## Doing naval history : essays toward improvement

-  Doing naval history : essays toward improvement 
-  Table of Contents 

# Doing naval history : essays toward improvement

Hattendorf, John B.

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JtLssays  low&rcl Improvement

Edited byJohn B. Hattendorf

Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime HistoryNaval War College

Naval War CollegeHistorical Monograph Series

No. 13

The Historical Monograph series are book-length studies of the history of navalwarfare, edited historical documents, conference proceedings, and bibliographies. Theyare the products of the Naval War College's historical studies and are based, wholly orin part, on source materials in the College's Naval Historical Collection. Financialsupport for research projects, conference support and printing is provided by the NavalWar College Foundation.

Other volumes in the series are:

No. 1. The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, edited by John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf(1975).

No. 2. Charleston Blockade: The Journals of John B. Marchand, U.S. Navy, 1861-1862,edited by Craig L. Symonds (1976).

No. 3. Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession,by Ronald Spector (1977).

No. 4. The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919-1941, byMichael Vlahos (1980).

No. 5. On His Majesty's Service: Observations of the British Home Fleet from the Diary,Reports, and Letters of Joseph H. Wellings, Assistant Naval Attache", London, 1940-41,edited by John B. Hattendorf (1983).

No. 6. Angel on the Yardarm: The Beginnings of Fleet Radar Defense and the Kamikaze Threat,by John Monsarrat (1985).

No. 7. A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, compiled by John B.Hattendorf and Lynn C. Hattendorf (1986).

No. 8. The Fraternity of the Blue Uniform: Admiral Richard G. Colbert, U.S. Navy, and AlliedNaval Cooperation, by Joel J. Sokolsky (1991).

No. 9. The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking theCentenary of Alfred Thayer Mohan's "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History,1660-1783," edited by John B. Hattendorf (1991).

No. 10. Mahan Is Not Enough: The Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir JulianCorbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, edited by James Goldrick and John B.Hattendorf(1993).

No. 11. Ubi Sumus?: The State of Naval and Maritime History, edited by John B. Hattendorf(1994).

No. 12. The Queenstoum Patrol, 1911: The Journal of Commander Joseph Knefler Taussig,U.S. Navy, edited by William N. Still, Jr. (1995).

Contents

About the Contributors      vii

Acknowledgements       ix

Introduction         1

John B. Hattendorf

PART I: Bureaucracy and Technology

1. The Problems of Modern Naval History       11

James Goldrick

2. Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management and Money:

The Study of Navies as Complex Organizations and the

Transformation of Twentieth Century Naval History         25

John Tetsuro Sumida and David Alan Rosenberg

3. Navies, Politics, and Political Science         41

Robert Jervis

PART II: Domestic Politics

4. Navies and Domestic Factors         53

Volker Berghahn

5. Domestic Factors, Regime Characteristics, and Naval Forces  ...     67

Robert S. Wood

PART III: Comparative History

6. Comparative Naval History         75

Paul G. Halpern

7. Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata in

Comparative Naval History         93

William R. Thompson

PART IV: General Naval History

8. Considerations on Writing a General Naval History    117

N.A.M. Rodger

vi    Contents

9. Toward a New Naval History       129

Dennis E. Showalter

PART V: Reflections

10. Context and Approach in Naval History: Admiral Tirpitz

and the Origin of Fascism       143

Paul M. Kennedy

11. Hitting the Target: Perspectives on Doing Naval History    151

Mark R. Shulman

About the Contributors

Volker Berghahn is the J.P. Birkelund Professor of European History atBrown University. While he has also written on business history, his works inthe field of military history include DerStahlhelm (1966); Der Tirpitz Plan (1971);Militarism (1981) and, with Wilhelm Deist, an edition of documents on Wilhel-mian armaments policy (1988).

James Goldrick was born in 1958 and joined the Royal Australian Navy in1974. A Commander, he is currently Executive Officer of HMAS Perth. Othersea postings have included command of HMAS Cessnock and exchange servicewith the Royal Navy. His publications include The King's Ships Were at Sea: TheWar in the North Sea, August 1914-February 1915 (1984) and co-editing Reflectionson the Royal Australian Navy (1991) and Mahan is Not Enough (1993).

Paul G. Halpern is Professor of History at Florida State University. He isthe author of The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914 (1971), The NavalWar in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918 (1987) and A Naval History of World War I(1994). He has edited four volumes for the Navy Records Society and hasrecently completed a biography of the Austrian naval commander, AdmiralAnton Haus.

John B. Hattendorf is the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History andDirector of the Advanced Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College,Newport, Rhode Island. Among his most recent publications, he has edited UbiSumus? The State of Naval and Maritime History (1994) and Maritime History in theAge of Discovery: An Introduction (1995). He co-edited Mahan is Not Enough (1993)and British Naval Documents, 1204-1960 (1993).

Robert Jervis is Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations atColumbia University. Among his recent publications are The Meaning of the NuclearRevolution (1989), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving WorldOrder, and The Logic of Images in International Relations (1989). His Systems: Dynamicsand Effects will be published by Princeton University Press in 1997.

Paul M. Kennedy is Dilworth Professor of History and Director of Inter-national Security Studies at Yale University. He is the author or editor of thirteenworks, including The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976), Strategy andDiplomacy (1983), The War Plans of the Great Powers (1979), The Rise and Fall ofthe Great Powers (1987), Grand Strategies in War and Peace (1991), and Preparingfor the Twenty-First Century (1993).

N.A.M. Rodger is a former Assistant Keeper in the Public Record Office,and now Anderson Research Fellow of the National Maritime Museum, wherehe is working on a new naval history of Britain. He has already published TheWooden World, An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (1986) and The Insatiable Earl:A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, 1118-1192 (1993.)

David A. Rosenberg is an associate professor of modern military anddiplomatic history at Temple University, Philadelphia. He received his B.A.from American University (1970) and his M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. with Honors(1983) from the University of Chicago. The author of dozens of essays, articlesand short monographs on post-World War II naval and military history and thehistory of nuclear strategy, he was awarded a five-year John D. and CatherineT. MacArthur fellowship in 1988. He is an intelligence officer in the U.S. NavalReserve who served on active duty with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff inOperation Desert Storm.

Dennis E. Showalter is Professor of History at The Colorado College. Hehas served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy,and is author of numerous books and articles in the field of military history,including Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (1991) and The Wars of Frederick the Great(1995).

Mark R. Shulman is author of Navalism and the Emergence of American SeaPower, 1882-1893 (1995), editor of An Admirals Yam: The Autobiography of HarrisLaning and co-editor of The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the WesternWorld (1994). Educated at Yale (B.A.), Oxford (M.St.) and the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley (Ph.D), he taught at Yale University and worked at theNational Strategy Information Center, before joining the faculty of the Air WarCollege as Associate Professor of Military and Diplomatic History.

Jon Tetsuro Sumida received his B.A. (1971) from the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz, and his M.A. (1974) and Ph.D., (1982) from theUniversity of Chicago. His books are The Pollen Papers: The Privately CirculatedPrinted Works of Arthur Hungerford Pollen, 1901-1916 (1984) and In Defence ofNaval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914 (1989;paperback edition, 1993). Dr. Sumida is an associate professor of history at theUniversity of Maryland, College Park.

William R. Thompson is Professor of Political Science and Director of theCenter for the Study of International Relations at Indiana University. In additionto serving currently as an editor of International Studies Quarterly, he is also thecoauthor of The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490-1990 (1994) and LeadingSectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Politics and Economics (1995).

Robert S. Wood is the Chester W. Nimitz Professor of National SecurityAffairs and Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval WarCollege. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University and receivedhis master's degree and his doctorate from Harvard University. He has previouslyserved on the faculties of Harvard and the University of Virginia. He haspublished widely and has authored, coauthored, edited and contributed to manybooks, of which his most recent is America the Vincible: U.S. Foreign Policy for theTwenty-First Century (1994).

Acknowledgments

This volume had its origins in the papers presented at the Second Yale—NavalWar College Conference held at the Paul Mellon British Art Center in NewHaven, Connecticut, 2-4 June 1994. I am grateful for the enthusiastic interestof Professor Paul M. Kennedy at Yale, and the administrative support providedthrough his International Security Studies program, particularly for the arrange-ments made by Dr. Mark Shulman, Ann Carter-Drier, and Ann Louise Antonoffin New Haven, and from Mrs. Barbara Prisk and Lieutenant Commander J. T.Dunigan at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. In particular, Iwould like to acknowledge the generous support of the Lynde and Harry BradleyFoundation in making the conference possible.

All, but one, of the essays in this volume were first presented to the conferencein New Haven. Commander James Goldrick's essay, "The Problems of NavalHistory" was given in December 1994 to a meeting of the Australian Associationfor Maritime History. I am grateful for the opportunity to include it in thisvolume.

In preparing this volume for publication at the Naval War College, I wouldlike to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Dr. Mark Shulman; Mrs. Prisk,Commander William S. Burns, and Dr. Peter Woolley in the AdvancedResearch Department, and Mr. Robert E. Hobbs Jr. and Mrs. Allison Sylvia ofthe College's Visual Information and Publications Department, Newport,Rhode Island.

John B. Hattendorf

Imfrocracfi

ion

John B. Hattendorf

There is an old sailor's grave that lies not far from Portsmouth, NewHampshire. On the moss-covered, native blue slate, one can still clearlyread the epitaph, engraved in 1818:

Lies here the hull of an old Ship, strip't

of her tackel and ornament food for worms, but

the work itself will not be lost, it will appear once

more as he believes, in a new & more beautiful

model corrected & amended by the Author.

This inscribed stone seems to be an appropriate symbol of what this volumeis about. In 1993, at the first Yale—Naval War College conference, theparticipants discussed the current state of maritime and naval history. While therewere exceptions to the rule, many agreed that much of the work that was beingpublished in the field was both relatively unsophisticated and outdated in itsapproach, particularly when contrasted to the best work on other themes incurrent historical research. A follow-on seminar was held at New Haven notto lament that fact, but to do something positive about it. While the old navalhistory may well be food for worms, the substance of naval history should notbe lost because of it. Naval history needs to reappear in a new, corrected andamended model, Unking it to general history while also improving methods forthe specialized study of the subject.

There are many dangers in making such a proposal. Perhaps, the first is theproblem presented by the very issue of discussing methodology. Joseph Strayeronce cautioned that "the more history we write the more we worry about thevalue and nature of history." He pointed out that "The increase in the numberof books on historiography and historical methodology is proportionally fargreater than the increase in the number of historians."  There is always a danger

"Francis Winkley, boat builder & mariner, deceased October 9th 1818, aged 85." The stone is locatedin a small family cemetery on a farm at Berry Hill, Barrington, New Hampshire.

The proceedings of this conference are included in John B. Hattendorf, ed., Ubi Sumus?: The State ofNaval and Maritime History (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1994).

Joseph R. Strayer, "Introduction," to Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (Manchester ManchesterUniversity Press, 1954), p. vii.

in concentrating too much on form and not substance, on theory and notpractice. Yet, I believe that the practice of naval history needs to examine bettermethods and to improve itself. It needs a breath of fresh air. Sailors willunderstand that for naval history, this could well be the "cat's paw" on the waterthat signals a shift in the wind.

Too often, when the current generation of naval historians get together, theylament their situation, complaining that they are unappreciated, unloved,unread. For many of us, it is very true, but we need to stand up and suggest howthe sub-specialty of naval history can improve itself. Before this conference tookplace in New Haven, no group of historians had ever tried systematically tosuggest broad standards for this sub-specialty, listing the critical ideas, issues andthemes for naval historians to examine.

Specialists in any field often have difficulty in seeing beyond the boundariesof their own topic. In attempting to break out of limiting habits, it is helpful,indeed essential, to bring in scholars from other disciplines who have relatedinterests. For the New Haven conference, we asked several political scientists tojoin a select band of historians. There undoubtedly will be those who see this assome kind of antinomian heresy, disregarding all accepted standards. On theother hand, there will be those who will say that it is not enough; we shouldhave asked students of art and literature, sociology and anthropology and a hostof others. There is much substance to the latter criticism, but it is more than onecan sustain in a single conference or in a single volume. It is something that canfollow on from this volume.

Rather than to range widely and superficially across all sorts of topics, it isbetter to begin by looking in depth at the essential nature of navies. In this, allwill agree that navies are instruments of government and operate as highlytechnological organizations within the context of both domestic and foreignpolitics, finance, technology, and bureaucracy. This range is as much the realmof political scientists as it is of naval historians.

The process of pairing historians with political scientists, of course, has itsdangers. As William Thompson has so righdy pointed out, one takes the riskthat forcing unlike animals to pull a wagon can sometimes result in inefficiencyor even in accomplishing nothing at all. That is indeed the risk taken here, butby avoiding disciplinary squabbles among specialists as well as ad hominem attacksagainst each other, we have collectively tried to exchange ideas on approachesto naval history. We publish them now as an attempt to stimulate thinking amongall who research, write, and read about navies. Let us all think more carefullyand fully about our craft, both in terms of the subject of navies and in terms ofthe role of naval affairs in the context of wider events.

In this volume, Commander James Goldrick of the Royal Australian Navylays out the general problem facing modern naval historians. He shows how thefundamental problem began with the introduction of ever more rapidly changing

technologies in the nineteenth century. Demonstrating how this has affectednaval affairs, he suggests that historians need to reexamine naval operations morecarefully, taking what many historians might regard as a far-outdated topic andapplying more sophisticated approaches to it in order to deepen our under-standing of the broad inter-relationships in naval affairs.

Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg make a compelling case by proposing anentirely new approach to thinking about navies, outlining a methodology indealing with finance, bureaucracy and technology that could completely revisestandard naval histories. Their thoughts form the fundamental kernel from whicha very important new approach can develop. From a political scientist's perspec-tive, Robert Jervis widens out the naval historians' perspective with his ownreflections on the general inter-relationship of technology and organizationalculture.

Since the time of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the study of naval history has beenlinked with international affairs. In many respects naval historians have overemphasized this relationship to the exclusion of domestic issues. In the 1970s,Professor Volker Berghahn was one of the pioneers who opened up a newperspective in German naval studies by showing the importance of domesticpolitics. In this volume, Berghahn elucidates his most recent reflections on thespecific issues in German naval history. Commenting on it in terms of broadpolitical science, Robert Wood widens the discussion to suggest parallel anddiverging issues in American experience. Noting that domestic issues are essentialto understanding a navy in its external roles, Wood goes on to suggest thatexamination of the characteristics of a regime are important to understandingthe character of its armed forces.

In looking at comparative naval history, Paul Halpern uses his detailedknowledge of the First World War in the Mediterranean to discuss a range ofinteresting issues posed by this particular time and place in naval history. In doingthis, Halpern provides a case study, focusing on the research problems posedwhen examining several navies operating simultaneously, either as allies orenemies. Through this perspective, one can deal with action and reactionbetween navies and their relationships to different naval cultures. Complement-ing this, William Thompson takes an equally valid, but quite different perspectiveon comparative history. Thompson takes the broad view, searching for com-parisons over vast stretches of time. From this perspective, he suggests fifty-twopropositions about the nature of naval power, emphasizing strategic policyorientations, the implications of domestic structures, conflict behavior and warstrategies.

Turning to the broad issues posed in writing a general naval history of aparticular country, Nicholas Rodger generalizes from his own current work inpreparing a multi-volume study on British naval history. He explains the rangeof research and insights needed in relating the navy to general national history,

making a clarion call for excellence. Commenting on this from the perspectiveof an historian of armies, Dennis Showalter relates the specific issues of navalhistory to the current trends and structural considerations in military history. Hesuggests that in naval history the skills of the political scientist and the skills ofthe historian might well converge, profitably producing a synthesis that fullyreflects common understanding.

Concluding the volume, Paul Kennedy uses the example of Admiral Tirpitzand the development of the German Navy as a means to suggest the continuedneed to develop wider, complementary levels of analysis in naval history.Pointing to the inter-connectivity in naval affairs, he suggests the need tounderstand the complex reality of naval affairs that range from social and culturalissues to technology as well as to high politics and grand strategy. Carrying thepoint further, Mark Shulman synthesizes the main points of these essays andemphasizes the ever important issue of documentary research. His proposal foran American naval records society, modeled on the example of the century-oldNavy Records Society in Britain, argues for both organizational support of thesub-discipline of naval history as well as for the continuing need to make primarysource materials available to the general public and for professional officers,researchers and writers.

The issues raised in this set of essays are the key issues that we, as a group, feelare of salient importance in understanding the central issues in modern navalhistory. These are the issues that Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg identify ascomprising the "core" of naval history. They have taken a useful step inidentifying another range of issues as "cognate" naval history. This distinctionis a very important one, but as Paul Kennedy has suggested in his essay, it shouldnot be understood as the basis for creating an exclusivist approach, but ratherrelated to making a distinction among legitimate and complementary methods,approaches, and levels of studying naval history.

There is a wide range of cognate issues in naval history that deserveconsideration and that contribute to knowledge in naval affairs. Cognate aspectsof naval affairs include such specialized areas as theory, art, literature, social affairsand so on, that might also be considered aspects of another broad theme, suchas intellectual history, social history, art history, sociology, political science orscience and technology. Readers and practitioners of naval history must avoidconfusing the core and the cognate, but they should ignore neither theinter-relationship nor disparage one over the other. When seen along side a fullappreciation of core naval history, cognate naval history becomes particularlyimportant in helping to define the place of naval affairs within the broad contextof general affairs.

Naval affairs, after all, are very often a special case of broader issues. On onehand, they fall under the broad rubric of maritime history; on the other, theyrelate to military issues. In the discussions that took place during the conference

that led to the book Ubi Sumus?, many agreed that we must work to rejoin themilitary and maritime aspects that have only recently become separated in NorthAmerican and British practices of historical writing.

In terms of the military dimension of naval affairs, it is important to understandthe navy as an instrument of national power, both in terms of the sources of itspower and in its varying inter-relationships to the nation's diplomatic, militaryand economic policies, strategies, operations and tactics. Within this context,the issues of joint operations that has become so increasingly important in thepast fifty years are very important. But the scope is wider and moves beyondoperations to larger issues as well.

For navies, these broader issues lead naturally to commerce at sea, shipbuild-ing, seamen, port development and the many other issues of sea transportation:the very stuff of maritime history. Maritime history is a broad theme withingeneral historical studies, that by its nature, cuts across standard disciplinaryboundaries. A student who pursues the theme may approach it from a varietyof vantage points, and at the same time, touch upon a wide variety of other,related approaches, including science, technology, industry, economics, trade,politics, art, literature, ideas, sociology, military and naval affairs, internationalrelations, cartography, comparative studies in imperial and colonial affairs,institutional and organizational development, communications, migration,inter-cultural relations, natural resources and so on. In short, maritime historyis a humanistic study of the many dimensions in man's relationship with the sea.

Maritime history focuses on ships and the sailors who operated them, relatingan identifiable segment of society to a specific range of technological develop-ment and to the hostile geographical area covering seven-tenths of the globe.The relative importance of maritime affairs varies from one period to anotherin general history; it stands out in some periods and in some cultures and not inothers. For example, maritime affairs were an essential aspect of general Europeanand European colonial history in the period from the fifteenth century to thetwentieth century. Only recently, in the twentieth century, have alternativemeans of communication and transport developed and displaced much of thetechnological, social, economic and industrial fabric that surrounded commercialmaritime affairs, although a number of aspects continue, navies among them.

While the subject may seem to brighten and fade for the general historian, aspecialist in the subject of maritime history must keep in mind the continuity ofmaritime development through all periods. Maritime affairs are rarely, if ever,absent in history. At the same time, ships and sailors are not isolated phenomena.They are very much a part of larger developments. In order to understand whathappened at sea and to analyze the effect of those events, one needs to relatethem and interpret them in the context of broad issues that were occurring onland. Maritime history is, in many respects, only an extension of events on land,but it does involve a variety of technical and specialist issues, such as ship-build-

ing, navigation, naval gunnery and tactics, marine engineering, hydrography,and so on. In order to understand these elements, which are key factors inmaritime history, maritime historians must explain them in terms of the broadestcontext, while at the same time, they must come to grip with the details andmake sense of the specific developments within that special area.

One of the main problems for maritime historians is the need to see eventsat sea in terms of a variety of perspectives. For example, a ship that was built ina particular country was a product of certain national political, economic, social,technological and industrial factors. When the same ship sailed at sea, it entereda different realm with an international dimension that may involve suchadditional factors as wars, cross-cultural relations, imperial competition, scientificresearch, the exchange of goods or the accumulation of capital through inter-national trade.

Additionally, when ships left land and the network of activities that createdand prepared them, they spent long isolated periods at sea. This unusualexperience created a social dimension within the ships that, itself, became a newfactor, creating microcosms of land-based societies while bringing them intovarious new environments and new experiences. These experiences, in turn,were reflected back into land-based societies as sailors returned from the sea. Inthis area, as in others, maritime affairs typically acted as both a conduit as wellas a separate channel of development. In this, they illustrate the relationshipbetween core and cognate histories.

Cognate naval history is as wide as naval experience, intellectual insight andscholarship can make it. Historical sociologists, for example, have already madesome very interesting contributions as have art historians. Work is justbeginning in literature and naval fiction, although studies on some literaryfigures such as Herman Melville whose work touched on the navy are wellestablished and the series of volumes in The Classics of Naval Literature serieshas established the beginnings for a canon to be considered. Among relatedissues, those surrounding recent popular culture and naval fiction remain tobe seriously examined.   In science and technology, there are a wide variety

4 Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1990).

5 Richard L. Stein, "Remember the Timhairr. Turner's Memorial of 1839," Representations 11 (Summer1985), pp. 165-200; David Cordingly, Nicholas Pockock 1740-1821 (London: Conway, 1986); DeutchesMarine Institut und Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt, herausgeber, Seefahrt und Geschichte (Herfordund Bonn: Verlag E.S. Mitder & Sohn GMBH, 1986).

6 The Classics of Sea Power series (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984-present) has helped toidentify a basic canon.

7 The work of novelist Tom Clancy in the Cold War period, for example as well as the large range ofother periods in historical fiction could be examined. There are some works on naval fiction in the ageof sail. See, A.E. Cunningham, Patrick O'Brian: Critical Essays and Bibliography (New York and London:W.W. Norton, 1994); Frank Adam, Homblower, Bolitho & Co.: Krieg unterSegeln in Roman und Geschichte(Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1992); and the bibliography of similar historical novels in Dean King, et.al., eds.,

Hattendorf    7

of issues. Important strides have already been made in the history of navalmedicine and hydrography, but many of these tend to concentrate on earlierperiods, not the twentieth century. Certainly there are numerous other areas forconsideration. Contributions in these areas all contribute to our understandingof the place of naval affairs in general history. The progress in historicalunderstanding that studies on earlier periods provide can guide development increating approaches to the different world and new issues posed by twentiethcentury naval affairs.

Although focusing on ships and sailors, maritime and naval historians deal inthe interrelationship of events on land and at sea, dealing simultaneously withintegrated, parallel, and unique aspects. As maritime and naval historians moveforward in their researches, they must also strive to compare and to contrastmaritime events at different times, in different circumstances, and in differentcontexts. As a theme in general history, maritime and naval history is not separatefrom other aspects of historical study. Nevertheless, it involves a wide range ofspecialized learning and knowledge that justifies the identification of maritimeand naval history as one of the many legitimate fields for historical research andwriting. Identifying the field in this way, however, neither removes it from theaccepted standards of the best historical scholarship nor creates any uniquestandards or exclusive prerogatives for those who follow it. It merely recognizesthat the topic is broad enough to identify fully a range of specialization and thatit is complicated enough to sustain the wide-ranging work of a number ofscholars devoting their scholarly careers to working on differing aspects of thetheme.

To understand sea affairs, maritime and naval historians must analyze themwithin the context of the broadest issues, while at the same time understandingand explaining the specific maritime and naval aspects. Like any good piece ofhistorical analysis on a specific theme, historians working in maritime and navalhistory strive to make a contribution to knowledge on a small, but not isolatedsector of that front. While they may limit themselves in scope to eithercommercial maritime or naval matters, the questions that they answer must alsohave a discernible relationship with problems of more general interest. In this itis important to maintain an awareness of the relationship between core andcognate historical work, between different and complementary methods, levels,and approaches.

The hull of the old ship of naval history, stripped of her tackle and ornamentmay well be food for worms, but the subject on which naval historians focusshould not be overlooked or lost. It can appear again in a new model, correctedand amended by a new breed of historians, who work with wider viewpoints

A Sea of Words (New York: Holt, 1995). The classic work in this field for the age of sail is C.N. Robinson,TTie British Tar in Fact and Fiction (London: Harper, 1909) and the anthology by C. Northcote Parkinson,ed., Portsmouth Point: The Navy in Fiction 1793-1815 (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1948).

8    Introduction

and on firm intellectual foundations. Along those lines, the essays in this volumeprovide some valuable insights and offer stimulating ideas on new approachesthat promote excellence in doing naval history.

PARTIBureaucracy and Technology

The Problems of Modern Naval History

James Goldrick

This paper argues that modern naval history requires a new approach on thepart of naval historians to satisfy the demands of the subject. This newapproach must improve on previous historiography by focusing on the core rolesof navies and analyzing much more comprehensively the multitude of tech-nological, financial and operational issues involved in decision making for navaldevelopment. In so doing, historians of the modern era will need to achieve atechnical mastery of their subject which has hitherto largely been confined tostudents of the age of sail.

In discussing modern naval history as a subject in itself, the first step is todetermine at what point in time navies entered a modern era. For the purposesof this paper, a simple definition can be offered: modern naval history begins atthe point when steam power becomes the principal propulsive mechanism forcombat. This occurred in the late 1840s, when the Anglo-French naval rivalrysaw the conversion of old ships of the line and the construction of screwpropelled sailing battleships.

The history of the age of fighting sail has been extensively treated and thereexists a body of scholarship which comprehends the administrative, social,technological and operational aspects of that era. There is also an assumptionwithin this body of work that navies are legitimate subjects for examination intheir own right. Historians of the period frequently acknowledge that naviesrepresented in many ways the most sophisticated of contemporary organizationswhich produced solutions to complex problems of logistics, materiel andadministration well before even the existence of such challenges had beencomprehended elsewhere within governments and societies at large. John

This paper was originally delivered in November 1994 to the Australian Associationfor Maritime History (AAMH) as the inaugural Vaughan Evans Memorial Lecture. Theauthor wishes to acknowledge the ready co-operation of the AAMH in allowing theinclusion of the paper within this volume.

See D.K. Brown, Before the Ironclad—Development of Ship Design, Propulsion and Armament in the RoyalNavy, 1815-1860 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), pp. 122-129.

Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, was reflecting the judgement of both histime and of posterity when he remarked to a fellow soldier:

The sea service is not so easily managed as that of the land. There are many moreprecautions to take and you and I are not capable of judging them.

The Admiralty, for example, was the greatest of the British Departments ofState for hundreds of years. One of the most prominent historians of theeighteenth century navy, Nicholas Rodger, has written:

Before the twentieth century, no British government ever undertook a moreonerous task than providing a fleet, or faced in a more acute form the problemsof administration on a large scale. In early modern Europe, navies "were the largest,costliest and technically the most advanced organizations of their day; the hazardsof putting a fleet to sea in the sixteenth century were equivalent to those of puttinga man on the moon in the twentieth.

That judgement is confirmed for the seventeenth century by such studies asCarla Rahn Phillips's Six Galleons for the King of Spain and Nicholas Rodger'sown work, the remarkable study of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century,The Wooden World, goes far to demonstrate the continuing relative sophistica-tion of naval activity. These two are certainly amongst the most outstanding ofrecent years, but the point is that they represent only a small part of a substantialand coherent body of work on sailing navies which has been built up since thelate nineteenth century.

The material covering the last hundred and fifty years does not possess thesame coherence nor the same serious attention to the history of navies in theirown right, as opposed to their influence on other affairs.

This is a serious claim that must be justified.

The fundamental cause is the issue of technology, which operates in two ways.The first is the difficulty posed to the historian by the pace and scale oftechnological change. The second is the "opacity" factor in technology. Broadlystated, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the nature of the changewhich it is undergoing becomes progressively more difficult to assess. This issimply illustrated. The differences between the last wooden battleships and the

Cited in R.D. Heinl, Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,1966), p. 206.

3 N.A.M. Rodger, The Admiralty (Lavenham, Suffolk: Terrence Dalton, 1979), p. x.

4 Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1984).

5 N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986).For one of the earliest works which remains useful as a history, see Julian S. Corbett, Drake and the

Tudor Navy, with a History of the Rise of England as a Maritime Power (London: Longmans, Green, 1898).Two volumes.

ironclad Warrior were not simply profound in themselves, they had a visualimpact on the observer which was dramatic. Lying with the old wooden craft,Warrior and her sister ship, Black Prince, were aptly described as the "black snakesamongst the rabbits.'* But no layman could now comprehend from the externalview the profound—even revolutionary—changes which have taken placewithin warships in the last thirty years through the advent of the computer age.Despite the fact that weapon ranges and operational horizons have extended fiveor six fold, the guided missile destroyer of 1965 looks little different to that oftoday. But it is in no way the same ship.

On the question of pace and scale, it is more difficult to convey in anystraightforward fashion the extent to which the problems of naval warfarebecame more complicated. One can best illustrate this by focusing on the threatto the battleship and taking a sounding at thirty or twenty year intervals—witha five year bracket in the Second World War. The progress between 1860 and1945 demonstrates the point. (See Table 1) From the time at which the onlyopen water threats to a battleship were the elements or another battleship, wehave evolved to a situation in which it can be threatened on, over or under thesea, in all weathers and at all times of day. This table should not, of course, beconsidered in only one dimension. The battleship itself, with its remarkablecapacity to absorb punishment and its heavy (and eventually radar equipped) gunarmament, represented a formidable proposition to anything which came withinrange of its weapons. These qualities go some way to explain the retention ofthe battleship past the Second World War, and even the temporary return toservice of the type during the 1980s.

The problem of understanding naval warfare becomes progressively moreprofound as we move from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. There isanother factor, which complicated contemporary analysis—that is, the definitionand planning of naval technological policy—-just as much as it has made lifedifficult for the historian. This is the effective absence of fleet-on-fleet en-counters from the onset of steam propulsion until the Russo-Japanese War in1904. Apart from the Battle of Lissa in 1866, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95,and certain actions in the American Civil War—and these were usually relatedto attacks on land fortifications—the battles which did take place were generallyindividual ship-on-ship encounters and rarely involved the great powers.

The result was that operational art transferred itself from a basis of practicalexperience to a largely theoretical and thus unprovable level. In modern terms,it was impossible to validate fully either materiel or tactics because there was notest of war. Thus, the development of doctrine, the planning to operate and fightat sea, had to proceed almost wholly on the basis of theories which, howeverwell conceived, were resting on intrinsically uncertain foundations.

7 Oscar Parkes, British Battleships 1860-1950 (London: Seeley, Service & Co, 1957), p. 15.

At the same time, the fact that technology was evolving in new ways and atan uncertain pace meant that the context in which decisions were made wasitself evolving continuously and unpredictably. In some circumstances, and thereare parallels here in the revolution in modern computing, the context fortechnological and operational decision making could experience profoundchanges within months, not the years or decades with which earlier eras tendedto deal. If the resulting problems which contemporary decision makers facedcould be appalling, we should not be surprised that their complexity has oftenproved too much for historians.

The researcher's problems are magnified because navies operate on threeinterconnected levels in relation to making policy for war fighting. The mostdifficult for the external observer to assess is the organization of a navy to facecurrent threats, the development of doctrine and policy for the operation ofexisting ships and equipment. This is the work of fleet staffs, tactical schools andsupporting commands. It is inherently highly classified and the associateddocumentation both arcane and transient, if it exists at all. Historical analysis ofthe material which does exist in archives requires a sophisticated understandingof the subjects under examination. This is because the original audience for anydocument already comprehended the problems and the circumstances involvedand was interested only in the solution.

Table One: The Threat To The Battleship

| Date | Threat         | Offshore | Range         | All Weather | Night |
|------|----------------|----------|---------------|-------------|-------|
| 1860 | Mine           | No       | Contact       | Yes         | Yes   |
| 1890 | Mine           | Yes      | Contact       | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Torpedo        | Yes      | 2,000 meters  | No          | No    |
| 1910 | Mine           | Yes      | Contact       | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Torpedo        | Yes      | 10,000 meters | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Submarine      | Yes      | 2,000 meters  | Yes         | Yes   |
| 1940 | Mine           | Yes      | 150 meters    | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Torpedo        | Yes      | 20,000 meters | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Submarine      | Yes      | 6,000 meters  | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Aircraft       | Yes      | 150 miles     | No          | Yes   |
| 1945 | Mine           | Yes      | 300 meters    | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Torpedo        | Yes      | 20,000 meters | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Submarine      | Yes      | 10,000 meters | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Aircraft       | Yes      | 350 miles     | Yes         | Yes   |
|      | Guided Missile | Yes      | 20,000 meters | Yes         | Yes   |

Note: Ranges are approximations for clarity based on an estimate of the effective ranges whichcould be achieved.

