of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958),

p. 542.

4. Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Philosophy of the Navaho Indians," F.S.C. Northrop, ed., Ideological Differences and World Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 359.

5. Hoebal, The Cheyennes, p. 87.

6. John A. Hostetler and Gertrude Enders Huntington, The Hutterites in North America

(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 6.

7. Clyde Kluckhohn and William H. Kelly, "The Concept of Culture," Alan Dundes, ed., Every Man His Way: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,

1968), p. 205.

8. Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn, "Dominant and Variant Value Orientations,"

Kluckhohn, et al., eds., Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1953);

Kluckhohn and Kelly, "The Concept of Culture."

9. Hoebal, The Cheyennes, pp. 95-104; Kluckhohn, et al., eds., Personality in Nature,

Society, and Culture, pp. 3-71. CHAPTER II-THE NATIONAL ETHOS

1. J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge

University Press, 1972), p. 104.

2. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: Vol. I, The Colonial

Mind, 1620-1800 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. ix. 3. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 23-25.

4. C. Vann Woodward, "The Age of Reinterpretation," The American Historical Review

,

October I960, pp. 1-19; Hofstadter, pp. 326-328.

5. Henry Nash Smith, The Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 12.

6. Alexander Hamilton, "The Utility of the Union in Respect to Commercial Relations and

a Navy," The federalist, or The New Constitution (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1945), p. 70.

7. Ibid., p. 69.

8. Felix Gilbert, To the farewell Address: The Beginnings of American foreign Policy

(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 114.

9. William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, Social, Geographical, Political (Philadelphia: 1874), p. 130. Quoted in Smith, p. 37.

10. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1937), pp. 225-226.

11. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: The Folio Society,

1974), pp. 54-55.

12. James Fenimore Cooper to Commodore William Bradford Shubrick, 30 April 1847; Cooper to Shubrick, 25 September 1847. Quoted in James Franklin Beard, ed., The Letters and

Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1968), v. V, pp. 206-207, 236-237.

13- A.T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York: Harper and

Brothers, 1907), p.„197.

14. Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost," The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1968), p. 144.

15. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in Everett E. Edwards, ed., The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938).
180

CHAPTER III-THE CORPORATE ETHOS

1. Adm. Albert Gleaves, "Background," Autobiographical Manuscript (Unpublished),

Gleaves Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF), p. 1. 2. A.T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York: Harper and

Brothers, 1907), p. 69.

3. Ibid., p. 65.

4. Ibid., p. 66.

5. Rear Adm. Julius Augustus Furer to Capt. Philip F. Wakeman, 22 April 1961, Furer Papers, NHF.

6. Mahan, p. 74.

7. A.B. Anderson to Capt. Dudley W. Knox, 28 September 1935, Knox Papers, NHF.

8. Gleaves, "Background," Gleaves Papers, NHF, p. 2.

9. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1937), p. 508.

10. Furer to Theodore E. Stevenson, 13 March 1959, Furer Papers, NHF.

11. Adm. William Sowden Sims, Journal, June to August 1877, Sims Papers, NHF.

12. Mahan, p. 105.

13. Ibid., p. 48.

14. Capt. J. K. Taussig, "The Old Navy," Navy Day Annual, 1937 (Seattle: Master Mechanics

Association, 1937), Record Group II, Naval War College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter

NHC).

15. Miscellany, Gleaves Papers; Miscellany, Taylor Papers, NHF.

16. Furer to Stevenson, 13 March 1959, Furer Papers, NHF.

17. Mahan, p. 101.

18. Herman Melville, Typee: A Romance of the South Seas (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1935), p. 3. 19. Adm. Albert Gleaves, "On the Road to China," Autobiographical Manuscript

(Unpublished), Gleaves Papers, NHF, p. 14; Melville, p. 256.

20. James O. Richardson and George C. Dyer, On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor

(Washington: Dept. of the Navy, Naval History Division, 1973).

21. Adm. Harry E. Yarnell, "Sons of Gunboats," Yarnell Papers, NHF.

22. Ibid., pp. 4-8; Marcus Goodrich, Delilah (New York: Popular Library, 1978, originally

published in 1941).

23. Martin Swanson to Adm. Harry E. Yarnell, 3 June 1942, Yarnell Papers, NHF.

24. Yarnell to Swanson, 8 June 1942, Yarnell Papers, NHF.

25. Clifford Calfinch to Adm. Ernest J. King, 22 January 1941, King Papers, NHF.

26. King to Calfinch, 16 February 1941, King Papers, NHF.

27. Gleaves, "Background," Gleaves Papers, NHF.

28. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great

Britain (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), p. 343.

29. Holloway H. Frost, The Battle of Jutland (Annapolis: The Naval Press, 1936), pp. 375,

514, 516, and others. See author's "The Fishing Off the Jutland Bank: The Search for a Symbol of

Victory," Unpublished Senior Essay, History Department, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.:

1973.

30. Mahan, The Life of Nelson, pp. 354, 396-400.

31. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, p. 124.

32. Furer Papers, King Papers, Bloch Papers, Yarnell Papers, NHF.

33- "Five and Fifty Years (Sam Wygant's Saga)," 24 March 1956, Furer Papers, NHF.

34. "Destroyer Men," Sims Papers, NHF.

35. "Spanish Ladies," Luce Papers, NHF.

36. J.V. Babcock to Dudley W. Knox, 16 December 1933, Knox Papers, NHF.

CHAPTER IV-MISSION AND ETHOS

1. Kenneth Bourne, "British Preparations for War with the North, 1861-1862," The

English Historical Review, October 1961, pp. 600-632.

2. George Washington, Fifth Annual Address to Congress, 8 December 1793, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1931-

1944), v. XXXIII, pp. 165-169.

3. Seward W. Livermore, "American Naval Development, 1898-1914," Unpublished

Dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.: 1944.
181

4. Craig Symonds, "The Antinavalists, the Opponents of Naval Expansion in the Early

National Period," The American Neptune, January 1979, pp. 22-27'. 5. Howard I. Chapelle, American Neptune, The History of the American Sailing Navy

(New York: Norton, 1949), pp. 179-242.

6. Alexander Hamilton, "The Utility of the Union in Respect to Commercial Relations and

a Navy," The Federalist, or the New Constitution (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1945), p. 64.

7. Ibid., p. 68.

8. Ibid., p. 65.

9. Ibid., p. 66.

10. Ibid., p. 70.

11. Charles A. Beard, "The National Interest," 8 January 1935, Knox Papers, Naval

Historical Foundation, Library of Congress, (hereafter NHF), p. 10.

12. Ibid., p. 9. 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. Ibid., p. 8. 15. The products of Knox's pen included: Annual State Convention of the American Legion, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, 17 August

1931 (Jahncke)

Recommissioning of the Constitution, June 1931 (Jahncke)

Chicago, 14 November 1931 (Adams)

Radio Address, Christmas Eve, 1931 (Adams)

Pennsylvania Military College, 7 June 1932 (Adams)

Navy Day, Washington Bicentennial, 29 September 1932 (Adams)

"George Washington as a Naval Strategist," Sons of the American Revolution, Lowell,

Massachusetts, 8 March 1932 (Jahncke)

Naval War College Graduation Speech, Newport, June 1932 (Adams)

Remarks on Decoration Day 1933 (Swanson)

Radio Address, CBS, May 1933 (Swanson)

Navy Day Radio Address, NBC, Chicago, 27 October 1933 (Standley)

"Building Up to Treaty Strength," 27 December 1933 (Standley)

Farewell to Byrd, October 1933 (Assistant Secretary Col. Roosevelt)

Remarks Before Aztec Club, November 1933 (Col. Roosevelt)

Radio Address, 19 September 1933 (Col. Roosevelt)

Address, Washington Cathedral, May 1934

Welcome Address for Italian Air Minister Balbo, Radio, July 1933 (Standley)

Radio Address, Los Angeles, September 1933 (Swanson)

Newsreel Interview, 12 July 1933 (Swanson)

Keynote Speech at Balbo Dinner, Washington, 30 July 1933 (Swanson)

Article for Hearst Papers, 23 July 1933

Newsreel Interview, Navy Day, 27 October 1933 (Standley)

Address, San Diego, October 1933 (Swanson)

Address, Seattle, October 1933 (Swanson)

Address, San Francisco, October 1933 (Swanson)

Address, Honolulu, October 1933 (Swanson)

"The United States Navy," Radio Address, 20 August 1933 (Standley)

Women's Patriotic Conference, January 1934 (Standley)

Radio Broadcast, June 1934 (Standley)

Navy Day Speech, 27 October 1934 (Rear Adm. J.K. Taussig)

Peary Anniversary, 6 April 1934 (Col. Roosevelt)

Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense, Washington, 26 January 1934 (Adm.

Clark H. Woodward)

Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense, Washington, (Rear Adm. E.J. King)

American Legion Speech, 23 July 1935 (Rear Admiral Stark)

Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense, January 1935 (Rear Adm. J.K. Taussig)

Armistice Day Speech, 1 1 November 1938 (Admiral Stark)

Farewell Luncheon to Leahy, July 1939 (Stark)

"Philippine Independence and Naval Bases," Policy Memorandum, August 1939 (Stark)

Chamber of Commerce Convention, 29 April 1940 (Stark)

Keynote Address, Navy Day Dinner, Chicago, 27 October 1940 (Stark)

Address, Washington Press Club, 10 April 1922 (Assistant Secretary Theodore Roosevelt)
182

District of Columbia Commandry of the American Legion, 12 February 1923 (Rear Adm.

Hugh Rodman)

Naval Academy Graduation Speech, Annapolis, June 1930 (Adams)

Address, Milwaukee, August 1931 (Jahncke)

Address on the Anniversary of Yorktown, 12 October 1931 (Adams)

Naval Academy Graduation Speech, Annapolis, June 1941 (Stark); Knox Papers, NHF.

16. Furer to Knox, 23 September 1927; Knox to Emmet, 29 September 1922; Babcock to Knox, 17 October 1931; Moffet to Knox, 28 February 1933; Knox to Standley, 29 April 1935; Stark to Knox, April 1940; Knox to Stark, Secret Memorandum October 1940, Knox Papers,

NHF.

17. "Memorandum Prepared for the President at His Direction," 13 January 1938, Knox

Papers, NHF.

18. Ibid., p. 11.

19. "Association with Franklin D. Roosevelt of Dudley W. Knox," Prepared by Knox for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, Knox Papers, NHF.

20. Radio Broadcast, Cleveland, Ohio, 27 October 1939, Standley Papers, NHF.

21. "Our Navy and Other Factors of Sea Power," Radio Broadcast, Springfield, Mass., 27 October 1922, Gleaves Papers, NHF.

22. Hamilton, p. 66.

23. Dudley W. Knox, "Naval Power as a Preserver of Neutrality and Peace," Manuscript of

article for U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1937, Knox Papers, NHF.

24. Quoted in "Memorandum Prepared for the President at His Direction," Knox Papers,

NHF.

25. "Naval Power as a Preserver of Neutrality and Peace," Knox Papers, NHF.

26 Hamilton, p. 66.

27. Ibtd., p. 64.

28. "Seapower—What Is It?" Navy Day Address, 27 October 1936, Knox Papers, NHF, pp.