The second level is the modification of existing systems to meet perceiveddeficiencies, achieve new capabilities or match emerging threats. Although the

intent is similar, this differs from the base level in that the nature and extent ofthe work required are such as to put it outside the capability of the seagoingforces to implement with their own resources or with those of the customarysupporting organizations. The historian can more easily understand these proces-ses because approaches to external authorities and the involvement of main navalstaffs inevitably require comprehensive documentation in the process of justify-ing the allocation of funds.

The third level provides at once the clearest and also the most treacherousground for the historian. This is the determination of the future force structure,the processes by which staff requirements are originated and developed for newships and new equipment. The clarity derives from the fact that much of theprocess is comprehensively documented; the treachery is due to the reality thatnot all staff requirements are generated according to technical or even strategicimperatives. Some may be what are, in work-place negotiations, termed as"ambit claims." Others may be stalking horses to put pressure on competingprojects or to satisfy an external authority, particularly political. It is also the casethat some critical staff requirements may never be produced at all, because thestaff capacity does not exist to do the analysis. What the historian sees maytherefore not be what he wants or needs.

Let me illustrate the difficulties of the modern naval historian with twohistorical problems, still not wholly resolved, both related to the Royal Navy inthe twentieth century. The first is in the origins of the battle cruiser, brainchildof Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher. The second concerns the evolution of theaircraft carrier.

The Battle Cruiser

In 1906, the British commissioned the all big gun, turbine-engined Dread-nought. Heavily armored, firing twice the broadside of any contemporarybatdeship and several knots faster, she represented such a leap in all round fightingpowers that, at a stroke, she rendered obsolete the battle fleets of every navy inthe world and set the standard for future capital ship construction.

Two years later there appeared the first of the battle cruisers, the Invincibleclass. These ships combined almost the firepower of the Dreadnought with muchhigher speed, but sacrificed protection to gain that speed. At that time and since,the roles of the battle cruiser type were hody debated. In retrospect, it seemsthat the battle cruiser would only be useful so long as no opponent built shipswhich were just as fast and as heavily gunned but were more adequately armored.

The battle cruiser emerged at a time when the British were increasinglyfocused upon the threat from Germany, the geography of which dictated apreoccupation with the prospect of a general fleet action, something which theGermans would have to seek if they were to avoid being blockaded in their portsby the Royal Navy. The likely battleground, the southern North Sea, was also

notorious for its poor weather and restricted visibility, which put naval forces atconstant risk of being surprised by a superior enemy.

When the Great War came, the battle cruiser, at least the British version, boreout the forebodings of the critics. Three blew up and sank at the Battle ofjudand,ostensibly victims of their inadequate protection, at the hands of the more"balanced" (that is, more heavily armored) German battle cruisers. As a separatetype, the battle cruiser did not survive that experience in the Royal Navy andeven the last to commission, the ill—fated Hood, was more accurately describedas a fast battleship, with imperfect rather than inadequate armor. Thus thejudgement of history runs.

That judgement is wrong or, to put it most charitably, grossly oversimplified.Recent research is only beginning to make clear the tangle of financial, technicaland strategic issues which were mixed up in the genesis and later developmentof the battle cruiser type. The whole story is still by no means clear.

It is not enough to label the battle cruiser as merely the ill—conceivedbrainchild of a single man who would not acknowledge the central flaw in histheories. The original idea behind the battle cruiser was not to be part of thebatde fleet, but to hunt down the enemy cruisers and merchant raiders whichthreatened British shipping routes and which Fisher believed to be the greatestdanger to Britain's well being. At the turn of the century, the perceived maritimethreat was not Germany alone, but France and Russia, which in concertrepresented not only an increasing material force in their developing battle fleetsbut a widely dispersed one with their numerous cruisers.

This dispersal would present almost insuperable difficulties to the hard pressedRoyal Navy. Britain not only had to match the European powers in battleshipconstruction, but build equally expensive and manpower intensive armoredcruisers for commerce protection. Even for the United Kingdom, the financialimplications of attempting to maintain superiority at all points and against allrivals were too much.

8 See the author's book, The King's Ships Were at Sea: The War in the North Sea August 1914—February1915 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984).

See, as a recent and prominent example, Robert K. Massie Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and theComing of the Great War (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 490-497.

For the following account, I am indebted to the work of Dr. Jon Tetsuro Sumida of the Universityof Maryland and to Dr. Nicholas Lambert of Wolfson College, Oxford University. This brief synthesis,however, is only a summary of some of the judgments which may be drawn from research to date. Thenature of both historians' work is such that they—and we—are learning all the time. See Jon TetsuroSumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy 1889-1914 (Boston:Unwin Hyman, 1989); "Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought, the sources of Naval Mythology," a paperdelivered to the Eleventh Naval History Symposium, Annapolis, October 1993. See also: NicholasLambert "Admiral Sir John Fisher and the Concept of Flotilla Defence 1904-09," Journal of ModemHistory, (Fall 1995), forthcoming; and "British Naval Policy 1913/14: Financial Limitation and StrategicRevolution," Journal of Military History, (Fall 1995), forthcoming.

Fisher's interest in alternative approaches was crystallized when he com-manded the Mediterranean Fleet during the Boer War and at a nadir of Britishprestige in Europe. He seized on torpedo craft, including the submersibles whichwere beginning to demonstrate their operational potential, as the best means ofneutralizing enemy battle fleets close to their own ports and bases. This conceptof "flotilla defence" would be combined with fast, long ranged and heavily armedships to hunt down and destroy enemy commerce raiders. Such a force mix heldthe possibility not only of holding at bay any possible anti-British coalition butdoing so at relatively limited cost.

The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 and the progressive engagement ofFrance and Russia in an Entente with Britain would change the strategic situationprofoundly in the next few years, but it is important to remember that thesepolitical developments were by no means as coherent or comprehensible at thetime as they appear now. In particular, the Royal Navy, despite a progressiveconcentration of forces into British home waters, never ceased to regard itsstrategic problems without some recognition of the continuing needs of theMediterranean and other stations further afield. That such a wider view ofstrategy existed between 1904 and 1914 has not always been recognized byhistorians of the era.

What roles, then, for the battle cruiser? The key lay in gunnery technology.Beginning in 1898, radical improvements were achieved by the Royal Navy inrange and accuracy which within a few years extended fighting ranges from 2to 3,000 meters to as much as 8,000. At this point, however, manual aiming andprediction of individual weapons began to become difficult to the point ofineffectiveness. At the time in which the dreadnought and battle cruiser designswere being put into production, the Royal Navy embarked upon an extensiveprogram of experiments to develop computerized gunnery fire control systems.The long and complex story of that program and its eventual misdirection isoutside my scope. The key issues, however, can be highlighted by pointing outtwo things. First, British gunnery policy changed direction drastically at leastfour times in the decade before 1914. Such changes of direction, however ill-conceived in retrospect, were not driven by a desire to increase or to minimizethe fighting range for its own sake, but because those responsible for the fightingefficiency of the Royal Navy were convinced that they were necessary to achievesuperiority in battle. This situation alone is indicative of the uncertainty of thedevelopment processes. It must be understood that naval decision making at thefirst and second levels, within which this situation existed, is more often focusedon solving contemporary problems within a limited time scale rather thanachieving an "ideal" solution. In short, the question is "how?" not "what if?"

Second, the technology issue was never confined to the gunnery fire controlproblem alone. At one point, it became apparent that the new "capped" armorpiercing shell was capable of penetrating any armor at ranges of 6,000 meters or

less.11 This obviously lent weight to the concept of a fast, heavily armed shipwhich would close to overwhelm an opponent with her weight of fire. Third,the torpedo was itself gaining in range and capability through improvedpropulsion and accompanying increases in size. The advantage retained by thegun since the invention of quick firing weapons late in the previous century wasthus being subjected to serious erosion. Sophisticated fire control might holdthe potential for recovery.

In these circumstances, a vision of the battle cruiser developed in which itseemed possible to marry a predictive fire control system with the fast ship toproduce a vessel which could not only dictate the fighting range but which couldscore hits at a distance at which it would be effectively invulnerable to lesssophisticated opposition. It is not surprising that armor seemed superfluous toFisher.

The criticism of Fisher's schemes has been that, however elegant the com-bination of battle cruiser and fire control might seem, it could only be temporary.It is an axiom of competitive technological development that the greatest steptowards duplicating an innovation is the recognition itself that the innovationhas been achieved. Britain's rivals would eventually produce their own firecontrol systems and fit them into balanced, more heavily armored ships.

Eventually, that is. But Fisher's conception of the battle cruiser was not

monochrome, nor did he ever regard it as a final solution to naval warfare.

Rather, just as the Dreadnought itself had improved Britain's position by imposing

an informal but highly effective 'holiday' on overseas battleship construction

1 owhich lasted anywhere between eighteen months and four years,    so the battle

cruiser would dislocate foreign programs. Britain would thus retain the initiative

in both operational and financial spheres. What might follow as the Royal Navy's

next move could be anything from ocean going submarines to enlarged torpedo

boat destroyers.

Unconsciously or not, Fisher was perhaps the first to grasp that rapiddevelopments in technology changed the fundamental measures by which forcestructures and thus the balance of power were judged from types to capabilities.Relationships between capabilities were inherently dynamic, not static. Withoutthe test of battle, this meant that the uncertainty over judgements as to relativestrengths greatly increased. In turn, the advantage, at least in the perceptionswhich affect decision making for future force structures, the 'third level' alreadydescribed, had to lie with the latest innovation, the 'super weapon' whosepotential could only be guessed at.

The capability issue possessed another element. Hitherto, naval force struc-tures had been largely symmetrical Fleets could be matched and graded against

11 Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy, pp. 55-56.

12 The Germans, for example, did not lay down a capital ship between August 1905 and June 1907.See Antony Preston, Battleships of World War I (London: Lionel Leventhal, 1972), pp. 64-67.

each other with relative ease. Battleships fought battleships; cruisers and scoutsexpected to face other cruisers and scouts. The advent of the torpedo was butthe first step in the breakdown of this system. It conferred what Corbett describedas "battle power" on small craft.    There would be more such changes to come.

The French Jeune Ecole had recognized some part of this process and itsimplications, but not enough. Their thinking was too fixated upon the vul-nerability of a British Fleet in close blockade. Such a policy was not just itselfvulnerable to technical change; it remained valid only so long as the Britishstrategies did not alter. What Fisher seems to have grasped is that force structuresare best defined by the tasks which navies must undertake to meet nationalinterests and not an overreaching requirement to destroy the enemy's main fleetfor its own sake. To the technological thrust towards asymmetry, he thus addeda strategic one.

All this reversed the assumption which had supported British policy for mostof the nineteenth century that the Royal Navy would follow innovation ratherthan initiate it. The reversion was the more logical because it reflected the realitythat a precondition of the old policy, Britain's overwhelming economic andindustrial strength, no longer applied. I should add that this policy had in no waylimited the Royal Navy's approach to development once a weapon wasintroduced into the order of battle elsewhere. Other navies might be the first tosecure such systems, the British were often the first to make them work.

The battle cruiser must thus be judged, not as Fisher's panacea for maritimecombat, but as a weapon which represented, even had it been brought toperfection through the installation of effective fire control, but one element inan attempt to preserve strategic advantage by technical innovation in a periodof financial semi-crisis.

There is a connection for Australia in all this. Battle cruisers were utilized inthe role of anti-commerce raiders only once, in 1914, culminating in thedestruction of the armored cruisers of the German East Asiatic Squadron by theheavy guns of the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible at the First Battle of theFalkland Islands in December that year. The British ships had the spectacularrole. Less well—known is the fact that the battle cruiser Australia, commissionedinto the Royal Australian Navy only a year earlier, was the principal reason whythe German cruisers never entered Australian waters. The eight twelve inch gunsof the Australia represented perhaps the most effective—and timely—strategicdeterrent in which Australia has invested.

The Aircraft Carrier

Let me turn to my second case study. The Royal Navy and its seniorcommanders have been seriously criticized by historians for the inadequate

13

I am indebted to Dr. Nicholas Lambert for this argument: Letter to the author, 6 February 1995.

development of the aircraft carrier and of naval aviation between 1919 and 1939,particularly by comparison with the Americans and Japanese. More than onecommentator has laid these failures directly at the door of conservative admiralspreoccupied with the big gun to the exclusion of all else. In consequence,British carriers were operating fragile biplanes and unsuitable conversions of landaircraft at a time when Japan had aircraft such as the Ztro and the United States,the Hellcat.

The British failure is undeniable and institutional conservatism centered onthe battleship undoubtedly played its role. So did the vexed question of dividedcontrol which occupied the central staffs of the Royal Navy and the Royal AirForce for most of the inter-war period. Consider, however, other circumstances.First, the pre-1939 aircraft carrier was not an "all weather*' system. It could notoperate aircraft in rough seas or in poor visibility—and often not at night.Second, economic conditions meant that the Royal Navy was forced to operatesmall and elderly conversions for much longer than it desired. Such ships carriedtoo few machines to mount the large scale strike operations staged by the Pacificpowers. There was also too few aircraft. Money for naval aviation had to befound within a budget over-stressed by the need to maintain large operationalforces world-wide as a result of Britain's strategic over-extension. A large carriercost more to operate than a battleship.

British naval aviation suffered from conservatism from the bottom. This wasa curious and largely unrecognized result of the fact that the creation of a separateRoyal Air Force in 1918 robbed the Royal Navy of the cream of its experiencedpersonnel. In the United States and Imperial Japanese Navies, commanders withflying experience forced the pace, taking risks with aircraft and ships whichresulted in higher casualty rates but also produced much more efficient and fasteroperating cycles. American and Japanese carriers could launch and recoveraircraft more rapidly than the British and could marshal their machines in theair more quickly. For example, it was British doctrine that each aircraft had tobe struck down to the hangar deck after it had landed on before the next wouldbe allowed onto the flight deck. This meant an interval between aircraft of upto three minutes—between four and six times more than the intervals achievedby the other carrier navies. Conversely, the British, who had adopted closedhangars, integral to the ships' hulls (for very good reasons of ship survivability),as opposed to the lighter structures of the Americans, could not allow aircraft to

For sources on this subject, see Norman Friedman, British Carrier Aviation: The Evolution of the Shipsand their Aircraft (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988); Geoffrey Till, Air Power and the Royal Navy1911-1945: A Historical Survey (London: Jane's, 1979); Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy Between the War(London: Collins, 1968 and 1976); and Jon Tetsuro Sumida, '"The Best Laid Plan: The Developmentof British Battle Fleet Tactics 1919-1942," International History Review, 14 (November 1992).15 See, for example, Arthur J. Marder, "The Influence of History on Sea Power: The Royal Navy and theLessons of 1914-1918" From the Dardanelles to Oran: Studies of the Royal Navy in War and Peace 1915-1940(London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 56-57.

start and warm their engines up before they were brought up to the flight deck.All of these factors added up to lengthen the reaction times for the British andreduce the effective operational ranges for their aircraft by about one—thirdcompared to the Americans or the Japanese. When this means the differencebetween an operational radius of 180 miles and one of 120, it can be important.Let me illustrate this with a short scenario.

We are watching a hypothetical exercise in the Atlantic in 1932. It is onehour before dawn and a carrier force in the east is pitted against a heavy cruiserforce in the west. At 0500, each side detects radio transmissions from the otherand, thus, knows the bearing but not the range of the opposition. Although eachassumes that the opposition is in the vicinity, they are in fact one hundred milesapart. Each determines to launch a scouting aircraft at dawn since their aircraftcannot operate at night. In each case, the scout is a Fairey IIIF biplane; thecruiser's machine is a float plane, the carrier's, a land plane. Each has a speed ofone hundred knots. The weather is clear and the sea slight, apparently idealconditions for air operations at sea. But note the first problem for the carrier—thewind is from the west, which means that the ship must steam towards the cruiserswhen launching or recovering aircraft. If she is operating any kind of air patrolsthis means that, at best, she cannot make ground to the east to keep her distancefrom the cruisers. In reality, she could well be making ground to the west, despiteher best intentions.

If all the equipment works and, accepting favorable times for the carrier torecover the scout and organize an eighteen aircraft strike (which against a threecruiser force is a threat but not necessarily a decisive one), we get the followingfigures: The carrier's aircraft would be able to achieve a strike when the cruiserswere still out of range at thirty-two miles. But, if the radio of the scouting aircraftfailed—and this was a not uncommon occurrence—the equation becomes verydifferent. The cruisers are approaching gun range at fourteen miles. This mayperhaps explain why carriers built in the 1920s carried 5.5", 6" or even 8" guns(as in the case of the American carriers, Lexington and Saratoga.) The margins ofsuperiority were too small to do otherwise.

An associated question is why the British exhibited so little apparent interestin single-seat fighters for air defense? First, such aircraft were of little use in otherroles, with minimal range, no load carrying capability and very tentativenavigation over water'—important considerations when a carrier could not carrymany aircraft in the first place. Second, and more importantly, small carriers withlimited capacity simply could not carry enough fighters to maintain a credibleair patrol overhead. Before radar, the first warning of an air attack was visual.This meant that the carrier might not have enough time to launch its fightersand for them to gain height and enter the action before the attackers launchedtheir bombs or torpedoes. The emphasis on anti-aircraft fire rather than air covermust thus be seen in this light, in addition to "gunnery conservatism."

22    The Problems of Modern Naval History

These explanations of the Fleet Air Arm's problems cannot wholly exoneratethe Royal Navy from its use of air power, nor are they complete in themselves.Nevertheless, they should indicate that there were other key issues thaninterservice politics or institutional conservatism. It is an error to mislabel simpletruth as simplicity; it is equally wrong to mistake a simple explanation for thewhole truth.

Conclusion

What points can be drawn from these examples? The first is the straightforwardone that naval history is not easy. If we are to achieve any improvement in ourunderstanding of navies in the machine age, there must be a new approach to thesubject, one which integrates the elements of technology, finance, strategy, opera-tions and personnel in achieving an understanding of the subject. I hasten to addthat I am not suggesting that only naval officers can be good naval historians.

But I am suggesting that we venture into naval history at our peril and thatonly extensive and lengthy study and a deep comprehension of the issues willsuffice. A recent example of the problem is John Keegan, a military historian ofgreat talent whose study of land warfare, The Face of Battle, combines magisterialauthority with a remarkably fluent and gripping style. By comparison, his 1988book Hie Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare maintains the qualityof prose, but possesses nothing like the insight of his military work. It takes a longtime to "grow" expert naval historians and they do not necessarily come fromthe backgrounds which might be expected. Amongst the finest recent work onthe history of warship design and construction is that by Norman Friedman,whose doctorate is in Physics.

The second point is that navies need to be studied for their own sakes and inrelation to the tasks which navies exist to undertake in war. I cannot stress this pointtoo much. For too long, the tendency has been to examine navies in relation totheir effect on other issues, such as diplomacy. This is to confuse the shadow withthe substance. Despite the rhetoric encompassing the many uses of maritime powerand, in particular, the diplomatic uses of a navy in peacetime as a means of exertingnational influence and demonstrating national presence, it is their war fighting roleswhich determine the force structures and organizations of navies.

In this context little has changed from the navies of the sailing age. "Take itall in all." said John Ruskin, "a Ship of the Line is the most honourable thingthat man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced." The implicit pointremains: the achievements of the gregarious animal. The interest to outsiders inthe navy for its own sake derives from the fact that navies remain amongst themost complex organizations within any society. They must solve, on a day to

16 See, for example, Norman Friedman, U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis: NavalInstitute Press, 1982).

17 Cited in Grant Uden, The Fighting Timkraire (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1961), p. 10.

Goldrick     23

day basis, highly complicated problems of technology, of logistics and of socialinteraction. They must possess the capacity to adapt constantly to changingenvironments and to changing equipment. They must be capable of operatingat great distances from any base, efficiently under threat of attack, whilemaintaining crew cohesion and morale. I would suggest that the complexity ofthe entire problem is so great that navies remain inherently at the leading edgeof problem solving in many areas, not least of them social.

Given this inherent complexity, it is axiomatic that valid histories must possessequally sophisticated methodologies which achieve a synthesis of archival and othersources and are written with an appropriate level of technical understanding of the subject.My favorable citation of much recent work in naval history makes it clear that Ithink a renaissance in modern naval history is, albeit on too small a scale, underway.But I do see that there is one area which has not yet been comprehensively examinedin anything like the necessary detail. I return to my earlier point about combat atsea being the touchstone of naval history, the proof of the extent to which naviesachieved the reality of their own self images. We need to extend the samemethodologies now in employment in the 1904-1914 period to operational history,in particular to major conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and theFirst and Second World Wars. The legacy of the official histories is no longerenough, even if we accept the political and security constraints under which theywere written. Indeed, the discoveries of the 1904-1914 period and in other periods,such as the development of naval aviation, suggest that much of what we haveaccepted as valid "core" history is in fact mistaken.

The acknowledgement of the importance of signals intelligence whichfollowed on the revelations concerning Allied cryptological successes against theGermans and Japanese in the Second World War is but one step in the right

1 R

direction. We now need to incorporate the whole range of technological andoperational issues and accept that the result may not be as we expected and maydiffer very widely from previous work. It can be done, and it is being done,but much more is needed and not only for the more immediately apparentaspects of the early electronic age, such as radar. This will be neither easy norquick, but it will be well worth the effort.

18 An Australian example of the emerging intelligence history work which places signals intelligencein the correct context is: David Stevens, "The Role of Radio Intelligence in the Anti-Submarine WarAround Australia, 1942-45," Journal ofthe Australian War Memorial, 25 (October 1994), pp. 23-30.

See also, as an example, David Zimmerman, The Great Naval Battle of Ottawa (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1989).

20 The author is indebted to Dr. David Rosenberg and Dr. Jon Sumida, whose much more sophisticatedarguments for the improvement of naval history are contained in the following chapter on "Machines,Manufacturing, Management and Money: The Study of Navies as Complex Organisations and theTransformation of Twentieth Century Naval History." See also, David Alan Rosenberg, "Process: TheRealities of Formulating Modern Naval Strategy" in James Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds.,Mahan b Not Enough: The Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral SirHerbert Richmond (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1993), pp. 141-176.

Okapter JL

Machines, Men, Manufacturing,

Management, and Money:

The Study of Navies as Complex

Organizations and the Transformation of

Twentieth Century Naval History

Jon Tetsuro Sumida and David Alan Rosenberg

Twentieth century naval history as a scholarly area of concentration appearsto be upon the brink of major change with respect to sources, methods,conceptual frameworks, and standards. For present purposes, the twentiethcentury means the one hundred years from the late 1880s to the late 1980s, aperiod of rapid technological advance and chronic great power antagonism,punctuated by global conflict that involved naval operations of unprecedentedscale. During this era of industrialized naval rivalry and war, the major powersbuilt large and technically up-to-date fleets. These forces were manned by ahighly skilled labor force and led by well educated professionals. The ships andpersonnel, in turn, had to be supported by a considerable industrial establishmentand administered by a complex bureaucracy. And the costs of all of this imposeda substantial financial burden upon the state. Much of what shaped the characterof twentieth century navies, therefore, hinged on matters related to machines,men, manufacturing, management, and money.

The coverage of these individual issues has left much to be desired. Thequantity of writing on naval technology is admittedly considerable, but oftenstrong on description at the expense of analysis and concentrated to an over-whelming degree on warships and warship design, with relatively little attentiondevoted to the systematic examination of significant technical infrastructure—that is, such matters as gunlaying and fire control mechanisms, data transmissionsystems (within ships, between ships, and from ship to shore), optical andelectronic sensors, and the finer points of steam, gas turbine, or nuclearengineering. There are a number of historical studies of naval personnel, but ingeneral these have failed to explore the relationship between social characteristicsand dynamics on the one hand, and institutional function and effectiveness onthe other. Books dealing with the warship construction industry of any country

and its connection to the civilian shipbuilding sector and the economy as a wholeare remarkably few. The history of naval administration over the past hundredyears has attracted so little scholarship that more is known about that subject inthe age of sail than in the age of steam. And the taking into account of navalfinance at best rarely proceeds beyond discussion of aggregate annual expendi-ture, and practically never addresses borrowing or the distribution of spendingbetween personnel, shipbuilding, ship maintenance, training, administration,and the subheadings thereof.

Naval technical, personnel, economic, administrative, and financial questionswere also interrelated. The characteristics of warships were decided by delibera-tions that were concerned with much more than strategy, tactics, and navalarchitecture. The size, kind, and numbers of units were always to a greater orlesser degree limited by financial and industrial considerations. The design,development, and production of ordnance and other equipment were more orless influenced by not only the availability of capital and labor, but by the natureof the procurement bureaucracy. The effectiveness of fighting vessels in wardepended to a great extent upon the state of training of their officers and crews,and the degree of their serviceability on the one hand and the capacity of thelogistical apparatus on the other—that is upon a combination of technical,human, administrative, and economic factors. But given incomplete or over-generalized understandings of naval machines, men, manufacturing, manage-ment, and money, important questions about the connections between themhave for the most part not even been asked, to say nothing of being answered.

These large deficiencies in knowledge about basic issues, however, have untilrecently caused few difficulties for most historians of twentieth century navalaffairs. To understand this situation, it is first necessary to describe the nature ofthe various forms of naval history as it is generally practiced and their relationshipsto each other. Serious naval history—which for present purposes includes officialand for want of a better term quasi-scholarly as well as academic works—maybe divided into three groups—core, ancillary, and cognate.

Core naval history consists of the standard narrative histories of naval policyand operations—set up either as national or comparative accounts—whichestablish the master plot. Their authors sometimes acknowledged the influenceof technical, economic, administrative, and financial factors, but did not inves-tigate these matters rigorously in their own terms. Ancillary naval historyconsists of those studies that deal primarily with naval machines, men (includingbiography) manufacturing, and management. The members of this group eitheraccept the core histories as given or ignore them altogether, and generally failto address their findings to larger questions of policy and operations.

1 The major core naval histories for the British and American navies are given in footnotes 16, 17, and 18.

Examples of the technical (studies of warship design) and economic and administrative (U.S. Navyofficial histories of naval shipbuilding, administration, and logistics) elements of this genre should be

Cognate naval history stands apart from the first two. It consists of works thatare concerned with navies in the past, but written mainly from the standpointof fields distinct from naval history, such as political,   diplomatic,   economic,social,    cultural,    intellectual,    technical,    maritime,     or Braudelian 'total'

11 10 1 "\

history;    or even different disciplines, such as political science    or sociology;or interdisciplinary specializations such as international security     or strategicstudies.    The main focus of this cognate naval history is not naval affairs as such,but the roles played by navies in domestic and international politics, maritime

well known to most readers, and require no listing [references for the economic and administrativeitems can be found in Robert Greenhalgh Albion, comp., Naval & Maritime History: An AnnotatedBibliography. 4th edition, revised and expanded. (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport for the Munson Instituteof American Maritime History, 1972) and (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1973), pp. 54-8, 220-2,and in Benjamin W. Labaree, comp., A Supplement 1971 -1986 to Robert G. Albion's Naval & MaritimeHistory: An Annotated Bibliography (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport for the Munson Institute of AmericanMaritime Studies, 1988)]. There are no studies devoted exclusively to naval finance that can beconsidered ancillary naval history.

3 For example, see Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power duringthe Pax Britannica (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986).

4 For example, see William Reynolds Braisted, The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1897-1909 (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1958) and The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-1922 (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, 1971).

5 For example, see Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson, The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). For examples of the economic history sub fields ofbusinessand financial history, see Hugh B. Peebles, Warshipbuilding on the Clyde: Naval Orders and the Prosperityof the Clyde Shipbuilding Industry, 1889-1939 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), and Philip Pugh, TheCost ofSeapower: The Influence of Money on Naval Affairs from 1815 to the Presetit Day (London: ConwayMaritime Press, 1986).

For example, see Frederick S. Harrod, Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modem NavalEnlisted Force, 1899-1940 (Westport: Greenwood, 1978).

For example, see Michael Vlahos, The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission,1919-1941 (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1980).

8 For example, see D. M. Schurman, The Education of a Navy: The Development of British Naval StrategicThought, 1867-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

9 For example, see Willem Hackmann, Seek and Strike: Sonar, anti-submarine warfare and the Royal Navy,1914-54 (London: HMSO, 1984).

10 For example, see Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires(New York: William Morrow, 1974).

No example exists for the twentieth century, but see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and theMediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); see especially ii:conclusions.

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For example, see George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics,1494-1993 (London: Macmillan, 1988).

For example, see Christopher Dandeker, "Bureaucracy Planning and War: The Royal Navy, 1880to 1918," Armed Fortes and Society, ll(Fall 1984).

For example, see Steven E. Miller and Stephen Van Evera, eds, Naval Strategy and National Security(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

15 For example, see John B. Hattendorf and Robert S. Jordan, eds, Maritime Strategy and the Balance ofPower: Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).

affairs, or the general life of a maritime state or region; or navies as exemplars ofcertain economic, social, cultural, technical, political, or strategic phenomena.Cognate naval history, while in large part dependent on the master plot providedby the core history, differs from ancillary naval history by engaging the largequestions and employing the methodologies characteristic of each of theirrespective fields.

Naval history thus embraces a wide and disparate range of activity. Core navalhistory, by its focus on policy and operations and exclusion of their institutionalcontext, closely resembles classical or mainstream military history, of which it isoften considered to be a sub-field. Ancillary naval history is largely the preserveof antiquarianism or otherwise ahistorical hyper-specialization. And cognatenaval history is simply the name given to various enterprises that involve thestudy of naval affairs but which are actually variants of non-naval fields of history.For these reasons, there is no particular "how of doing" naval history—its waysand means may be those of virtually any branch of history and in some caseseven non-history. Like Gertrude Stein's city of Oakland, there is, from thestandpoint of practice, "no there there."

Beyond the common subject of navies in the past, what the varieties of navalhistory do share is at least rough agreement about what navies were meant todo or did. Naval planning and performance are the stuff of core naval history,and confidence in the excellence of the established leading studies is high. Thisis particularly so in the case of the literature devoted to the twentieth century'stwo largest navies, which set the standard for the genre. The core naval historiesof Britain from the 1880s to 1945, which consist of multi-volume works basedon access to large quantities of official documents and providing comprehensivetreatment, are widely considered to be authoritative. The core history of theUnited States Navy for the same period, though less complete, is respected asessentially sound. For the post-1945 era, credible core naval history is sparse,but the best work for this period, when allowances are made for the problem of

Arthur J. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naual Policy in thePre-Dreadttought Era, 1880-1905 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940); idem., From the Dreadnought toScapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919, 5 vols (London: Oxford University Press,1961-70); Stephen W. Roskill, The War At Sea, 3 vols in 4 (London: HMSO, 1954-61); and idem.,Naual Policy Between the Wars, (London: Collins, 1968-76) 2 volumes. For the only comparativetwentieth century naval history based on serious archival research, see Paul G. Halpern, The MediterraneanSituation 1908-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); The Naual War in the Mediterranean1914-1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), and A Naual History of World War I (Annapolis: NavalInstitute, 1994). For the most recent one-volume general histories of British naval operations of theworld wars, which do not offer fundamentally different interpretations than their multi-volumepredecessors, see Richard Hough, The Great War at Sea, 1914-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1983), and Corelli Bamett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Nauy in the Second World War(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

17   Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naual Operations in World War II, (Boston: Little,Brown, 1947-62) 15 volumes.

lack of access to important classified sources, equals and in important respectssurpasses the quality of its pre-nuclear era counterparts.

The core histories of the British and American navies, in short, are widelyregarded as being, if not definitive, close to it. And because this happy conditionwas achieved without recourse to systematic examination of technical, person-nel, economic, administrative, or financial matters, it has seemed as if thecommitment of efforts in those directions would result in little except detailimprovement. The negative effect of this impression has in turn been exacer-bated by the fact that the extraction of meaningful conclusions about mattersrelated to machines, men, manufacturing, management, and money require agreat deal of specialized knowledge and significant amounts of technical skill.The marginality of ancillary naval history can thus be attributed in large part toa combination of small demand and the difficulty of supply.

But the finality of the core accounts can be questioned on three grounds. Inthe first place, in spite of the skill, diligence, and intelligence of their authors,the scope of inquiry and the volume of available archival materials were too greatto allow detailed research into all matters of importance. Secondly, at the timethat they were written, a large number of documents, including major collectionsof private papers, were for a variety of reasons unknown or otherwise unavail-able. And thirdly, the creators of the core naval histories deployed the rhetoricand methods of traditional political, diplomatic, and military history, whichlimited their perspectives and precluded the application of new and powerfultechniques—such as systematic quantitative analysis or interest group behaviorstudies—that had been developed in other areas of history. In short, that whichcould be examined was so vast as to preclude careful measurement by a singlescholar in a reasonable length of time, the dossier was incomplete, and themanner of investigation relatively unsophisticated.

Eric J. Grove, Vanguard to Trident: British Naval Policy Since World War 11 (Annapolis: Naval InstitutePress, 1987). Grove's monograph, indeed, to a far greater extent than its Royal Navy core historypredecessors, takes account of technical, economic, administrative, and financial factors. This contributesstrongly to its success, whose nature is such that Grove's work may be to a certain degree exempt fromthe kind of wholesale reevaluation being recommended for the core naval histories of the pre-1945period. The high standards of analysis and research set by Grove's volume are not, unfortunately, matchedby Michael T. Isenberg's Shield of the Republic: The United States Navy in an Era of Cold War and ViolentPeace, 1945-1962 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

19 For a critique of some of the methodological practices that produced the core history of the RoyalNavy in the early twentieth century, see Jon Tetsuro Sumida, "Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought:The Sources of Naval Mythology," Journal of Military History, 59 (October 1995). For broader discussionof the important methodological issues at stake, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History(New York: W. W. Norton, 1965; first published, 1931). For the new techniques in political historydeveloped between the World Wars that might have informed, if not been applied to, the study of theBritish and American navies, see Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, seconded. (London: Macmillan, 1957; first published 1929), and England in the Age of the American Revolution,second ed. (London: Macmillan, 1961; first published, 1930); and especially Eckart Kehr, BattleshipBuilding and Party Politics in Germany, 1894-1901, Pauline R. and Eugene N. Anderson, trans. (Chicago:

Such general criticism aside, two recent developments have challenged theintegrity of the core naval histories in fundamental ways. In the first place, anumber of new monographs that deploy novel analytical techniques based onthe use of a wide range of previously unexploited sources have discreditedimportant sections of the core history of the pre-1945 Royal Navy. Andsecondly, a complex model of institutional function tailored to describe thedecision-making processes of the United States Navy in the nuclear era, callsinto question to many of the basic assumptions underlying virtually all historical

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writing about naval policy-making from 1945 through the 1980s. Much ofthe latter work, indeed, is applicable to the first half of the twentieth centuryand to the navy of Britain, neatly complementing the new model monographsby in effect codifying the methodological agenda implicit in their choice ofsubjects and presentation of argument.

The new model monographs employ, and the decision-making processanalysis approach calls for, the integrated examination of technical, personnel,economic, administrative, and financial factors in order to reinterpret the courseof policy-making and its consequences in operations. The adjustments ofportions of the main narrative structure of the pre-1945 period, which amountto radical alteration and not mere modification, take the form of either directchanges in the existing record or additions to the record that put what was alreadyknown into a different perspective. In effect, this work violates the boundariesof the established core/ancillary division of labor by weaving together subjectmaterials from both categories to renovate the core. Integration is facilitated bythe exploitation of large quantities of previously unavailable or unexploitedevidence and the deployment of new analytical approaches.

University of Chicago Press, 1973; first published 1930).

20 John Robert Ferris, Men, Money, and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919-26(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); G. A. H. Gordon, British Seapowerand Procuremetit Between theWars: A Reappraisal of Rearmament (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988); Nicholas A. Lambert, "TheInfluence of the Submarine upon Naval Strategy, 1898-1914," unpublished Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1992;idem., "Admiral Sir John Fisher and the Concept of Flotilla Defence, 1904-1909," Journal of MilitaryHistory, 59 (October 1995); idem., "British Naval Policy, 1913-14: Financial Limitation and StrategicRevolution," Joimw/ of Modern History (forthcoming); Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defettce of Naval Supremacy:Finatice, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914 (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989; paperbackedition, 1993); idem., "British Naval Administration and Policy in the Age of Fisher," Journal of MilitaryHistory, 54 (January 1990); idem., "'The Best Laid Plans': The Development of British Battle FleetTactics, 1919-1942," International History Review, 14 (November 1992); idem., "British NavalOperational Logistics, 19U-1918," Journal of Military History, 57 (July 1993); idem., "Forging the Trident:British Naval Industrial Logistics, 1914-1918," in John A. Lynn, Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfarefrom the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 1993); and idem., "The Quest for Reach: TheDevelopment of Long Range Gunnery in the Royal Navy, 1901-1912," in Lt. Col. Stephen D.Chiabotti, ed., Tooling for War: Military Transformation in the Industrial Age (United States Air Force,forthcoming 1995).

David Alan Rosenberg, "Process: The Realities of Formulating Modern Naval Strategy," in JamesGoldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds, Mahan is Not Enough: The Proceedings of a Conferettce on the Worksof Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1993).

There are reasons why factors related to machines, men, manufacturing,management, and money play so important a role in the making of works thatpose fundamental challenges to the existing master plot. The existing core navalhistory placed these subjects in conceptual "black boxes" whose outputs wereheld to be secondary to primary concerns defined by matters that were con-sidered to be more directly related to policy and operations. The internaldynamics of these black boxes, moreover, were implicitly dismissed as being ofeven lesser significance. What the new model monographs have done by onemeans or another is to show that the outputs were not what have been supposed.They have also indicated that the processes that were putatively contained bythe black boxes—and therefore held to be separate—were not only connectedto each other at many points, but indeed, by the very nature of their interactions,affected the making of policy and operations to such a degree as to count as akind of output as well.

Much of the conviction of the new model scholarship is to be found only intheir presentation of the particulars of their specific subjects. Nevertheless a gooddeal of what has just been explained may be illustrated by a broad comparisonof aspects of the core literature with those of the new model monographs.Speaking very generally, the core histories oversimplify, and thereby obscure,the influence of technical, personnel, economic, administrative, and financialmatters to extreme degrees. For example, the basic structure of fleets andfunctions of its constituents are generally considered to be fixed. The characterand training of personnel are rarely considered, with emphasis on the humanfactor most often addressed only with regard to the personalities of top com-manders. Production capacity is assumed to be available and the relationship ofnaval building to the rest of a nation's armaments manufacturing effort a matterof little interest. Bureaucracy is usually viewed as a given, and even when assignedvalence it most often takes the negative form of being no more than animpediment to efficiency. And financial support is similarly taken as a constant,and when taken into account at all, only as a restrictive factor.

The handling of these matters by the new model monographs is much morecomplex and open to considerably wider variation. The structure of fleets andthe functions of warships are treated as the hotly controversial questions thatthey often were, and the myriad technical, human, economic, administrative,and financial considerations that affected the strategic, tactical, and logisticaldiscussion given a much greater measure of their due.

The particular practical experiences of officers in dealing with complicatedand changing technology within the contexts of a difficult physical environ-ment—namely the sea—and a complex institutional setting, have been foundto have had a powerful influence on decision-making. The distribution oflimited manufacturing assets between competing armed services and the civilianeconomy in wartime is considered to have been a centrally important strategic

issue, and also an extremely difficult problem of politics and administration. Thecareful scrutiny of bureaucratic organization, procedures, and cognizance haverevealed previously unknown and substantive connections between the work ofadministration on the one hand, and policy and strategy on the other, whoseeffects were both enabling or disabling depending on circumstances. And finally,the examination of the specific terms of naval finance has clearly established thatchanges in the availability of money and shifts in its distribution among majorspending categories had a major impact on the direction of naval policy inpeacetime.

In the course of placing such issues on the table as significant factorsinfluencing policy and—through the function or malfunction of machines, men,administration, and organization in war—operations, the new modelmonographs and decision-making process analysis approach has raised questionsabout other important matters which have previously been relegated to thesidelines or ignored altogether. These include naval officer education, training,promotion paths, and formation of interest groups based on weapons specializa-tion, service association, or social background; the professional, as opposed tostrictly social, experience of the naval rank and file, especially that of thetechnically skilled ratings; the nature of the naval labor market, that is, the effectof supply and demand on the quality and quantity of the naval work force;considerations affecting reserves and preparations for the wartime expansion ofnaval manpower; naval logistics, both industrial and operational; fleet training;naval intelligence in general, and naval industrial intelligence in particular; eventhe development of naval tactics; and last but not least, interservice rivalry.

The new model monographs and decision-making process analysis approach,in short, have indicated that the understanding of navies as complex humanorganizations that exist in relation to and even in competition with other suchbodies within the same national structure, should be a prerequisite to the studyof policy and operations. By opening up the black boxes of naval technology,personnel, economics, administration, and finance, its practitioners have in effectrevealed the inadequacy of viewing a navy itself as a larger black box—that is,as little more than a nautical instrument of force of greater or lesser size andefficiency. Navies, they have suggested, might instead be better understood asinstitutions whose manifold dimension, variations in major characteristics, andpotential for radical reformation need to be taken into consideration wheninvestigating the conscious or even unconscious (that is, irrational psychologicalor cultural) motives underlying the behavior of naval decision-makers. Equally,appreciation of these same characteristics—that is, complexity, variety, andsusceptibility to change—ought to inform evaluations of civil-naval relations,including naval legislative politics, the propagandization of the electorate, or thebuild-up of the military-industrial complex.

As in the case of those advances in science that have often resulted infundamental changes in general outlook, the propositions put forward by thenew model monographs are based on empirical research that in both qualitativeand quantitative terms represent a considerable advance over what has previouslybeen accepted as sufficient. In part this has simply been the result of the greatinflux of government documents and private collections of papers into archivesduring the twenty-plus years since the publication of the core histories, whichprovided much additional historical fodder for those that came afterward. Inaddition, however, the authors of the new model histories examined sourcesthat dealt with technical, personnel, economic, administrative, and financialmatters, which had been largely overlooked and which existed in quantity. Theirstudies also utilized basic engineering and accounting analytical techniques tomake sense of substantial masses of technical and financial papers, producing newdata sets that could be used to enhance the study of naval policy formulation.The effects of this work have been both to alter perspectives and reveal a plethoraof detail that had previously been obscured, which has provided much of theevidentiary foundation for the challenges thus far to sections of the core histories.

The generation of new points of view and achievement of clearer resolutionhas raised questions about the historical methodology that created the corehistories as well as about the integrity of their narratives. This is because the newfindings about finance and technology, when combined with the carefulconsideration of other evidence, have indicated that the internal communica-tions of the government within and between departments cannot be taken atface value as was done to a very great extent in the core histories. This has threeserious implications. In the first place, it means that even supposedly confidentialand authoritative policy documents must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny andcriticism. In the second place, in the absence of trustworthy and clear statements,proximate estimates of the decision-making process and its outcomes may haveto be inferred or synthesized from inexplicit materials, such as financial state-ments or analysis of the technical characteristics of major weapons, usingspecialized analytical techniques. And thirdly, it may in fact be impossible toconstruct even inexact descriptions of what the decision-making process and itsoutcomes were because of the shortcomings of the sources, leaving the presen-tation of likely alternatives as the best that can be accomplished.

Besides calling into question the basic narrative integrity of the core navalhistories of the British and American navies, and the methodology that produced

This can be called "consilience of induction," a phrase coined by the nineteenth century philosopherof science William Whewell to describe the practice of coordinating findings from a number ofindependent data sets to reach conclusions about a particular historical pattern, for which see StephenJay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989),p. 282.23   Ibid.

it, the new model monographs and decision-making process analysis approachmake it possible to broaden and sophisticate the study of navies as complexorganizations. Three areas seem likely to become important focal points ofinquiry: the social and cultural context of service and civilian naval decision-making, the role of contingency in the shaping of the course of naval affairs, andthe relationship of the history of navies to general history.

Over the past three decades, several historians of twentieth century navalaffairs have maintained that the socio-cultural characteristics of naval officers asa group have heavily influenced and even determined the course of navalpolicy-making. The naval history literature had for all intents and purposes nottaken account of this factor, and the general proposition that it was an issue ofconsiderable significance is a worthy one. Unfortunately, the exaggeration ofclaims, the dependence upon anecdote rather than the deployment of systematicargument, and inadequate or faulty evidence has compromised much of the value

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of this work, and thus restricted its influence. On the other hand, theproliferation of well founded and conceptually advanced writing on navies asinstitutions will provide the basis for more sensible analyses of the social andcultural context of naval officer behavior, and that of politicians and bureaucratsas well. This should establish socio-cultural analysis as a much larger and moreimportant form of naval history than is currently the case.

A detailed understanding of the organization of navies and the multiple andinterlocking processes that constitute their internal dynamics and relationshipsto other departments of state and the political system in general, may also makeit possible to consider the operation of chance to a far greater extent than hasbeen done in the past. This question has two major aspects. In the first place,such an approach should reveal the extent to which certain kinds of decision-making at the highest level were exposed to disruption by happenings at lowerlevels whose outcomes were unpredictable. In effect, this would amount to theapplication of Clausewitz's concept of friction to non-combatant activity,usefully updated perhaps by contributions from recent work in chaos andcomplexity theory. In the second place, recognition that crucial decisionscould depend upon chance must raise the question of the viability of alternativemajor outcomes. This would mitigate the tendency towards determinism,which would, among other things, perhaps temper the confidence of thoseengaged in historically based prediction for policy purposes.

24 For example, see Robert O'Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S.Navy (Boulder: Westview, 1991).

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1976), book one, chapter seven; James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science(New York: Viking, 1987); M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992);and Donald N. McCloskey, "History, Differential Equations, and the Problem of Narration," HistoryTheory, 30 (1991).

For a provocative exploration of this theme, see Gould, Wonderful Life.

The point of considering alternative outcomes, it needs to be said, is not toindulge in the treacherous practice of "what if history, but rather to gain agreater appreciation of the extent to which naval policy makers were confrontedby a difficult range of choices. Current standard histories typically judge policyor operational outcomes as good or bad, accordingly assign praise or blame tothose held responsible, and sometimes attempt to draw lessons. But if events incertain instances could possibly or even probably have turned out differentlythan they did, decision-makers of the day who in hindsight selected the wrongoptions may be, if not forgiven, at least better understood, and the temptationto moralize resisted. And improved understanding and judgmental restraint inthis area is important, because it may serve as the basis for an assessment oftwentieth century naval policy making as a human organizational activity of notmerely great difficulty, but in its time one of unique formidability. Thisproposition bears directly on the third category of analytical focus, a newperspective on the relation of naval to general history.

From the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth century, the leaders ofmajor navies were confronted by technical, personnel, economic, administrative,and financial problems that were arguably of greater scale, difficulty, andcomplexity than that facing the executives of any other department of state orprivate corporation. Rapid technological change resulted in the swift deprecia-tion of capital, whose periodic replacement by novel and usually larger, morecomplicated, and costlier equipment almost invariably required retraining andupgrading of the work force, improvements in productive capacity, the exten-sion of bureaucracy, and increased expenditure. And higher spending, inparticular, over time was bound to cause serious political complications. It shouldnot, therefore, be surprising that the twentieth century is Uttered with navalerrors of prediction with regard to choice of equipment, warship types, forcestructure, doctrine, tactics, and strategy given the hostile characteristics of theterrain that had to be negotiated.

In the later twentieth century, the problems that had formerly been theexclusive property of navies became more widely distributed as armiesmechanized, air forces expanded and improved, and businesses discovered thattimely responses to increasingly rapid changes in technology were essential forsuccess. Thus the experience of navies, in light of more recent history, may takeon a different appearance. Naval leaders as a group have not infrequently beendepicted as technologically conservative and tradition-bound, and as suchconstituting reactionary subcultures isolated from surrounding progressive in-dustrial society. The present brief survey has attempted to suggest the utility offollowing a different analytical tack—namely, that navies engaged problems ofa kind that would not confront other major organizations until much later, andthat their record of occasional predictive failure should not obscure the fact that

they carried burdens and developed solutions that made them precursors of, andperhaps models for, post-industrial institutional development.

The alterations of master plot, changes in method, extension of the data base,reconceptualization of the subject, and suggested agenda for additional workdescribed in this paper amount to more than revisionism. The phenomenonbeing depicted is not mere improvement or development of a field, but areordering of its basic components to such a degree that its fundamental natureis transformed. Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book on the structure of scientificrevolutions, called such an event a "paradigm shift." For Kuhn, the conceptof a paradigm had multiple aspects, which allowed manifold applications, butessentially it meant a sense of problem-solving program and method that wasthe common intellectual property of an entire field. A paradigm, in other words,defined identity.

Kuhn's model may be applied usefully to the discussion of the present andfuture condition of twentieth naval history as a serious scholarly undertaking. Inthe case of the existing paradigm for naval history, the doing of it involves thestudy of navies in the past without much quibbling over questions of whatpurpose or which procedure. Naval history as such is thus an activity defined bysubject rather than method. Such looseness has had its advantages, for it hasallowed scholars from different historical fields and even different disciplinesaltogether to participate in an occupation that might otherwise have had manyfewer practitioners. There are, however, serious drawbacks. While eclecticismhas enlarged and enriched the field, it has also perforce resulted in a lack of focusand uncertain standards. There is little discussion—let alone agreement—aboutwhat major questions ought to be priority targets of investigation, and whatmethods might or might not be deployed or developed to address them. Andin their absence, important subjects have been mishandled in a variety of ways.

The disparate and uneven quality of the twentieth century naval historicalparadigm, moreover, has been growing. With core naval history presumed tobe settled, and ancillary naval history dismissed and thus neutralized as a majorinfluence, cognate naval history has become by apparent default the only areaof dynamism and growth. This has had two consequences. First, it has reinforcedthe tendency to make the study of naval affairs a sub—department of many otherfields or disciplines, increasing the difficulty of conceiving of naval history as anintellectually coherent activity on its own. And second, in the absence of a soundcore naval history, the development of much cognate naval history has beenlimited or even compromised by insufficient or faulty information and analysisabout basic things.

In addition to the propensity to disintegrate because of the action of internallygenerated centrifugal forces, the existing twentieth century naval historical

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second Edition (Chicago: University ofChicago, 1970; first published 1962).

paradigm has been subjected to strong external pressure via the already describedassaults by the new model monographs on the core naval history. These attacks,at one level, have served a purely destructive purpose by overturning importantsections of the master plot. In this sense, the new model monographs havecorresponded to Kuhn's anomalies—that is, experiments that produce resultsinconsistent with what might be expected if the existing scientific paradigm wassound. The multiplication of anomalies, Kuhn maintained, caused crises thatwere only resolvable by the adoption of a new paradigm that convincinglyaccounted for all or almost all recognized phenomena. The possibility of such aparadigm shift in naval history has been at least indicated by the amount of navalhistorical anomaly produced thus far.

At a second level, however, the new model monographs and the decision-making process analysis approach have gone beyond the generation of anomaliesby providing the groundwork for a basic rearrangement of the present structureof what is now called twentieth century naval history. In the new structure, coreand aspects of ancillary naval history are to be integrated in order to achieve afundamental reconstruction of the former, which in turn should provide sounderfoundations for cognate naval history. The renovation of core naval history willbe no mean task. The problems to be solved—such as the influence of financeon policy, or industrial logistics on strategy—are important, and themethodological instruments necessary to accomplish the solutions— such asstatistical or technical analysis—are in many cases difficult to manipulate. It is anundertaking that cannot be accomplished by a single scholar or even a singlegeneration of scholars. It is, in short, work that is properly the responsibility ofan autonomous field.

Such a field would not supplant what has been called twentieth century navalhistory in its entirety, but take its place within a larger framework that would.For heuristic purposes, the latter might be called 'the historical study of twentiethcentury naval affairs,' while the former would assume the name 'twentiethcentury naval history.' Twentieth century naval history would consist of areformed core supported by ancillary naval history as before. The historical studyof twentieth century naval affairs would constitute an activity that included navalhistory on the one hand, and the various forms of cognate naval history viewedas variants of other historical fields or disciplines on the other. Though navalhistory would be privileged in this arrangement by virtue of the fact that it wasprimarily responsible for the condition of the master plot, upon which cognatenaval history is necessarily heavily dependent, this would not preclude theexertion of strong influence on naval history by cognate history contingent uponcircumstances.

Kuhnian paradigm shift as applied to the transformation of what was formerlycalled twentieth century naval history can now be described. Fundamentally, itis about the emergence of a coherent field of twentieth century naval history

38    Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

separate from what had been called cognate naval history, with its own distinctproblem-solving program and methodology, but still related to cognate navalhistory under what might be called the 'grand field' title of the historical studyof twentieth century naval affairs. The main outcome of such changes shouldbe scholarly study of naval history that is much more dynamic, disciplined, anddirected towards engagement with important issues that would otherwise havebeen ignored. The new naval history, because of the wide disparity betweenarmies and navies with respect to environment and technology, will differ fromthe 'new' social, economic, cultural, etc. military history and even the 'new,new military history' that attempts to synthesize the new contextual military and'old' operational military history. And because of its greater discipline, depth,and sophistication, its proneness to misappropriation by social scientists ofwhatever stripe for the purposes of extravagant theorizing or unrestrainedprognostication should be reduced.

Large gaps in the printed record limit the applicability of many of the newmodel techniques of twentieth century naval history to previous times. Muchof what has been described nevertheless might well be applied with profit toearlier periods. Michael Oppenheim, the great historian of naval administrationas it was practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, investigated hissubject in ways that made him very much a student of pre-industrial machines,men, manufacturing, management, and money. It is thus significant, perhaps,that in 1909 he argued that naval administration was

the somewhat ugly scaffolding without which the building of Naval History isimpossible, and the understanding of it still less possible. That is to say that, in thepast, other things being equal or nearly so, campaigns were won in the dockyardsand administrative departments rather than by the Admirals.

It may be appropriate, therefore, to reason by way of analogy— allowing for thedifferences in the degree of mechanization, and the slower pace of technicalprogress—and suggest that the practice of naval history for at least the sixteenth,seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries may be subject to some of thesame sort of alterations that have been described for that of the industrial period.

2 For a recent exploration of aspects of the new military history, see "Proceedings of the Symposiumon 'The History of War as Part of General History'" at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton,New Jersey," Journal of Military History, 57 [special issue] (October 1993). For the "new, new militaryhistory," see John Childs in The Nine Years' War and the British Army 1688-1697: The Operations in theLow Countries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp.2-3.

Michael Oppenheim to Sir John Fisher, 20 January 1909, quoted in Sumida, "British NavalAdministration and Policy in the Age of Fisher," p. 26.

30 For examples of works that have already proceeded along these lines, see Daniel A. Baugh, BritishNaval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), Jan Glete, Naviesand Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500-1860, (Stockholm: Almqvist& Wiksell International, 1993) 2 volumes, and N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy ofthe Georgian Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986).

Rosenberg and Sumida    39

How quickly changes will come is impossible to predict, but the prospectsfor rapid advance are not fair. There are few historians of naval affairs of anykind to start with, and fewer still who are likely to pursue the course ofscholarship just presented. Moreover, assistant professorships for historians of alldescription are hard to come by, and this is particularly so for those whosesubjects involve armed forces; a significant increase in the number of newacademics committed to the historical study of navies is thus highly unlikely,and this constraint at the entry level is to be especially regretted because thedevelopment of novel ideas and methods suit the temperament and energy ofthe young. And finally, it needs to be said that the new model naval historyrequires the learning of specialized skills and the investment of relatively largeamounts of labor in proportion to the output of publishable work, which mustfurther tend to the discouragement of would-be practitioners.

Doing naval history as it should be done, in conclusion, requires theovercoming of great obstacles, and in this sense it may resemble the actual taskof maintaining and deploying a large and effective fleet. This paper's propositionswith regard to an incipient transformation of program and method may thusserve as no more than a distant beacon. The will to change and confidence inits benefits, upon which most future action will depend, must come from anothersource. This was described by Kuhn, when he wrote that the person "whoembraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of theevidence provided by problem-solving." That individual, he maintained, mustbelieve that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems thatconfront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few." "Adecision of that kind," Kuhn observed, "can only be made on faith."

Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, chapter 12.

Navies, Politics, and Political Science

Robert Jervis

It is the dream—and the nightmare—of a scholar to outline the research agendafor a field about of which he knows little. Political science did not separate fromhistory so very many years ago and scholars in the two fields study many of the samephenomena and read many of each other's works. Nevertheless, our separation isdeep enough so that we sometimes talk in different languages.

How we proceed depends in large part on exactly what questions we aretrying to answer (although of course the reciprocal also is true—the approacheswe use influence the questions we see as interesting and important, sometimesunproductively, as in the law of the instrument, but often productively). Wewill never have one theory of naval history, let alone one theory of history. Astudent of the role of navies in international conflict, for example, will usedifferent concepts, examine different data, and employ different methodologiesthan the person who wants to know how navies influenced and were influencedby conceptions of gender.

The existence of a field of inquiry like naval history implies two things. First,the area is distinct enough from others so that it can be studied in relative isolation.Of course this does not mean that it is totally uninfluenced by what happenselsewhere, but only that we are not doing a terrible injustice to the world wewant to understand by the boundaries we draw, which tell us what we are notgoing to examine. There is something of a paradox here in that we need to beable to isolate the field of naval history on order to study it and yet part of whatmakes the field so interesting is the links it has to many other areas—e.g., foreignpolicy, organizational theory, the uses of technology. Boundaries include as wellas exclude, and the second criteria for a field of study is that the factors and eventsinside it are closely related to each other and to the phenomena we seek tounderstand. There is then some coherence both in the world we are trying toexplain and in the fields of study we have constructed. For Sumida andRosenberg, what makes naval history both coherent and distinctive is that naviesare organizations which touch on, integrate, and embody very different tasksand elements.    In too many previous investigations, the topics of finance,

1 See the essay by Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg in this volume.

manufacturing, and technology have been treated as peripheral if not as outsidethe boundaries. But they are central to navies as organizations and so must bethe focus of naval historians.

Navies As Causes of Foreign Policy and Conflict

It may be useful to think of navies as causes and as effects even though theseparation is simplified and somewhat misleading. Perhaps the first thing astudent of international politics wants to know is what difference naviesmake—i.e., how alternative organizations, technologies, strategies, and tacticscontribute to national power and patterns of international politics. Since we arenot alone in being especially interested in inadvertent and unnecessary wars andthe related question of how the attempts by a state to gain security can makeothers less secure despite the fact that this is not the state's intention (aphenomenon known as the security dilemma), let us take this as the firstexample.

Because states have to rely on self-help in the anarchic international system,they must prepare for conflicts that might arise in the future. Thus, part of themotive for Germany's building a battle fleet in the early twentieth century wasthe fear that Germany eventually would come into conflict with Great Britainand that, absent a fleet, Britain could sever Germany's access to colonies andoverseas trade. Britain, being an island and dependent on the seas, understandablyif not entirely correctly viewed the German fleet as a luxury and, indeed, as inindication of hostile German intentions. To a significant extent, it was. But itwas not entirely hypocritical of German leaders to see the fleet as necessary forself-defense: it would reduce German vulnerability to Great Britain during a warand, for this reason, reduce British leverage over Germany in peacetime. Thesewere legitimate objectives that would have been pursued by even a status quoGermany. Nevertheless, the effect was to decrease British security. This meantthat even if both states desired mutual security, their naval policies would haveincreased the frictions between them. To overstate the case, Germany couldonly be secure if it had a fleet large enough to break a British blockade; Britaincould only be secure if its fleet could sweep all before it and keep the seas openfor British trade. Under some geographical and technological conditions, thesegoals could be compatible. In the early twentieth century they were not.

I have argued elsewhere that if both sides adopted the doctrine of MutualAssured Destruction (MAD) during the Cold War, mutual security could havebeen gained more readily through deployment of SLBMs than by land-basedmissiles.  Because accurate ICBMs can be used to destroy the other side's similar

The literature is very large: much of it is discussed in Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception inInternational Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 62-83.

3 Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics, 30 (January 1978), pp.212-14.

weapons, MAD can be difficult to maintain, especially if the missiles havemultiple warheads. If each side builds more ICBMs to make itself more secure,it will threaten the other side. This is not true for submarine-launched nuclearmissiles. Not only are these relatively invulnerable, but they cannot readily beused to attack each other. Thus, an increase in the number of American SLBMSwould not impinge on Soviet second-strike capability and, under the idealizedassumption of mutual acceptance of MAD, what little military competitionoperated would not increase political frictions and the chance of war.

The other side of this coin is that many of those who criticized the U.S.Maritime Strategy in the 1980s did so on the grounds that it embodied thesecurity dilemma. That is, the forces and tactics called for would menace theSoviet Union even if that country did not have aggressive intentions because itplaced a premium on striking first and called for actions which would have hadthe effect—and sometimes (but only sometimes)—the intent of crippling theUSSR's retaliatory capability.

As the discussion of the Maritime Strategy illustrates, the security dilemmacan operate at the level of tactics as well as strategy. That is, some technologiesand tactics generate incentives to strike first. In such a situation fighting mayoccur even though neither side wants it: each knows that despite a mutualinterest in staying at peace, attacking is much better than receiving the first blow.Because ships are small in number and relatively vulnerable, I suspect that naviesare more prone to destabilizing dynamics of this kind than are armies. Whilethere are cases of isolated inadvertent exchanges between land units, these rarelyspread very far. But ships not only carry more national prestige, they operate infleets and the potential for undesired escalation is very great. Historically, theobvious example is the battle of Navarino, although I grant it would be betterfor my argument if I could readily provide a longer list.

It used to be believed that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a near-miss in thatthe unauthorized activities of the American navy could easily have set off adangerous Soviet response. But on closer examination it appears that the navywas not only quite faithful to civilian instructions, but understanding the clanger,took steps to minimize it. It turns out, however, that the Cold War does giveus a nice example of naval forces increasing the dangers of inadvertent war. TheSoviet and American fleets were dangerously deployed during the October 1973

4 See, for example, John Mearsheimer, "A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrencein Europe," International Security, 11 (Fall 1986), pp. 3-57. Also, James D. Watkins, et. ai, The MaritimeStrategy, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Supplement, (January 1986).

The general situation is well described by the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is closely related to thesecurity dilemma. For a good discussion of how actors can cooperate in such a situation, see KennethOye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Scott Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security, 9(Spring 1985), pp.99-139; Joseph Bouchard, Command in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), chapter4.

Middle East war. Each navy felt—probably correctly—that there were greatincentives to strike first. Thus it appears that war could have grown out of eachfleet's attempts to protect itself. Furthermore, the civilian leaders, at least on theAmerican side, were blissfully unaware of the significance of the naval deploy-

„   8ments.

This brings up two additional related reasons why navies may be especiallyprone to be destabilizing. First, because of technology and traditions, shipcaptains have a great deal of individual autonomy. I also suspect that they aremore prone to ignore orders—after all, it was a naval hero who put the glass tohis blind eye. Of course unauthorized actions may reduce rather than increasethe dangers of inadvertent war: military leaders are often less bellicose than theircivilian counterparts and more aware of the danger of events getting out ofcontrol. But people on the spot are likely to feel great pressures to protect theirmilitary units even if doing so makes the world more dangerous. Second, as the1973 example illustrates, civilian leaders are likely to know and understand evenless about naval plans and behavior than about those of the other armed services.Outsiders find navies especially hard to comprehend and while they are likelyto enjoy photogenic rides on ships, they rarely know what fleets do undereveryday situations, let alone how they will operate in a crisis. Complementingthis civilian ignorance is the fact that, at least in the post-war U.S., naval officersseem to pay less attention to politico-military issues than do their counterpartsin other services. (This fact requires an explanation. One obvious component isthe great stress placed on competence in commanding ships for naval promotionand the concomitant devaluation of time spent in Washington. But whether thiscan be explained by the inherent requirements of navies or whether it is morecultural is an open question. Comparisons to other countries and other periodsof time would be useful.)

Of course countries rarely seek security or other goals unilaterally; alliancesare an essential part of international politics. Here navies play a number ofinteresting roles which we need to know more about. First (although notnecessarily most important), when navies work together the individuals involveddevelop transnational ties which can influence national policy. Each navy canbecome a lobby for the strengthening of the political connections with the other.Furthermore, naval officers in country A may conspire with their colleagues incountry B to get the political leaders of their country to adopt policies that willserve both the national interest as they see it and the interest of their organization(of course these two are likely to be seen as consistent if not identical). Thuscountry A's admirals may put pressure on their government to increase the size

Bouchard, Command in Crisis, chapter 6.

8 Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 475.

Richard Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991).

of their fleet by getting the admirals of country B to persuade B's leaders torequest greater naval support from A. In other cases, the transnational ties mayaffect less visible behavior. Thus it seems that a significant amount of the militaryassistance that the U.S. provided to Great Britain in the Falklands-Malvinas Warnot only went through informal naval channels, but was not explicitly authorizedby the civilian leaders.

On a broader political level, political relations can both influence and beinfluenced by perceived naval requirements, which in turn change with chang-ing technologies, national goals, and international configurations. The need fornaval bases can drive the state to seek either good relations with or thedomination of countries which could menace those bases, even if those countriesare of no intrinsic importance to the state. Of course the existence of good orbad relations with various countries is itself an important determinant of the needfor naval forces, and this in turn influences both the kind of navy that is requiredand the bases that are available and must be sought.

Navies influence domestic politics—and indeed other aspects of domesticlife—as well as foreign affairs. This topic is sufficiently large and far from myexpertise that I only wish to note that it appears to be underappreciated andunderstudied. Since armies often stage coups it is impossible to overlook theirpolitical roles. But just because navies are offshore does not mean they arewithout influence, both direct and indirect. Not only are they potent instrumentsof violence, but they can create or undermine the legitimacy and influence ofgroups and ideologies within the country. Furthermore, they can lead and shapeother institutions by the examples they set and the demands they make on therest of society. In many eras, they are the largest, most complex, and mosttechnically advanced organizations in their countries. Although determiningtheir influence is not likely to be easy, it is never likely to be minor.