2-3.29. Radio Address, CBS, 10 August 1940, Standley Papers, NHF.

30. Radio Address, Pittsburgh, 27 October 1927, Furer Papers, NHF.

31. Quoted in "Memorandum Prepared for the President at His Direction," Knox Papers,

NHF.

32. "Our Navy and Other Factors of Sea Power," Gleaves Papers, NHF, p. 13. 33. Radio Address, CBS, 10 August 1940, Standley Papers, NHF.

34. Hamilton, p. 67.

35. Radio Address, CBS, 10 August 1940, Standley Papers, NHF.

36. Hamilton, p. 67.

37. "Our Navy and Other Factors of Sea Power," Gleaves Papers, NHF, p. 9. 38. Dudley W. Knox, The Eclipse of American Sea Power (New York: Army and Navy

Journal, 1922).

39. "The Price of Peace," Manuscript of article for Atlantic Monthly, April 1938, Knox

Papers, NHF.

40. "Our Navy and Other Factors of Sea Power," Gleaves Papers, NHF, p. 8. 41. "The Price of Peace," Knox Papers, NHF.

42. Radio Address, Navy Day 1927, Furer Papers, NHF.

43. Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Vintage

Books, 1966), pp. 228-260.

44. "Personality and Influence," Draft of speech delivered at the Royal Naval College,

Dartmouth, England, Mahan Papers, NHF.

45. Adm. Harry E. Yarnell, "Sons of Gunboats," Yarnell Papers, NHF.

46. For example, Marcus Goodrich, Delilah (New York: Popular Library, 1978); Vernon L. Kellogg, Beyond War, A Chapter in the Natural History of Man (New York: Holt, 1912); George

Nasmyth, Social Progress and Darwinian Theory (New York: Putnam, 1916); John Hayes

Holmes, New Wars for Old (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1916); Walter E. Weyl, The End of the

War (New York: Macmillan, 1918); Morris Jastrow, The War and the Coming Peace: The Moral

Issue (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1918), for the paradigm transition during the second decade of

this country.

47. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston: Little, Brown,

1897), p. 18. 48. "Memorandum Prepared and Read by Rear-Admiral Knight at the Meeting of the General Board on July 28, 1915," General Board File 420-2, Naval Historical Division.
183

49. "U.S. Naval Building Policy," Memorandum No. 21, Planning Section, London, May

1918, Record Group 45, National Archives.

50. Dudley W. Knox, "National Strategy," 7 October 1932, Record Group XIV, Naval War

College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

51. "Memorandum Prepared and Read by Captain W.L. Rodgers, Third Section at General

Board Meeting, July 27, 1915," General Board File 420-2.

52. "U.S. Naval Building Policy."

53. "The Blue-Orange Situation: Lecture Delivered by Captain R.R. Belknap, U.S.N., for

Fleet- War College Sessions, 1 November 1921," Record Group XIV, NHC.

54. "The Price of Peace," p. 15. 55. Outline History of the United States Naval War College 1884 to Date (Newport:

Collected Transcript, Bound, 1937).

56. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in International Conditions (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1910), p. 39.

57. "Memorandum," Rodgers, General Board File 420-2.

58. "U.S. Naval Building Policy."

59. "The Blue-Orange Situation."

60. W.D. Puleston, The Armed Forces of the Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1941), p. 29.

61. Adm. H.E. Yarnell, "Commander in Chief, Asiatic Fleet, to Chief of Naval Operations,

Situation in the Pacific," 26 November 1938, Record Group 8, NHC.

62. "U.S. Naval Building Policy."

63. "Memorandum" Rodgers, General Board File 420-2.

64. "Memorandum of George Dewey," 24 June 1904, General Board File 425, Naval

Historical Division; Seward W. Livermore, "Theodore Roosevelt, the American Navy, and the

Venezuelan Crisis of 1903," American Historical Review, April 1946, pp. 452-471.

65. The flavor of that adventure, for Americans, is brought out in Richard O'Connor, The

Spirit Soldiers: A Historical Narrative of the Boxer Rebellion (New York: Putnam, 1973); for a

direct, imagistic injection of the American role, see Frederick Remington's painting, "The Ninth

United States Infantry Entering Peking," at the Granger Collection.

66. Seward W. Livermore, "The United States Navy as a Factor in World Politics, 1903-

1913," American Historical Review, July 1958, pp. 863-879-

67. "Memorandum for Commander McCain," 15 August 1930, Knox Papers, NHF.

68. Ibid., p. 2. 69. Ibid., p. 3. 70. "Memorandum for Lt.Com. Emmet, September 29, 1922," Knox Papers, NHF.

71. "Our Navy and Other Factors of Sea Power," Gleaves Papers, NHF, pp. 9-10.

72. Ibid., p. 11. 73. Ibid., p. 12. 74. Navy Day Address, Pittsburgh, 1927, Furer Papers, NHF.

75. Hamilton, p. 70.

76. "Memorandum," Rodgers, General Board File 420-2.

77. "Memorandum on Naval Bases," undated (probably 1920), Knox Papers, NHF;

"Philippine Independence and Naval Bases," Memorandum prepared by Knox for Stark, August

1939, Knox Papers, NHF; "Naval Base in Philippines," Memorandum prepared by Yarnell

CINCASIATIC for Standley, CNO, 1 1 February 1937, Yarnell Papers, NHF; Rear Adm. Bradley

A. Fiske to Secretary of the Navy, 3 June 1924, Sims Papers, NHF; Sims to Fiske, 6June 1924,

Sims Papers, NHF.

78. "Proposed Plans for Establishment of League of Nations Army and Navy,"

Memorandum for CNO, PD 1 79- 1 , Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Naval

Historical Division.

79. See Sims' letters to his wife, December 1910 to January 1911, Sims Papers, NHF.

80. Gerald E. Wheeler, Admiral William Veazie Pratt, U.S. Navy: A Sailor's Life (Washington: Dept. of the Navy, Naval History Division, 1974), pp. 96-133.

81. "Cooperation with the Entente Powers," W.S. Benson to the Secretary of the Navy,

January 1918, Records of the Chief of Naval Operations.

82. "Building Program," Memorandum Number 67, Planning Section, London, 21 November 1918, Record Group 45, National Archives.

83- Outline History of the Naval War College.

84. Knox, "National Strategy."

85. Ibid., p. 12.
184

86. "Memorandum," Rodgers, General Board File 420-2.

87. "U.S. Naval Building Policy."

88. Knox, "National Strategy," p. 13. 89. Hamilton, p. 70. 90. Knox, "National Strategy," p. 11. 91. Ibid., p. 25. 92. "Memorandum," D.W. Knox to Senior Member, General Board, 8 September 1921,

Knox Papers, NHF.

93- Knox, "National Strategy," p. 18. 94. "Memorandum," Rodgers, General Board File 420-2.

95. "U.S. Naval Building Policy."

96. Knox, "National Strategy," p. 20; "Memorandum on Naval Bases," Knox Papers, NHF.

97. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1937), p. 226.

98. Knox, "National Strategy," p. 19; Hamilton, p. 67. 99. Knox, "National Strategy," pp. 7, 24. 100. Ibid., p. 9. 101. Outline History of the Naval War College.

102. Davis to Knox, 13 April 1934, Knox Papers, NHF.

103- Knox to Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, 4 June 1934, Knox Papers, NHF.

104. Knox to Secretary of the Navy, "For Harper's Magazine," 17 February 1932, Knox

Papers, NHF.

105. Ibid., p. 2. 106. Adm. William H. Standley, Address before Academy of Political Science, New York,

December 1937, Standley Papers, NHF; Harold R. Stark, Armistice Day Address, 1 1 November

1938 (written by Knox), Knox Papers, NHF; Capt. Dudley W. Knox, "Seapower-What Is It?" Navy Day Address, 27 October 1936, Knox Papers, NHF.

107. "Building Program on Expiration of Washington and London Treaties," Kalbfus to Standley, 1 October 1935, Record Group VIII, NHC

108. "Memorandum," Knox to Senior Member, General Board, Knox Papers, NHF.

109- Analysis of Order of Battle and Battle Ratios in 9 Engagements, 13 November 1943 to 25 October 1944.

110. "The Price of Peace."

111. "Situation in the Pacific," Yarnell to Leahy, 26 November 1938, NHC

112. Radio Address, CBS, Standley Papers, NHF.

113- Radio Address, Pittsburgh, 27 October 1927, Furer Papers, NHF.

114. Bryan Edwards, quoted inJ.H. Parry, Trade and Dominion (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 45. PART II-MISSION

1. Rear Adm. Stephen Bleecker Luce, "On the Relations Between the U.S. Naval War

College and the Line Officers of the U.S. Navy," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 191 1, p. 25, Sims Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress.

2. Capt. J.R.P. Pringle, "Naval War College Course," 4 September 1924, Record Group II, Naval War College Naval Historical Collection. CHAPTER V-THE EVOLUTION OF MISSION

1. Rear Adm. Stephen Bleecker Luce, "On the Relations Bewtween the U.S. Naval War

College and the Line Officers of the U.S. Navy," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 191 1, p. 28, Sims Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF).

2. Ibid., p. 25.

3. Ibid., p. 26.

4. Ibid., p. 29.

5. Adm. William Sowden Sims, Memorandum to Secretary of the Navy, "General

Recommendations Concerning War College," 15 January 1920, Record Group II, Naval War

College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

6. Ibid.

7. Sims to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., 22 December 1922, Sims Papers, NHF.

8. Sims, "Tentative Notes Concerning Possible Activities and Functions of the War

College," Record Group II, NHC.
185

9. See, for example, Sims to Coontz, 11 January 1922; Belknap to Sims, 17 July, 2 August

1923; Sims to King, 20 February 1914; Knox to Sims, 25 February 1917; Sims to Rodgers, 23

August 1921, Sims Papers, NHF.

10. Capt. Dudley W. Knox, "National Strategy," p. 11, Record Group XV, NHC

11. Ibid., p. 12.

12. Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, Diary: "Notes of B.A. Fiske, Rear Admiral, U.S.N.," entries

for 3, 4, 15 January 1915, Fiske Papers, NHF.

13. Rear Adm. Austin M. Knight, "Address Opening Course of January 1914," p. 11, Sims

Papers, NHF.

14. Ibid., p. 9. 15. Ibid., p. 12.

16. Julius Augustus Furer, Administration of the Navy Department in World War II (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959), p. 109-

17. Knox, Address of Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams at 1932 War College

Graduation, p. 2, Knox Papers, NHF.

18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Ibid., p. 5. 20. Ibid., p. 3. 21. Capt. Leonard James Dow, Address, Naval War College, June 1956, p. 4, Dow Papers,

NHF.

22. Ibid., p. 11. 23. Ibid., p. 12. 24. Ibid., p. 13.

CHAPTER VI-THE COURSE

1. Outline History of the United States Naval War College 1884 to Date (Newport:

Collected Transcript, Bound, 1937).

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Sims, "Tentative Notes Concerning Possible Activities and Functions of the War

College," Record Group II, Course Comparison, Outline History of the Naval War College.

5. Questions and Discussion, The Conference of 1905, The Conference of 1907, The

Conference of 1912, Record Group VIII, Naval War College Naval Historical Collection

(hereafter NHC).