Causes of Naval Policy

Dean Acheson once remarked that his already low estimate of political sciencewas lowered still more when he saw a study that treated him as a dependentvariable. "At the very least," he said, "I thought I was an independent variable."But we are interested in what causes navies to develop the way they do as wellas the influence of navies (and, as previously noted, the relations often arereciprocal). Somewhat artificially, we can divide naval policy into procurement,strategy, tactics and, although it is not quite on the same level and indeedinfluences the first three, propensity to innovate. These interact to produce navalcapability. They in turn are influenced by the state's external environment,domestic politics, bureaucratic politics, and the autonomous beliefs and valuesof the decision-makers.    Technology and organizational culture are also crucial

This typology of causal factors is the classic—for international relations scholars—division into levelsof analysis, first articulated by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia

and, to some extent, intervene between the causes I have listed and the aspectsof naval policy we are trying to explain. We can summarize this scheme asfollows:

| EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT  |                       | PROCUREMENT           |            |
|-----------------------|-----------------------|-----------------------|------------|
| DOMESTIC POLITICS     | TECHNOLOGYAVAILABLE   | STRATEGY              | CAPABILITY |
| BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS | ORGANIZATIONALCULTURE | TACTICS               |            |
| DECISION-MAKING       |                       | PROPENSITYTO INNOVATE |            |

Although the diagram does not provide any answers, it does frame a numberof questions about the connections that operate. Of course almost everything isconnected to everything else, and in an earlier draft of this paper I drew in thearrows only to find that they filled the page. But a few connections are absentand others are weak. Earlier I talked about naval policy and foreign policy. Thelatter to some extent influences if not dictates the former, but only at the mostgeneral level. The development of tactics presumably is related to the identityof the adversary only to the extent that different potential adversaries havedifferent kinds of navies. Some connections are important but indirect andobscure, however. Navies often choose among competing tactics, and to theextent that different naval leaders would choose differently, anything that affectsthe identity of the leaders can affect the tactics adopted. General foreign policycan certainly influence who is selected for top positions, and so the choice oftactics could be an unintended by-product of foreign policy disputes. Anotherindirect linkage is that a popular foreign policy could encourage militaryspending and produce a large pool of manpower for the navy. This, in turn,could make certain tactics attractive.

The role of domestic politics is also greater in some aspects of naval policythan others. In pre-World War I Germany, the growing middle class supportedand benefitted from a large navy and in post-War America congressional districtswith many naval bases had an interest in maintaining a large fleet. But weprobably do not need to delve into these matters if we are focusing on the ways

University Press, 1959). Also see Arnold Wolfers, "The Actors in International Politics," in Discord andCollaboration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 3-24. The division into fourlevels is taken fromjervis, Perception and Misperception, chapter 1.

in which new technologies were adopted or the interaction of individuals ofvarying ethnicities and class backgrounds in the ship-bome societies.

Students of arms races—at least of certain methodological and ideologicalpersuasions—see each state's military as responding to the other. In this model,the country and each of its armed services is vigilandy looking outward at theadversary, analyzing what others are doing, adapting its behavior to maximizethe chances of winning the next war, and in general responding to externalpressures and opportunities. Quite a different view sees countries as a whole,military organizations in general, and perhaps navies in particular as being guidednot by the outside world but by internal impulses. To what extent, then, arenavies, like many other bureaucracies, operating on auto-pilot? When and underwhat conditions do they follow their own impulses, cultures, and conceptionsof interest with little regard for what other countries and other navies are doing?To what extent do navies know what their adversaries are doing and how theywill fight? Is such information diligently sought, adequately processed, andaccurately assessed? Or are views of the external world rationalizations morethan rationales?

It should be noted, however, that even if the sources of naval conduct areinternal, there may be important external effects, which in turn feed back andaffect the state's security and naval policy. Thus even if Wilhelmine Germanydeveloped a strong navy in part to strengthen the regime domestically, this actionchanged the international environment and menaced Great Britain. The effectis especially pronounced because not only are states generally slow to see thatothers are being driven by domestic concerns, but they are prone to "worst caseanalysis" which justifies their assuming that the latter's arms will be directedagainst them no matter what its motives are.

Innovation

It is a commonplace that navies are even more hide-bound than mostbureaucracies. Even if this characterization is correct, it may be a blessing fornational policy, especially if other navies behave similarly. The country, and theworld, might not be better off if military organizations were quicker to developingenious methods of destruction. But, assuming the characterization is true, wewant to know what the reasons are. Is conservatism impelled by the requirementsof building and running ships and fleets? Or is the explanation more sociologi-cal—the nature of the personnel recruited, the promotion system used, or thekind of close-knit society that almost inevitably develops among a group ofpeople who interact mostly with each other?

If either of these determinisms operates, we would expect navies of onecountry to resemble navies of others, especially in their conservatism. This, in

For a good discussion, see Wesley Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany,1933-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

48     Navies, Politics, and Political Science

turn, would mean that there would be nothing particularly German about theGerman navy or American about the American navy. This would simplify ourscholarship: to understand the navy we are studying, we would not have to delvedeeply into the political or cultural characteristics of the society at large.

It seems likely that navies, as other organizations, are more prone to adoptinnovations swiftly if they assist the organization in better carrying out a missionit already sees as central than if the innovation serves a mission that is new,different, and, especially, conflictive with established ones. Adopting a betterairplane is relatively easy; adopting aircraft at all is not. Such developmentsrequire large and ramifying changes and call into question the ideas, machinery,and personal power hierarchies that previously dominated the organization.These barriers are common to all organizations; two further ones are potentwithin the military.

First, it is particularly difficult for them to test the environment by small-scale

experiments because the true value of the proposed innovation can be known

only through combat. Second, as Edward Katzenbach has stressed in his fine

study of the cavalry's resistance to the introduction of tanks, for men to fight

well they must have faith in their weapons and tactics.    Touting the new means

and denigrating the old, it is not surprising that people will be slow to see the

flaws in the systems on which they have been relying for their survival. But, on

occasion, large innovations, somewhat akin to paradigm shifts in scholarship, do

occur. The most obvious explanation for them is extreme external pressure:

organizations only undergo radical changes when they have to. When the

international environment is relatively calm, military organizations are more or

less left on their own and can do what they please; when war becomes more

1 "\probable, civilian leaders intervene and upset established routines.     But this

view may underestimate the internal sources of military innovation. Organiza-tional maintenance is not always the highest priority; officers do realize that theyneed to win the next war. This debate has been conducted largely within thecontext of ground and air forces. Examining this question for navies, althoughnot any more likely to yield definitive answers, should be valuable by explicatingthe links, or lack thereof, among the external environment, internal perspectivesand interests, and naval behavior. It should help tell us the extent to which thenavy is following its organizational imperatives and is acting in a world of itsown.

12 Edward Katzenbach, "The Horse Cavalry in the Twentieth Century: A Study on Policy Response,"in Carl Friedrich and Seymour Harris, eds., Public Policy (Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of PublicAdministration, 1958), pp. 120-50.

Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

14 Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modem Military (Ithaca. CornellUniversity Press, 1991).

Jervis    49

But we should not overlook the element of chance and accident in innova-tion. Often a fundamental change is made possible by previous developmentsthat were pursued for other reasons. Organizations produce an array of innova-tion candidates whose fates may be determined by how they coincide withessentially unrelated problems and opportunities. Thus the chances of adoptinga newly-developed safety device will be increased if an accident occurs even ifthe device would not have prevented the accident. To take a naval example,SLBMs would not have been possible without nuclear-powered submarines.Yet the latter were not developed with the former in mind. Although this mayreflect my own ignorance, it is far from clear to me that it would have beenworthwhile for the U.S. to have developed nuclear submarines had not SLBMsbeen developed later; anti-submarine warfare efforts might have been betterpursued with other instruments. If this line of argument is correct, then neitherthe external environment nor internally-generated impulses of the bureaucracyentirely determine what will happen. This may reduce the extent to which wecan generalize, which would just show the importance of history and the limitsof political science.

15 See Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, "A Garbage Can Model of OrganizationalChoice," Administrative Science Quarterly, 17 (March 1972), pp. 1-25; James March and Johan Olsen,Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1976); for an excellentdiscussion and critique, see Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, 3rd ed. (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1986), pp. 131-54.

PART IIDomestic Politics

Navies and Domestic Factors

Volker Berghahn

If one tries to discover a dominant perspective that pervades military historyas a genre, it is probably fair to say that most scholars stress the role armedforces play in the context of a particular country's external security. Armies,navies, and air forces exist and overwhelmingly tend to be justified, by contem-poraries as well as retrospective historians, as defensive establishments againstexternal enemies. This interpretation sounds particularly plausible to those whostart from the assumption that to this day the international system is anarchic andruled by the principle of cut-throat competition among the nation states thatemerged from the Peace of Westphalia. In this Social Darwinist world, it isargued, some states will always be tempted, in the absence of a central policingauthority, to move into perceived power vacuums around them. In this casearmed forces are created and maintained for the purpose of external conquest.And they will be successful, if their neighbors cannot defend themselves and/orfail in maintaining a balance of power, often in alliance with others, against thepresumed aggressor.

This "primacy of foreign policy" perspective has been challenged many timesby those who argue that a nation's foreign and security policy is much less, andcertainly not exclusively, determined by external pressures. It could even beargued that during the 1960s and 1970s the balance of scholarly activity swungin the opposite direction when the advocates of the "primacy of domesticpolitics" approach began to gain ground. In the United States, this latter approachwas most powerfully represented by the Williams School. While William A.Williams was concerned with the overall design of American foreign policy sincethe eighteenth century, the most heated debates arose over the question of theorigins and propellants of the Cold War. Here it was the "revisionists" who, ina number of studies, put the case against those who had seen U.S. diplomacyand security policy during the Cold War period as a defensive response to Soviet

1 A now classic statement of this view of international politics can be found in Ludwig Dehio's book"Equilibrium or Hegemony" whose English translation appeared in 1963 under the less telling titlePrecarious Balance. But it can also be spotted in most books on international history and politics thatespouse geopolitical and realpolitische approaches. L. Dehio, Precarious Balatice: Four Centuries of theEuropean Power Struggle (New York: Vintage, 1965).

expansionism and imperialism. In the long-term this particular controversy hasbeen moving toward a position that stresses the interaction of domestic andexternal factors. Moreover, its protagonists have focused on the tendency ofdecision-makers to overestimate foreign threats and to assume the worst case;they have introduced social-psychological factors and refused to see foreignpolicy-making as something that is predetermined by the unchanging "laws" ofan anarchic international system. Indeed, they say it is only with the benefit ofhindsight that the aggressiveness of another power turns out to have been lessserious than had been assumed at the time.

While this appears to be a more widely accepted view among experts ofAmerican foreign and security policy, the debate on German foreign policy hastaken a different turn. Here the rise of the "primacy of domestic politics" schoolin the 1960s and 1970s did not end in an intermediate position. Prominent andinfluential analysts have revived Dehio's notions of power-politics and onceagain highlighted Germany's situation "in the middle of Europe." This returnto the positions of the 1950s is based on an unfortunate ignoring of researchresults and has blocked the kind of developments that have taken place withregard to the Cold War debate in the U.S. The overall thrust of this essay istherefore to appeal to the protagonists of the "primacy of foreign policy" toadvance toward more sophisticated approaches that incorporate domestic factors.The appeal is by implication also directed at military and naval historians whotend to start from the above-mentioned Social Darwinist vision of the interna-tional system and whose tools of analysis have hence remained rather traditional.

The case for the importance of domestic factors can be made most plausiblyfor the land forces of the great powers in Europe prior to 1914; for it is oftenforgotten that armies have never been just instruments for waging external war.They were always also available for civil war; they could be moved against aforeign enemy, but tended to be no less well prepared to quell domestic unrestand revolutionary movements. Governments and professional military of thenineteenth century were acutely aware of this function of their land forces, andthe experience of the 1848 Revolutions acted as a powerful incentive not toignore it. While the military archives of European powers contain relevantmaterial on this subject, the best documented case in point is probably that of

See, e.g., W. Lippmann, The Cold War (New York: Harper, 1947); H. Feis, From Trust to Terror (NewYork: Norton, 1970); W.A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy 2nd edition. (New York: Dell,1972); G. Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1972); Lloyd Gardner, Architects ofIllusion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).

3 See, e.g., J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); idem., TheLong Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

4 H.-U. Wehler, The German Empire (Leamington Spa: Berg Publ., 1985); K. Hildebrand, "Staatskunstoder Systemzwang," Historische Zeitschrift, 228 (1979), pp. 624fT; D. Calleo, The German ProblemReconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); M. Sturmer, Das ruhelose Reich (Berlin:Severin & Siedler, 1983); G. Schollgen, Escape into War> (Oxford: Berg Publ., 1990).

the Prusso-German Army. In light of Germany's exposed geopolitical positionin the heart of Europe, it is also the most telling case when we remember thatReich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and his military advisers always claimedto be haunted by the "nightmare of hostile foreign coalitions" and for this reasonhad repeatedly argued for increased defense expenditure. However, in the 1890sthis argument largely disappeared from the arsenal of the professional officercorps and did so for a full quarter of a century. There were no increases in defensespending to deal with foreign threats and Germany's exposed position in theheart of Europe. It was only after twenty-five years of stagnation that sharpincreases in Army expenditure were once more demanded and approved in1912-13. How can this be explained? Could it be that domestic considerationseven came to outweigh diplomatic ones?

In his memoirs, published in 1933, General Karl von Einem, the PrussianWar Minister between 1903 and 1909, blamed the civilian government and theReich Parliament for a policy of inaction that he now argued had had disastrousconsequences for Germany's military power in World War I. Einem hadconveniently forgotten that it had been the Army itself that had adopted thispolicy after the last major Army bill of 1893. Indeed, around the turn of centuryhe, at this time still a department head in the Prussian War Ministry, had railedat the "rage de nombre" that he believed motivated Alfred von Schlieffen, Chiefof the General Staff. Later, as War Minister, he let repeated opportunities slipby to increase the size of the Army. In 1905 he wrote for Schlieffen's benefit along "Clarification of My Views on the Future Development of the Army"which he said had the support of both the Kaiser and the Chief of the Military

Q

Cabinet.   As Einem put it:

Both from the point of view of the formation of new units and the establishmentof new troops, the development of the Army can, at the present time, be regardedas being by and large complete. The question of whether the number of cadres issufficient to meet the case of war can, in my view, on the whole be answered inthe affirmative. This also applies to the further question of whether the numberof soldiers is large enough to secure the adequate strength of the existing cadresas well as the training of sufficient recruits so that the required reserve and Landwehrunits may be formed in the case of war.

In 1909, Einem was still arguing against the "people who never cease wantingto expand the Army." That this was also the position of his successor, GeneralJosias von Heeringen, is evidenced by a letter he wrote to Reich Chancellor

5 V.R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871-1914 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1994), pp.261ff.

6 Karl von Einem, Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (Leipzig: F.F. Koehler, 1933), pp.59f.

Quoted in Germany. Reichsarchiv. Kriegsriistung und Kriegswirtschaft (Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1930), vol.I, pp. 65f.

8 Quoted in Kriegsriistung und Kriegswirtschaft, vol. II, pp.90f.

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in 1910. He confirmed that he had no plansto increase the size of the Army, although Germany's international situation didnot look at all comfortable. In 1904 the Entente Cordiale had been formedbetween England and France. Three years later this arrangement had beenextended to an Anglo-Russian accord. Since France was also allied to Russia,an alliance system that many Germans by then perceived as an "encirclement"was complete. So, if the "primacy of foreign policy" was really the all-motivatingforce, Heeringen might have done something to strengthen the Army. Insteadhe wrote to Bethmann: "I do not have to explain to Your Excellency the reasons

for this [inaction] which, military considerations apart, belong to the realm of

i. .     „10politics.

The political considerations emerge from Einem's memorandum of 1905 inwhich had admitted to Schlieffen that there were "weaknesses and gaps" and inparticular "a not inconsiderable shortage of officers." This shortage could, ofcourse, be overcome, but only at the cost of lowering "the standards regardingfamily background etc. of officer aspirants." If such a policy were adopted,however, "we can no longer prevent acceptance, on an increased scale, ofdemocratic and other elements which are not suited to the officer class." Einemadded that for the same reason it was dangerous to increase the intake of ordinaryconscripts which would similarly "weaken the Army."

It is not too difficult to see what the Kaiser and his military advisors wereworried about. They feared that a further expansion of the Army wouldundermine the homogeneity of the officer corps in which the percentage ofaristocratic and devoutly conservative officers had already experienced a declinefor lack of suitable candidates. An influx of officers of bourgeois backgroundwas thought to create problems not in a foreign war, but in the eventuality ofinternal unrest. Could bourgeois officers, possibly from liberal families, be reliedupon to give tough orders to shoot on demonstrators, strikers, or insurgents?Ordinary recruits caused similar concerns among the arch-conservative officercorps. In an age of rapid demographic change, industrialization, and urbanizationa growing number of those who were drafted into the Army came fromworking-class background. Would these soldiers not refuse to obey orders in acivil war when asked to move against fellow-workers behind the barricades?Clearly, if in the hour of serious domestic crisis the Army could no longer berelied upon to defend the existing order, the monarchical system would bedoomed. It was this nightmare that led Einem and his colleagues to pursue theirpeculiar armaments policy after the mid-1890s.

9 Quoted in V.R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-FHan (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971), p. 269.

10 Quoted in Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan, p. 270.

Quoted in Kriegsrustung und Kriegswirtschaft, vol. II, pp. 90f.

M.   Messerschmidt,  Militar und Politik in  der Bismarckzeit und im   Wilhclminischen  Dcutschland(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Bunchgeselleschaft, 1975).

The Prusso-German case may be particularly glaring; but it is safe to assume

that similar considerations were also in the minds of Army leaders in other

countries. At a time of growing working-class organization and radical talk about

the impending "revolution" the function of armies in Europe was patently not

just for external defense, but was equally directed against the 'internal enemy'.

All officers,  and the Prusso-German ones in particular,  had their written

instructions in their top-drawers, telling them what to do in the event of strikes

1 %and civil disturbance.     Their counterparts, especially in the monarchies of

Europe, were similarly briefed on what to do in such cases.

At first glance, it seems more difficult to make a similar case about navieshaving a clearly recognizable domestic function. War ships are not suitable forfighting civil wars, except perhaps in marginal operations, such as the shellingof insurgent towns in coastal waters. The conclusion that naval historians havetended to draw from this is that naval armaments are the clearest and mostunambiguous reflection of the "primacy of foreign policy." Ships are builtbecause of a perceived need to acquire or to protect overseas possessions and todefend the country against an external aggressor. This is also how Admiral AlfredTirpitz justified the stepping-up of ship-building in Germany from 1897, andso did historians of the interwar years and of the post-1945 period. WaltherHubatsch was the prime protagonist of this position in the 1950s. JiirgenRohwer and others made this case in subsequent decades, mainly by conductingelaborate comparisons with the building programs of other European countriesto which, they maintain, Tirpitz merely reacted defensively, demanding no morethan a 'measure' of sea power to protect Germany's overseas commercial interestsand small colonial empire.

The problem with this position was that the German Navy files, fullyaccessible to research for the first time only since the 1960s, told a different story,even if looked at from the angle of the "primacy of foreign policy." There was,to begin with, the blunt memorandum that Tirpitz produced for the Kaiser inJune 1897 in which he pinpointed Britain, the first sea power, as Germany's"most dangerous enemy" against whom any naval building ultimately had to bedirected. Subsequent work showed that Tirpitz wanted to build, until 1920and in several carefully calculated smaller steps, some sixty capital ships to beconcentrated in front of the Royal Navy's doorstep.    Should the British try to

13 W. Deist, "Die Armee in Staat und Gesellschaft, 1890-1914," in M. Sturmer, ed., Das kaiserlicheDeutschland (Dusseldorf: Droste Athenaum, 1970), pp. 312-39.

A. von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig: K.F. Koehler, 1929), pp. 79ff.

15 See, e.g., W. Hubatsch, Die Ara Tirpitz (Berlin: Musterschmidt Verlag, 1955).

16 J. Rohwer, "Kriegsschiffbau und Flottengesetze urn die Jahrhundertwende," in H. Schottelius andW. Deist, eds., Marine und Marinepolitik, 1871-1914 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1973), pp. 211-35.

17 Quoted in J. Steinberg, Yesterday's Deterrent (London: Macdonald, 1965), Appendix.

18 See V.R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan.

launch an attack against the Reich, this battle fleet, in line with accepted doctrineon relative strengths required in a naval engagement, was to have a "genuinechance of victory'* in the North Sea. If, on the other hand, the Royal Navy didnot start a war, the sheer size of the German battle-fleet was to be used by theKaiser and his advisors as a power-political lever with which they expected towring territorial concessions from the British at the negotiating table. At a timewhen old empires, like the Portuguese one, were crumbling and many peopleexpected a "reordering of the world," the Kaiser wanted to be able to raise hisvoice and to bully other powers into making concessions.

Klaus Hildebrand was among those who in the 1970s drew attention to theradical character of Tirpitz's program. This program amounted, he argued, tonothing less than a move to revolutionize the international system either byshifting the existing balance of power, so to speak, in one afternoon during thevictorious battle against the Royal Navy in the North Sea or through insistentdemands to be allocated sizeable colonial possessions. German naval andWeltpolitik, Hildebrand concluded, was "quite certainly" inspired by "revolu-tionary intentions." The Kaiser and his advisors wanted to "shake the global PaxBritannica" and to effect a new balance of power in the world. He also had nodoubt that this design had disastrous consequences for Germany and the rest ofthe world. It triggered the Anglo-German arms race, once the British becameaware of Germany's "revolutionary challenge," before the naval competitionescalated into a general race on land that involved all the major powers of theEuropean continent. The Tirpitz Plan thus became a key factor in the outbreakofWorldWarl.

Hildebrand never investigated the question as to why the Kaiser and hisadvisors should, at the turn of the century, have promoted a naval armamentspolicy that was admittedly designed to overthrow the international status quo.There was, of course, an explanation, first put forward in the 1920s by theGerman historian Eckart Kehr, that might have merited further inquiry.According to this view, the Imperial government decided to challenge theinternational distribution of power in order to avoid having to change thedomestic status quo that had increasingly come under pressure from reformistforces that demanded a modernization and parliamentarization of the by thenold-fashioned Prusso-German constitutional order of 1871. But instead ofgrappling with this view, Hildebrand in effect joined forces with anotherinfluential historian, Michael Sturmer.    The latter had rediscovered for some

19 K. Hildebrand, "Imperialisms, Wettriisten und Kriegsausbruch," Neue Politische Literatur, 2 (1975),pp. 160-94; ibid., 3 (1975), pp. 339-64.

See E. Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics in Germany (Chicago, 1973); idem., "Anglophobiaand Weltpolitik," in Kehr, ed., Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1977).

21   M. Sturmer, "Deutscher Flottenbau und europaische Weltpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg," in

time the geopolitical arguments of the 1950s and "the deeply pessimistic powertheory of Friedrich Meinecke, Ludwig Dehio, [and] Gerhard Ritter." Accord-ingly Stunner had begun to publish books on Germany as "the land in themiddle" and spoke of the country's difficult and exposed position in the heartas a tragic "conditio Borussica".

Above all, Stunner began to polemicize against a "modern school of his-toriography that believes in the 'primacy of domestic politics' and presents it asa doctrine," lumping its advocates together with representatives of "Marxist andvulgar-Marxist theorems." This school, he asserted, "draws from the 'criticaltheory' of the Frankfurt School. . . the idea of a society optimized by socialscience [einer sozialunssenschaftlich optimierten Gesellschaft], with external relationsthat are fundamentally peaceful." Whoever takes such a view, Sturmer con-cluded, has little understanding for notions of power politics. He confronts"manifestations of power, hunger for power, and the disintegration of powerspeechlessly and without analytical tools. Hubris and nemesis cannot be foundin the name index of this kind of historiography."

Stunner's and Hildebrand's intellectual trajectories from the 1960s to the 1980swill be of considerable interest to future historians of postwar German historicalwriting. Overall their return to the positions of Dehio and Ritter will have to beseen in the larger context of the "conservative turn" that many West Germanhistorians completed in this period. It is certainly no coincidence that both of themplayed a prominent role in the Historikerstreit and have been laboring hard to diminishthe influence of leftist and liberal historians and to help create a new historicalconsciousness—a key concern that emerged from the debate on Ernst Nolte'shypotheses concerning the origins and status of the Holocaust in modern history.

The trouble is that, just as Nolte had to ignore tangible evidence relating tothe Nazi "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," Sturmer chose to overlookprimary material on the calculations underlying the Kaiser's naval armamentsprogram held at the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg. This material showedthat the Tirpitz Plan had, if nothing else, a dual purpose: It was to challenge theRoyal Navy and the international status quo in the way that has already beenexplained. But it was also to shield the German Navy from the legislative powersof the Reichstag. The building of the above-mentioned sixty battle ships wasprojected in such a way that an Aetemat, an iron budget, would be establishedat the end of the building period. This would have created for the Kaiser alarge monarchical zone that was free from interference by the legislature. An

Deutsches Marine-Institut, ed., Die deutsche Flotte im Spannungsfeld der Politik, 1848-1985 (Herford: E.S.Mitder & Sohn, 1985), pp. 57f., also for the following.

On recent trends in West German historiography and the so-called Historikerstreit, see RJ. Evans,In Hitler's Shadow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); C.S. Maier, The Vnmasterable Past (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); P. Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).23  V.R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan, pp. 170ff.

Aetemat would have made certain that the naval budget could not be reducedby a majority vote in Parliament. Its power to appropriate resources on a regularbasis would have been decisively undermined. The Kaiser as the supremecommander of the Navy could have used it as he saw fit in international politics,without having to fear budgetary sanctions from deputies that disapproved ofhis use of the Navy.

The Aetemat question has to be seen in the larger context of another domesticfactor, i.e., the universal suffrage in Germany. For reasons of his own which hadnothing to do with the idea of democracy, Bismarck had introduced the suffragefor all males over twenty-four when he founded the Reich. He and even moreso his successors bitterly came to regret this step. For, while Bismarck hadcounted on the conservative vote of the agrarian population that he, the Prussianlandowner knew so well, the momentous industrialization and urbanization ofGermany in the final decades of the ninteenth century had created an urbanproletariat that did not vote conservative. Worse, a growing number ofGermany's working men voted for the Social Democrats who spoke of radicalchange and even revolution. Small wonder that the Reich government, and thepolitical forces supporting it, increasingly came to worry about the day whenthe Social Democrats might attract a majority of the voters and its representativesmight refuse to accept, or amend beyond recognition, bills that were crucial tothe conduct of government. Small wonder also that far-sighted politicians likeTirpitz tried to forestall precisely such a situation by immunizing the naval budgetfrom cuts by a left-wing Reichstag majority.

This is why the Kaiser's proposed navy has been called a "fleet against twoparliaments," the British and the German one. The link between the two wasnot just a power-political one in the international sense, i.e., a challenge to theRoyal Navy and Britain's global position; it was also a constitutional one. Unlikeits British counterpart, the German Reichstag was not the power center of thepolitical system. The prerogatives of the crown under Prusso-German con-stitutionalism were still decisively greater than those of, say, Queen Victoria, theKaiser's grandmother. In the eyes of the Kaiser and his advisors everything hadto be done to preserve this state of affairs. For Reichstag deputies, on the otherhand, who were not arch-conservative monarchists, the British parliamentarysystem, whose members participated in the nomination of the executive and hadthe a say in crucial decisions of the state, had long appeared as a goal to workfor. Tirpitz's response to these aspirations that were not lost on him was to tryto block and to divert them toward the grandiose vision of a "great overseaspolicy." As he put it in 1895:26

24 T.S. Hamerow, "The Origins of Mass Politics in Germany, 1866-1867," in I. Geiss and B.-J. Wendt,eds., Deutschland in der Weltpolitik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Diisseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1973), pp.105-20.

25 V.R. Berghahn, Riistung und Machtpolitik (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1973), p. 32.

In my view Germany will quickly sink back from her position as a great powerin the coming century, if we do not now promote energetically, expeditiously,and systematically our general maritime interests, to no small degree also becausethere lies, in the new great national task and the economic gains to accrue fromit, a strong palliative against educated and uneducated Social Democrats.

It may be argued that Tirpitz's concerns with domestic politics and the threatof parliamentarization and democratization are uniquely German. British orFrench naval ministers, by contrast, who were answerable to their nationalassemblies in the first place, can be assumed to have been much less worriedabout parliamentary interference in their building plans although closer scrutinyis likely to reveal resentments and attempts to contain deputies' "meddling" inmilitary matters. However, it may be hypothesized that the monarchical govern-ments of Austria-Hungary and Russia were strongly moved by internal con-siderations when they looked at naval appropriations and at how the demandfor, and spread of, representative government might sooner or later affect theirmonarch's power position in the field of naval armaments. In short, the questionthat confronted Tirpitz might with profit also be posed when analyzing othernational experiences with "navies and domestic factors."

There is yet another such factor that the modern naval historian should befully informed of: finance and taxation. The mobilization of military means ofviolence raises for any complex society the question of how the material andfinancial resources for the build-up are to be extracted. This in turn willunavoidably result in domestic disagreements over how much a society shouldspend on armaments and how this expenditure is to be distributed on differentshoulders in the shape of direct and indirect taxes. The pre-1914 Anglo-Germannaval arms race offers a particularly instructive lesson in the importance of thisperspective.

However, ambitious, indeed megalomaniac, Germany's pre-1914 navalpolicy may appear to have been with the benefit of hindsight, its protagoniststhought that it had been carefully designed in terms of all its implications. Thisapplied also to the financial sacrifices that the building of a sixty-ship battle fleetwould require from the German people. Created at a time of economic boomand general optimism about the country's future, the revenue from indirect taxeswas expected to cover all the current costs of the naval budget, while loans wereto provide for any additional expenditure. With the Army, for reasons thathave been outlined above, refraining from additional claims on the Reich

26 Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, p. 52.

27 D. Geyer, Russian Imperialism. The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914 (New York:Berg, 1987), esp. pp. 249ff. It is also interesting that Tirpitz's idea of an Iron Budget aroused the interestof other naval ministries in Europe.

28 See M. Geyer, Deutsche Rustungspolitik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984).

29 Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan, pp. 27Iff.

budget, the introduction of higher agricultural tariffs in 1902 was expected toput all military expenditure on a sound basis. Since the expansion of the numberof ships was staggered over a longer time-span, the growth in the budget was tobe made good by the anticipated growing tax revenue.

Unfortunately for Tirpitz the actual development of the early years of thetwentieth century turned out to be different. To begin with, growth in revenuewas not as fast as expected. But what put Tirpitz's optimistic calculations of theturn of the century into a fatal tail-spin was that Britain, suspicious of what theGermans were up to, added a qualitative dimension to the quantitative navalarms race that had gotten underway by about 1903. With the British decisionto build the Dreadnought, Tirpitz, in order to keep up with the Royal Navy,not only had to build more and more ships, which he had calculated he couldmanage; rather London now also engaged him in a competition to build biggerand bigger ships.

Worse from a budgetary point of view, they were more and more expensiveships. By 1907, it was clear that the next navy bill would require resources thatcould no longer be raised through the Reich's system of indirect taxes. Directtaxes on wealth and income also had to be increased. The stage had thus beenset for a major political battle: indirect taxes—so far the mainstay of navalfinance—had hit the mass of the population harder than the well-to-do.Working-class families spent a major percentage of their weekly budget on food.Once rent and other necessities had been deducted, little was left for savings andleisure. This is why higher grain tariffs had imposed greater burdens on the poorthan on the rich whose expenditure percentages on food were considerablylower. The penny on the loaf of bread had thus become a critical issue. Someof the revenue for the next navy bill had to be taken from the wealthy throughhigher income taxes and death duties.

Knowing that an equalization of the burdens of armaments were a politicalnecessity, if a revolt of the voters and a further leftward shift in domestic politicswas to be avoided, Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow prepared a financebill that was to raise some 500 million marks. Four-fifths of the sum was to belevied by higher indirect taxes on tobacco, beer, and other "small pleasures" ofthe "little man." The rest, 100 million in all, was to be taken from the rich bymeans of a Reich death duty. The alternative would have been to abandon thenaval arms race with Britain, as the shipping-magnate Albert Ballin had suggestedin 1908. Fully aware of the dangers, both foreign and domestic, of a stepped-uparms race, he warned that "we cannot afford a race in dreadnoughts against themuch wealthier British."' However, this solution was even more unpalatableto the Kaiser and his advisors than raising a direct tax on the rich.

30 Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan, pp. 419ff.

31 Quoted in V.R. Berghahn, "Naval Armaments and Social Crisis in Germany before 1914," in G. Bestand A. Wheatcroft, eds., War, Ecotwmy and the Military Mind (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 71.

Before we look at the outcome of the huge struggle that ensued in 1909 overBillow's finance bill, it is worth remembering that Britain was faced with verysimilar questions. Her situation was exacerbated by the fact that the Liberals,who had come to power in 1905, were also wedded to introducing a socialinsurance system. Having failed to achieve budgetary relief with the help of aninternational agreement to reduce armaments, largely because—significantlyenough—the Kaiser refused to go along, the Liberal Cabinet in London adopteda solution that War Minister Richard Haldane had outlined in 1908. "Weshould," he argued, "boldly take our stand now on the facts and proclaim apolicy of taking, mainly by direct taxation, such a toll from the increase andgrowth of wealth in this country as will enable us to provide (1) the increasingcost of social reform, (2) national defense, and (3) a margin in aid of the sinkingfund." In short, the additional financial burdens were to be put squarely on theshoulders of the well-to-do tax-payers. Haldane also had a rationale for thisstrategy. "It will," he added, "commend itself to many timid people as abulwark against a nationalization of wealth."