6. Julius Augustus Furer, Administration of the Navy Department in World War II (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959), pp. 115-123.

7. Ibid., pp. 111-114.

8. Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, Journal, 5 November 1914, 17 March 1915, Fiske Papers,

Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF).

9. Rear Adm. Austin M. Knight, "Address Opening Course of January, 1914," p. 11, Sims

Papers, NHF.

10. Outline History of the Naval War College.

11. Rear Adm. William S. Sims, "Organization of War College Staff," June 1922, p. 2; Capt.

J.R.P. Pringle, "Naval War College Course," 4 September 1924, p. 2, Record Group II, NHC.

12. Outline History of the Naval War College.

13. "Information Regarding Naval War College," 7 October 1925, NHC, p. 3; Pringle, p. 4. 14. Outline History of the Naval War College.

15. "The Naval War College Correspondence Course," 3 May 1920, Record Group II, NHC.

16. Ibid., p. 2. 17. James O. Richardson and George C. Dyer, On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor

(Washington: Dept. of the Navy, Naval History Division, 1973).

18. The Class lists and Curriculum records aggregated in the typescript record, Outline

History of the Naval War College, are the basis for the statistical analysis of this section.

19. Professor John O. Dealey, "National Policies in the Pacific," 10 September 1921, p. 6, Record Group XIV, NHC.

20. Professor John P. Baxter, "The Objectives and Aims of American Foreign Policy," "The

Navy as an Instrument of Policy," 1932-37, Record Group XV, NHC.

21. Professor George Grafton Wilson, "International Law, Orientation Talk," Department

of Intelligence, p. 2, Record Group II, NHC.
186

22. "Proposed Plans for Establishment of League of Nations Army and Navy,"

Memorandum for CNO, PD 179-1, Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations,

Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.

23. Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1977), p. 147.

24. The German Aland Island operation of 1917 was the only rival of Gallipoli; see A. Harding Ganz, "'Albion' —The Baltic Island Operation," Military Affairs, April 1978, pp. 91-97.

25. Naval War College to Bureau of Navigation, Memorandum: "Reading Course

Professional Bibliography," 18 June 1928, p. 2, Record Group II, NHC

26. Naval War College, Educational Department, "Prescribed Reading Course," June 1934,

Record Group II, NHC.

27. Advanced Course, 1934-1935, "List of Books Reviewed," Record Group II, NHC.

28. Rear Adm. W.S. Pye, "Advanced Course of 1934-1935, Book Review: The Decline of the West" p. 1, Record Group II, NHC.

29. Ibid., p. 2. 30. Capt. Byron McCandless, "Advanced Course, 1934-1935, Book Review: The Racial

History of Man',' Record Group II, NHC.

31. "Information Regarding Naval War College," 7 October 1925, NHC, p. 3; Pringle, p. 4. 32. Capt. J. M. Reeves, "Thesis on Tactics, Class of 1925," Department of Tactics, 23 February

1925, Record Group II, NHC.

33- Capt. J.O. Richardson, "The Relationship in War of Naval Strategy, Tactics, and

Command," Thesis, Senior Class of 1934, 7 May 1934, p. 2, Record Group XIII, NHC.

34. Spector, p. 150.

35. Capt. J.R. Poinsett Pringle, "Thesis on 'Policy,'" 13 September 1919, Record Group II, NHC.

36. Record Group XIII, Student Theses, NHC.

37. Ibid., scan of titles, 1919-1941.

38. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 605.

39. Capt. T.C. Hart, "Class of 1923: Thesis on Policy," 1 September 1922, p. 5, Record Group.

XIII, NHC.

40. Hamilton to Washington, 10 November 1796; Hamilton's draft of Washington's Eighth

Annual Address to Congress, 10 November 1796; in Harold C. Syett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), v. XX, pp. 381-387.

41. Clausewitz, p. 608.

42. Cdr. C.W. Nimitz, "Class of 1923: Thesis on Policy," 1 September 1922, p. 5, Record

Group XIII, NHC.

43- Clausewitz, p. 605.

44. Ibid., p. 581.

45. Capt. E.J. King, "Thesis: The Influence of the National Policy on the Strategy of a War,"

Senior Class, 1933, p. 7, Record Group XIII, NHC.

46. Clausewitz, pp. 585-586.

47. Capt. A.J. Hepburn, "Thesis: The Inter-Relation in War of National Policy, Strategy,

Tactics, and Command," Senior Class of 1931, 15 May 1931, p. 18, Record Group XIII, NHC.

48. Clausewitz, pp. 605-610.

49. Record Groups II and XIII, NHC.

50. Capt. J.W. Greenslade, "Thesis, Policy," Class of 1926, 5 December 1925, p. 9, Record

Group XIII, NHC.

51. Clausewitz, p. 594.

52. Bradley A. Fiske, Our Navy as a Fighting Machine (New York: Scribner, 1916), pp. 137-

143, 153-157; Charles W. Cullen, "From Kriegsakademie to Naval War College: The Military

Planning Process," Naval War College Review, January 1970, pp. 10-15.

53- Cdr. R.A. Spruance, "Thesis on Policy," Class of 1927 (Senior Class), 4 December 1926, p. 30, Record Group XIII, NHC.

54. Greenslade, p. 12. 55. Cdr. Husband E. Kimmel, "Thesis on Policy," Class of 1926, 5 December 1925, p. 4, Record Group XIII, NHC.

56. Greenslade, p. 12. 57. Kimmel, p. 4. 58. Nimitz, p. 7. 59. King, pp. 25, 26. 60. Richardson, "Thesis," p. 6.
187

61. King, pp. 32, 33; Richardson, "Thesis," p. 7. 62. Capt. R.L. Ghormley, "Thesis: Present Trends in the Foreign Policy of the United States

in Regard to Europe," pp. 22, 25, Record Group XIII, NHC.

63- Greenslade, p. 2. 64. Hepburn, p. 22.

65. Capt. C.P. Snyder, "Thesis: Policy," Class of 1925, 6 December 1924, p. 1, Record Group

XIII, NHC.

66. Capt. Joseph Reeves, "Thesis: Policy," Class of 1924, 4 September 1924, pp. 2-4; Nimitz,

pp. 1-5, Record Group XIII, NHC.

67. Nimitz, p. 1. 68. Ibid., p. 2. 69. Reeves, p. 3. 70. Cdr. R.E. Ingersoll, "Thesis on Policy," Class of 1927 (Senior Class), 4 December 1926, p. 23, Record Group XIII, NHC.

71. Nimitz, pp. 2, 3. 72. Ibid., p. 2. 73- Snyder, p. 6. 74. Nimitz, p. 2. 75. Hart, p. 8. 76. Ibid.; King, pp. 23-24.

77. Cdr. Ellis Mark Zacharias, "Thesis: The Relationship Between National Policy and

Strategy in War in the Russo-Japanese War," Senior Class of 1934, 1 February 1934, pp. 8, 56,

Record Group XIII, NHC.

78. Lt. W.D. Puleston, "Thesis: BLUE Strategy in the Pacific," July 1914, p. 2, Record Group

XIII, NHC.

79- Zacharias, pp. 6-8; Puleston, pp. 5-7. 80. Kimmel, p. 17. 81. Nimitz, p. 21.

82. Puleston, p. 11. 83. Greenslade, p. 16; Puleston, p. 1 ; Nimitz, p. 2 1 ; Hart, p. 10; Kimmel, p. 19; Snyder, p. 19; Kalbfus, p. 71; Reeves, p. 10. 84. King, p. 22; Richardson, "Thesis," p. 6. 85. Capt. C.C. Bloch, "Thesis: The Present Foreign Policies of the United States," Senior

Class, 1930, 26 April 1930, p. 52, Record Group XIII, NHC.

86. Capt. E.C. Kalbfus, "Thesis on Policy," Class of 1927 (Senior Class), 4 December 1926, p.

2, Record Group XIII, NHC.

87. Richardson, "Thesis," p. 6. 88. Lt. Cdr. D.W. Knox, "The Role of Doctrine in Naval Warfare," Reprinted from the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March-April 1915, with a Preface by the President, Naval War

College, 15 June 1936, p. 1, Knox Papers, NHF.

89- Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, Journal, "Notes of B.A. Fiske, Rear-Admiral," 15 January

1915, Fiske Papers, NHF.

90. Knox, p. 8. 91. Ibid., p. 8. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., p. 5. 94. Ibid., p. 1. 95. Ibid., p. 2. 96. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore Politico. Or, the Elements of Law, Moral and Politick (London: J. Martin and J. Ridley, 1650).

97. Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).

98. Rear Adm. Austin M. Knight, The Estimate ofthe Situation, June 1915, Revised by Naval

War College Staff, March 1921, p. 3, Record Group XXVII, NHC.

99. The Estimate of the Situation, Plans and Orders, Prepared at the United States Naval

War College, 1929, p. 9, Record Group XXVII, NHC.

100. "The Estimate of the Situation: Diagram to Show Sequence of Derivation," Record

Group XXVII, NHC.

101. Rear Adm. E.C. Kalbfus, preface to Naval War College reprint of "The Role of Doctrine

in Naval Warfare," p. 2, Record Group II, NHC.
188

102. Rear Adm. E.C. Kalbfus, Sound Military Decision, 22 July 1940, Record Group XXVII,

NHC.

103. Ibid., p. 13. 104. Ibid., p. 45.

105. Richardson, "Thesis," pp. 14-15.

106. Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, quoted in Sims to Fiske, 21 May 1923, Sims Papers, NHF.

107. Richardson and Dyer, On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor.

108. Nimitz to Melson, 24 September 1965, NHC.

109 Outline History of the Naval War College.

1 10. Ibid.; Gerald E. Wheeler, Admiral William Veazie Pratt, U.S. Navy: A Sailor's Life (Washington: Dept. of the Navy, Naval History Division, 1974), pp. 67-89; Elting E. Morison,

Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 293-294.

111. Vice Adm. Reginald R. Belknap to Rear Adm. William S. Sims, 17 July 1923, Sims Papers,

NHF.

112. Belknap to Sims, 2 August 1923, Sims Papers, NHF.

113. Updated typescript, probably late summer 1912, Sims Papers, NHF.

114. Ibid. 115. "Slides Made By and Shown to Classes of 1925 Naval War College," Record Group II, NHC.

PART III-THE ENEMY

1. Belknap to Sims, 2 August 1923, Sims Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress.

2. Pratt Papers, Naval War College Historical Collection.

3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Avon, Conn.: Heritage Press, 1943).

CHAPTER VII-THE CALLIMORPHOSIS OF THE ENEMY: RED

1. Kenneth Bourne, "British Preparations for War With the North, 1861-1862," The

English Historical Review, October 1961, pp. 600-632.

2. For a contemporary commentary on America's 19th-century naval stagnation, see Rear

Adm. S.B. Luce, "The Fleet," North American Review, October 1908, pp. 564-576; "Naval

Strategy," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 1909, pp. 93-112; "Modern Navies. No.

1 —Navy of the United States," Army and Navy Journal, 12 August 1876, p. 7; "Annual

Address—1888," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, v. XIV, no. 1, 1888, pp. 1-8; "Calhoun's

Opinion of the Navy," The Newport Mercury, 18 August 1906, p. 4; Alfred Thayer Mahan, From

Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), pp. 26-102.