This was also Bulow's argument on the other side of the English Channelwhen he launched his elaborate propaganda campaign to sell his tax package.Unless the rich, for the first time, bore a slightly fuller share of militaryexpenditure, the injustices of the tax system would be grist to the mills of theSocial Democrats. Hearing a compelling argument about who it was who refusedto bear his share, voters would move to the Left in ever larger numbers. TheReich government, unable to cobble together acceptable majorities in theReichstag, would find it even more difficult to get legislation passed. Theexecutive would be paralyzed and be forced to rule by decree. In a letter ofAugust 1908, the Reich Chancellor wrote that the government must do itsutmost to "convince the German people that morally and materially, this reformis matter of life and death** for the country.

He quickly ran into the fierce opposition of the Conservatives whose votershad much to lose from higher direct taxation. As their leader, Ernst vonHeydebrand und der Lasa expressed it, direct tax rights must not fall "into thehands of a parliamentary body elected on the basis of equal suffrage." WhatBiilow was proposing was thus the thin end of the wedge. It had to be preventedat all cost to close the door on a future expropriation of the wealthy by meansof a steep progression in direct taxes. The Conservatives introduced an alterna-tive budget which contained no direct taxes. Instead 400 million marks were to

Quoted in P.M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism (London: George Allen andUnwin, 1980), p. 335.

33 See P.-C. Witt, Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschen Reiches von 1903 bis 1913 (Lubeck: Matthiesen Verlag,1970), pp. 199ff.

34 Quoted in: P.-C. Witt, "Reichsfinanzen und Riistungspolitik, 1898-1914," in Schottelius and Deist,Marine und Marinepolitik, 1871-1914,p. 162.

be raised through higher consumer taxes and stamp duties; the remaining 100million marks were to be contributed by the Federal states. When this budgetfound a majority and Billow's was narrowly defeated, the Reich Chancellor hadlittle choice but to resign.

Reich finances continued to be in a weak state, unleashing major conflicts inthe government between those who believed that the Tirpitz Plan offeredGermany's only hope for a successful future among the great powers and thosewho wanted to reduce the naval build-up and come to an understanding withBritain, Tirpitz's arch enemy. Worse were the electoral repercussions. Manyvoters were so disgusted with what the Conservatives had done that theyregistered their protest at the next poll by supporting parties which had opposedthe Conservative bill. The first ominous signs of a rebellion could be detectedin the results of the 1910 Prussian elections. Although their chances of competingon equal terms with the Conservatives were severely limited by the three-classvoting (restricted suffrage) system, the Left made tangible gains. But the mostimpressive breakthrough came during the 1912 Reichstag elections in whichthe Social Democrats obtained over four million votes and moved into theReichstag as the largest party, holding 110 seats.

In light of these dramatic domestic developments, it is difficult to see howthe modern naval historian can do without a good knowledge of fiscal andeconomic history. Certainly the entire subsequent course of the German navaldevelopment up to 1914 cannot be understood without the chronic lack of fundsthat affected all aspects of naval life: ship-building, recruitment, training, tech-nological and tactical innovation, preparedness for war. Tirpitz's concern withthe disruptive influence of the Reichstag and with the creation of an Aetematmay have been a peculiarity of monarchical government in the age of increasedpolitical participation. The problem of mobilizing resources for stepped-uparmaments in an arms race situation, by contrast, was a problem that affected allmodern states whatever their constitutional order. It determined the viability ofentire societies—and not just in the pre-1914 period. It is an aspect that deeplyimpacts upon all countries to this day. The Soviet-American arms race of theearly 1980s provides a recent example: President Reagan's "Star Wars" programwas probably the final step of the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, leading to thecollapse of communism; but it almost bankrupted the United States, withconsequences to American society that are still being felt today. There is anotherfactor that modern naval history has increasingly become aware of: the economicand technological infrastructure that is capable of producing the most advancedinstruments of warfare. Since the nineteenth century, ship-building capacitieshave tended to be dominated by private entrepreneurs who took in orders for

35   See P.-C. Witt, Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschai Reiches, pp. 316ff.

See M. Epkenhans, Die wilhelminische Flottenrustung (Munchen: R. Oldenbourg, 1991), pp. 313ff.

Berghahn     65

warships on a for profit basis. With the state being the main customer, a newrelationship developed between industrial capitalism and the national govern-ment that was preparing for war. Statesmen may have had their own domestic-political and imperial reasons for naval building; private ship-yards wereinterested in the idea for economic gain and, in economically hard times, inorder to stabilize the manufacturing sector of the economy. A particularly blatantexample of this kind of consideration is to be found in a letter that Prince zuSalm, the President of the German Navy League, sent to Tirpitz on 3 December1901. Bemoaning the temporary recession and growing unemployment, heurged the Reich government to revive the economy with the help of fresh ordersfor warships, expecting from it a rise in related stocks and a consolidation of themarket.

Nor is it a coincidence that pressure to increase the building tempo emergedin 1908 at the time of another recession in the ship-building industry. As RobertCount Zedlitz-Trutzschler, the Marshall of the Kaiser's Court, recorded on 9April 1909:

The power of the steel kings weighs heavily, and worries about their business,their desire to create a bull market, have been served up to us as a national concernfrequently before.

However, the navy-industry link reaches beyond the macro-economic level ofconjunctural ups and downs in the national or world economy. It also goes beyondthe research that Clive Trebilcock has undertaken with regard to Britain in an effortto calculate technological and economic spin-off effects from naval armaments.

Rather there is the often intriguing and underresearched field of cooperation,but also of conflict between industry and naval bureaucracies in technologicallyadvanced countries. Thanks not least to the work of Michael Epkenhans a gooddeal of information has recently become available on the relationship betweenKrupp and the Imperial Navy. If there emerged something like an embryonic"military-industrial complex," it was certainly not always a cozy marriage. Thisresearch shows that, however welcome state orders were, business was jealouslyguarding its decision-making powers against governmental interference. Con-versely, the navy, especially at a time when it was starved of funds, repeatedlytried to squeeze Krupp's enormous profits by promoting competition betweensteel trusts and ship-yards.     Since industry was finally quite uninhibited in

37 Reprinted in V.R. Berghahn and W. Deist, eds., Riistung im Zekhen der uHlhelminischen Weltpolitik(Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1988), pp.289f.

Riistung im Zeicheti der uHlhelminischen Weltpolitik, p. 299.39  See C. Trebilcock, '"Spin-off in British Economic History. Armaments and Industry, 1760-1914,"in Economic History Review, 22 (1969), pp. 474-90.

M. Epkenhans, Die wilhelminische Flottetiriistung.41   Ibid., pp. 143ff.

66     Navies and Domestic Factors

supporting nationalist associations in their clamor for increased armaments, a linkbetween domestic and electoral politics was established that deserves much moreintensive study than has been undertaken for most industrial nations so far.

The least the naval historian who inclines toward a geopolitical view cantherefore do is to be aware of the constant interaction of domestic andinternational factors and explicitly to incorporate the former perspective into hisanalysis. Armaments and their economic implications, as Gustav Schmidt hasdemonstrated, frequently acted as a hinge between the two spheres. All this isnot meant to imply that we must stop studying battles, the design of ships, orthe state of the international system and its perception by politicians andpopulations in individual nation states. However, at the end of the twentiethcentury naval history can no longer be written and, even less, taught without afull understanding of the domestic context in which navies operate.

42  G. Schmidt, The Politics and Economics of Appeasement (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

Domestic Factors, Regime Characteristics,

and Naval Forces

Robert S. Wood

It may seem banal in itself to suggest that domestic factors shape the size, shape,and character of naval forces. The key issues, then, are ones of degree andkind of influence, as well as whether or not the scholarly community isadequately or correctly assessing this influence. Beyond this general problem,there is a broader concern about the relationship between the character of aregime and the character of its military forces. Although his paper assesses thespecific domestic factors that shaped German naval forces prior to World WarI. Professor Volker Berghahn's study particularly points, consciously or not,toward this broader "regime" consideration. The following observations are thuskeyed on his analysis.

Berghahn's paper on navies and domestic factors does two things: first, it givesa useful and interesting perspective on the domestic calculations that shapedGerman naval developments prior to World War I; second, it seeks, if not todismiss, at least to question analyses that would attribute to power politicalcalculations the dominant influences in those naval developments. As to the latteraspect of his paper, many readers will probably be tempted to shrug their shoulderand exclaim: "But of course! Does anyone seriously believe that any militarydevelopments are simply responses to the general problem of internationalanarchy and to external challenges posed by other states?" Such a perspectivewould have to assume that states are simply inert "billiard balls" whose motionis determined by the impact of external stimuli. It is useful, therefore, to lookmore closely at the "primacy of foreign policy" perspective and to determinewhat is at stake in this approach.

In most respects, the primacy of foreign policy concept is not an analyticalperspective at all, but a doctrinal or policy position. It is grounded in anunderstanding of international politics that divides the world into politically-in-dependent states who claim sovereign authority to define their internal affairsand external interests and to advance and defend their individual regimes andcollective objectives. In a heterogenous world of scarcity, the definition ofinternational politics as "anarchical" generally entails interstate competition and

a high degree of militarization of foreign policy. Even if one details the degreeof actual political and economic interdependence, as well as social integration,in the world, the fragmentation of power and the continuing dominance of thestate as the focus for social aspirations and control are still salient features ininternational politics. But, not all interstate systems are alike and the degree andlevel of cooperation, as well as of competition, are not foreordained by thegeneral context of anarchy or specific external "threats." Both the nature of theregimes of the several states and the concept of interests held by the peoples andleaders of those states are crucial in determining one's international posture andtherefore the shape of one's military power. One may analyze the policies chosenand justified by a particular regime, but one should avoid smuggling into one'sanalysis a determinism that neither the context of international politics nor theparticulars of a regime could possibly sustain. Again, however, one might be ledto remark that this must be patently true.

Therefore, to reject the claim that constitutional and policy prescriptions arein some near absolute sense determined by the necessities of the externalenvironment is to repudiate those policy makers and the social groups who seemserved by such a claim, as well as the academic scribblers who put their talentsat the service of those leaders and groups. The "primacy of foreign policy," fromthis point of view, is an attempt by those entrusted with foreign and militarypolicy to avoid scrutiny from other agencies of government and to shield theirdecisions from public inquiry. There is a particular scholarly perspective thatsustains this attempt.

The viewpoint of those who embrace what Berghahn calls the "geopoliticaland realpolitische approach" can thus be simply stated: In the absence in theinternational system of political power of either a central authority or an effectivelegal order, statesmen are driven to follow certain norms often associated withthe concepts of reason of state, power politics, and balance of power. In a worldof precarious external security and internal order, the notion of reason of statepoints to the belief that those entrusted with state authority have, if required, anextra-constitutional right to use whatever means are necessary to preserve orenlarge the power of the state. Logically related to this idea is power politics,that is, the accepted use of force by sovereign states to achieve political objectives.A world of states animated by the demands of reason of state and employingpower politics leads naturally to the balance of power. The balance of power,in the words of Frederick von Gentz is "that constitution of neighboring andmore or less connected states by means of which no one of them can damageanother in its independence or essential rights without being restricted some-where, and therefore endangering itself." The primacy of foreign policy is thusseen as a logical concomitant of this perspective.

1  Quoted in Edward Vost Gulik, Europe's Classical Balatice of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1955), p. 81.

The primacy of foreign policy is a constitutional and policy claim. That claimasserts that the need to protect the state from external menace requires, first, aseparation of international from domestic politics; and second, the freedom ofthe rulers to mobilize all instruments of power and shape policy as circumstanceswarrant, unencumbered by normal domestic political constraints. Peoples inoceanic powers, such as the United Kingdom, have been reluctant to embracesuch an uninhibited sphere of political power. But, even the father of liberalpolitical philosophy, John Locke, divided executive power into two spheres,ordinary executive power and what he called "federative*' power, the latter beingessentially compatible with the extra or supra-constitutional claims of theprimacy of foreign policy. If the American founders followed Locke in manythings, they clearly did not follow him in this. The American constitution admitsof no claim to foreign policy primacy. Not only were there no persistent threatsto U.S. security that would have justified such a claim, but it was felt that theprotection of liberal democratic order within would be jeopardized by any suchclaim. Although from the beginning of the republic, there have been politicaland legal assertions of such a right, the weight of tradition and the relativelydetached geographical position of the United States have on balance workedagainst such claims. We will return to this in a moment. It is worth noting atthis point, however, that Berghahn focuses on continental and particularlyGerman politics and here the relative attachment of states to each other canplausibly be seen as exacerbating the "security dilemma" and thus sustaining theclaim to foreign policy primacy.

In the matter of pre-World War I German naval developments, Berghahncounters the "continentalist" claim to foreign policy primacy on two grounds.First, he disputes the contention that the presumed encirclement entailed by theAnglo-French entente in 1904 and the addition of the 1907 Anglo-Russianaccord to the French-Russian alliance, compelled the German naval response.He appears to make this case by alluding to the fact that there were policyalternatives, including naval arms agreements, that could have been pursuedmore vigorously. At the same time, he also notes that the size and character ofthe actual naval developments were heavily influenced by the desire to maintainGerman social arrangements and to insulate the defense, including naval, budgetsfrom parliamentary scrutiny. Now these latter points do demonstrate thatdomestic factors shaped naval developments, but they hardly touch the dragonthat he is trying to slay, foreign policy primacy. Surely, no commentator deniesany domestic influences; the issue is whether those influences decisively deter-mined the rationale for and the object of the navy. It is hard to imagine anyserious scholar evaluating military developments as a response exclusively eitherto domestic factors or to external factors. Moreover, his citation of Tirpitz'smemorandum which implied that German naval developments could lead to afundamental reordering of the international system would, as he himself admits,

70     Domestic Factors, Regime Characteristics,

sustain the geopolitical argument. Berghahn's most powerful argument lies notin his citation of specific domestic factors that shaped the navy, but in hissecond,and principal, analysis of the nature of the political regime as a whole.

Germany was not simply some generic state existing in some abstractanarchical international order. It represented a particular internal pattern ofvalues and power, of social groups and diverse interests. As such, German leadersinterpreted the challenges and opportunities of the external environment so asto sustain a particular vision of international power and a specific social patternwithin. This was as true of naval as of other military developments. The weltpolitikof pre-World War I Germany was not abstractly required by the specifics ofinternational anarchy at that time nor was the size and structure of the fleet andthe social character of the navy ordained by an assessment of external threats.The very nature of the regime, even in middle Europe, was more important inshaping military and naval policies than the character of external dangers. At thispoint, however, one could well ask how the geopolitical position of Germanymolded the regime and thus influenced its responses—proving what a seamlessweb domestic and international factors might be! This latter concern takes usback to the position of the United States mentioned earlier.

If one were to ask which was more decisive in predisposing the Americanstoward a certain skepticism toward claims of foreign policy primacy—thegeographical detachment of the United States (what one commentator describedas a weak neighbor to the North, a weak neighbor to the South, fish to the Eastand fish to the West) or its political culture derived from British history and theEnglish Enlightenment—the answer would have to be "yes!" Whatever theexplanation, however, I suspect that some commentators might, in a kind ofreversal of Berghahn's approach to Germany, seek to correct the "primacy ofdomestic policy" perspective as governing the American external posture andmilitary developments. Here, as with Berghahn's explanation of German navalpolicy, an examination of the nature of the American regime might provide asuggestive approach to how American leadership interprets the external worldand shapes its military and naval forces. One could make a credible case that inthe absence of an overwhelming clear and present external danger (which is mostof the time), U.S. naval developments will be determined by the resourcesallocated, the object of political-military engagements, and doctrines concerningthe use of force—all of which are probably less determined by internationalanarchy and specific external challenges than by the character or the regime.

In the same way Berghahn challenged, or at least qualified, the geopoliticalexplanation of pre-World War I German naval developments, so analysts havequestioned Cold War explanations for the U.S. Maritime Strategy and navalbuild-up in the early 1980s. This is often expressed in the query, was the maritimestrategy a war-fighting strategy or a budgetary strategy? The maritime strategyand the forces associated with it were aimed at influencing and thus deterring a

Wood     71

general conflict with the Soviet Union that, though centered in Europe, wouldbe global in character. It was presented as an attempt to use the mobility andtechnological sophistication of naval power, not only to secure control of thosesea areas critical to the projection and sustainment of U.S. and allied forces inEurasia, but to attack from the peripheries of the Soviet Union and Warsawpowers operational, logistical, and economic capabilities critical to the Sovietwar effort. Attack submarines, carrier battle forces, maritime patrol aircraft,information systems, and missile developments were all justified on thesegrounds. Critics, however, said that the real target was the share of a growing—and then contracting—defense budget. The general threat of the Soviet Unioninsured that the rationale for the naval budget would be a general war-fightingcapability, but the motivation for it was largely bureaucratic and domestic. Soself-evident is it that general geopolitical and domestic concerns intertwine thatthis debate is not very interesting as a stark "either/or" proposition, even if onechooses to weigh the respective factors. Again, however, Berghahn suggests anapproach that holds some interesting promise: regime considerations.

The fact that the United States is separated from many of its key interests byoceanic expanses is probably still a vital beginning for any examination of boththe character of its institutions and its forces and strategy. Beyond this, however,one should push further the question to what degree the American historicalexperience, its current social patterns, the structure of its political institutions,its internal political struggles, shape not only the general U.S. external posturebut the types, sizes, structures, and strategic-doctrinal approaches of its armedforces? Aside from revealing the peculiarities of various doctrinaires in historicaldebate, one might find nothing particularly exceptional in Berghahn'sdemonstration that domestic factors should not be ignored in explaining Germannaval development. On the other hand, to recover the almost Aristotelianconcept of constitution or regime and bring that perspective to a systematicanalysis of military and naval matters may both provide useful insights andcontinue to contain the propensity toward "billiard ball" explanations.

PART IIIComparative History

'L^Iiapter ©

Comparative Naval History

Paul G. Halpern

Naval history seems largely concerned with the actions of the great navies,those with the largest and most powerful fleets. In the First World Warthis has generally meant the British and the German navies, joined by the timeof the Second World War by the navies of Japan and the United States. Thenavies of other powers appear at best in supporting roles, often relegated to actingin certain well defined and possibly confined areas. This does not mean themedium sized or smaller navies are without interest. They often representedconsiderable financial sacrifices to their own nations, they interacted andinfluenced each other, and in their own terms might often have enjoyed ameasure of success. They were also small or medium sized only in comparisonto the leading fleets. France, Italy, Russia and, until 1918, Austria, possessednaval forces whose potential could not be ignored. They all played an importantrole in furthering the diplomatic objectives of their countries or at the very leastdefending their own coastlines and colonies. The same could be said for smallernavies of, for example, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

For the purposes of this paper comparative naval history might be consideredthe inclusion of more than one navy in the same study. It is not necessarily aformal comparison, that is the British did the matter this way and the Frenchthat way, although certainly this could be involved. The comparison is apt tobe less direct and often the term "comparative" would mean the study ofdifferent navies acting in the same geographical area. This paper will alsoconcentrate on navies beyond the three British, American and German moststudied by Anglo-American historians, and to remain within reasonable propor-tions will focus on the past century. The major objective will be to suggestsubjects that need further study.

One might also question the utility of putting "comparative naval history" ina separate category. The basic methodology for this field is not really differentfrom that employed by someone working in British or American naval history.There is the same need to establish what happened, and equally important, andperhaps more difficult, why it happened. The historian would use all materialwhich sheds light on the subject, starting with the available naval papers bothofficial and private and when appropriate going on to political and diplomatic

and the all important financial records. By now we all realize that navies do notexist in a vacuum, that they are a product of their societies and time and theyare constrained by financial as well as geographical realities, human factors suchas the pool of manpower available to man those ships and infrastructure, notablythe dockyards to build and maintain ships and the administration to provisionand fuel them. Naval history is also influenced more than many other types ofhistory by technology. The concept of "holistic naval history" is now popularand certainly can also be applied to comparative naval history.

There is nothing here that is really different in comparative naval historyexcept that by definition it will involve more than one navy. This is all fairlyobvious, but there are certain aspects that make comparative naval historydifferent. The first is that of language. Comparative naval history will usuallyinvolve using more than one language, quite possibly two or more. There is noway to disguise the fact that this is a major problem. Unfortunately, there is notnecessarily any correlation between a talent for languages and an interest in navalhistory. Certainly, there are some who have a gift for languages or have inheritedanother tongue through family background. The historian who specializes inone country should, over a period of years, acquire by painful hard work a certainfluency in that particular language. But, in comparative naval history, one willsoon move into areas requiring languages beyond the one with which they arefamiliar. The problem can be compounded by unfamiliar handwriting, employ-ing script which does not use Roman characters, and, in the case of languageslike Russian and Japanese, a completely different alphabet. Technology hasactually added to the difficulty. Until recently, the average historian spent mostof his effort on reading; writing and speaking were secondary. Now, oral historyprograms are being established and the naval historian is faced with the problemof understanding rapidly spoken and, frequently, colloquial speech. Writtentranscripts of recordings are the exception rather than the rule. Certainly theseare obstacles, not absolute barriers. However, they work against comparativehistory for one is now forced to balance the possible results with the frequentlyenormous effort to learn the language. Is it worth it? At times the comparativehistorian, who is not a specialist in a particular national field, may conclude it isnot. After all, there is only so much time available and it will be more cost-effective to work in more familiar areas. One will then forsake possiblyinteresting fields of study. Russian and Japanese topics are obvious examples.Collaborative works with other historians may offer at least a partial solution tothe problem.

There is another area where comparative naval history will encounterparticular problems. The United States and Great Britain are fortunate in the

1 For an interesting example by the French Navy complete with analytical summaries (which are nosubstitute for actually understanding the text) see Marc Vigje, Catalogue des Archives Orales (Vincennes:Service historique de la Marine, 1981).

twentieth century in never having had to suffer enemy occupation. This has notbeen true of other nations. Archives have been destroyed, deliberately burned,or looted. This is particularly true in France, where the Germans made asystematic effort to exploit French archives during the occupation. The fate ofmany of these archives is unknown. The French Foreign Ministry was able toreconstitute many of its lost archives from embassy and consular records. TheFrench Navy has not been that fortunate. The result is, in contrast to earlierperiods, the records of the inter-war period contain many gaps. In fact, one ofthe interesting subjects for further study, not strictly naval, would be to attemptto trace the activities of these German archival teams by using essentially Germanrecords. Who were they? What were they after? What did they publish beyondthe German "White books" on the origins of the war? And finally, can we learnanything of the fate of these records? The hope that some might turn up in theformer German Democratic Republic seems to be fading. The occupation ofFrance by the Germans also resulted in parallel damage for the naval historian.There was at least one French admiral who quietly burned his private papers.There may well have been others.

The Austrian Navy is another example of lost archives. The navy wasorganized with a Marinesektion at the Ministry of War in Vienna. The majorfleet base and the headquarters of the Flottenkommandant was in Pola. So toowere other important naval establishments such as the MarinetechnischenKommittee. Those duplicates or copies of reports that were sent to Vienna haveprobably survived. Unfortunately, the originals and many important recordsnever left Pola. At the time of the collapse in 1918, one Austrian officer in hisreport of this period described how he was burning sensitive material before theItalians arrived. The Italians did acquire a large amount of material which theycarted off to Rome and intended to use in their detailed histories for internalnaval use. The mass of this former Austrian material is still in Rome, only roughlycatalogued, and is an important potential source, although it is not clear howmuch may turn out to be relatively routine and how much of great importance.

In an ideal world, a historian will find in the naval or other archives theimportant plans, correspondence between the titular head of the naval and themost important commanders-in-chiefs, justifications for the naval budget,reports by naval attaches on potential enemies or allies, estimates of the potentialthreat, and, in time of war, the reports of proceedings and the whole multitudeof supporting records which will help to explain not only what happened, butwhy. The official records will be supplemented by private collections of diariesand letters which will provide insight into the personalities and internal politicsof the organization, the sort of revealing information given when people are not

2 A brief interview with Ursula Rudt von Collenberg, one of those who worked at the French ForeignMinistry, is in David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, 1940-1944(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p.244.

writing for the record to justify their actions and to protect and to advance theircareers. That is the ideal world. In practice, comparative naval historians, likeany other naval historian, must take what they can find, assuming the archivesare even open to them. This is no different than what any naval historian has tocontend with, but it may involve countries where the navy does not occupy thesame relative position that it has in Great Britain or in the United States andwhere the cadre of supporting literature is likely to be neither as extensive noras well developed. However, just as naval designers must make the inevitabletrade-offs between speed, protection and armament, those in comparative navalhistory must sacrifice depth for breadth, if they are to keep their published workwithin manageable proportions. They must often, of necessity, rely heavily onthe work of others for a foundation. This can pose a problem in areas where theliterature is relatively restricted, but it can also signal those subjects where thereis the need for further research.

The author of this paper has specialized in the Mediterranean area and thenavies discussed in this paper naturally reflect this. The Baltic during 1914-1918has also been the subject of recent study. The author's experience has reinforcedthe conviction that, in order to do comparative naval history, one needs a solidbody of studies, based on national fields to support it. Certainly, a successfulaccount of a limited period of time can be written on a comparative basis, butanyone who has done this is likely to realize that there is far more to the storythan one can include and keep the work within manageable proportions. Toput it another way, in comparative history, one is looking at a navy or navies ona horizontal basis, over a relatively short time, as compared to the national historywhich looks at it on vertical basis, over a longer period of time. Undoubtedly,the task of the historian is to pick and choose what to include as well as tosummarize prior work when necessary. But in order to do this, it is necessary tohave that solid foundation of studies for each navy. Unfortunately, such studiesare not available for all navies.

This is particularly true in regard to the history of the French Navy over thepast 150 years. It is somewhat misleading to stress Anglo-Saxon indifference tothe naval history of France. The French, themselves, have this problem. A notedFrench archivist, Etienne Taillemite, recently published a work called L'Histoireignoree de la marine fran$aise. The title tells it all, the "unknown history" of theFrench Navy. The author is not referring to obscure events, either. He is talkingabout the major facets of French naval history and the relative lack of knowledgeabout them in France. He has a point. Although more than three quarters of hisbook concerns the pre-1815 era, the more modern period is no exception. Offour important monographs—as opposed to general histories—on the FrenchNavy on the period between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War,

3 Etienne Taillemite, L'Histoire ignore"e de la marineJratifaise (Paris: Perrin, 1988).

two are by Americans and one by a German. There is certainly, at least, onesubject during this period that is worthy of further examination, notably thenaval operations conducted by Admiral Courbet against the Chinese in the1880's. These involve rivalry over Tonkin, an undeclared war with China, withthe interplay between purely domestic politics and foreign relations, colonialismand, naturally, some naval operations that are very interesting in themselves.

The French Navy is badly in need of a study of its experience during the FirstWorld War. The operations are reasonably well covered in the series of volumesby A. Thomazi, which are based on the records in the Service Historique. Theyare, however, largely confined to the operations themselves. The broader picturewould include the relation of the navy with the other branches of the govern-ment and with parliament, the struggle for scarce resources to manufacture gunsand ammunition or to build light craft to fight submarines, the allocation ofprecious manpower, the role of the merchant marine and the hesitant responseto the submarine challenge. There were fierce personal rivalries within theFrench Navy, partially illuminated by the parliamentary inquiry into the escapeof the Goeben and Breslau. We need to know more about them, which admiralswere in which "equipe" and what were the possible effects on operations andstrategy. In 1917, it appears that political pressure forced the creation of theDirection generale de la guerre sous-marine (DGGSM) to counter the horrificlosses from submarines. There is much more to be learned about this and thepossible similarities to the British debate over the introduction of convoys.Furthermore, is there any link between serving in the DGGSM and careersduring the postwar era?

The French Navy in the interwar period also deserves considerable study.Again, the relation between the navy and parliament is important. After all, thenavy had considerable success in its building program by the outbreak of theSecond World War. The French were particularly strong in fast, light cruisersand destroyers, exactly the sort of craft they had not had in 1914-1918. Theyhad two modern battle-cruisers in service, two modern battleships nearingcompletion, and even a pair of aircraft carriers on the stocks when the collapsecame in 1940. It is not surprising that the fate of the French fleet aroused so

4 Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modem Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871-1904. Edited byStephen S. Roberts (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Ray Walser, France's Search for a Battle Fleet:Naval Policy and Naval Power, 1898-1914 (New York and London: Garland, 1992); and Volkmar Bueb,Die "Junge Schule" derfranzosischen Marine. Strategie und Politik, 1815-1900 (Boppard am Rhein: HaraldBoldt, 1971); and Henri Le Masson, Propos Maritimes (Paris: Editions Maritimes et d'Outre-Mer, 1970).A French officer, Admiral Ausseur, is reported to be working on a study of the period.

A. Thomazi, La Guerre navale dans la zone des armies du Nord (Paris: Payot, 1924); id., La Guerre navaledans I'Adriatique (Paris: Payot, 1925); id., La Guerre navale aux Dardanelles (Paris: Payot, 1926); id., LaGuerre navale dans la Mkditerranke (Paris: Payot, 1929). See also the relevant chapters in Vice-AdmiralSalaun, La Marinefrancaise (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1934).

A good example focused on one campaign is George H. Cassar, The French and the Dardanelles: Astudy of failure in the conduct of war (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971).

much concern on the part of Churchill. But what of the fleet on the outbreakof the war? Did things look better than they really were? What of naval aviation?How did the navy sell itself to parliament and to the nation at large, in order toobtain the considerable resources it eventually enjoyed?

There has been an interesting study of the French naval officer corps duringthe interwar period. Ronald Chalmers Hood gave his book the title, RoyalRepublicans, and relied to a great degree on a few dozen extensive interviews,obtained through the alumni association of the Ecole Navale. Unfortunately,his study was very long in gestation and he did not make use of the oral historycollection which became available at the Service Historique. This would havebroadened his selection. His approach, as the title suggests, was largely sociologi-cal and he paid little attention to the 1914-1918 experience. But, it was a goodbeginning and it suggests an interesting avenue of investigation. He labeledcertain admirals as "progressive." On checking their careers after reading hisbook, it became apparent that they may have had a common thread during thewar, notably association in one way or another with the DGGSM. We needfurther study of certain important individuals, such as Georges Leygues, Ministerof Marine in 1917-20 and 1925-33, and the Chiefs of the Naval Staff, AdmiralsSalaiin, Violette, Durand-Viel and, of course, Darlan. The grandson of Leygueshas published a biography of his grandfather, which includes extensive quotationsfrom his diary, but unfortunately the only diary found deals with the period of

Q

the war and there is relatively little on his important post—war career. HerveCoutau-Begarie and Claude Huan have written an excellent biography of thecontroversial Darlan. They naturally concentrate, as have most historians, onDarlan's role in the Vichy government, but their chapters on the pre-1940 periodare invaluable. From the point of view of naval historians, Darlan's career beforethe war is of equal, if not greater, importance than his participation in Petain'sgovernment, the subject most historians have concentrated upon.

The literature in regard to ships, their specifications and design andchronological history has always been much better than the literature about whythose ships were built in the first place and how they were supposed to beemployed. This situation is, of course, not confined to the French. The lateHenri Le Masson did publish an extremely detailed work on torpedo craft underthe auspices of the Academie de Marine which included an analysis of tacticsand strategy.     Unfortunately, the trend has been in the opposite direction.

Ronald Chalmers Hood, Royal Republicans: The French Naval Dyttasties Between the World Wars (BatonRouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

Jacques Raphael-Leygues, Georges Leygues: Le "Pere de la marine" (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1983).

9 Herve Coutau-Begarie and Claude Huan, Darlan (Paris: Fayard, 1989). This has now beensupplemented by their Lettres et Notes de I'Amiral Darlan (Paris: Editions Economica, 1992).

Henri Le Masson, Histoire du torpilleur en France (Paris: Academie de Marine, 1966). See also his workon French submarines, Du Nautilus (1800) au Redoutable (Paris: Presses de la Cite, 1969).

Recently, the French publisher Marines Editions et Realisations has started aseries on French warships, similar to the Anglo-American "The Anatomy of theShip," although with far fewer drawings of internal detail. These volumes areheavy on technical detail and seem to be aimed as much at the ship-modeler asat the historian. Nevertheless, a historian can gather many useful details and, inthe volume on the Dunkerque and Strasbourg, Admiral Louzeau speaks of theserious error of conception in grouping their main armament forward, an errorrepeated in the Richelieu class battleships which followed. There are similarsentiments in Jean Labayle-Couhat's preface to the volume on the Richelieu toindicate that the rationale for this design must have caused considerable debate,possibly with strategic and tactical implications. Labayle-Couhat has even moreinteresting remarks in his preface to the volume on the 7,600-ton cruisers. Thistime, he comments on the excessive dispersion of the fire from their 152mmprimary armament. He attributes this to the lack of interest in materiel and claimsthat, after the First World War, the naval staff was primarily concerned withtactics and strategy and on the organization of command. Materiel questionswere left to technicians, often younger officers unable to complete with highlytouted engineers seeking perfection. The validity of these assertions is certainlyan interesting subject for further research.

Unfortunately, this is the period of French naval history where the gaps inthe archives are likely to be most serious. The authors of the ship monographshave obviously found much technical detail in the central archives at Vincennesand the local archives in Brest and Toulon. But, for the higher direction of thenavy, it is apparent that important files in the nature of the correspondencebetween the Minister of Marine and the Chief of Naval Staff are likely to bemissing. Here, the naval historian will have to work around the gaps, perhapstrying the alternate approach. Fortunately, the collection of private papers at thearchives for the period after 1918 is far more extensive than for the earlier years.What might be termed the "mirror" technique might be employed. If one sideof the correspondence is missing, possibly the carbon copy or original can befound in the records of either the originator or the addressee. There is also thepossibility that naval documents or papers relating to the navy can be found inthe archives of other services or of bodies dealing with national defense. Anotable example would be the files of the Conseil superieur de la Defensenationale at the Service Historique de TArmee de Terre. The papers of statesmen,such as Edouard Daladier, may also be of value. There have been some excellent

Amiral Bernard Louzeau in Robert Dumas, Les cuirassSs Dunkerque & Strasbourg (Bourg-en-Bresse:Marines Editions et Realisations, 1993), p.6.

Jean Labayle-Couhat in Robert Dumas, Le cuirasse Richelieu (Bourg-en-Bresse: Marines Editions etRealisations, 1992), p.7. See also: id, Le cuirasse Jem Bart (Bourg-en-Bresse: Marines Editions et Realisations, 1992).

Jean Labayle-Couhat in Jean Moulin, Les croiseurs de 1600 tonnes (Bourg-en-Bresse: Marines Editionset Realisations, n.d. [1993]), p. 5.

studies of French defense policy or diplomacy in recent years and a carefulanalysis of their bibliographies might yield useful suggestions.14 In the finalanalysis, however, one will have to reconcile oneself to the fact that thesealternate sources probably will not be adequate compensation for the missingfiles at the Service historique de la Marine. One will have to work with a lowerlevel of documentation than would be the case for studies of earlier periods.

The great rival of the French Navy in the Mediterranean was the Italian Navyand it remains an important, but underdeveloped, field of study. The ItalianNavy was large, excessively large according to some, in comparison to theresources of the state. Italian naval designers aroused considerable interest abroadwith their innovative designs. The story of how the Italian Navy was able toobtain so much from the state is an interesting one, which is closely linked tothe development of heavy industry in Italy. Certain areas of that industry weredescribed by one historian as a hot-house product fed by expensive navalorders. With this in mind, a full biography of Ispettore del Genio NavaleBenedetto Brin, Minister of Marine in 1876-8,1884-91,1896-8, would be mostinstructive. Apparently, it was easier to obtain funding for new constructionthan it was for more mundane subjects such as maintenance and training. Whatis now needed is a study focusing on the navy rather than industry or politics.

There is another aspect to Italian naval history that needs to be probed. It issometimes forgotten that the Italian Navy was a new and initially somewhatartificial creation. The united Kingdom of Italy did not exist until 1861 and, asthe famous Piedmontese statesman and writer Massimo d'Azeglio put it, "Nowthat we have made Italy it remains to make the Italians." The navy was createdfrom an amalgamation of Piedmontese and Neapolitan naval forces, which hadbeen hostile to one another. The difficulties in integration were a factor in thedisastrous performance in 1866. How did one integrate this navy? What, forexample, were the careers of former Neapolitan officers and ratings? Wereconscious steps taken by the navy towards nation building similar to those in thearmy? In the latter, troops were deliberately stationed away from their localprovinces, a practice that was expensive and slowed mobilization.

Examples would be Robert J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and MilitaryPlanning, 1933-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); William I. Shorrock, FromAlly to Enemy: The Enigma of Fascist Italy in French Diplomacy (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,1988); and Nicole Jordan, The Popular Front and Central Europe: The Dilemmas of French Impotence,1918-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

The basic starting point would be Mariano Gabriele and Giuliano Friz, La Politico Navale Italiana dal1885 al 1915 (Rome: Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare, 1982).

16 For this subject see Richard A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 1908-1915 (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1975).

An excellent short study is Ezio Ferrante, Benedetto Brin e la Questione Marittima Italiana (1866-1898).Supplement to Riuista Marittima (November, 1983).

18 On this point, see John Gooch, Army, State and Society in Italy, 1810-1915 (New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1989),pp.21-22.

As in the case of France, the role of the Italian Navy during World War I alsoneeds to be studied. The massive eight volume study, La Marina italiana nellagrandeguerra, has concentrated on operations. However, we need to know farmore about the inner workings of the high command. Ezio Ferrante, makinguse of the hitherto unknown private papers of Thaon di Revel, has made anexcellent start which needs to be expanded to other leaders. The papers of theCasa di Savoia, if they are ever made public, would be crucial, since both KingVictor Emmanuel III and his cousin, the commander of the fleet at the beginningof the war, the Duke of the Abruzzi, played important roles. Just as in France,there must have been a strong competition for scarce resources, and, in Italy,coal would certainly have to be considered a scarce resource. The political aspectof the war may have been even stronger than in France, for Italian coastal citieson the Adriatic were literally on the front line. Furthermore, there were also aseries of disasters, such as the loss of the battleships Benedetto Brin and Leonardoda Vinci, which were attributed to sabotage, supposedly confirmed by the Italianagents who broke into the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Zurich in 1917. Thissubject has been the stuff of myth-making, indeed, there have been documen-taries on Italian television which sensationalized it. The naval disasters duringthe war did produce lengthy parliamentary inquiries with extensive reports. Itis now the task of the historian to shift through this mass of material and to tryto separate truth from fiction and to establish what probably happened. TheItalians have been heavily criticized by their British and French allies, quite oftenwith good reason. Efficiency may not always have been a strong point. Thereasons for this should be analyzed. On the other hand, it is now important tosee things from the perspective of the Italian Navy, why they took actions andmade claims that seem to others mere sacro egoismo. It is also time to lay to restthe old canards about Italian lack of courage, reflected in the jibe of the Americangeneral at a meeting of the Supreme War Council: "Well, they [the conferees]are all at sea, except the Italian admiral and he won't go there."' The refusal ofJeUicoe or Beatty or Scheer to foolishly risk ships is regarded as common sense.Why should the same action by Thaon di Revel, under comparable circumstan-ces, be regarded any differently?

The Italian Navy in the interwar period also needs attention. How did thenavy fare under the Fascist regime, particularly when Mussolini, himself,assumed the duties of Minister of Marine during much of the period? How didthey cope with the implications of Mussolini's foreign policy? The records in

Ufficio Storico delta R. Marina, La Marina italiana nella grande guerra 8 vols (Florence: Vallecchi,1935-42). A very useful up-to date summary is the anniversary edition of Ezio Ferrante, La GrandeGuerra in Adriatico: Nel LXX Anniuersario delta Vittoria (Rome: Ufficio Storico, 1987).

20 Ezio Ferrante, II Grande Ammiraglio Paolo Thaon di Revel (Rome: Rivista Marittima, 1989).

21 Hankey diary, 3 June 1918, quoted in Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, volume I: 1877-1918(London: Collins, 1970), p. 559.

Rome can be supplemented with valuable insights from the reports of theGerman naval attaches in Rome. The question of naval aviation, the decisionnot to build aircraft carriers, relations with the Italian Air Force and cooperationor the lack of cooperation between the air service and the naval service areparticularly important questions in the light of the experiences of the SecondWorld War.23

The Italian Navy is well served by the traditional ship books. Indeed, theUfficio Storico della Marina Militare was a pioneer in the field, launching a seriesof well illustrated and authoritative books on different types of ships in the 1960s.

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Some of these titles have been revised and reprinted. In the scope and varietyof its publications, the Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare has been extremelyambitious, publishing books that would probably be left to commercial publish-ers in other countries.

It is nice to know the technical specifications of warships, the dates of theirlaunching and so forth. But, as is often the case, there is a need to integrate thissort of material into the history of the navy as a whole. Biographies for twentiethcentury naval figures are also important and useful. Just as we need studies ofBenedetto Brin, Cuniberti and the Duke of the Abruzzi for the earlier period,so, too, we need studies of figures such as Admirals Domenico Cavagnari, headof the navy in 1933-1940, and his successor Arturo Riccardi, head of the navyin 1940-1943. This is a period when the historian will have a particularly difficulttime navigating through the controversies and apologia associated with thesedisastrous years in Italian history.

Writing the history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy has its own set ofchallenges. Perhaps, the first is to convince people that it even needs to be done.American, British and German historians with their vision of great encounterslike Jutland or the great air-sea carrier centered battles of the Second World Warare inclined not to take the subject seriously. Even those who specialize in theHabsburg Monarchy are sometimes guilty of this fault. A recent, and otherwisesuperb study of the Habsburg officer corps, dismissed the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine as

I am grateful to Professor Brian Sullivan for drawing my attention to this source.

23 Published studies tend to concentrate more on the ships than policy. See, for example, ErminioBagnasco, La Portaerei tiella Marina italiana. Idee, progetti e realizzazione dalla origini ad oggi. Supplementto Riuista Marittima (December, 1989); idem., "Una portaerei mancata: La Francisco Carracciolo. Altraocasione perduta per la Marina degli anni Venti-Trenta", Riuista Marittima (May, 1991), pp. 95-107;and Giorgio Pellizzoni, "R.N. Aquila. La Portaerei italiana incompiuta", Riuista Marittima, (May 1989),pp. 93-105.

The titles, by various authors, include, with date of first publication: Le naui di linea italiane (1962);I sommergibili italiani (1963); Le torpediniere italiane (1964); Gli incrociatori italiani (1964); I cacciatorpediniereitaliani (1966); I MAS e le motosiluranti italiane (1967); and Esploratori,fregate, coruette ed auuisi italiani (1970).

Commercial publishers in Italy also jumped into the fray with the series "Orizzonte Mare: naui italianenella 2 guerra mondiale". The original tides had the imprint of Edizioni Bizzari of Rome, which appearsto have been subsequently absorbed by Edizioni Ateneo. The series was resumed in 1993 by ErmannoAlbertelli of Parma.

"a rather useless navy" and the author, in order to keep the study from becomingtoo long, chose largely to exclude the navy from the analysis. This may, at leastpartially, be due to the fact the author is of Hungarian origin and, therefore,underlines one of the major difficulties the navy faced. Since 1867, the HabsburgMonarchy was a Dual Monarchy and Hungarian assent for naval expenditurewas hard to obtain. Hungary is basically an inland state with little natural interestin the sea, although it should not be forgotten that before 1918 the Hungarianscontrolled Croatia and, thereby, had access to the sea through the port of Fiume(Rijeka).

There are some additional points that should be made. The navy was not"rather useless;" its strength was not negligible. It was growing and would havean important influence on the general naval situation. The development ofnavalism in as complex a structure as the Habsburg Monarchy was one of themore interesting phenomena of the time. Furthermore, the Austrians were notmere stooges of the Germans; they had their own plans and objectives. Finally,when put to the test of war, the navy was not completely unsuccessful, even ifthat success came in ways that had not been anticipated. The navy, on the whole,defended either directly or indirectly by deterrence the coasts of the DualMonarchy, and, while the point can be endlessly debated, it is quite possible thatwithout a serious fleet the hard-pressed Monarchy might have faced invasion inthe South and might have had to fight on yet another front.

The financial aspect of Austria's naval growth is obviously of importance, asis the creation of a naval infrastructure of shipyards and armaments manufacturersthat accompanied it. The political—one is tempted to say diplomatic—wheelingand dealing that freed the necessary sums of money for the navy is also of interest.We now have an excellent analysis of the period based on archival research.This demonstrates how useful a full biography of Admiral Rudolf Graf Mon-tecuccoli would be. Montecuccoli was Marinekommandant from October 1904to February 1913, a period when the very nature of the Austro-Hungarian Navywas transformed.

Certainly, the same attention should also be paid to the naval officer corpsthat has been paid to army officers. The multi-national character of the navymust have posed special problems of command. How successful were they inovercoming these complexities? For example, in January 1909 a category ofreservists had to be retained beyond their normal date of release because of theBosnian crisis. The men affected were ordered to assemble on the quarterdeckof the flagship following Sunday Mass. The admiral commanding the squadronmade the announcement in German, followed by his chief of staff, a Croatian,

26 Istvan Deak, Beyond Natiottalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.6.

27 Lawrence   Sondhaus,   The  Naval  Policy  of Austria-Hungary,   1867-1918:   Navalism,   IndustrialDevelopment and the Politics of Dualism (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1994).

who repeated it in Serbo-Croatian. Other officers made the announcement inHungarian and in Italian, while the chief surgeon concluded with the an-nouncement in Czech. The admiral, then, called for "Three cheers for theKaiser" and believed the performance appeared to have had at least some effecton the dissatisfied long-serving reservists. Perhaps, but studies on this subjectseems to concentrate on failure, notably the Cattaro mutiny of February 1918.We need to know about the successes. Cattaro was an aberration and not therule, probably due to factors other than nationality problems.

The history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy has a problem which may not besolved. The after-action reports of proceedings were usually forwarded in copyto the Marinesektion in Vienna. These can be quite extensive and were the basisfor the semi-official history by Hans Hugo Sokol, Osterreich-Ungarns Seekrieg,published in 1933. The problem is, we know what happened, but we do notalways know why. The internal fleet memoranda often did not leave Pola andthey have disappeared. It is frustrating to see in the report, for example, fromthe battleship squadron commander the statement that a conference of captainswas held in the Flottenkommandant's quarters. There is no indication of whatwas discussed or decided. There are equally intriguing plans for sizeable warships,including battle cruisers. The rationale beyond these giants, which seem ofquestionable use in the Adriatic, is not given. Was there collaboration concern-ing naval designs between the Austrian and German navies? Are Austrian plansfor huge capital ships an example of navalism gone wild? The answers probablylie in the missing archives of the Marinetechnischen Kommitee in Pola. Willthere be any clues in the largely unworked Austrian records in Rome? Thefuture historian of the Habsburg Navy during the twentieth century is going tohave to sort through those records. It is known that they include decodedAustrian intercepts of Italian wireless messages. A careful correlation of thismaterial may indicate the Austrians had something akin to Room 40 at theAdmiralty and that they had some clue of what their enemies were up to. This,obviously, would have had an effect on naval operations.

The German naval records are another method of approaching Austrian navalhistory during the war, but there are definite limitations. The relationship between

28 Admiral Anton Haus, Tagebuch, 1 January 1909, Kriegsarchiv, Vienna, Nachlass Haus B/241:5/vii.

29 The standard monograph on the mutiny is: Richard Georg Plaschka, Cattaro—Prag: Revolte undRevolution (Graz and Cologne: Bohlau, 1963).

The archival organization and gaps is discussed in Walter Wagner, "Das Archiv der k.u.k.Kriegsmarine im Kriegsarchiv Wien," Osterreich zur See ("Schriften des Heeresgeschichtlichen Museums(Militarwissenschaftliches Institut) in Wien, Band 8," Vienna: OsterreichischischerBundesverlag, 1980).

These points are discussed in Erwin Sieche, Communication to Warship International, XXIX, No.4 (December, 1992), pp. 411-21, based largely on his "Grosskampfschiffs-Projekte des MTK aus derZeit des Ersten Weltkriegs", Marine—Gestern, Heute, VIII, No.4 (December 1981), pp. 123-40.

Peter Jung, Marinereferent at the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna, is currendy preparing an article on thismaterial for the Mitteilungen des Osterreichischeti Staatsarchius.

the two was not one of unbounded confidence and sharing. The Germans hada tendency not to take their Austrian allies seriously. The Austrians, in turn,could be resentful of the Germans, whom many felt did not understand theirsituation,  although the Marinekommandant, Admiral Anton Haus, would

become a strong supporter of Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare cam-

33paign.

The Austrian archives do contain raw materials for further study of one aspectof the war at sea. The Allied barrage of the Straits of Otranto is widely consideredto have been a failure. The number of submarines destroyed by the barrage werein no way proportionate to the effort put into it. Proponents of the barrage alwaysargued that, at the very least, it would exhaust submarine crews and restrict theiroperations. In other words, there were intangible benefits to the barrage that do notshow up in mere numbers of submarines destroyed. Because the German submarinesoperated from the Austrian bases, copies of the submarine logs were given to theAustrian authorities. The majority of these logs and those of Austrian submarineshave probably survived. It should now be possible to go carefully through them andto note the circumstances of passing through the barrage. How many times did asubmarine have to dive? How long did it stay down? What did the submarinecommander see? Drifters? Destroyers? How far off? Did the activities of theAmerican submarine chasers in the final months of the war have any effect? Whatpercentage of the passage was made at night? The experiences of submarines seemto have varied gready, but this is not surprising, since the numbers of drifters andother small craft the allies were able to put on the barrage also varied gready. Theinformation could then be correlated with the British reports of proceedings at thePublic Record Office to establish the strength of the barrage at different intervals.Because the number of submarines using this route was relatively limited and easyto establish and the area to be covered also relatively confined, it should be possibleto establish once and for all where the barrage was effective, where it was not andthe real reasons for its apparent failure.

The account of how the French, Austrian and Italian navies, joined by theirstronger allies, the British and Germans, competed with and then fought againsteach other in the Mediterranean, before and during the First World War, has

'XA

been told in various studies. There are now a sizeable number of articles andmonographs to form the basis for a similar study of the interwar period, althoughthe Austrians will vanish from the scene after 1918.

The author of this paper is writing a biography of Haus to appear in the series on Austro-Hungarianleadership during the First World War published by the Militarhistorischen Dienstes.34Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1971); idem., The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918 (London: Allen andUnwin/Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Mariano Gabriele, Le Convettzioni Navali delta Triplice(Rome: Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare, 1969); and Adolphe Laurens, Le Commandement naval enMediterrank, 1914-1918 (Paris: Payot, 1931).

There is one aspect of the pre-World War I competition that might receivefurther study. This concerns the naval missions which the Great Powers wereprepared to send to the navies that they wanted to influence. The British woundup in the embarrassing situation of having naval missions on opposing sides—Greece and Turkey—during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. There shouldbe sufficient material in diplomatic and naval archives (and possibly the recordsof private firms) of the powers involved to study more closely these missions andtheir links with armaments sales. Naturally, this study of naval missions could beextended to other navies and other periods.

The Baltic area during the First World War is another theme wherecomparative naval history would be promising. It has probably not received theattention it deserves. Here, we have the Germans contending against theRussians, who fight a very singular type of naval war, employing minesextensively and coordinating their defense with coastal batteries on shore. Thesituation is complicated when the British send submarines to operate in the Balticand give the Germans the problem of defending their shipping against them.The Swedish Navy also comes to play a potentially important role, eventuallyforming convoys and escorting traffic within Swedish territorial waters. TheGermans are usually, but not always, the beneficiaries of this. The Russian Navybefore the 1917 revolution is far from unsuccessful. Among the interestingpoints, the story is well known of how the Russians turned over to the Britishthe German code books taken from the wreck of the Magdeburg. But did theRussians keep a copy for themselves? There is some evidence that the Russianswere able to read intercepted German wireless traffic and, at times, acted uponit. Furthermore, the German Navy, in the early stages of the war, was a verydifferent navy in the North Sea than in the Baltic, where they used theirobsolescent warships. Of course, should they had chosen to withdraw from theNorth Sea, they could have achieved overwhelming superiority over theRussians. But, if they chose to face the British, the advantage might have beenwith the Russians, particularly as the new Russian dreadnoughts of the pre-warbuilding program began to enter service. The interplay between North Sea andBaltic, on the German side, is interesting, particularly, since the titular Germannaval commander was Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the Kaiser's brother. Sincethere is some doubt as to Prince Heinrich's competence, a study of Germancommand relationships should prove unusually interesting. The interplay be-tween naval force and diplomacy is also important, with enforcement of theAllied blockade and concern for Swedish susceptibilities a complicating factor.This is one of the reasons why use of Swedish archives might be very fruitful.

Very useful and suggestive in this regard is the recent BJ.C. McKerchner, Esme Howard: A DiplomaticBiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and BJ.C. McKerchner and Keith E.Neilson, '"The Triumph of Unarmed Forces': Sweden and the Allied Blockade of Germany,1914-1917" Journal of Strategic Studies, 7 (June 1984), pp. 178-99.

The Baltic was also the scene of one of the major amphibious operations duringthe war, OPERATION ALBION—the German capture of Osel island and theGulf of Riga in October 1917. ALBION used to be studied at the U.S. NavalWar College in the interwar period, along with Gallipoli, as an example of acombined operation.

Those interested in combined operations, that is navies operating togetherwith land forces, should not forget the riverine operations of the First WorldWar. While the Mesopotamian campaign is fairly well known in English-speak-ing countries, the Danube operations are not. A modern study of the Serbiancampaign of 1914-1915 and the Romanian campaign of 1916 should be mostrewarding.

This brings one to another neglected topic, that of neutral navies during timesof war. The Swedish Navy in the Baltic has already been mentioned, but whatof the Royal Netherlands Navy? The Dutch had the misfortune to have theproverbial pair of eight hundred pound gorillas fighting on their doorstep. What,if anything, did they do—or could they do—to enforce their neutrality at home?The question of their colonies in the East Indies is even more interesting. Oneis impressed, when reading accounts of the Emden in the waters of the Nether-lands East Indies, at how frequently the Germans encountered a Dutch warshipof superior strength, whenever they tried to use Dutch territorial waters. Thereis an interesting story here, if only to verify the theory that has been advancedthat the Dutch were rigidly acting to enforce their neutrality so as to avoid givingthe Japanese an excuse to move.

Other neutral navies are also of interest, notably the Danes and the Nor-wegians. They controlled strategic waterways and it would be nice to knowmore of their plans about, for example, mining the Belts to forestall possibleGerman intervention.

The Japanese Navy during the 1914-1918 war also needs more attention fromhistorians. Undoubtedly, active operations by the Japanese, in which shots werefired in anger and losses sustained, were restricted to the 1914 siege of theGerman colony of Tsingtao and to the 1917 operations in which destroyers weresent to assist the hard pressed Allies in the Mediterranean. However, the Japanesevery actively exercised sea power, escorting the Imperial convoys from Australiaand exerting that steady pressure which drove von Spee's German squadronwestward to South American waters. The Japanese Navy joined the hunt forthe German raider, Emden, and it was only due to the decision of the convoycommander that it was HMAS Sydney, and not the Japanese battle cruiser Ibuki,which finished off the German cruiser. By the time Spee's squadron waseliminated off the Falkland Islands, Japanese warships were operating, as well,in the western hemisphere off the coast of Panama.

In writing about operations during 1914 and taking into consideration themany demands on the Royal Navy in the first months of the war, the British

official historian, Sir Julian Corbett, admitted that it was hard to see how theycould have acted so effectively in eastern waters without Japanese assistance. In1917, the Japanese were again active in the Indian Ocean, when the Germanraider Wolf was on the loose. In writing of these operations, Corbett's successor,Sir Henry Newbolt, remarked that, in the Indian Ocean, the Japanese becamethe preponderant partner. These Japanese operations involved regular use ofSingapore as a base as well as other ports of the British Empire. What ambitionsdid this awaken within the Japanese Navy? What lessons might have been learnedabout submarine warfare (and forgotten) in the Mediterranean? These operationsseem controversial in Japan and one post-1945 historian even appears to inferthe Mediterranean destroyers were a mercenary squadron. In this, historianshave studied the role of Japan on a diplomatic level and as the background forinternal politics in Japan, but how did things appear to the naval leaders in theFirst World War era?

There is another aspect of the World War that would lend itself to thecomparative approach, that is, one that is comparative in the sense that thearchives of different nations would be used. This concerns the German Etappesystem of using German merchant ships in neutral countries and speciallychartered neutral merchantmen, anxious for a profit, to supply German warshipsat large at the beginning of the war. This was obviously a diminishing asset, butit would be useful to take a close look at how effective or ineffective it mighthave been. The files of the Etappen system were allegedly burnt immediatelyafter the First World War, to protect those who might have assisted theGermans. However, it should be possible to uncover at least some of the workthrough alternate files or ship's logs. Furthermore, the German diplomaticrecords, especially the consular records, might contain considerable information.This was the sort of activity one would expect consuls to be heavily involvedin. Certainly, British diplomats and consuls did what they could to frustrate theGermans and there should also be material on this in the British and Frencharchives.

What of good old fashioned operational history? Of course, there is still aneed for operational history—good operational history. Navies are meant tofight when necessary. When they do, there should be an accurate account ofwhat happened and why. This sounds obvious, but in doing comparative navalhistory, one will run into areas where it is not the general rule. This would be

36 Julian S. Corbett and Henry Newbolt, History of the Great War: Naval Operations (London: Longmans,Green, 1920-1931), Vol.1, p. 278; Vol.IV, pp. 216-17.

37 Cited in Ian Nish, "Japan 1914-18H in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., MilitaryEffectiveness. (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988), Volume I: The First World War, pp. 237-9, and 247, note19.

The burning of the Etappe records is noted in Charles B. Burdick, The Japanese Siege of Tsingtau(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976), p. 209, note 24.

Halpern    91

particularly true of subjects involving the Russian Navy, where until recently,the Cold War has cut off western historians from access to Russian archives.There are still restrictions. Recently, the Russian naval archives did not permita British historian to consult files dated after 1935. This, of course, would stillleave plenty of leeway for the historian of the First World War.

There are three broad categories of literature dealing with Russian navaloperations during the First World War. First, we have those works written byemigres, anxious to justify the old Imperial Russian Navy in which they servedand to rectify slights or lack of appreciation for Russian naval effort which, theyinsist, should not be seen solely as a backdrop for the Revolution and its anarchy.They suffer, though, from the nostalgia factor, the nationalist factor and the factthey were writing in exile, frequently deprived of written records and forced torely on memory.

A second type of literature is that written during the Soviet period which,while often strongly nationalist and using archival citations, has a certain pointof view to put across. The most accessible example of this literature, to thosewho do not read Russian, is the translation of The Fleet in the First World War,done under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the National ScienceFoundation. Portions of this seem at best fanciful. The fact that the translationwas done in India, by people who were not provided with a historical gazetteer,does not help matters.

The third method of looking at Russian naval operations is through the eyesof their German enemies. While the volumes of Der Krieg zur See dealing withthe Baltic or the Black Sea are extremely detailed, they are obviously writtenfrom the German point of view, with all the disadvantages this implies.

It can be difficult to reconcile the three types of accounts. The language barrierhas cut off historians from making even the best use of emigre literature. A goodattempt to rectify this was made by a retired Australian naval officer, fluent inRussian, in a study of the Black Sea Fleet. It is a useful beginning and citesmany unfamiliar works published in the Russian language by emigres, but doesnot include any archival work.

In addition to the Russian archives that are, at least, partially open, there areother opportunities in Russia to supplement them. The same historian whofound the naval archives closed for material after 1935 also found that the NavalMuseum in Saint Petersburg had an extensive manuscript collection. Thereseemed to have been almost a compulsion for people to put their recollectionson paper in a land where the official version of history was subject to change. Itnow remains for the historian to correlate these new sources with what is already

39 N.B. Pavlovich, ed., The Fleet in the First World War. Volume I: Operations of the Russian Fleet (Englishtranslation. New Delhi: Amerind Publishing, 1979).

40 George Nekrasov, North of Gallipoli: The Black Sea Fleet at War, 1914-1917 (Boulder, Colorado:East European Monographs, 1992).

92     Comparative Naval History

known. The result is certain to be a better understanding of the Russian Navyand its leaders. The fact that the period of the First World War might beconsidered less sensitive than more recent years may also facilitate the work ofthe historian. Those working in more recent periods face serious problems, withaccess to the archives subject to the prevailing political winds and subject tocapricious decisions which may be based on political connections and, in somecases, "on who offers the highest bid."

One journal, Warship International, has recently begun to publish translatedmaterial from Russian sources. The bias is naturally towards subjects involvingmore recent naval construction. The somewhat fragmented form in which theinformation is presented can also be confusing. Nevertheless, it is exciting toread, for one can feel a sense of uncovering the raw materials of history. Therecent publication in Russia of the memoirs of Admiral I. K. Grigorovitch,Minister of Marine 1911-17, indicates that we may now be proceeding beyondtechnical specifications of ships to matters involving policy. It will be up to afuture historian to put this material together and to interpret it. The subject ofthe Russian Navy in the twentieth century is one of the great opportunities forhistorians, provided they have the linguistic skills, and given the uncertainconditions in Russia today, a cast-iron stomach, the willingness to tolerateuncomfortable living conditions and the ability to wheel and deal with localofficials.

This paper has shown a preference for the pre-World War II period, basedlargely on the author's special interests and past work. The post-World War IIperiod, however, can also be productive. Once again the French Navy, after itsarchives are opened to a reasonable degree, will be very interesting. The studywould examine its renaissance after 1945 and its transformation, from aheterogeneous collection of surviving pre-war ships, borrowed and ex-Germanships, into a modern force which now plays the major role in France's nucleardefense. The French decision to develop nuclear powered ballistic missilesubmarines, largely on their own, owes much to Charles De Gaulle's conceptionsof the Fifth Republic and of French grandeur, but it must also have involved anenormous effort and required a considerable portion of the state's resources. TheFrench remain one of the few naval powers currendy to have a full-sized nuclearpowered aircraft carrier under construction. Furthermore, aside from the purelymaterial aspect, the story of healing a navy that had been sharply divided betweenVichy and Free French sentiments should be equally fascinating.

41 Mark Kramer, "Archival Research in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls", Cold War International HistoryProject Bulletin, 3 (Fall 1993), p. 19.

42 I.F. Tsvetkov, ed., Vospominaniia Byushego Morskogo Ministra [Memoirs of a former Minister of Marine](St. Petersburg: Deva Press, 1993) cited in "News of Naval Books", Warship International, XXX (1993),p. 359. The work is described as well edited with extensive commentary.

Some Mild and Radical Observations onDesiderata In Comparative Naval History

William R. Thompson

The structure of this volume pairs an historian with a political scientist todiscuss preferences for future research in various areas of naval history. Thehistorian advances his preferences first; the political scientist follows withcomments on the first paper, ideally without degenerating into inter-disciplinarysquabbles over assumptions and methods. This strategy is an old device forpairing odd couple animals to pull wagons (for instance, a mule and a horse withreaders permitted to assign their own disciplinary labels to the different animals).Presumably, the basic idea is that the wagon ends up being pulled moreeffectively than if the wagon driver relied on two animals from the same species.On the other hand, the risk is that the unconventional pairing will not cooperatein pulling the wagon either at all or in the appropriate direction.

I am happy to make the attempt to move the wagon of comparative navalhistory subject to the following qualifications. One, my observations are madeas more of a consumer than a producer of naval history. This caveat grants melicense to behave like the proverbial rich, but uneducated, art collector whoknows what he likes when he sees it, even if he does not fully understand theart history context from which a piece has emerged.

Two, I frequently find myself uncomfortable with the mainstream assump-tions of both the historical and political science disciplines. Whether horse ormule, it is difficult to conceal maverick orientations that, no doubt, will spiralto the surface from time to time. In the process, some of my observations willseem mild, while others may appear more radical. There is no need to apologizein advance for radical observations. The point, instead, is that any perceivedextremism in my observations probably will appear equally extremist to bothhistorians and political scientists.

Three, I have no real quarrel with Professor Halpern's desire to have morehistorical work done on major power navies in World War I. I agree that weneed more analysis along the lines he specifies. In any event, this is his area ofspecialization and I lack any authority to quibble with his sense of priorities.However, I do have some different ideas about what comparison involves, why

one might wish to engage in it, and what questions in naval history are mostsusceptible to comparative inquiry. Thus, rather than focusing on World War Inaval history, my own topical and temporal approach will be somewhat broaderand certainly more eclectic in pursuit of different types of comparative strategies.

Professor Halpern presents one model of comparative naval history—theanalysis of two or more navies operating within a specific milieu such as WorldWar I. More generally, any study that involves "more than one navy in the samestudy" qualifies as comparative in nature according to this approach. In such amodel, comparison tends toward the more implicit end of the continuum and,in fact, is often missing altogether as different stories are pursued separately. Ofcourse, the extent to which that generalization is true ultimately depends on theanalysis and the analyst.

The relatively implicit comparative approach is not something to reject outof hand. The vast majority of the histories that have been generated have beenproduced on its premise:

There is the . . . need to establish what happened, and equally important, andperhaps more difficult, why it happened. The historian would use all materialwhich sheds light on the subject, starting with the available naval papers—bothofficial and private—and when appropriate going on to political and diplomaticand the all important financial records.

This is precisely what most historians do. They discern a significant hole inour information and comprehension base and try to fill it by examining therelevant archives for documents that speak to the what and why of humanbehavior. Much of our consequent information base is predicated on just suchan approach. I, for one non-historian, would be among the last to suggest thatwe have no need for what might be described as "conventional" history. Myown work on developing data bases on some 270 military coups in fifty-ninestates (1946-1970) and five hundred years of concentration and deconcentrationin the distribution of sea and land power has relied heavily on conventionalhistorical narratives. An ongoing project involving a contrarian approach to thequestion of why democracies do not fight one another involves a rather

However, there is a hint or flavor of the ethnocentric notion that comparison is something that onedoes when one is examining non-British or non-American phenomena. This peculiar idea is wellinstitutionalized in American political science as well where students of domestic politics either studyAmerican politics or politics in other countries. If one does the latter, the analysis is referred to as"comparative" even though no actual comparative analysis may be attempted. The price one pays forsuch Anglo-Saxon ethnocentricity is less genuine comparison than might otherwise be the case.