3. Howard I. Chapelle,/4 History ofthe American Sailing Navy (New York: Norton, 1949), pp. 172-185.

4. Adm. George Dewey to Victor H.Metcalf, 25 April 1907, General Board Papers, File 420-

1, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.

5. Cdr. N.H. McCully, "Organization, Mobilization and Distribution of Red Naval Forces in Case of War with Blue," BNOpP, 18 March 1912, Record Group VIII, Naval War College Naval

Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

6. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in International Conditions (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1910), pp. 161-164: Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951 through 1954), v. II, pp. 1151, 1362, 1208, v. VI, p. 1292, v. VIII, pp. 1394, 1412, 1415, 1416; Theodore Roosevelt to Arthur James Balfour, 10

December 1918, v. VIII, p. 1415 cites: We feel that the British Navy from the necessities of the British Empire should be the most

powerful in the world, and we have no intention of rivalling it 7. Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist or the New Constitution (Avon, Conn.: Heritage

Press, 1945), p. 70.

8. Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, Diary, "Notes of B.A. Fiske, Rear Admiral," 12 February

1915, Fiske Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF).

9. The Joint Board, Joint Planning Committee, "Joint Army and Navy Plan for the Capture

and Occupation of the Azores (GRAY-WPL-47),"J.B. No. 325 (Serial 694), 28 May 1941; "Joint Army and Navy Basic Plan for the Occupation of Iceland by a Permanent Garrison of the United

States Army (INDIGO)," J.B. No. 325 (Serial 697), 1 July 1941; Gen. L.T. Gerow to Rear Adm.

R.K. Turner (Dir WPD), "Plans for DAKAR Operations" (WPD4511-3), 23 July 1941, War
189

Plans Division (OP- 12), Records of the Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy Operational

Archives, Naval Historical Division.

These are the first forward defense, mid-Atlantic combined operations plans drawn up by

the Army and Navy. Two years earlier, Capt. R.L. Thormley, the Director of OP- 12, wrote a memorandum to Adm. H.R. Stark, CNO, "State Department's letter 22 May 1939, requesting

comment on the extent of Liberian Protective Measures," 24 May 1939 (OP-12B-WHC (SC)

A14-7/RF39 D- 17446). Navy opinion, just months before the outbreak of European War, was

unable to support an African, transatlantic base, even with Liberian pleas in their ears. Atlantic

paradigm displacement would await the fall of France.

10. "Memorandum No. 67, Building Program," Planning section, London, 21 November

1918, pp. 2-11, Record Group 45, National Archives.

11. Ibid., p. 12.

12. Ibid., p. 15.

1 3- Rear Adm. Julius Augustus Furer, Radio Address, Pittsburgh, 27 October 1929, p. 2, Furer

Papers, NHF. Capt. E.J. King, Thesis, p. 21, Record Group XIII, NHC

14. Lt. Holloway H. Frost, "Strategy of the Atlantic," 9 September 1919, p. 1, Record Group

XIV, NHC; Cdr. H.E. Yarnell, Memorandum for Admiral McKean, OP- 56, 11 February 1919,

Yarnell Papers, NHF.

15. Frost, pp. 5, 16-17.

16. David Syrett, The Seige and Capture of Havana (London: Navy Records Society, 1970).

17. Lt. Holloway H. Frost, "The Naval Operations of a Red-Orange Campaign," Lecture

delivered at the General Staff College, 25 October 1920, "Received from Naval Operations,"

Record Group XIV, NHC.

18. Lectures from Army and Naval War Colleges, War Plans Division (OP-12), U.S. Navy

Operational Archives, Navy History Division. There are 300 such lectures in the records of the War Plans Division.

19. Frost, "The Naval Operations of a Red-Orange Campaign," p. 1. 20. Ibid., pp. 6-10.

21. Frost to Sims, 14 October 1923, Sims Papers, NHF.

22. Great Britain, Admiralty, The Navy List (London: HMSO, 1920); U.S. Navy

Department, Report of the Secretary of the Navy (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1920).

23. Great Britain, Parliament, Navy Estimates, 1921 (London: HMSO, 1921).

24. Holloway H. Frost, The Battle ofJutland (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1936), p. 514.

25. Dudley W. Knox, The Eclipse of American Seapower (New York: The American Army

and Navy Journal, 1922).

26. Capt. J.M. Reeves, "A Tactical Study Based on the Fundamental Principles of War of the Employment of the Present BLUE Fleet in Battle Showing the Vital Modifications Demanded by

Tactics," p. 36, Record Group II, NHC.

27. Class of 1923, Tactical Problem IV, "The Battle of the Emerald Bank," Record Group II, NHC.

28. Class of 1924, Tactical Problem II, "The Battle of Sable Island," Record Group II, NHC.

29. Reeves, p. 36.

30. Ibid., Plate 48.

31. Ibid., p. 35.

32. General Board Records, pp. 420-422, 1925-1932, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval

History Division.

33. Reeves, pp. 31-32.

34. Reeves to Secretary of the Navy Charles Swanson, 17 May 1937, Records of the Secretary

of the Navy, Record Group 80, National Archives.

35. Rear Adm. H.E. Yarnell, "Memorandum on London Treaty," Spring 1930, p. 9, Yarnell

Papers, NHF.

36. Senior Class of 1938, Operations Problem VI (Tactical), Record Group II, NHC.

37. Rear Adm. Hugh Rodman to Secretary of the Navy, "Officers Uniforms—changes in," 30

April 1918, Sims Papers, NHF.

38. General Board to Secretary of the Navy, "Questions to Be Answered in Connection with

Consideration of the Elevation of Guns," 23 December 1924, G.B. No. 420-6, Serial No. 1259,

General Board Records, Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.

39. Cdr. T.H. Thomson to Capt. Dudley W. Knox, 11 December 1923, Knox Papers, NHF.

40. Capt. D.W. Knox, "Strategy of the Atlantic in a War with a Major European Power," p.

14, Knox Papers, NHF.

41. Capt. E.J. King, "Thesis: The Influence of the National Policy on the Strategy of a War,"

p. 21, King Papers, NHF.
190

CHAPTER VIII-THE CACOMORPHOSIS OF THE ENEMY:

ORANGE

1. Board on Defenses, "War with Spain andJapan," p. 8, UNOpB, Record Group VIII, Naval

War College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

2. Capt. Caspar F. Goodrich, "Strategic Features of the Pacific," 23 June 1897, p. 6, Record

Group VIII, NHC.

3. Lt. J.M. Ellicott, "Sea Power of Japan," 1900, JN, p. 23, Record Group VIII, NHC.

4. Ellicott, "The Strategic Features of the Philippine Islands, Hawaii, and Guam," 14 June

1900, XSTP, p. 4, Record Group VIII, NHC.

5. Rear Adm. George Remey, Memorandum reported in General Board Proceedings, 29

May 1902, General Board Records, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.

6. Conference of 1902, "Solution of Problem of 1902," pp. 14-19, Record Group XII, NHC.

7. Conference of 1903, "Problem: Course of 1903," Record Group XII, NHC.

8. A.T. Mahan to Henry C. Taylor, 7 December 1903 in Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, eds. Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), v. Ill, p. 86.

9. See A.T. Mahan, The Interest of America in International Conditions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910), pp. 38-46; Homer Lea, The Day of the Saxon (New York: Harper, 1907), pp. 216-223; Bradley A. Fiske, Diary, 12 February, 10 March 1915, Fiske Papers, Naval Historical Division, Library of Congress.

10. Rear Adm. R.P. Rodgers, "Strategic Plan of Campaign Against Orange," 1911, Record

Group XII, Naval War College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC); "War Portfolio No. 2," General Board Records, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.

11. Conference of 1906, "Solution of Problem," Record Group XII, NHC; General Board of the Navy, "In Case of Strained Relations with Japan," 1906, Record Group XII, NHC.

12. Ibid., p. 3. 13. Ibid., pp. 9-14, 42-50.

14. Cdr. H.S. Knapp, "Memorandum," 31 January 1907,JNOpP, p. 3, NHC.

15. Mahan to Editor, New York Sun, 28 January 1907; Seager and Maguire, v. Ill, p. 206.

16. Lt. Cdr. W.D. MacDougall, "Study of Special Situation," 5 April 1907, JNOpP, p. 10, Record Group VIII, NHC.

17. James O. Richardson and George C. Dyer, On the Treadmillto Pearl Harbor (Washington:

Dept. of the Navy, Navy History Division, 1973), pp. 383-402.

18. Cdr. J.H. Oliver, "Memorandum Submitted to the President of the War College," 20 April

1907, Record Group VIII, JNOpP, NHC.

19. Rodgers, pp. 52-57.

20. Ibid., p. 39. 21. Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1977), pp. 147-150.

22. Nimitz to Melson, 24 September 1965, NHC.

23. Oliver to Rodgers, 27 February 1911, with "Strategic Plan of Campaign Against Orange";

also, Outline History of the United States Naval War College 1 884 to Date (Newport: Collected Typescript, Bound, 1937) ; Mahan to Capt. Raymond P. Rodgers, 22 February and 4 March 1911,

Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, v. Ill, pp. 380-388, 390-391.

24. Rear Adm. Bradley A. Fiske, Journal, 30 November 1914, Fiske Papers, Naval Historical

Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF).

25. Sims to Daniels, "Matters Connected with the Pacific," 13 August 1920, Sims Papers,

NHF.

26. Capt. D.W. Knox, "Memorandum on Naval Bases" 1922(?), Knox Papers, NHF; Cdr.

Julius Augustus Furer, "Drydocking and Major Repairs in a Campaign in the Western Pacific,"

UNOpP, Record Group VIII, NHC.

27. Office of Naval Operations, "Synopsis of a Preliminary Technical Study-Basic Orange

Plan, Advanced Base," 1 December 1927, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical

Division.

28. Summation of ORANGE Economic Committee, "The influence of ORANGE Economic

Factors on BLUE's Strategy in War," XSTP, Record Group VIII, p. 6, NHC.

29. General Board, "Strategic Problem—Pacific," 7 October 1916, Record Group VIII, UNOpP, p. 25, NHC.

30. Fiske to Sims, 3 June 1924, Sims Papers, NHF.
191

31. Adm. H.E. Yarnell, CINCASIATIC to CNO, "Situation in the Pacific," 26 November 1938,

p. 73, XSTP, Record Group VIII, NHC

32. Capt. R. A. Koch, "BLUE-ORANGE Study," 3 1 March 1933, UNOpP, Record Group VIII,

p. 17, NHC

33. Navy Basic Plan—ORANGE (WPL-13/Volume 1, WPL-14/Volume II, WPL15/ Volume III, WPL- 16/ Volume IV), March 1929, War Plans Division (OP- 12), Records of the

Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.

34. Ibid., p. 12. CHAPTER IX-BEHIND THE MASK

1. Rear Adm. Stephen B. Luce to Vice Adm. Yamamoto Gombei, "To the Secretary of the Imperial Japanese Navy," 1901, Luce Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress

(hereafter NHF).

2. Lt. John M. Ellicott, "Sea Power ofJapan," JN, Record Group VIII, p. 4, Naval War College

Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

3. Conference of 1902, "Solution of Problem of 1902," pp. 14-19, Record Group XII, NHC.

4. Yarnell to Snyder, 10 January 1939, Yarnell Papers, NHF.

5. Homer Lea, The Day of the Saxon (New York: Harper, 1907), pp. 216-223; Dewey to Bonaparte, October 1906, General Board Letters, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval

Historical Division.

6. Dewey to Newberry, 24 February 1909, General Board Letters, U.S. Navy Operational

Archives, Naval Historical Division, "Memorandum for the General Board Presented by Captain

Sargent," 15 June 1907, General Board Letters.

7. Rear Adm. B.A. Fiske, Journal, 30 November 1914, 12 February 191 5, Fiske Papers, NHF;

"Problem: Course of 1903," Record Group XII, NHC.

8. A.T. Mahan, The Interest of America in International Conditions (Boston: Little, Brown,

1910), pp. 38-39.

9- Fiske, Journal, 9 February 1915, Fiske Papers, NHF.

10. Professor John H. Latani, "The Relation of the United States and Japan," p. 26, 1913,

Record Group XIV, NHC.

11. Office of Naval Intelligence, "RE Orange Strategic Plan," 20 February 1914; "Japanese

Plan for a Campaign Against America," 22 May 1914; "War Between Japan and America: A

Picture of the Future" (ostensibly translated from articles in Japanese newspaper Manyo),

JNOpP, Record Group VIII, NHC.

12. Fiske, Journal 9, 10 February 1915, Fiske papers, NHF.

13. Lt. Cdr. L. A. Cotton, "Far Eastern Conditions from the Naval Point of View," 26 February

1915, p. 7, Record Group XIV, NHC.

14. Ibid., p. 2. 15. Ibid., p. 8. 16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 11.

18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. Roger Pineau.ed., TheJapan Expedition, 1832-1834. The PersonalJournal of Commodore

Matthew C. Perry (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), pp. 159, 163.

20. Cdr. H.E. Yarnell, "Strategy of the Pacific-Japanese Characteristics," 8 September 1919, p.

7, Record Group XIV, NHC.

21. Office of Naval Intelligence, "Memorandum RegardingJapanese Psychology and Morale,"

JNP, Record Group XIII, NHC.

22. Capt. Edward Howe Watson, "Some Notes, Comparisons, Observations, and Conclusions

made in Japan, China, and the Far East," April 1939, 4A, JR, Record Group VIII, NHC.

23. Cotton, pp. 17-18.

24. Professor J.O. Dealey, "National Policies in the Pacific," 10 September 1921, p. 6, Record

Group XIV, NHC.

25. Cdr. C.W. Nimitz, "Thesis on Policy," 1 September 1922, p. 2 1, Record Group XIII, NHC.

26. Capt. T.C. Hart, "Thesis on Policy," 1 September 1922, p. 10, Record Group XIII, NHC.

27. Cdr. H.E. Kimmel, "Thesis on Policy," 5 December 1925, p. 17, Record Group XIII, NHC.

28. Capt. Byron McCandless, "Book Review. Advanced Course 1934-1935," The Racial

History of Man, 3 August 1934, p. 2, Record Group II, NHC.

29. Nimitz.
192

30. Cdr. Ellis Mark Zacharias, "The Relationship Between National Policy and Strategy in War in the Sino-Japanese War, and the Russo-Japanese War," 1 February 1934, p. 53, Record

Group XIII, NHC.

31. Lt. W.D. Puleston, "Thesis Blue Strategy in the Pacific,"July 1914, p. 22, Record Group

XIII, NHC.

32. W.D. Puleston, Armed Forces of the Pacific (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 29, 43,56.

33. Yarnell to Knox, 6 September 1938; Yarnell to Snyder, 10 January 1939; Yarnell to Hornbeck, 10 March 1939; Yarnell to Leahy, 11 October 1938, Yarnell Papers, NHF.

34. Yarnell to Puleston, 5 January 1938, Yarnell Papers, NHF; Preface by Adm. H.E. Yarnell

in Puleston, Armed Forces of the Pacific. 35. Sadao Asada, "The Japanese Navy and the United States" in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei

Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941 (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 225-259; Stephen Pe\z, Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Conference and the Onset of World War II (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press, 1974), pp. 35-38. PART IV-THE GAME

1. Capt. William McCarty Little, "The Strategic Naval War Game, Or Chart Maneuver,"

Lecture delivered by Capt. W. McCarty Little, June 1912, Record Group II, p. 10, Naval War

College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

2. William Shakespeare, Henry V, Chorus.

3. Capt. John Stapler to Capt. J.V. Babcock, 18 November 1931, Record Group II, NHC.

4. Little, p. 12.

5. Ibid., p. 3. 6. Senior Class of 1929, Department of Operations, Information Sheet, Tactical Demonstrative Exercises, 18 July 1929, Record Group II, NHC.

CHAPTER X-THE GAME AS RITUAL: EXPEDE HERCULEM

1. Rear Adm. Stephen Bleecker Luce, "The Naval and Military Conference of 1909," Naval

War College, Summer 1909, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF).

2. Ibid., p. 9.

3. Adm. W.S. Sims, Excerpt from Address to Opening Class of June 1919, General

Correspondence, Sims Papers, NHF.

4. Ibid.

5. Outline History of the Naval War College (Newport, R.I.: Collected Typescript, Bound,

1937).

6. Department of Tactics, "Demonstrative Search Problems," Annual Classes, 1922 to 1941,

Record Group II, Naval War College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

7. Department of Tactics, Demonstrative Exercise Materials, Annual Classes, 1922 to 1941,

Record Group II, NHC.

8. Department of Operations, The Conduct of Maneuvers, June 1935, p. 2. Record Group

IV, NHC.

9. Ibid., pp. 2-3, 24. See also, Rear Adm. E.C. Kalbfus, Sound Military Decision, 22 July 1940,

Record Group XXVII, NHC.

10. The Conduct of Maneuvers, p. 17. 11. Ibid., p. a. 12. Ibid., pp. 24-25.

13 Department of Operations, Maneuver Rules, Record Group II, NHC.

14. Ibid., pp. 126-137.

15. The Conduct of Maneuvers, p. a. 16. Ibid., p. 2. 17. Ibid., p. 7. 18. Ibid., p. 8. 19. Ibid., p. 7. 20. Ibid., p. 27.
193

21. The Chief of the Bureau of Navigation (C.W. Nimitz) to President, Naval War College,

"Request for fifty copies of drawings to accompany specifications for Mark III War Game Outfit," 12 June 1935, plus enclosed drawing, Record Group II, NHC.

22. The Conduct of Maneuvers, p. 29.

23. Maneuver Rules, p. 10. 24. The Conduct of Maneuvers, p. 15. 25. Torpedo Fire Cards, October 1930, Record Group II, NHC; "Table 4: Target Maneuvers,"

"Table 5: Hits Alongside," "Table 6: Hit Values," Maneuver Rules, pp. 130, 132.

26. Sample Forms Used in Conduct of Maneuvers, 25 November 1930, "Umpire's Damage

Sheets: Blue, Orange, Red Fleets," Record Group II, NHC.

27. Maneuver Rules, "Section F—Gunfire," pp. 61-84.

28. Sims to Coontz, 1 1 January 1922, Sims Papers, NHF.

29. Luce, "The Naval and Military Conference of 1909''

30. Ibid. 31. Frost to Sims, 14 October 1923, Sims Papers, NHF.

32. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 578. CHAPTER XI-THE GAME AS ORACLE: THE CAMPAIGN

1. Bradley A. Fiske, Our Navy as a Fighting Machine (New York: Scribner, 1916), p. 209-

2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 358.

3. Ibid., p. 119.

4. Class of 1923, "The Battle of the Marianas," Tac, p. 96, 1923, Record Group II, Naval War

College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

5. Senior Class of 1928, Operations Problem IV, 1928, Record Group II, NHC.

6. Senior Class of 1933, Operations Problem IV, 1933, Record Group II, NHC.

7. "Stenographic Notes Taken at Critique," Senior Class of 1933, Operations Problem IV, May 1933, p. 11, Record Group II, NHC.

8. "Remarks of President Naval War College Preliminary to Solving Operations Problem

III," Senior Class, 1935, 20 February 1935, Record Group II, NHC.

9. Senior Class of 1938, Operations Problem V (Strategic), 1938, Record Group II, NHC.

10. Senior Class of 1938, Operations Problem VII, 1938, Record Group II, NHC.

11. Ibid.; Senior and Junior Classes of 1939, Operations Problem VII, 1939, Record Group II, NHC.

12. Senior and Junior Classes of 1939, Operations Problem VII, 1937, Record Group II, NHC.

13. U.S. Army War College-U.S. Naval War College, Operation Problem VI- 1929, Joint

Army and Navy Operations with Forced Landing, Part II, Estimate of Situation and Decision, 1 July 1928, p. 6, Record Group II, NHC.

14. Ibid.; Part I, The Preliminary Situation, Annex (A), pp. 5-7.

15. Ibid.; "Stenographic Notes Taken at Critique," Record Group II, NHC.

16. Operations Problem VI- 1929, Joint Army and Navy Operations with Forced Landing,

Part XII, Support Force Operation Orders and Accompanying Annexes of Commanders, Naval

Landing Groups and Air Group, 15 March 1929, Record Group II, NHC.

17. Ibid., Part VIII, Operation Order, No. 1 Support Force, Annex VI, Boat Data.

18. "Stenographic Notes Taken at Critique."

CHAPTER XII -THE GAME AS ORACLE: THE BATTLE

1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 227.

2. Rear Adm. Harris Laning, President, Naval War College, The Naval Battle, May 1933, p.

1, Record Group II, Naval War College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

3. Ibid., p. 55.

4. Ibid., p. 1. 5. Ibid., p. 55.

6. Department of Operations, The Fire Action of the Battle Line, 23 May 1932, p. 2; Cruisers

and Destroyers in the General Action, June 1936, p. 1, Record Group II, NHC.

7. Laning, p.* 55.

8. Dept. of Operations, The Fire Action of the Battle Line, p. 45.

9. Laning, p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. 57.

11. Ibid., p. 3.
194

12. Dept. of Operations, The Fire Action of the Battle Line, Plates 1-4.

13. Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1977), p. 150; Malcolm Muir, Jr. "The Capital Ship Program in the Unk,d States Navy, 1934-1935," Unpublished dissertation,

Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1976, p. 38.

14. Holloway H. Frost, The Battle ofJutland ( Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1936), p. 516.

15. Cdr. H.R. Stark, "Thesis on Policy," p. 32, Record Group XII, NHC

16. Laning, p. 48. CHAPTER XIII-THE GAME AS ORACLE: THE WEAPON

1

.

The vertebral metaphor of the battleship guided all interwar imagery: it was the supreme

naval shibboleth. Every public address made by a naval officer of this era could be certain to encompass both "battleship" and "backbone" in the same breath. The personal papers sifted by

this writer—from Gleaves to Furer to Knox to Sims to Bloch—support the spinal cliche in familiar battleship imagery. Occasional antomical variations like "The Heart of the Fleet," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1940, were acceptable, though rare. Britain had "The Sure

Shield of Empire," in Geoffrey Parratt, The Royal Navy (London: Sheldon Press, 1937), but America could count on "The Backbone of the Fleet," Scientific American, September 1921, or

better yet, "The Backbone of the Monroe Doctrine," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 1940.