Paul Halpern, "Comparative Naval History," chapter 6 above.3 William R. Thompson, The Grievances of Military Coup-Makers. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1973); GeorgeModelski and William R. Thompson, Sea Power in Global Politics, 1494-1993. (London: Macmillan,1988); and Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of the GlobalPowers. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

labor-intensive examination of the political histories of a large number ofpersistent democracies, intermittent democracies, and non-democracies. Suchan undertaking would be impossible without the availability of extensive politicaland diplomatic histories of the countries and periods of time of most interest.My only complaint is that there are still so many information holes left to fill.Thus, it is neither academic largess nor letting a hundred flowers bloom thatunderlies an appreciation for straightforward and conventional approaches totelling historical stories. It is self-interest pure and simple. Historical informationand analysis is indispensable in its own right and for those of us who repackageit.

Nevertheless, there are other approaches to what comparison entails. Onearea of disagreement involves analytical motivations. How do we select thequestions that we pursue? The implicit comparison approach often is motivatedprimarily by the perceived need to fill gaps in our information base. The rationaleis not unlike the one some mountain climbers use when asked why they climbmountains—because they are there. Similarly, voids in our information are filledbecause they are there. For instance, we know quite a bit about British navaloperations in World War I and comparatively less about the activities of theAustro-Hungarian or Italian navies. That observation represents one justificationfor analyzing, comparatively or otherwise, the activities of the Austro-Hungarianand Italian navies during World War I.

However, another approach to comparison—and one that is much moreexplicit in orientation—might be undertaken to analyze more general questions.For example, what was the role of arms races in bringing about World War I?One might study the same two states (Austro-Hungary and Italy) and their navalpreparations for war to generate a partial answer to the arms race question. Theanswer would be partial because there were other naval arms races worthexamining (in particular, the celebrated Anglo-German one) and non-naval armsraces to evaluate as well.

A major difference between the implicit and explicit comparisons, then, is amatter of case justification. In the implicit case, it suffices to note that we do notknow as much as we would like about the naval activities of state X. In theexplicit case, the state of our information base is secondary to the more specificconcern with locating possible participants in a naval arms race that may havepreceded World War I. We may not know much about Chilean and Braziliannavy operations either, but we have good reason to suspect that, even if they

The approach is contrarian because most explanations of why democracies do not fight one anotherare essentially ahistorical. The prevailing assumption is that it must be something about democraticinstitutions that produce the selectively peaceful behavior. Just what that might be is the subject ofconsiderable analytical debate in international relations. My contention is that a more importantcontribution to resolving the puzzle is found in the geopolitical milieus that have not only produced orfacilitated the survival of democratic regimes but that have also made less aggressive foreign policiesmore probable.

have engaged in naval arms races, it would not have affected the outbreak ofWorld War I. Only if our question about the causal relationship between navalarms races and war was stated in the most general way would all states, naviesand wars become pertinent.

A third difference between what I am calling implicit and explicit comparisonsis how we arrive at answers to our questions. What does it mean to explainsomething? I certainly do not wish to get into issues of the philosophy of scienceand the philosophy of history by raising this question. Nor do I wish to suggestthat there is only one valid way to attempt to answer questions. However, Ithink it is fair to say that more general answers (to general questions) are apt tobe more compelling, at least for some people, than are idiosyncratic answers.

One illustration of this problem is what is referred to as the "long peace"question. As long as we do not count China as a major power, there has beenno war between major powers since 1945. Whether the post-1945 era deservesto be characterized as truly or relatively peaceful is a much different question.Nor does the long peace conceptualization mean to suggest that major powerconflict has been either absent or even always non-violent. The observation isonly that the major powers have not gone to war with each other in some fiftyyears, with the accompanying implication that this is unusual.

Why has this happened? The three most popular answers are nuclear weapons,the irrationality of war and bipolarity. The development of devastating nuclearbombs and missiles has made a World War III, if not unthinkable, at least,considerably unlikely. The specter of nuclear war, along with other factors suchas economic interdependence, contributes to the notion that war no longermakes any political-economic sense for the combatants. More would be lostthan might possibly be gained. Finally, bipolarity stresses the idea that interna-tional systems dominated by two, roughly equal, major powers are more stableand less prone to showdowns than are multipolar systems.

The problem is that the contemporary long peace is not quite as unusual asone might think. There was, for example, no inter-major power warfarebetween 1816 and 1853 and 1872 and 1903. Now, it may very well be the casethat the latest "long peace" has a different etiology than its two immediatepredecessors. But that is something that requires demonstration. Moreover, theabsence of nuclear weapons, bipolarity, and widespread feelings about theirrationality of war in the two earlier "long peaces" suggests that there may bemore fundamental factors at work. A comparative analysis of the "long peace"phenomenon is obviously necessary to avoid a misidentification of why long

Lest one accuse me of injecting political science problems into a discussion of naval history, I shouldnote that the "long peace" problem was first raised by a historian, John L. Gaddis, The Long Peace:Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and that at leastone possible answer to the problem has a strong naval twist in the sense that a naval historian, Clark G.Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires. (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1974) argues that these long peaces are actually "naval peaces."

peaces happen. So, the approach to comparison also depends on the question.Some questions clearly demand explicit comparison while others may not. If weask what did Russian naval decision-makers think about their strategic optionsin year X, a comparative approach does not seem all that intuitively appealing.However, if we ask why did Russian decision-makers decide to go to war inthe midst of a crisis involving the deployment of naval forces, comparativeapproaches begin to appear more attractive. It is certainly possible to answer thislast question in a non-comparative mode, but there will always be some residualdoubts and room for reinterpretation of the evidence. No matter how good thearchival resources or how talented the historian, the reconstruction of the pasttends to be an imperfect process subject to periodic revision.

A comparative approach would involve examining two or more decisions togo to war in roughly similar situations. This might mean comparing war decisionson both sides of a crisis. Or, it might require finding cases of a certain type thatpermit the analyst to reduce the number of possible explanations to somethingreasonably manageable and still generate a more general explanation of the typeof behavior in question.

A fourth reason for engaging in explicit comparison has to do with theory.Theory comes in all sorts of formats. Some theories are very well delineatedwhile others are more than a bit hazy. Some theories are arrived at deductivelywhile others are more inductive in origin. Whatever the case, the contention isthat we all, albeit to a varying extent, operate with them in our analyses. Thequestion is not whether we, as analysts, engage in analysis with or without theaid of theories but, rather, how explicitly we make use of theory in our analysis.The more explicit the use of theory, the more likely that some type of explicitcomparison will be found to be analytically useful.

These fairly abstract points about the desirability of explicit comparison canbe made more concretely by referring to two illustrations of what I have in mind.The first example is Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery.The second is C.I. Hamilton's Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840-1870? Noteveryone may agree that these two works are unquestionably comparativeanalyses, but they approximate my own criteria.

Kennedy's examination of the naval history of Britain focuses primarily onone navy, but it qualifies as a comparative analysis because it asks generalquestions about the role of sea power (the timing of its salience and itsrelationship to economic and land power), and then proceeds to explore thesegeneral questions by studying the evolution of the British navy's role in foreignpolicy and war strategies. Basically, it represents a further testing of some of thearguments advanced in an earlier comparative undertaking, Mahan's The In-

6 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. (London: Macmillan, 1976; Malabar, FL:Robert E. Krieger, 1982).

7 C.I. Hamilton, Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840-1870. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

Jluence of Sea Power Upon History. The chapters are arranged chronologically: to1603, 1603-1688, 1689-1756,1756-1793, 1793-1815, 1815-1859, 1859-1897,1897-1914,1914-1918,1919-1939,1939-1945, and post-1945. The story aboutBritish naval supremacy is followed as it unfolds much as any other narrativestory might do. If the different time periods had been compared explicitly to seewhether the answer changed depending on when one asked the question, thatalone would have qualified it as a comparative work.

The more overt comparative element, however, is the continued analysis ofthe Mahanian argument or, more accurately, the Mahan-Mackinder debate. Thegeneralizations at stake initially were meant to apply to more than one state.The analytical interaction between a general argument and a specific casetherefore, is certainly comparative in spirit, if not, strictly speaking, in form.

Kennedy's work might have been more explicitly comparative than it was.The time periods around which the chapters are organized are as much fornarrative convenience as they are for delineating the changing parameters of thefactors involved in the interactions among land, sea, and economic power. Forthat matter, an entirely different approach might have been taken that wouldhave entailed contrasting the evolutionary histories of two sea powers (e.g.,Britain and the Netherlands) or a sea power and land power {e.g., Britain andFrance). Whether the answers to the general questions that would have emergedwith these alternative foci might have been any different from the ones foundin Kennedy is beside the point. There are several ways to skin the comparativecat. Kennedy's analysis of the rise and fall of the Britain and its naval leadrepresents one way to harness historical narrative to the pursuit of answers togeneral questions about comparative naval activities.

A second example, Hamilton's Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840-1870 mightseem more obviously "comparative" since it is about the rivalry and navalinteractions of two states (Britain and France). But it does not take on thestructure that it might have—that is, switching back and forth from chapter tochapter and country to country. The focus is placed on the rivalry and notnational historical narrative. Individual book chapters are organized arounddifferent angles or vantage points (e.g., diplomacy and technological change,tactics and strategy, personnel, dockyards, and so forth). The basic questionsconcern the origins and termination of the rivalry and the role of naval changesin shaping the nature and course of the rivalry. In the pursuit of these generalquestions, Hamilton makes a strong case for naval considerations having playeda significant role in the unfolding of the rivalry.

What do these examples have in common? Other than the ubiquity of theBritish navy and the high quality of the analyses undertaken, both works areabout general questions in international relations that "happen" to have very

8 Ac the same time, it would not be unfair to suggest that both Mahan and Mackinder were stronglyinfluenced by the British example in their geopolitical writings.

strong naval twists. In what circumstances is sea power superior to land power?What drives rivalries between competing naval powers? They also share singularfoci, with one analysis concentrating on a single navy and the other a singlerivalry. The number of navies does not really matter. What matters is the natureof the analytical enterprise. As long as the authors in question are grapplingexplicitly with general questions, they are engaged in a collective endeavor thatdraws upon past attempts to explain behavior and serves as a stepping stone tofurther efforts. As long as the collective endeavor is characterized by multiplecases, it is sufficient to allow an author with one case to participate in comparativeanalysis.

Yet even so, both illustrations suggest other dimensions of comparability. Onedraws upon change over time. The interaction of pertinent factors in differentways at different times can certainly be compared. The other examines theinteractions of two states that, while involved in the same rivalry, need not havethe same response to various technological changes or retain similar internationalpositions over time. Comparison thrives on variance. If nothing changes or allactors act alike, there is little point in engaging in comparison. Because thingschange and because all actors do not act alike, we, as analysts, are presented withopportunities to explain via careful comparisons of selected similarities anddifferences.

One other common denominator in the Kennedy and Hamilton examples isthe breadth of their inquiries. Neither author is concerned exclusively with navalmatters. Few would challenge the generalization that navies operate in geopoliti-cal-economic contexts and are highly sensitive to technological change. As aconsequence, it is extremely difficult to suppress considerations of geography,politics, economics, and technology when examining naval activities. Indeed,comparative naval history should and frequently does highlight the symmetricaland asymmetrical interaction of these factors. It is certainly possible to study thebiographies of admirals (or able—bodied seamen), battle tactics, and ship con-struction details from a comparative perspective. But unless these foci areharnessed to larger questions, their appeal tends to remain limited to aficionadosof such topics.

Putting aside biographies, tactics, and marine architecture, there are a numberof middle-range phenomena in international relations to which comparativenaval history can contribute. Most involve the interaction between states andthe role of navies in shaping the natures of these interactions. One topic,represented by Kennedy, is the question of grand strategy. How do decision-makers determine (assuming that they do) what national goals to pursue andhow and when do they draw upon the tool box of alternative resources(including navies) to implement these goals? How has the tool box itself evolved?

9 An exception perhaps is John Keegan, lite Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare. (NewYork: Penguin, 1988).

What are the historical relationships among land, sea, and air power? Alterna-tively, who wins and what is the relationship between winning and the strategieschosen?

Another complex of interactive processes with significant naval inputs are therivalries studied by Hamilton, among others, and arms races, crises, and deterrence.It does not seem an over-generalization to say that while these topics, with thepossible exception of rivalries, have received substantial treatment, the precise roleof navies in them is less than clear. Are crises involving primarily naval resourcesless likely to break out into warfare because the bargaining instruments can bemanipulated in more flexible fashions? Are all arms races subject to the sameunderlying dynamics or are naval arms races different from other types of weapons?The likelihood of all naval arms races operating similarly seems low, inasmuch assome are followed by wars while others are not. Why, then, do some naval arms

races precede the outbreak of war and others do not? Do periods of rapid

1 "ytechnological change forestall or accelerate the probability of conflict?

Deterrence is about communicating, with credibility, the capability to inflict

damage on opponents, if they choose to pursue undesired behaviors. Do attempts

at deterrence emphasizing naval weapons fare better or worse than other types

of emphases? Perhaps it depends on the nature of the pawns being fought over

or, perhaps, it depends on the characteristics of the states deterring and the states

that are supposed to be deterred?

Compare, among others, Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783.(Boston: Little, Brown, 1890); John F. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology andMediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Paul M.Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery and Chester A. Starr, The Influence of Sea Power onAticient History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

11 John Arquilla, Dubious Battles: Aggression Defeat and the International System. (New York: CraneRussak, 1992); Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine, eds. The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power inthe Eighteenth Century. (Adantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989); Colin S. Gray and Roger W.Barnett, eds. Seapower and Strategy. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1989); Colin S. Gray, andThe Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War. (New York: Free Press, 1992); JohnB. Hattendorf, "Alliance, Encirclement and Attrition: British Grand Strategy in the War of the SpanishSuccession, 1702-1713," in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace. (New Haven, Ct.:Yale University Press, 1991); Paul M. Kennedy, ed., special issue on sea power, International HistoryReview, 4 (February, 1988); and George Modelski and William R. Thompson Sea Power in Global Politics,1494-1993. (London: Macmillan, 1988).

For a mixture of approaches to questions pertaining to naval arms races, see Samuel P. Huntington,"Arms Races: Prerequisites and Results." Public Policy Yearbook. (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University,1958); John C. Lambelet, "The Anglo-German Dreadnought Race, 1905-1914." Peace Science Society(International) Papers, 22 (1974), pp. 1-45 ; John C. Lambelet, "A Numerical Model of the Anglo-GermanDreadnought Race, 1905-1916." Peace Science Society (International) Papers, 24 (1975), pp. 26-48; JohnH. Maurer, "The Anglo-German Naval Rivalry and Informal Arms Control, 1912-1914." Journal ofConflict Resolution, 36 (1992), pp. 263-87 ; Richard J. Stoll, "Steaming in the Dark? Rules, Rivals, andthe British Navy, 1860-1913." Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (1992), pp. 284-308; and David D'Lugoand Ronald Rogowski, "The Anglo-German Naval Race and Comparative Constitutional 'Fitness,'"in Richard Rosecrance and Arthur A. Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy. (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1993).

Can sea powers deter land powers as readily (assuming for the sake ofargument that they do) as they deter other sea powers? Or, is it possible that itis extremely difficult for sea powers to convince land powers (and vice versa) thatthey mean what they threaten?

It was suggested earlier that we know much less about rivalries than one mightthink. What was meant is that we have a great deal of descriptive material aboutthe ways in which specific rivalries have worked. But we do not know thegeneral answers to questions about why rivalries begin, why they end, or whatsorts of factors escalate or deescalate the processes of competition and conflict. 4Since we do not have much in the way of general answers, it is less surprisingthat we also lack understanding about how naval rivalries might or might notdiffer from other types of rivalries. For instance, Hamilton argues that navalrivalries are in many respects easier to control than rivalries on land, but his1840-1870 case involved a pair of states that were never fully equal in capability.Moreover, one state's position (France) was declining faster than the other's.The same state with the faster declining position was also more acutelythreatened by the emergence of a new and adjacent rival (Germany). Whichfactor mattered most in accounting for the demise of the Anglo-French navalrivalry? The point is that we probably cannot answer this question very well ifwe are restricted to the one rivalry. More rivalries are needed. More comparativeanalyses are needed.

The contribution of comparative naval history is by no means restricted toquestions of grand strategy, rivalries, crises, arms races, and deterrence. Naviesfigure prominently in the annals of European state building in the sense that seapowers tended to build much different states than did land powers. This is anarea in which we have only scratched the surface in coming to grips with anunderstanding of the emergence of liberal republican and more democraticpolitical regimes. Sea power was important to many of the early institutionalmanifestations of democratic regimes just as it was critical to the subsequentdiffusion and protection of such regimes.

Another line of inquiry that has hardly been begun is assessing the possibly criticalrole played by the development of naval infrastructure and related industries in the

13 We have several studies of Tirpitz's risk theory yet exactly where that episode fits remains controversial.If the risk theory is taken at face value, it suggests that one type of naval deterrence was spectacularlyunsuccessful in one instance. If one suspects, on the other hand, that it was a domestic ploy to buy time andresources from a resistant legislature in order to build a fully competitive navy, then it must be seen assomething else entirely (Paul M. Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870-1945: Eight Studies. (London:George Allen & Unwin, 1983). The problem is that we tend to dwell on specific cases exclusively ratherthan also attempting to see how specific instances correspond to other specific instances.

14 William R. Thompson, "Enduring Rivalries in the Long Run," paper delivered to the conference onDynamics ofEnduring Rivalries (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University, May, 1993) advances a numberof hypotheses on structural rivalries between global (maritime) and regional (continental) powers.

15 See Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490-1990.(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994) for a crude sub along these lines.

economic development of the world economy core. Shipbuilding complexes,as for example in Venice, England, and the Netherlands, were among the earliestmanifestations of relatively sophisticated industrial plants. In later periods, wehave the related but somewhat different processes related to emerging economicsectors vital to naval construction seeking protection and government contractsin the downswings of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. We alsohave various types of disguised and open industrial policies in the twentiethcentury by which defense research contracts encouraged the development ofimportant industrial sectors. What role, then, should we attribute to thedevelopment of navies in fostering modern economic growth and development?

So far, I have been discussing the mild observations on possible avenues ofinquiry for comparative naval history. They are considered "mild'* because thereis little controversy that the topics mentioned have very specific connections tonaval matters. Navies presumably matter to grand strategy, rivalries, arms races,crises, deterrence, state building, and economic development. Exactly howmuch they matter may not be clear but most observers would not object linkingnavies to these various phenomena. All need and deserve more comparativeanalytical attention.

In the second section of this essay, I turn to what I suspect will be seen asmore radical observations. These comments will take two forms. One is that weneed more attention to what might be called thalassological perspectives onhuman behavior. Thalassological interpretations elevate the role of naval andmaritime elements as unusually critical to an understanding of how the worldhas worked and continues to work. Naval history in general has a tendency tobe relegated to the margins because its interests often seem too narrow or obscureunless of course dramatic sea battles are underway. Some naval history topics arenarrow and obscure but thalassological perspectives would suggest that navalhistory in general deserves a central place because of its impact in shaping worldpolitics and the world economy.

A second type of even more radical observation is related to the earliercomment that naval history is difficult to disentangle from its geopolitical-economic context and its sensitivity to technological change. I will suggest thathistory (and the social sciences) have not been as good at explaining long-termchange as they are at short-term changes. To explain long-term change, we mayneed to develop a new type of interdisciplinary expertise in which comparativenaval history is likely to play a prominent role.

More Radical Observations

The first more radical observation is neither naval history per se nor fullythalassological in nature. It concerns a social science theory about long cycles inleadership that features a prominent place for history and for naval power. Its

link to comparative naval history is that it offers some general arguments aboutworld system dynamics that could be explored by comparative naval historians.

The theory gives particular emphasis to two dynamics. The first has to dowith intermittent spurts of radical innovation that tend to be monopolizedinitially by a pioneer economy and state. The radical innovations in commerceand industry elevate the pioneering state into a leading position in the worldeconomy. But uneven growth is destabilizing. Some states appear to be movingahead of their competitors. Conversely, some states appear to be falling behind.Global war breaks out as a challenger takes on the declining incumbent systemleader and its allies in a showdown struggle over who will make policy and rulesfor global politics and economics. In the five global wars fought to date(1494-1516,1580-1608,1688-1713,1792-1815, and 1914-1945), either anewlead economy usually allied to the declining incumbent or a renewed incumbenthas defeated the challenger and its allies.

The challenger, whose decision-makers may not fully realize the extent of itschallenge actually initiates a bid for regional hegemony predicated in part on itspreponderance in land power capabilities. Maritime powers, depending on theirlocation, view this bid as a direct or indirect threat. If their home base is locatedwithin the threatened region, the threat is acute. If the home base is locatedoutside the region, the threat is potentially acute. Hegemony in the world's mostimportant region would create an impressive foundation for launching agenuinely global challenge. Either way, maritime powers have powerful incen-tives to ally with one another and with other equally threatened, continentalpowers that can provide ground troops for the coalition against the regionalthreat.

The global war that ensues thus tends to reduce itself to a regional leader,primarily oriented toward land combat, fighting, ultimately unsuccessfully, ontwo fronts against a coalition of states combining sea and land power. Themaritime leader of the winning coalition emerges from the global war as thesystem's leading military-political and economic power, thanks in part to theeconomic resources generated by the previous innovation surge that have paidfor the sinews of global war.

One of the benefits of victorious global war participation is a newly acquiredmonopoly in the possession of capabilities of global reach. The term "global" asused here refers to intercontinental transactions over long distance. The premiere

Leadership long cycle theory is developed in George Modelski, ed. Exploring Long Cycles. (Boulder,Co.: Lynne Rienner, 1987); George R. Modelski and William R. Thompson, Sea Power in GlobalPolitics, 1494-1993. (London: Macmillan, 1988); George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics.(London: Macmillan, 1987); George Modelski and Sylvia Modelski Documenting Global Leadership.(London: Macmillan, 1988); Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson The Great Powers and GlobalStruggle, 1490-1990. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); and Karen A. Rasler and WilliamR. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989),among other places.

capabilities of global reach have been, and continue to be, blue water navies. Atthe end of the global war, then, a new global order can be created because onestate possesses a technological and naval edge over its potential opponents.

Another benefit of winning a global war is the greatly enhanced probabilityof a second surge of radical economic innovation. By extending the leader's edgeeven further, the several decades immediately after the conclusion of the globalwar tend to be the most opportune period for imposing some semblance ofpolicy management and order. But just as technological innovation tends to bespatially and temporally concentrated, it also tends eventually to diffuse and moveon to more propitious centers. Diffusion means some competitors are likely tocatch up to the incumbent leader. Shifts in the locus of innovation mean thatnew leaders are likely to emerge.

As a consequence, the global system has developed a cycle of rising and fallingleadership, buoyed by a pair of innovation waves and highly uneven economicgrowth, and punctuated by primitive and bloody leadership selection process.The pattern is one of a surge of radical economic innovation and the develop-ment of a new foundation for economic leadership, followed by global war anda reconcentration of naval capabilities, followed by a period of the globalpreeminence of a single state and a second surge in radical economic innovation,followed by a period of deconcentration in economic and naval leadership untila new wave of long-term economic growth establishes the circumstances forrepeating the cycle.

Considerations of space and time permit only a cursory outline of leadershiplong cycle theory. Suffice it to say that a fair amount of empirical support hasbeen generated for this perspective. Modelski and Thompson develop andexamine a five hundred year series on the distribution of naval power and foundthe five predicted cycles of naval leadership (Portugal, the Netherlands, BritainI, Britain II, and the United States). Rasler and Thompson develop and contrastfive hundred year series on the distribution of army and naval power anddocuments the pattern of partially dissynchronized cycles of land and sea powerconcentration and their relationship to global war. In addition, the theoreticaland quantitative relationships among leading sector economic growth rates,economic leadership, naval leadership, and global war are predicted and con-firmed in Rasler and Thompson. Modelski and Thompson develop empiricalseries on leading sector growth and innovation surges are able to predict and

17 George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Sea Power in Global Politics, 1494-1993 (London:Macmillan, 1988).

18 Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers.(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers.(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

George Modelski and William R. Thompson Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution ofGlobal Economics and Politics. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995).

document the existence and timing of paired innovation waves that extend backto tenth century China. The coevolving relationships among innovation waves,global war, and naval power concentration are also predicted and documentedin Modelski and Thompson.

The point of this brief overview of recent research in world politics is tosuggest that powerful theoretical arguments and empirical evidence exist todemonstrate the salience and centrality of sea power not only to the dynamicsof world politics, but also to long-term economic growth and a variety of othertopics. Comparative naval history is not merely interesting to its devotees; it isalso critical (or at least has the potential to be critical) to an understanding ofbasic political and economic processes as they have evolved over the lastmillennium. If the long cycle perspective has the story right, comparative navalhistory should not be simply a sideshow speciality within the larger undertakingsof military and diplomatic history. Questions of naval leadership and its exercise,as well as the opposition to it, represent a respectable proportion of the dynamicsof world order and disorder. These are questions that students of comparativenaval history are well equipped to address.

I appreciate that everyone has not yet warmly embraced the long cycleperspective and its arguments. However, there is a second set of arguments thathave a longer pedigree and yet advance similar or overlapping contentions tothose found in the long cycle literature. I refer to the full-fledged, thalassologicalarguments of classical geopolitics that focus on the differentiation and tensionsbetween maritime (sea) and continental (land) powers. While the long cycleperspective is restricted to the past one thousand years, classical geopolitics hasan even longer temporal scope. The suggestion that I wish to make in this regardis that students of comparative naval history should be addressing the validity ofthese thalassological arguments more often than they do. They deserve to beaddressed with greater frequency than they are not merely because they are aboutnavies or because they, by the nature of their arguments, give navies and theirhistories great importance. These reasons are not to be dismissed as trivial butthe major reason classical geopolitics deserves greater attention is that there isconsiderable explanatory potential in their arguments. There is also considerableface validity to their arguments. Yet, somehow, they have been largely shuntedaside in the late twentieth century to make room for more fashionable topics.The question is whether some of the more fashionable approaches to accountingfor human behavior possess as much explanatory potential as old-fashionedgeopolitical contentions.

That is indeed a question. The suggestion here is not that we should adoptgeopolitical lenses because they impart received wisdom. Rather, the geopoliti-cal arguments deserve more attention from students of comparative naval history

21  Ibid.

because the arguments are interesting and focused on important issues of concernto naval history. Students of comparative naval history also have considerableexpertise on naval matters that is essential to assessing the value and liabilities ofgeopolitical propositions. If they also encourage students of comparative navalhistory to broaden their perspective to encompass more territorially-basedphenomena (in order to compare sea and land power), so much the better.

Of course, it is one thing to say that we should pay more attention to classicalgeopolitical arguments. It is quite another to specify just what the arguments areabout and what needs to be done. Toward this end, I have assembled fifty-twogeopolitical propositions of the thalassological persuasion from a fairly recentliterature. The inventory is not meant to exhaust the potential set of propositionsthat deserve attention. On the contrary, the fifty-two listed below werebrought together quite quickly to illustrate the ready availability of strong claimsabout how sea power works and what influence it has over other processes.

The propositions tend to fall into one of three general categories. The firstone concerns strategic policy orientations, how they are adopted, and whatconditions favor adopting maritime versus continental vantage points. Thesecond set focus on the domestic implications of maritime orientations. Strongclaims are made linking basic regime and societal types as derivatives ofgeopolitical orientations. The third set of propositions are focused on howmaritime and continental powers fight one another and why continental powerstend to lose.

No claim is made that these fifty-two propositions are all likely to be equallysupported by historical evidence. Some, no doubt, are too extreme while othersmay be applicable only to limited periods of time. A few of the propositions mayeven contradict others in the inventory. But that is precisely the point. We donot know how consistent or well supported these generalizations are or wherethey do and do not apply. We should know more about them for they are notonly very much about navies, they also link navies to the worlds in which theyoperate in nonidiosyncratic ways. And presumably, that is one of the mainreasons why analysts engage themselves in comparative naval history.

The propositions are drawn exclusively from Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The Historyand Strategy of Maritime Empires. (New York: William Morrow, 1974) and Clark G. Reynolds, Historyand the Sea: Essays on Maritime Strategies. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); PeterPadfield, Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigns in the Rise of the West, Vol. 1. (London: Roudedgeand Paul Kegan, 1979); and Colin S. Gray and Roger W. Barnett, eds. Seapowerand Strategy. (Annapolis,Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1989); Colin S. Gray, and The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantageof Navies in War. (New York: Free Press, 1992. Another source of maritime/continental powerdistinctions is Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance. (New York: Vantage, 1962). His propositions,which are not found in the inventory, are tested and coopted into long cycle theory in Thompson,William R. "Dehio, Long Cycles and the Geohistorical Context of Structural Transitions." World Politics(October, 1992); and Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, The Great Powers and Global Struggle,1490-1990. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).

Thalassological Propositions: Strategic Policy Orientations

1. Two separate strategic policies recur throughout history as great maritimeand continental powers have confronted one another. Despite the transitionsfrom the oared galley to the sailing ship, to the steam and nuclear-driven shipand notwithstanding the appearance of aircraft, missiles, and nuclear weapons,seapower and land power have continued to be distinguishable. This strategicdichotomy is far and away the most powerful single theoretical tool for anyattempt to understand how and why particular states, empires, and alliances havefunctioned as security communities.

2. Every country has a principal environmental orientation to its securityconcerns, either maritime or continental. Geographically conditioned traditionsand largely subconscious habits of mind create all-pervasive strategic cultures.

3. States with long land borders with multiple opportunities for attack,territorial expansion, and defense concerns are unlikely to develop successful seapower.

4. Unless the maritime element within a state or the maritime state itselfwas actually or virtually isolated from domination by the state's continental rulingfactions or foreign enemies and was situated along important shipping lanes fortrade, it could not break away to evolve independendy as an ocean-orientedstate.

5. Maritime powers base their national political and economic policies andstrategies chiefly on trade, overseas possessions or dependencies, and naval forces.

6. Maritime power implies diffused, commercial-industrial power. Success-ful maritime powers are allowed by geographical circumstances to concentratea relatively greater share of their resources on market-acquiring efforts.

7. The commercial drives of a maritime power make profit all-importantand once the cost of holding a colony exceeds its return, the tendency will beto discard it unless it is a vital strategic link in the imperial chain.

8. For maritime nations, the navy has been the main strategic arm of thenation's defensive structure, dominating the defensive policies of the homegovernment, maintaining a generally offensive stance, and operating mainly onthe blue water of the high seas. Maritime excellence can be developed andsustained only if there is an absence of intense competition for scarce resourceswith the army. Consequently, maritime armies are usually small by contrast tothose of continental states, so that for large-scale land operations, the maritimenation usually must depend upon a large continental ally.

9. Maritime powers, vulnerable to external pressures on their food supply,raw materials and power sources, and thus primarily interested in maintainingtheir economic wealth through overseas trade, have sought to enforce areasonable state of international order on the high seas so that the economiclifeblood for their merchant economy should not be interrupted or threatened.Navies maintain that order by policing the trade routes.

10. Domination of the seas by a great maritime power in the cause ofeconomic and thus political stability has resulted in protracted periods of seemingpeace. Each Pax has really been a naval peace, where supremacy at sea providesa major deterrent against serious challenge by unfriendly opponents.

11. Continental powers rely chiefly upon the produce of the nationalhomeland and whatever political or economic advantage they can gain fromtheir neighbors.

12. Continental powers have depended upon overland communications fortheir economic wealth and upon large armies and fortifications for their politicaland military security. Continental armies are usually defensive in character. Themilitary history of modern continental Europe has been written largely in termsof armed frontier quarrels. Wars over disputed borderlands and improvedsecurity have been the rule. Attempts at outright permanent conquest ofneighboring great powers have been the exception and invariably unsuccessfulover the long-term.

13. For continental powers, the army (and lately, in combination with theland-based air force) has been the main strategic arm of the nation's defense. Itsnavy usually maintains a defensive strategic stance.

14. The attempts of continental powers to operate navies has been frustratednot only by geographic limitations but by related political, cultural and socialconsiderations. Decision makers, preoccupied with defending the status quo athome and preserving their government from internal upheaval and externalattack, have little appreciation for overseas enterprises and tend to be too rigidto adopt the techniques and innovations of the maritime powers. Investmentsare made primarily in the army. The navy is subordinated to continentalobjectives and assigned army transport and commerce raiding missions.

15. When continental powers have attempted to create a maritime empirereplete with a navy, the navy soon discovers itself outside the mainstream ofinternal politics and national life, and eventually manipulated into virtualextinction by dominant, army-supported factions.

Domestic Structure and Implications

16. Maritime powers, in comparison to continental powers, are more politi-cally and religiously liberal, economically competitive and wealthy, technologi-cally innovative and advanced, industrially sophisticated, socially cosmopolitanand diversified, intellectually creative, and thus culturally dynamic. As such, therelative progressiveness of peoples with close physical proximity to the sea hasbeen a major element not only in the naval experience of each such people butfor civilization as a whole. It is not necessarily the sole determining force butrather one important catalyst for change and growth.