2. U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, "Conference on the Limitation of Armament, Washington, 12 November 1921-16 February

1922; Treaty Between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan,

Signed at Washington, 6 February 1922; Chapter II, Part IV, Definitions," v. I, 1922

(Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1938), p. 264.

3. Michael Vlahos, "A Crack in the Shield: The Capital Ship Concept Under Attack," The

Journal of Strategic Studies, May 1979, p. 52.

4. In spite of the tides of "isolationism" and "disarmament," the battle fleet remained, in the

collective American imagination, the emotional symbol of security for this New World

sanctuary. The writer's father remembers audiences at movies cheering and throwing their hats

into the air every time the U.S. Battle Fleet appeared at the end of a newsreel. This was the normal response to America's strategic forces in the 1930s, Springfield, Ohio, the Heartland. As

Adm. C.C. Bloch, then CINCUS, wrote of a similar scene in California, 1939: A friend of mine reports that his wife and child were in a movie house last week in Los Angeles and had seen newsreels of a foreign navy in action, which left the audience

wondering just how the United States Navy was. Immediately after the newsreel, your "Filming the Fleet" came to the screen. During its showing and afterwards, the audience

applauded with much gusto.

Adm. C.C. Bloch to Mr. Truman Talley, 7 November 1939, Bloch Papers, Naval Historical Foundation, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF).

5. Rear Adm. H.R. Stark to Adm. C.C. Bloch, 12 July 1937, Bloch Papers, NHF.

6. C.V. Ricketts, "Battleships and Cruisers," 7 August 1947, Record Group XIV, Naval War

College Naval Historical Collection (hereafter NHC).

7. W.D. Puleston, The Armed Forces of the Pacific (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

Press, 1941), p. 242.

8. Critique by Capt. R.B. Coffey, Senior Class of 1933, Tactical Probelm V, Operations

Problem IV, May 1933, p. 1, Record Group II, NHC.

9. Rear Adm. Harris Laning, President, Naval War College, The Naval Battle, May 1933, p.

7, Record Group II, NHC.

10. Department of Operations, Cruisers and Destroyers in the General Action, June 1936, p.

1, Record Group II, NHC.

1 1. Laning, p. 9. 12. Ibid., p. 46.

13. Ibid.

14. Capt. J.M. Reeves, "A Tactical Study Based on the Fundamental Principles of War of the Employment of the Present BLUE Fleet in Battle Showing the Vital Modifications Demanded by

Tactics," 20 March 1925, Plates 4-7, Record Group II, NHC.

15. These, the dozen battleships of the battle force in the Pacific—four divisions of three ships each—in the last year of peace: 1940. The oldest of the American ironclad veterans, New

York, Texas, and Arkansas, were already patrolling the raider-crossed waters of the North

Atlantic.
195

AFTERWORD

1. Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey to Admiral Robert B. Carney, 10 November 1958, Dow

Papers, Naval Historical Division, Library of Congress.

2. Adm. Robert B. Carney, Review of "Leyte," typescript, 1959, Dow Papers, Naval

Historical Division, Library of Congress.

3. Michael Vlahos, "A Crack in the Shield: The Capital Ship Concept Under Attack," The

journal of Strategic Studies, May 1979, pp. 69-75.

4. Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 179.

5. Vice Adm. J.B. Stockdale, "Taking Stock," Naval War College Review, January 1979, p. 2. 6. Rear Adm. S.B. Luce, "On the Relations Between the U.S. Naval War College and the Line Officers of the U.S. Navy," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1911, p. 29.

7. Vice Adm. J.B. Stockdale, "Taking Stock," Naval War College Review, April 1979, p. 1. 8. From conversations with Fleet Games participants.
196

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE NAVAL HISTORICAL

COLLECTION

Record Group 2: "Administrative Records" (Operational

Files)

Serial No. 1836:

Serial No. 1980:

Serial No. 1981:

Serial No. 1997:

Serial No. 1998:

Serial No. 1999:

Serial No. 2095:

Serial No. 2107:

Serial No. 1687:

Serial No. 1502-A:

Rear Admiral Harris Laning, President,

Naval War College. The Naval Battle,

(Confidential). May 1933.

Department of Operations, Naval War

College. The Conduct of Maneuvers,

(Confidential). June 1935.

Department of Operations, Naval War

College. Maneuver Rules, (Confidential).

June 1935.

Department of Operations, Naval War

College. Blue Fire Effect Tables, (Confidential).

Department of Operations, Naval War

College. Orange Fire Effects Tables, (Confidential).

Department of Operations, Naval War

College. Red Fire Effect Tables, (Confidential). June 1935.

Department of Intelligence, Naval War

College. Fleet Organizations: Blue, Red and

Orange, (Confidential). June 1935.

Department of Operations, Naval War

College, Cruisers and Destroyers in the

General Action, (Confidential), June 1936.

Torpedo Fire Cards, (Confidential). Naval

War College. October 1930.

Sample Forms Used in Conduct of

Maneuvers, (Confidential). Naval War

College, Master Copy, 25 November 1930.
197

Serial No. 1800-D: Description and Use of the Relative Plot

Game Board and Maneuver Protractor,

(Restricted). Naval War College, 22

January 1937.

Record Group 8: Intelligence and Technological

Archives

XSTP:

UNOpB:

JN:

JNOpM:

UNOpP(T)

JND:

JNT:

UNOpP:

BNOpP:

XBAA:

JNOpP:

JNOpP:

Captain C.F. Goodrich. Strategic features of the

Pacific. Letter to Assistant Secretary of the Navy

on War with Japan. 23 June 1897.

Board on Defenses. War with Spain and Japan.

July 1897.

Lieutenant John M. Ellicott, Sea Power ofJapan.

1900 (Confidential).

W.W. Taylor. Japanese Operations About

Gensan. 5 February 1905. (Confidential).

Navy Department, General Board. War Plan:

Orange-Blue Situation, assumed September,

1906. June 1907. (Confidential).

Major L.C. Lucas. Armored Ships-Blue and

Orange-Values. May 1909. (Confidential).

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

Japanese Naval War College. 10 August 1910.

(Confidential).

Rear Admiral R.P. Rodgers, President, Naval

War College. Strategic Plan of Campaign Against

Orange. 15 March 1911. (Confidential).

Commander N.A. McCully. Organization, Mobilization, and Distribution of Red Naval Forces in

Case of War with Blue. 18 March 1912.

(Confidential).

Captain E.H. Ellis. Naval Bases: Their Location,

Resources, and Security. 1913. (Confidential).

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

Possibilities of a Japanese-American War. 26

June 1914.

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence

RE Orange Strategic Plan. February 1914.
198

JNOpP:

JNOpP:

JNOpP:

XPON:

UNOpP:

XBAN:

XPOD:

UNOpP:

UNOpP:

XSTP:

UNOpP:

JNOpP:

XSTP:

UNOpP:

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

Orange Strategic Plan, Japanese Plan for a Campaign Against America. 22 May 1914.

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

Plans of the Japanese Government in the Event

of War between the United States and Japan. 17

March 1915.

Major General Clarance R. Edwards. Translation

of an article from frankfurter Zeitung: "War

Between Japan and America, A Picture of the

Future," 27 May 1915.

Commander W.V. Pratt. Scheme for the Progressive Development of the Fleet. 1915.

Navy Department, General Board. Strategic

Problem —Pacific. Solution by General Board of

Blue-Orange Problem submitted by Department.

7 October 1916. (Confidential).

Captain W.V. Pratt. Naval Bases from the Viewpoint of a Definite Policy. 15 December 1919.

(Confidential).

Navy Department, Office of the Chief of Naval

Operations, Plans Department. Building Program XIII Appendixes. 8 June 1920. (Secret).

Lieutenant Commander H.H. Frost. The Naval

Operations of a Red-Orange Campaign. 25

October 1920. (Secret).

Commander R.B. Coffey. The Navy War Plans

Division. Naval Plans and Planning. 1 1 March

1924. (Confidential).

Navy Department. General Board. Matters

Connected with the Pacific. 13 August 1920.

(Confidential).

Lieutenant Commander S.F. Bryant. Pacific War

Plan Notes. 22 November 1921. (Secret).

Office of the Naval Attache, American Legation,

Peking. Japanese War Plans. 8 September 1923.

(Secret).

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

The Next Great Naval War: Criticism of Hector

Bywater's Book, "The Great Pacific War." 27

August 1925.

Captain J.M. Reeves. A Tactical Study based on

The Fundamental Principles of War of the
199

JNP:

XSTP:

UNOpP:

UNC:

XSTA:

UNOpP:

XSTP:

XSTP:

XSTP:

UNC:

XSTP:

XSTP:

XSTP:

Employment of the Present Blue Fleet in Battle

showing Vital Modifications Demanded by

Tactics. 25 March 1925. (Secret).

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

Memorandum Regarding Japanese Psychology

and Morale. 1 March 1927. (Confidential).

Navy Department, Office of Naval Intelligence.

The Strategical Situation in the Pacific (Naval

Attache Report W-28, 1927). 27 January 1927.

(Confidential).

Captain J.W. Greenslade. Joint Estimate of the

BLUE-ORANGE Situation. 1928. (Secret)

Rear Admiral Harris Laning, President, Naval

War College. Building Program, 1932 (War

College Suggestion). 19 September 1930. (Confidential).

Commander H.H. Frost. BLUE Naval Strategy in

the Atlantic. 16 February 1932. (Secret).

Captain R.A. Koch. Blue-Orange Study. 31 March

1933. (Secret).

Naval War College, Orange Economic Committee. The Influence of Orange Economic

Factors on Blue's Strategy in War. 21 March 1933.

(Confidential).

Correspondence between Rear Admiral H.E.

Yarnell and Rear Admiral E.C. Kalbfus, President, Naval War College; 21 November 1934, to

18 December 1934.

Rear Admiral H.E. Yarnell, and Rear Admiral

E.C. Kalbfus. Northern Pacific—Strategy of.

November 1934. (Confidential).

Rear Admiral W.H. Standley, President, Naval

War College. Building Program on Expiration of

Washington and London Treaties. 1 April 1935.

(Confidential)

Ensign August Smiley. A History of the

Campaign. 7 April 1936.

Commander R.R.M. Emmet. Comment on Plan

of Operations submitted by Advanced Class of

1935-1936. 15 August 1938. (Confidential).

Admiral H.E. Yarnell, Commander in Chief,

Asiatic Fleet. Situation in the Pacific. 26

November 1938. (Confidential).
200

JR: Captain Edward Howe Watson. Some Notes,

Comparisons, Observations, and Conclusions

made in Japan, China, and the Far East after an

absence of 15 years. April 1939.

Joint Efforts of Army and Navy War Colleges:

JNOpP: Correspondence between Lieutenant

Colonel W.W. Wotherspoon, President,

Army War College, and Rear Admiral J.W.P.

Merrell, President, Naval War College, 23

February 1907, and 21 April 1907.

JNOpP: Army War College, Joint Army-Navy Committee. Memorandum Preparedfor the President

ofArmy War College byJoint Committee. Consideration of Special Situation. 18 February 1907.

JNOpP: Army War College,Joint Army-Navy Committee.

Problem Involving War Between Orange and

Blue. Course of 1907-1908.

JNOpP: Lieutenant Commander W.D. MacDougall. Study

of Orange-Blue Situation of 1906-1907. 5 April

1907. (Confidential).

JNOpP: Commander J.H. Oliver. Military Policy in the

Pacific. 20 April 1907. (Confidential).

JNOpP: Army War College,Joint Army-Navy Committee.

Preliminary Papers in Army War College Joint

Committee's Work. 25 January 1907 to 14

February 1907. (Confidential).

UNOpP: Army War College, Memorandum for the

Director, G-4 Division. Estimate of maximum

Blue forces which can be transported to and

maintained in Western Pacific and Asiatic

Mainland. 21 December 1925. (Secret).

UNOpP: Army War College, Course at the Army War

College, 1923-1924. The Logistic Plan of the

Orange War Plan. Committee No. 5. Naval

Supply. 27 February 1924. (Secret).

Part I. Introduction, and Discussion of Basic

Strategic Plan, Orange.

Part II. Discussion of the Basic Logistic Plan,

Orange.
201

Record Group 12: Student Problems and Solutions

Naval War College. Solution of Problem of 1902. Strategy and

Military Operations. Summer 1902. (Confidential). 3 Appendixes.

Naval War College. Conference of 1906. Solution of Problem.

Summer 1906. (Restricted). Three Parts.

Naval War College. Problem of 1908. Informal Memorandum

Relating to Questions of Fleet Supply.

September 1908.

After 1918: See Appendix III.

Record Group 13: Student Theses

Captain C.C. Bloch, "Thesis: The Present Foreign Policies of the

United States," 26 April 1930.

Captain Aubrey W. Fitch, "Thesis: Present Trends in the

Foreign Policies of the United States as Affecting the Monroe

Doctrine," 18 April 1938.

Captain R.I. Ghormley, "Thesis: Present Trends in the Foreign

Policy of the United States in Regard to Europe and the Near

East," 18 April 1938.

Captain J. W. Greenslade, "Thesis: Policy," 5 December 1925.

Captain T.C. Hart, "Thesis on Policy," 1 September 1922.

Captain T.C. Hart, "Thesis: Tactics," 28 April 1923.

Captain A.J. Hepburn, "Thesis: The Inter-Relation in War of

National Policy, Strategy, Tactics and Command," 15 May

1931.

Lieutenant J. L. Holloway, Jr. "Thesis Number One: Destroyer

Operations at the Battle of Jutland," 30 October 1930.

Commander R.E. Ingersoll, "Thesis on Policy," 4 December

1926.

Captain E.C. Kalbfus, "Thesis on Policy," 4 December 1926.

Commander H.E. Kimmel, "Thesis on Policy," 5 December

1925.

Captain E.J. King, "Thesis: The Influence of the National Policy

on the Strategy of a War," 1933.

Captain Harris Laning, "Thesis: Tactics," 22 April 1922.

Commander C.W. Nimitz, "Thesis: Policy," 1 September 1922.

Lieutenant W.D. Puleston, "Thesis: BLUE Strategy in the

Pacific," July 1914.

Captain J. M. Reeves, "Thesis: Tactics," 1 May 1924.

Captain J. M. Reeves, "Thesis: Policy," 4 September 1924.
202

Captain J. O. Richardson, "Thesis: The Relationship in War of

Naval Strategy, Tactics, and Command," 7 May 1934.

Commander R.A. Spruance, "Thesis on Policy," 4 December

1926.

Captain C.P. Snyder, "Thesis on Policy," 6 December 1924.

Commander H.R. Stark, "Thesis Tactics," 28 April 1923.

Commander Ellis Mark Zacharias, "Thesis: The Relationship

Between National Policy and Strategy in War in the SinoJapanese War, and the Russo-Japanese War," 1 February 1934.

Record Groups 14 and 15: Faculty and Staff Presentations, and Guest Lectures

Professor John H. Latani, The Relation of the United States and

]apan. Lecture—summer conference, Naval War College,

1913.

Lieutenant Commander L.A. Cotton , Far Eastern Conditions

from Naval Point of View. Lecture delivered at Naval War

College, 26 February 1915.

Captain H.E. Yarnell, Strategy of the Pacific. Lecture delivered

before Army General Staff College, 8 September 1919.

Commander H.H. Frost. Strategy of the Atlantic. Lecture

delivered before the General Staff College, 9 September 1919.

Professor J.O. Dealey, National Policies in the Pacific. A lecture

delivered before the officers of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, at the

Naval War College, 10 September 1921.

Captain R.R. Belknap, The Blue-Orange Situation. Lecture

delivered for Fleet-War College Sessions, 1 November 1921.

Captain J. A. Furer, Drydocking and Major Repairs in a

Campaign in the Western Pacific. Lecture delivered for FleetWar College Sessions, 21 November 1921.

Captain W.S. Pye, War Plans. Lecture delivered at the Naval

War College, 7 January 1926.

Captain D.W. Knox, National Strategy. Lecture delivered at the

Naval War College, 7 October 1932.

Record Group 27: General Subjects

The Estimate of the Situation, Revised and Printed for the Use

of Officers in Attendance at the Naval War College. Master

Copy. Naval War College. May 1921.

The Estimate of the Situation, Plans and Orders, Prepared at the

Naval War College. Naval War College. 1929.
203

Sound Military Decision, Including the Estimate of the Situation, the Elements of Planning, and the Formulation of

Directives. Naval War College. 22 June 1940.

Manuscript Collection

This list contains personal papers of United States Navy

officers. This collection complements the holdings of the Naval

Historical Foundation at the Library of Congress.

Ms. Coll. 12: Raymond Ames Spruance. Papers, 1942-1968. 7

boxes, 5 vols.

Ms. Coll. 13: William McCarty Little. Papers, 1880-1915. 3

boxes, 3 vols.

Ms. Coll. 17: Alfred Thayer Mahan. Papers, 1880-1908. 14

vols., 15 folders.

Ms. Coll. 24: William Veazie Pratt. Papers, 1903-1963. 18

boxes, 22 vols.

Ms. Coll. 28

Ms. Coll. 30

Ms. Doc. 15

Richard W. Bates. Papers, 1932-1972. 19 boxes.

Richard G. Colbert. Papers, 1932-1973. 21 boxes.

Harris Laning. Unpublished autobiography "An

Admiral's Yarn," 1 vol.

Ms. Doc. 24: Charles M. Remey. Unpublished "Reminiscences,

George C Remey, Rear Admiral, USN," 1920. 2

vols.

Ms. Doc. 43: Charles L. Melson. "Reminiscences of Vice

Admiral Charles L. Melson," 1974, 413pp.

II. THE NAVAL HISTORICAL FOUNDATION,

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, MANUSCRIPT DIVISION

Baldridge, Harry Alexander, 1880-1952 (100).

Belknap, George Eugene, 1832-1903 (1400).

Belknap, Reginald Rowan, 1871-1959 (7100).

Bingham, Donald Cameron, 1882-1946 (100).

Bloch, Claude Charles, 1878-1967 (1400).

Chambers, Washington Irving, 1856-1934 (12000).

Cotton, Charles Stanhope, 1843-1909 (600).

Cushing, Leonard R, 1901-1962 (3600).

Dahlgren, John Adolphus, 1809-1870 (700).

Farragut, David Glasgow, 1801-1870 (400).

Fullam, William Freeland, 1855-1926 (3850).
204

Furer, Julius Augustus, 1880-1963 (2800).

Gleaves, Albert, 1858-1937 (6000).

Halsey, William Frederick, 1882-1959 (22000).

Home, Frederick Joseph, 1880-1959 (1000).

Jones, Hilary Rollard, 1863-1938 (2400).

Kimmel, Husband Edward, 1882-1968 (200).

King, Ernest Joseph, 1878-1956 (10000); these papers contain

complete material for King's two courses of study at NWC

Knox, Dudley Wright, 1877-1960 (6500).

Lockwood, Charles Andrews, 1890-1967 (7600).

Luce, Stephen Bleecker, 1827-1917 (8000).

Merrill, Aaron Stanton, 1890-1961 (600).

Porter, David Dixon, 1813, 1891 (600).

Richardson, Holden Chester, 1878-1960 (3600).

Rodgers Family, 1788-1944 (15500).

Sargent, Nathan, 1849-1907 (2700).

Sellers, David Foote, 1874-1949 (6500).

Shafroth, John Franklin, 1887-1967 (1800).

Sims, William Sowden, 1858-1936 (43000).

Standley, William Harrison, 1872-1963 (2500).

Symington, Powers, 1872-1963 (2500).

Taylor, Henry Clay, 1845-1904 (300).

Taylor, Montgomery Meigs, 1869-1952 (1200).

Wainwright Family, 1842-1941 (18).

Wilkinson, Theodore Stark, 1888-1946 (200).

*Dupont, Samuel Francis.

*Fiske, Bradley Allen.

*Yarnell, Harry Ervin.

•Collections not part of Naval Historical Division
205

III. UNITED STATES NAVY OPERATIONAL

ARCHIVES, NAVAL HISTORY DIVISION,

WASHINGTON NAVY YARD.

General Board. Letter Books, 1900-1911.

General Board. Proceedings, 1900-1916.

General Board. Subject File Records:

420-2. Building Programs and Overall Policy, 1914-1945.

420-6. Battleships, Design and Employment, 1900-1937.

Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, War Plans Division.

Navy Basic War Plan—Red. 1930.

WPL-22, Volume I. WPL-23, Volume II. WPL-24, Volume III. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, War Plans Division.

Navy Basic Plan —Orange. March 1929.

WPL-13, Volume!

WPL-14, Volume II. WPL-15, Volume III. WPL-16, Volume IV.

The Joint Board, Joint Planning Committee.

Joint Army and Navy Basic Plan for the Capture and

Occupation of the Azores, GRAY—WPL-47,].B. No. 325

(Serial 694), 28 May 1941.

The Joint Board, Joint Planning Committee.

Joint Army and Navy Basic Plan for the Occupation of Iceland

by a Permanent Garrison of the United States Army,

INDIGO, J. B. No. 325 (Serial 697).

IV. PUBLISHED WORKS

This list contains many of the autobiographies, biographies,

memoirs, and journals that I have consulted, as well as those

relatively few histories dealing with the Navy of the interwar

period. In my investigation of the Navy ethos, all of these have

been of use. Abbazia, Patrick. Mr. Roosevelt's Navy: The Private War of the

U.S. Atlantic Fleet, 1939-1942. Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 1975.

Albion, Robert Greenlaugh, and Connery, Robert Howe.

Forrestal and the Navy. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1962.
206

Arnold, Henry H. Global Mission. New York: Harper, 1949.

Arpee, Edward. From Frigates to Flat-Tops: The Story of the

Life and Achievements of Rear Admiral William Adger

Moffet, U.S.N. Lake Forest, 111.: privately printed, 1953.

Bailey, Thomas A. "Dewey and the Germans at Manila Bay,"

American Historical Review, October 1939, pp. 59-81.

Ballantine, Duncan S. U.S. Naval Logistics in the Second World

War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Beard, Charles A. The Navy: Defense or Portent? New York:

Harper and Brothers, 1932.

Bishop, Joseph. Charles Bonaparte, His Life and Public Services.

New York: Scribner, 1922.

Borg, Dorthy, and Shumpei, Okamoto, eds. Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941. New

York: Columbia University, 1973.

Braisted, William R. The United States Navy in the Pacific,

1897-1909. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958.

The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-1922.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.

"The United States Navy's Dilemma in the Pacific,

1906-1909," Pacific Historical Review, August 1957, pp.

235-244.

"The Philippine Naval Base Problem," Mississippi

Valley Historical Review, June 1954, pp. 21-40.

Brownlow, Donald Grey. The Accused: The Ordeal of Rear

Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, U.S.N. New York:

Vantage Press, 1968.

Buckley, Thomas A. The United States and the Washington

Conference, 1921-1922. Knoxville: University of Kentucky

Press, 1970.

Buell, Thomas B. The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral

Raymond A. Spruance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

Bywater, Hector C. The Great Pacific War: A History of the

American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1925.

Navies and Nations: A Review of Naval Developments Since the Great War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.

Sea Power in the Pacific: A Study of the AmericanJapanese Naval Problems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

Carter, Worrall R. and Duvall, Elmer E. Ships, Salvage and

Sinews of War: The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in Atlantic

and Mediterranean Waters During World War II. Washington: Navy Department, 1954.
207

Challener, Richard D. Admirals, Generals, and foreign Policy,

1898-1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Clark, Joseph J. with Reynolds, Clark G. Carrier Admiral. New

York: David McKay, 1967.

Clinard, Outten Jones. Japan's lnfhence on American Naval

Power, 1897-1917. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1947.

Coontz, Robert E. From the Mississippi to the Sea. Philadelphia:

Dorrance, 1930.

Cronan, Robert E. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels,

1913-1921. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.

Cummings, Damon E. Admiral Richard Wainwright and the

U.S. Fleet. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1962.

Davis, Forrest. The Atlantic System: The Story of AngloAmerican Control of the Seas. New York: Reynal and

Hitchcock, 1941.

Davis, George T. A Navy Second to None: The Development of

Modern American Naval Policy. New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1940.

Dingman, Roger. Power in the Pacific: The Origins of Naval

Arms Limitation, 1914-1922. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1976.

Dyer, George Carroll. The Amphibious Came to Conquer: The

Story of Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner. Washington: U.S.

Govt. Print. Off., 1972.

Evans, Holden A. One Man's Fight for a Better Navy. New

York: Dodd, Mead, 1940.

Fiske, Bradley A. From Midshipman to Rear Admiral. New

York: Century, 1919.

The Navy as a Fighting Machine. New York:

Scribner, 1916.

Frank, Benis M. Halsey. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

Frost, Holloway H. The Battle of Jutland. Annapolis: Naval

Institute Press, 1936.

Fry, Michael G. Illusions of Security: North Atlantic Diplomacy,

1918-1922. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

"The North Atlantic Triangle and the Abrogation

of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance." Journal of Modern History,

March 1967, pp. 353-362.

Furer, Julius Agustus. Administration of the Navy Department

in World War II. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959.
208

Gleaves, Albert. The Life of an American Sailor: Rear Admiral

William Hemsley Emory, United States Navy. New York:

Doran, 1923.

Halsey, William F., and Bryan J. III. Admiral Halsey's Story.

New York: Whittlesey House, 1947.

Herwig, Holger H. The Politics of Frustration: The United

States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1943. Boston: Little,

Brown, 1976.

Herwig, Holger H., and Trask, David F. "Naval Operations

Plans Between Germany and the United States of America,

1898-1913: A Study of Strategical Planning in the Age of

Imperialism." Militareschichliche Mitteilungen, v. II, 1970,

pp. 5-32.

Hoyt, Edwin P. How They Won the War in the Pacific: Nimitz

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INDEX

Adams, Charles Francis 32

Allen, Rear Admiral Burrell C. 26

Annapolis

Rites of Passage 15

role in corporate acculturation 16 B

Dealey, Professor John Q. 68, 127 Demonstrative exercises 134

Doctrine

Role in Operational Ethos 89-90, 141,

158

Evolution of, from Knox to Kalbfus

85-91

Dow, Rear Admiral Leonard James 62,

157

Babcock, Captain J. V. 28

Baxter, Professor J. P. 68

Beard, Professor Charles 31 Belknap, Admiral Reginald R. 93, 94, 97

Benson, Admiral William S., center of Navy

Anglophobia 46

Bloch, Admiral C.C 26, 84

Board maneuvers 135

Ellicott, Lieutenant J. M. 115

Elliott, Professor William Y. 68

Ethos

American frontiers and ethos 8-14

Corporate iii, iv, 1 et seq. Institutional 3, 29

Operational 89-90, 141, 160

The Capital Ship

at Newport, place of the capital ship

concept within the naval war game 140

critical instrument in planned transpacific

offensive 143-144, 153-156

defender of the "Monroe Doctrine" 36, 99

dominance of the battleship in the engagement 139

dominance of the engagement in tactical thought 147 et seq. emotional image of the battleship as "Shield

of the Republic" 152

growing awareness of the potential of the

aircraft carrier 136-137, 145

role of the battleship in U.S. naval strategy

108

Carpenter, Rear Admiral Arthur S. 26

Chart maneuvers 134

Clausewitz, role in War College thinking:

Operational Ethos 76, 77, 78-79, 141, 147

Cooper, James Fenimore 13 Cotton, Lieutenant Commander L.A. 124-126,

127

Cultural personality 5 corporate 6

individual 5 national society 5, 7

Fiske, Rear Admiral Bradley 85, 91, 119, 143

Foote, Rear Admiral Percy W. 26

Frost, Commander Holloway 103, 105-106,

150

Furer, Rear AdmiralJulius Augustus 17, 36, 53, 119

Furlong, Rear Admiral W.R. 26

Game histories and scenario development for the Pacific War 141, 143 et seq. 157-158

Ghormley, Admiral R.L. 81 Gleaves, Admiral Alfred 18, 25, 34, 35, 43, 44

Goodrich, Captain Caspar S. 114 Goodrich, Professor L.M. 68

Great Britain

as ally and future friend/fraternal rival 46

as declining empire according to Darwinist

images 106, 110-112

as role-model 101-102, 104

as role to be inherited, future national

mission 112

as traditional antagonist 98 et seq., 104

Greenslade, Admiral J. W. 79

H

Daniels, Josephus 119

Halsey, Admiral William S. 93, 157-158

Hamilton, Alexander 10, 30
213

importance of Federalist Papers 31 "Navalist" School 100-102

role in Monroe Doctrine 31

traditional Atlantic Strategy, Navy mission

34, 121 Hart, Admiral Thomas C. 26

Hepburn, Admiral AJ. 78, 81

Jahncke, Ernest Lee 32 Japan, image of future enemy and future war

98, 113 et seq. Japan and Social Darwinism 40-41, 82-84

place of Japan in naval historicism as inevitable enemy 129

racism toward Japanese culture 82, 83, 122- 130

role of Newport in creating hostile mask

40-41, 68-69, 73, 82-84, 114, 122-130

Jefferson, Thomas

"Anti-Navalist" School as symbolic father 100-101

role in "Continentalist" School 30

Jellicoe, Admiral John 150

Jutland

impact of battle on naval thinking 70, 111

role in Newport war gaming 148-151

U.S. Navy attitudes toward British perfor- mance 103, 111-112

Morison, Samuel Eliot 157

Mythologies of American persona, Navy and

American myths 8, 9

N

The Naval Battle game search for a pattern for an American

Trafalgar 149-151

negative image of Jutland 105-106, 149-150

role-model of the "Decisive Engagement"

118, 141

Trafalgar, Tsushima 148

Naval War College

approach to history 58-59

approach to Navy mission 76

bibliography 71 et seq. curriculum focus 65

educational role within Navy 63 et seq. lectures 67 et seq. role of student thesis in indoctrination/

acculturation of mission 75-85

Nimitz, Admiral C.W. 77-78, 80, 83, 92, 128

O

Oikoumene, nation in embracing cultural system 158

Oliver, Commander J. H. 118

Operations problems 134, 135

Kalbfus, Admiral E.C. 52, 84, 90

Kidd, Admiral Isaac 160, 161

Kimmel, Admiral Husband 79, 83, 128

King, Admiral Ernest J. 24, 80, 93, 110

Knight, Rear Admiral Austin M. 39, 60, 64, 86,

87

Knox, Captain Dudley W. 32, 33, 34, 36, 39, 43,

47 et seq., 59, 61, 85, 93, 110, 119

Laning, Admiral Harris 93, 147

Lee, Admiral Willis 93, 132, 158

London Planning Section

role in promoting Darwinian world view 39,

40-41

Luce, Rear Admiral Stephen Bleecker 57, 121,

133, 140, 141, 159

M

Mahan, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer 13, 16, 20,37,38, 101, 115, 117, 119

McNamee, Admiral Luke 93

Melville, Herman 22

Merk, Professor Frederick iv, 37

Mission v, 4, 29, 55 et seq. Mitchell, Brigadier General, William 70

Philotema

Greek concept of honor, self-esteem,

identity 141

its place in the formation of a distinct operational ethos within the Navy 158- 161

Pratt, Admiral William Veazie 45, 93, 95, 97,

119

Pringle, Admiral J.R. Poinsett 55, 93

Puleston, Captain W.D. 41, 128-129, 153-154

Pye, Rear Admiral W.S. 74

Quick-decision problems 134

R

Reeves, Admiral Joseph 92, 107-108

Remey, Rear Admiral George 115

Richardson, AdmiralJ.0. 23, 75, 80, 84, 91, 93, 111 Rodgers, Rear Admiral Raymond P. 118

Rogers, Admiral W.L. 45, 48, 93, 119

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

role in Navy mission definition in interwar

period, creation of historical precedent

during Barbary Wars and Quasi-War 33
214

Roosevelt, Theodore

role as "Founding Father" of modern Navy

35,114

Schofield, Admiral F.H. 46, 94, 119

Search problems 134

Sims, Admiral William Sowden 19, 27, 58, 67,

92,93,94, 106, 119, 133, 141 Snyder, Admiral C.P. 26, 81, 82

Social Darwinism

role in early 20th century Navy world view

37 et seq., 75, 80, 81, 104

Spruance, Admiral Raymond A. 79

Standley, Admiral William H. 33, 35, 36, 93, 111

Stark, Admiral Harold R. 26, 150

Stockdale, Vice Admiral James 159-160

Swanson, Claude 32

W

War games

origin at Newport, role of McCarty Little in 131-132

role of the war game in indoctrination of operational ethos 141-142, 160-161

structure of game play, Maneuver Rules 133

et seq. texture of game play 137-140

War plans

continuities of focus on potential enemies

99-104

enemy fleets, color-coding of 97

RED, ORANGE, BLACK, etc. Appendix I role of War College in formulation 98

role of War College in preparation 60

Watson, Captain Edward Howe 126

Whitman, Walt 11, 19,50

Wilde, Oscar 14 Wilson, Professor George Grafton 69

World View iii, 1, 3 et seq.

Tactical problems 134

Taussig, Admiral Joseph 21, 93

Taylor, Admiral Montgomery Meigs 21 Yarnell, Admiral Harry E. 23, 24, 93, 122-123

Vision 4 Zacharias, Rear Admiral Ellis Mark 93, 128