17. Maritime supremacies all evolved into catalysts of change, in relativecontrast to continental counterparts, as explorers of physical and intellectual

worlds. They developed maritime industries, navigational techniques and en-gineering sciences with which to utilize the sea and thereby stimulated agenuinely high level of technology and industry.

18. Maritime insularity has been a key ingredient in intellectual ferment, thegrowth of applied technology and the fostering of democracy. If a maritimepopulation can rely upon a formidable navy operating literally out of sight oftheir homeland to insure insularity, they can ignore such culturally inhibitingforces as military frontiers and forts, military strongmen and despots, standingalliances, frequent invasions and wars, and the whole mosaic of problemsinvolved in counter-attacking, defeating, occupying, and reconstructing anenemy nation.

19. The growth of the merchant class has been more rapid and pronouncedin countries that depend on overseas trade. Continental states have taken decadeslonger than their maritime counterparts to bridge or close the great gap betweenaristocracy and peasants.

20. Land power implies concentrated central power.

21. Continental powers are based on conquest and must therefore holdconquered people by armed force and suppress centrifugal tendencies. Thestronger the centrifugal tendencies, the greater the repression that will be used.Maritime powers are not subject to the same compulsions principally becausetheir sources of strength are diffused and flow upwards from commercial groupsand corporations, not downwards by dictation. In addition, the colonies of amaritime power, whether overseas settlements in the historic sense or overseascorporations in the modern sense, are separated one from another and from themother country and there is not the same need for a powerful central control.

22. The stability, loyalty, and trustworthiness of overseas colonies anddependencies are directly proportional to the strength of the mother navy.

23. It is not the forms of society and government which help to determinewhether a nation will become a successful sea power, but the reverse: more openforms of society and government are more likely to develop in maritime powerstates.

24. Continental powers are trapped in economic straitjackets from whichthere is no escape, dependent on maritime competitors for manufactured goodsand foreign bankers, businessmen, and shipping to manage large economicaffairs.

25. A continental power cannot become an efficient industrial power unlessit changes itself into a maritime power. If it does so, its forms of governmentand society will also change.

26. A continental power cannot build its industrial base in the same way asa maritime power without freeing its subject population to become market-ac-quiring commercial agents, thus increasing their centrifugal tendencies andincreasing the need for central control.

27. If the tensions between central and diffused control result in the breakupof the continental power, it loses its formidable strength; if they result in thevictory of the market-acquiring groups, the state changes its nature and becomesa maritime power itself; if they result in a victory for central control, themarket-acquiring tendencies are suppressed and neither industry nor commercewill be efficient.

28. The social system of a maritime power is homogeneous, workingupwards from each individual within it, a dynamic whole in which the successfulrise, the unsuccessful fall. A continental power, by contrast, is based on centralcontrol, hence devolved rights and duties which are the reverse of the sea power'sdynamic.

29. The differences between maritime and continental powers are mostmarked when the power is on the upward slope of its cycle. Developing maritimepowers are characterized by very high social mobility and a slackening ofconstraints such as guild ties, while developing continental powers are markedby rigid social orders. The decline of maritime powers is accompanied by socialossification, the decline of continental powers is characterized by tendenciestoward greater social movement. If the decline is catastrophic, the movementwill be revolutionary.

30. Due to a mixture of organizational emphasis on individualism, discipline,and insulation from domestic politics, navies have usually been among the leastpolitical and most stable of institutions in maritime nations. Naval officers, dueto their technical orientations, inexperience in commanding large numbers ofmen, and infrequent contact with governmental organizations, have tended toremain aloof from politics or to adopt a seemingly safer, conservative approachto politics.

31. Agriculturally (and later industrially) based, continental powers havedepended mostly on the mobilizing, disciplining, and administration of largearmies for defense and the effect has been a general tendency towardauthoritarian government. Given the sprawling landmass of the continental state,a strong authoritarian government is the primary requirement for manning andmaintaining a large standing army and fixed fortifications for external security.

32. With creativity constrained to political utility, the cultures of continentalpowers are generally bland and backward. Philosophy, art, science, and technol-ogy are subjugated to the will of the state.

Conflict Behavior and War Strategy

33. Wars, for the most part, have been fought to gain control of the land.States seek to control the open seas in order to affect or influence what ishappening on the land.

34. Ultimately, sea power is not about the military efforts of fighting ships;rather, it is about the use of maritime lines of communication for the effective

interconnection, organization, and purposeful application of the warmakingpotential of a coalition.

35. Maritime and continental powers often have had great difficulties inreaching the enemy's center of strategic gravity for the purpose of forcing afavorable decision. Since maritime powers typically can be beaten only at seaand continental power can be beaten only on land, struggles between maritimeand continental states tend towards stalemate.

36. In major conflicts between maritime and continental powers or coali-tions, each side must pursue a mixed strategy embracing both land and seaelements. These conflicts develop into contests to determine which side is betterable to translate its original, environmentally specific, comparative advantageinto success in the environment favored by the enemy.

37. The offensive is the stronger form of combat at sea because 1) anopponent has practically unlimited possibilities for evading a defender's forcesand falling by surprise on some part of the defender's commitment and 2) theinventory of capital ships is relatively small and, therefore, sinking one or moreof them tends to be an event of unusual strategic significance.

38. Continental powers can win wars against maritime powers if they areable to deny a tolerable level of sea control to their maritime-dependent enemies.

39. The most viable solution a continental power can seek in its quest for anaval presence is alliance with a maritime nation.

40. Although maritime powers cannot win wars at sea against continentalpowers, command of the relevant sea areas is an indispensable enabler foreventual victory in war.

41. Superior sea power typically functions to permit its owner to use time inthe search for advantage. Sea power allows the protraction of conflict and tendsto set up a frustrated continental enemy to overreach on land.

42. Because of the unity of the oceans, the coalition superior at sea has theadvantage in waging a global war.

43. An important advantage in sea power translates into the ability to controlthe geostrategic terms of engagement in war. Another advantage is greater timeto knit together the stronger coalition.

44. When frustrated by their inability to bring a conflict to an immediatesatisfactory conclusion, a continental power or a maritime power typically willattempt what it can with the limited strategic reach of the preferred and availableinstrument of excellence.

45. A continental power confronting a maritime power will: a) at sea, resortto a raiding strategy, assaulting the maritime communications of the sea powerenemy while endeavoring to avoid the concentrated strength of its naval forces;b) on land, attempt to eliminate continental allies of the maritime power so thatthe maritime power-led coalition will be unable to wage war on land; c) invadethe maritime power.

46. The only effective response to a determined guerre de course is theexpedient of convoying in order to oblige raiders to place themselves in the wayof maximum harm.

47. Maritime powers have had to seek to acquire land power; continental powershave had to seek to acquire sea power. Different patterns of relative advantage havemanifested themselves in ancient and medieval times as contrasted with the modernperiod. In the former era, great continental states persistendy acquired the sea powernecessary to defeat maritime foes. In the latter period, no sea-oriented coalition ofstates has lost a conflict with a continental enemy.

48. Continental powers must contend with more friction than must maritimepowers. Physical and political geography impedes the extension, consolidation, andexploitation of land power in ways that have no approximate parallels at sea. Thebalance of advantage tends to shift to the maritime power in protracted conflictbecause dominant land power generates countervailing opposition that can beenlisted in a common antihegemonic cause by a preeminent maritime power.

49. Maritime powers are capable of strategic overreach at sea but continentalpowers perennially overreach themselves even in their own preferred environ-ment of combat. Preponderant land power is far more likely, in effect, to wreakits own destruction than is preponderant sea power. Maritime powers are morelikely to make better use of their superiority at sea for the generation andregeneration of landward fighting strength than continental powers have beenable to turn advantage on the continent into the power of decision at and fromthe sea.

50. Continental power decision makers repeatedly have succumbed to thetemptation to believe that their army can defeat the grand strategy of theopposing maritime power-led coalition.

51. Maritime powers and continental powers focus strategic confidence intheir traditional military instrument of excellence. An essentially maritime orcontinental tradition more often than not leads to the misuse and underapprecia-tion of the traditionally non-preferred military instrument. This underapprecia-tion translates into less deterrent leverage than there should be for both sides ofa sea power-land power confrontations.

52. There are no trends extant—technological, economic, political, ormilitary—which suggest an iniminent dimunition in the strategic leverage of seapower. If the coming of the railroad, internal combustion engine, and missile,nuclear, and space eras could not demote the strategic value of sea power significant-ly, it is difficult to see what could emerge to do so over the next several decades.

I have one last "radical" observation to make about comparative naval history.I have argued elsewhere    that the social sciences are much better at explaining

23 William R. Thompson, "Ten Centuries of Global Political- Economic Cocvolution," paperdelivered to the Workshop on Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences (Seattle, Washington:University of Washington, May, 1994).

Thompson     113

short-term changes than they are in dealing with long-term changes. One reasonis that the social sciences have become increasingly ahistorical. 4 Another reasonis the marked preference for equilibrium-type models that assume simple andstable worlds. Still another reason is the insistence that behavior be meditatedvia human agents and usually in a rational choice format. It cannot be deniedthat these attributes of contemporary social scientific inquiry facilitate par-simonious theory construction and quantitative analysis. But at what cost?

One of the costs is that social scientists tend to overcompartmentalizethemselves. Most economists deal only with "economics." Most politicalscientists restrict themselves to "politics." Most geographers study only "geog-raphy." To be sure, there are notable exceptions that include the hybridspecialties such as international political economy. Yet the problem is that causalchains in the social sciences, and especially for long-term phenomena, arefrequently more complex than any one discipline or specialization can handle.The tendency is to follow causal chains as far as one's expertise allows and thenstop the analysis in hopes that some other analyst will pick up the rest of the trail.Sometimes that happens but usually it does not.

Thompson argues that long-term social science problems can be concep-tualized as occurring within a matrix of reciprocally interdependent subsystems:politics, technology, economics, population, culture, and energy/environment.Each subsystem has a past that creates path-dependent tendencies. Eachsubsystem encompasses a network of changing causal relationships. Each subsys-tem is also linked to each of the other subsystems in variably asymmetric andsymmetrical ways. Thus, the parts are evolving over time and so is the whole.

The point is that we have done a relatively better job in deciphering how theparts work than we have in mapping the interdependences and the evolutionor coevolution of the whole. This problem seems tailor made for comparativenaval historians. References to at least four of the main six subsystems (politics,technology, economics, and energy/environment) are quite common in com-parative naval history. They are fairly common because they are so inescapablein unraveling questions pertaining to the development and employment of navalforces. And who should be more sensitive to path-dependencies than historians?

What is needed, however, are more self-conscious, explicit, and generalizableattempts to decipher how the parts fit together to make the whole. Therein liesthe rub. Many naval historians are unlikely to embrace such a task eagerly. Whenthey come close, the tendency is to shy away from general statements. Nor are

While social scientists tend to be ahistorical, historians tend to be atheoretical. Neither characteristicis very helpful in unraveling long-term processes of change.

25 William R. Thompson, "Ten Centuries of Global Political- Economic Coevolution," paperdelivered to the Workshop on Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences (Seattle, Washington:University of Washington, May, 1994).

26 Path-dependencies refer to sensitivities to initial parameters or, in other words, the past.

114    Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

they alone for it is a mission that most other analysts have also avoided. Still, itis something that at least needs to be tried more often than it is. Comparativenaval historians might find that they are more used to dealing with the inherentinterdependent complexities than many other types of analysts.

Conclusion

In sum, there are indeed a number of gaps in our understanding of how theworld works and what roles navies play in the world's structures and processes.There are a number of ways to fill these holes. One way is to look at a singlenavy's activities at a time. Another entails examining multiple navies' activities.These can be done for one time period or for several time periods. They can bedone narrowly or very broadly. The range runs from old-fashioned "saltwaternarratives" to the complexities of coevolving subsystems. The comparisons thatmay or may not go on in the analysis may also be done implicidy or explicidy.Similarly, theory may also be relatively implicit or explicit in the analysis. Weall have our own preferences on how to choose among these options. Thereseems little point in arguing for the superiority of one approach over another aslong as the comparative analysis of naval history, in all its possible manifestations,continues to be attempted.

PART IVGeneral Naval History

Considerations On Writing A General

Naval History

N. A. M. Rodger

As recently as twenty years ago, it was possible for weighty scholarly opinionto insist that naval history ought to be regarded as a branch of militaryrather than maritime history, on the grounds that it dealt only with chroniclesof war service, and could not pretend to the broad sweep of more serioushistorical subjects. We have come a long way since then, but it is still easyenough to discern traces of the habits and attitudes which led the Royal DutchAcademy of Sciences to give that verdict, and it seems clear that one of the mosturgent tasks of the naval historian today, perhaps the single most urgent task, isto reconnect his subject to the main stream of historical scholarship. This meansnot only demonstrating its relevance to other historians, but also incorporatingtheir insights into naval history. The two processes are of course mutuallysupportive. The same applies to integrating the naval history of Britain with thatof other countries; a full comparative history is a formidable undertaking, butno historian of one country's naval affairs can afford to be ignorant of enemies,allies and foreign influences.

None of this is novel or peculiar to naval history, and it would be perfectlypossible to dismiss the problem of writing naval history as non-existent; to claimthat there is, or ought to be, nothing in naval history which is not present in thework of all good historians. To a considerable extent this is true. The qualitiesrequired of the naval historian are those required of all historians, and theweaknesses of the subject correspond to a failure to attain the best professionalstandards. All historians would agree on the importance of basic scholarship, of

* J.R. Bruijn, "Geschiedschrijving van de Marine", Tijdschrifi voor Zeegeschiedatis, XIII (1994), pp. 3-17at p. 3, referring to Rapport over de huidige stand en toekomstige planning van net wetenschappelijk onderzoekder Nederlandse geschiedenis, samengesteld door de Historisch- Wetenschappelijke Commissie der KoninklijkeNederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Amsterdam, 1974).

2 But see, for example, Christian Buchet, La hue pour I'hpace Caraibe et la facade atlantique de I'AmeriqueCentrale et du Sud (1672-1763) (Paris: Librairie de 1' Inde 1991) 2 volumes; J.R. McNeill, Atlantic Empireso/Fratice and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1985); Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914 (Cambridge, Ma.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1971), and The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918 (Annapolis: Naval InstitutePress, 1987).

a thorough knowledge of the sources. At the level of the monograph this mustmean the documentary sources; at the level of synthesis, the printed authorities.If naval historians were in the habit of thoroughly exploiting the archives, andof reading all the relevant literature (including that in foreign languages), manyof the defects of the subject would disappear. It is equally obvious that the navalhistorian, like any other historian, must deploy the intellectual skills to analyzeand explain his material, and the literary ability to make it intelligible andinteresting to the reader. It could be argued, therefore, that there is nothingrequired for naval history but common professional standards.

If so, the common professional standards are not as common as they shouldbe. It is not necessary to be an advanced adherent of the Annates school to bedissatisfied with narrative history unaccompanied by any serious attempt toanalyze causes and effects. Naval history is certainly one of the few historicalsubjects in which there are authors who still think that success or failure can beexplained by references, overt or implied, to the innate superiority of nationalcharacter. Indeed, this is not all which some authors try to explain in this way:a recent book, which very properly emphasizes the critical role of sea power insecuring the independence of the United States, does not scruple to imply thatit was largely American ships which were responsible, and stops only just shortof claiming that the United States Navy was founded in 1775. This sort of thingeasily explains the indifferent reputation of naval history among other historians,and it would be possible to compile a considerable list of books on naval historypublished in recent years, not only in English, which make no serious attemptto analyze cause and effect, still less to locate naval history in its national andinternational contexts. If this is what naval history is like, then other historiansmay argue with some plausibility that it is simply bad history.

It is not surprising that much of the bad naval history is written by authorswho lack a professional training as historians. Retired naval officers will naturallytend to be unfamiliar with the techniques and approaches of historical research,and are bound to find it hard to view the history of their own service withdetachment. But this does not sufficiently explain the problem. History is,happily, one of the few academic disciplines in which it is still possible for theamateur to make serious contributions, and non-professional historians havepublished and continue to publish many valuable studies which do authors andsubject credit. Professional historians, moreover, are themselves perfectly capableof nationalist bias, tunnel vision and professional incompetence, and these defectsare by no means confined to naval history. It does seem to reasonable to guess,however, that the more good historians tackle naval history, the more its standingas a serious subject will be enhanced, and the more it will attract better work.

3 Several recent histories of the U.S. Navy have been criticized for just this.

4 Raymond G. O'Connor, Origins of the American Navy: Sea Power in the Colonies and the New Nation(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994).

Nothing succeeds like success, and what we need are some signal successes toturn the tide.

It might be easier for naval historians to analyze cause and effect if the subjecthad attracted more theorists. Always most popular among the pragmatic his-torians of the English-speaking world, naval history tends in practice to havelacked convincing theoretical structures. Mahan rather implied than advancedhis own ideas, leaving his works to be pillaged by interested observers in searchof justification for well or less well-conceived policies. Such foreign theoristsas Wegener and Castex remained until recently untranslated and unreadoutside their own countries. By far the most enduring influence has been SirJulian Corbett, whose work retains much of its authority as an explanation of

Q

naval strategy. But Corbett was a strategist, not an historical theorist or a politicalscientist: he did not attempt to explain why navies exist, or how and why somenations have supported successful navies, some unsuccessful ones, and some noneat all.

For writers of his generation it could be more or less taken for granted thatthe Navy had made the Empire, and the Empire had made Britain great. Wecan see now that this line, if not necessarily wrong in itself, raises more questionsthan it answers. If navies are necessary to empire, and empire is necessary togreatness, the connections between them ought to be closer and clearer thanthey actually were. Why did medieval England attempt at vast cost to sustain anoverseas empire without a navy, when Anglo-Saxon England had successfullyemployed one? If the meaning of a navy is to be sought in connection withempire, what was the point of Queen Elizabeth's navy? No-one now wouldseriously argue that she had, or intended to have an overseas empire, but sheunquestionably had a powerful modern fleet. In this she contrasts sharply withPhilip II of Spain, who had the greatest oceanic empire in the world, but noregular navy outside the Mediterranean. We might equally note that the sundid not begin to set on the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century, bywhich time the Spanish fleet had been outclassed for most of four centuries,

5 James Goldrick & John B. Hattendorf, eds., Mahan is Not Enough (Newport: Naval War CollegePress, 1993).

Wolfgang Wegener, Die Seestrategie des Weltkrieges (Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1929); The Naval Strategy ofthe World War. Translated and edited by Holger H. Herwig (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1989).

R.V.P. Castex, Theories Strategiques (Paris, 1929-35, 5 vols); Strategic Theories, edited and translated byEugenia Kiesling (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993). On Castex, see Herve Coutau-Begarie,La Puissattce Maritime: Castex et la straUgie navale (Paris: Fayard, 1985), with an admirable survey of theliterature on naval strategy in all languages.

Julian S. Corbett, Some Priticiples of Maritime Strategy (London, 1911; Edited with an introduction byEric Grove (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986).

Even the Irish expedition was undertaken reluctantly, right at the end of her reign, long after theTudor fleet was well established.

Excepting the Portuguese galleons, after the occupation of that country in 1580.

while the British were careless enough to lose two empires (in the Americas inthe 1770s and the Far East in the 1940s) at high points in their naval strength.Britain enjoyed an industrial revolution at a time of naval supremacy, butapproximately in the interval between the dissolution of one empire and theconstruction of another.

The Dutch and Portuguese maintained the longest-lived of all Europeancolonial empires with the feeblest of European navies. These are obvious puzzles,largely ignored, which would be easier to explain if more attention had beenoffered to matters of theory. Only now, with the appearance of Jan Glete'sNavies and Nations, have we acquired a coherent theoretical interpretation ofnavies in terms of Continental ideas of staatenbildung. This is a rich and powerfulsynthesis of international naval history, stiffened by a valuable theoreticalframework, which ought in time to advance the subject to a much higherintellectual level. It is also one of the first books to confront a very obviousproblem in naval history. For the historian of the seventeenth to twentiethcenturies it is possible, indeed customary, to define the subject as the history ofan institution, the Navy. This is not realistic or satisfactory for any period, forno navy of any nation has ever monopolized naval warfare, nor could any navyin any period be regarded as an autonomous institution divorced from the stateand society which it represents. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,moreover, this interpretation is simply impossible, for in this period a state navywas only one of a range of possibilities for making war at sea. Elizabeth I ofEngland had a permanent navy, recognizably of the modern type, but almostnone of its personnel were in her full-time service. Administrators, admirals,officers and men were also private merchants, contractors, shipowners, ship-masters and seamen, investors and participants in privateering operations. TheQueen herself contributed her ships to privateering cruises as a private investor.The Navy Royal was only one, admittedly important, section of a national navalcapability most of which did not belong to the crown.

In Spain, the same was even more true. Philip II possessed as many as sevennavies,    but all were regional forces belonging to constituent parts of his empire

11 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seameti, Pirates and theAnglo-American World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), applies FrenchMarxist thinking of thirty years ago to maritime social history, but is open to the same objection as itwas; that even the best theory is no substitute for research.

Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America 1500-1860 (Stockholm:Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993) 2 volumes.

13 David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot: ScolarPress, 1992).

14 The galley fleets of the Crown of Aragon at Barcelona, the Viceroy of Sicily at Naples, and theCrown of Castille at Seville; The Armada de Flandes at Brill (until 1577) and later Dunkirk, the Armadade Barlovento in the Caribbean, the Armada del Mar del Sur in the Pacific, and the Portuguese fleet(after 1580).

rather than to the whole, and only one was capable of operations on the highseas. None of them was much involved in the principal 'naval' activity of theempire, the escorting of the annual plate fleets across the Atlantic, which wasundertaken by a squadron of armed merchantmen, the Guarda de Indias, providedby a chartered merchant guild, the Casa de Contratacion in Seville, from theproceeds of a compulsory levy on the value of cargoes shipped under escort.15Even this system was simplicity itself compared with Dutch naval forces in theseventeenth century, which were provided by five independent provincialadmiralties, the States General on behalf of the Republic, two joint-stockcompanies (the East and West India Companies), several insurance syndicatesand a great number of privateer owners. Yet these were the instruments whichraised the Dutch Republic to be the greatest naval power and the wealthiesttrading nation in the world, and to write of this rise as though only the State'sfleet were involved would be palpably absurd. So any comprehensive navalhistory has to be much more than the history of a navy.

We have to ask what it is about naval history in practice which deters goodhistorians, or prevents them from reaching the best standards. One answer iscertainly that it is seen as a difficult as well as an unrewarding subject. Historianswho have attempted to write naval history—and perhaps even more, those whohave not—perceive particular difficulties in the subject. Firstly, naval history isabove all technical history. In every era of history, warships and sea fighting haveinvolved the most advanced and complex technologies of the period. It isimpossible to understand or explain what went on at sea without coming to gripswith the technologies concerned. Historians are aware of this, and one suspectsthat many of them are daunted by it. There are real obstacles, both practical andpsychological, to mastering high technologies, especially more or less completelyextinct technologies. On a psychological level, historians with no education inmathematics or science (which includes a large majority of British historians,myself among them) are easily frightened by high technology. It may not be asdifficult as it looks, but it looks difficult enough, and those who have mastered,say, navigation or naval architecture, do not always go out of their way to explainthemselves to the uninitiated. These, moreover, are current technologies withliving experts to write and speak about them; it is much harder to learn how tohandle a large ship under sail. Few historians will have the opportunity to getmuch experience at sea, and in any case a modern sail-training ship differs somuch from, say, a seventeenth or eighteenth-century warship that the ex-perience is of doubtful relevance anyway. This is not to say that seafaring

Ricardo Cerezo Martinez, Las armadas de Felipe II (Madrid: 1989).

16 The Admiralties of Amsterdam, of the Maze (at Rotterdam), of Zealand (at Middle burg), of Friesland(at Harlingen), and of the North Quarter (alternating every six months between Hoorn and Enkhuizen).

17 Jaap R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, S.C.: Universityof South Carolina Press, 1993).

experience is valueless, but it can be highly misleading without deep historical

1 rknowledge.    Many types of ship once important to naval history (notably the

galley) have entirely disappeared. The modern practice of building and making

trial of seagoing replicas of historical craft has done a great deal to remedy our

ignorance in some areas, notably the Viking age, and in Scandinavia there are

now so many more or less authentic reconstructions that it is possible to hold

'Viking regattas'. The building of the trireme Olympias has been a very notable

and inspiring example of co-operation between the scholar and the naval

architect.    When all this has been said, however, a regatta is not a perfect image

of war. There is a limit to what can be learned even from a real ship about the

realities of ancient warfare, and no-one is likely to be able to build a ship of the

line, still less a fleet of ships of the line, for the historian to play with. In the end

much will depend, as it always does in history, on the imaginative sympathy of

the historian to appreciate the real problems and possibilities of the past. It can

be done, in naval history as in any other area of history, by those who are prepared

to invest time and trouble in mastering the complex and unfamiliar. This is not

a subject to recommend to anyone in search of a quick and painless path to

scholarly knowledge, but there is no reason to be frightened of it. The essential

is to be prepared to invest time and effort in mastering lost technologies.

The problem in actual practice has been that writers of naval history tend to

be drawn from two distinct camps. On the one hand those with an education

as historians, more or less accustomed to taking a large view and to locating their

findings in an historical context, may shy away from technical questions because

they do not understand them, or even because they do not accept them as being

of real historical interest. Those who do understand, on the other hand,

sometimes display a narrowly antiquarian pleasure in the amassing of facts, or

supposed facts, without asking themselves why they are interesting or important.

They may even claim that technology alone is a sufficient explanation for the

course of naval history: "The evolution of a Navy is dictated, and thus explained,

by the increase in the power of its guns."    Such claims do not recommend

technical history to the trained historian, and yet in this subject it is absolutely

indispensable. No historian will make much contribution to naval history who

dismisses technical knowledge as antiquarian enthusiasm. One of the most

18 Two recent articles on the same campaign illustrate the point: CM. Gillmor, "Naval Logistics ofthe Cross-Channel Operation, 1066," in R. Allen Brown, ed., Anglo-Norman Studies VII: Proceedings ofthe Battle Conference 1984. (Woodbridge: 1985), pp. 105-131; and Christine and Gerald Grainge, "ThePevensey Expedition: Brilliantly Executed Plan or Near Disaster?," Mariner's Mirror, LXXIX (1993) pp.261-273. Gillmor is painfully ignorant of the sea, the Grainges offer the yachtsman's view of the eleventhcentury; both fall into strange errors.

19 Boris Rankov, "Reconstructing the Past: The Operation of the Trireme Reconstruction Otympiasin the Light of the Historical Sources," Mariner's Mirror, LXXX (1994) pp. 131-146.

20 Jean Boudriot, The History of the French Frigate, 1650-1850, translated by David H. Roberts(Rotherfield, East Sussex: Jean Boudriot Publications, 1993), p. 282.

encouraging signs of renaissance in the subject is a consciousness on both sidesof this divide that it needs to be bridged. It is too soon to say that it hasdisappeared, but for the good of the subject it ought to, and anyone who tacklesnaval history has got to be prepared to link the technical and the general. It isencouraging that so much good technical history about ships and weapons hasbeen published in recent years, advancing our knowledge enormously, andmaking it possible for the technically illiterate to acquire the essentials of thesubject. The importance of mastering the technology of naval history runs wellbeyond naval history itself. Only when naval historians have mastered thisessential aspect of their subject will they be properly equipped to convey itsimportance to non-specialists. For want of technical literacy, historians of otherdisciplines can and do fall into serious errors in treating of maritime affairs, andit is the business of the naval historian to be able to correct them.

There is, however, much more to writing any overview of naval history thanintegrating and explaining complex technologies. Naval history of its naturetouches on many areas of national history which are commonly studied separate-ly. Anyone who wants to write the history of a navy, still more the naval historyof a country, must be able to explain the naval influence on, or contribution to,political, social, economic, diplomatic and of course military history. It is idle tostudy the social history of seafaring in ignorance of social history at large. Somuch is obvious, but the converse is true as well, and we are still some way fromdemonstrating to social historians that their subject is incomplete so long as itexcludes one of the largest and most distinctive occupations. Economic, colonialand imperial historians, keenly interested in the linked debates on how and whythe European empires rose and fell, and to whose profit, cannot and do notignore the role of sea power, but it is characteristic and deplorable that theirwork has not much influenced naval historians. Those who should be mostinterested in the question of what navies achieved and how, are not alwaysfamiliar with the theories of, for instance, Frederic Lane or Niels Steensgaard.A considerable body of research now exists on the relations of governmenteconomic and fiscal policy, economic growth, foreign trade and naval power,but it has not yet been integrated into naval history as it should. Among theeconomic historians, for example, the origins of the industrial revolution have

21 Notably by such authors as Brian Lavery, Peter Goodwin, Jean Boudriot, Frank Fox, John Harland,Robert Gardiner, James Lees, D.K. Brown, Andrew Lambert and Norman Friedman.

22 An example is treated by myself in "Cnut's Geld and the size of Danish Warships,"EMg/w/i HistoricalReview, ex (1995) pp. 392-403.

23 Hence the value of such works as Anthony Carew's The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy 1900-39:Invergordon in Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), or Bernard Capp's Cromwell'sNavy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Historiansof trades-unions or radical social movements may not be able to tell us everything about life at sea, butthey can tell us a great deal which conventional naval historians have hitherto missed.

24 Notably by Patrick O'Brian, John Brewer and James C. Riley.

long been a matter of debate. One of the critical issues is the role of capital: howmuch was needed, when, and where, and whence did it come? It seems to beclear that the colonial trades, especially from the West and East Indies, werecrucial generators of liquid capital for investment elsewhere. It is less clear thatthe availability of this capital was essential to industrial development, but itcertainly supplied the credit structure which supported the British war effort.

This credit structure has itself been identified by James C.Riley as one of thefoundations of British superiority over France, and his (admittedly technical)works on the operation of international capital markets ought to be invokedearly in any discussion of the ingredients of naval power. There is much still todebate, but the relevance of colonial trade and forms of government debt to seapower are obvious, and naval historians should be participating fully in thediscussion. It is to be feared that not all of them are conscious that it is going on.Nor are the economic historians always as aware as they might be of thesignificance of naval history to their work. A good case can be made that chronicindebtedness resulting from unsustainable naval expansion was the fundamental(as distinct from precipitating) factor in the decline of the Dutch in the earlyeighteenth century, and the collapse of the old regimes of France in 1789,Germany in 1918, and the Soviet Union in the 1990s, but the point is not oftennoticed.

Similar comments might be made of political history. Though naval strengthhas been a prominent political issue in Britain since the fourteenth century atlatest, naval history still tends to shy away from discussing politics, without whichthere is no possibility of explaining the formation of naval policy and strategy,and indeed many other aspects of naval history. We cannot, for example, analyzethe reputation of Lord Howe before and after the battle of the 1st June 1794without recalling that he was a survivor of a generation of senior officers whohad split the fleet on political lines, that as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1788his handling of promotions had aroused such fury that attempts were made toimpeach him, and that as commander-in-chief in 1790 he had been extremelyunpopular. It is equally unrealistic to describe the course of high politics withno reference to the Navy at many critical points in history, such as the installationof Edward IV, the rise and fall of the English republic, and the revolution of1688. The illusion is widespread that the sea has insulated Britain from invasion.In fact English or Scottish regimes have been overthrown by seaborne invasionsat least ten times since the Norman Conquest,     besides at least eight other

25 International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1740-1815 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1980), and The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in Frattce: The Economicand Financial Toll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

26 N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich 1718-1792 (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp. 254-255 and 308-309.

27 In 1139, 1153, 1326, 1332, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688.

successful landings of major forces. These figures take no account of lesser raidsand landings, they ignore all expeditions which did not succeed in putting troopsashore, and they do not include landings in Ireland. This does not altogetherjustify political historians in overlooking the threat of invasion, nor navalhistorians in overlooking the fact of it. In more recent periods when enemylandings have been avoided, naval policy has continued to be a central theme inhigh politics, and an indispensable study for anyone interested in explaining thecourse of naval policy. It is impossible to explain British naval strength in theeighteenth century, for example, without understanding why the variedideologies of Whigs and Tories, Havoverians and Jacobites, King's Friends andPatriots, led all of them for different reasons to support a strong navy. Conversely,historians of political ideas can hardly describe their subject fully withoutreference to national defence, always the most expensive and difficult of anygovernment's responsibilities.

Similar comments could be made about a wide range of historical specialtieswhich need to be integrated with naval history. Industrial history cannot bewritten without reference to the dockyards, until recently the largest and mostcomplex industrial enterprises in the world, and the first to adopt machine tools.There is a crucial relationship, still very ill-explored, between the developmentof the blast-furnace and of iron founding technology, and the adoption of ironguns at sea. Architectural history requires reference to dockyard buildings,pioneers in several building and civil engineering techniques, notably wide-spaniron roofs. The religious history of the Navy is important not only as an aspectof religious and social history in general, but for its impact on many other aspectsof naval affairs. It is, for instance, quite unrealistic to discuss the Royal Navy'sfailure to profit from Arthur Pollen's revolutionary fire-control equipment,without mentioning that Pollen belonged to a prominent Roman Catholicfamily in an age when most naval officers were strongly anti-Catholic. Evensartorial history ought to notice that most men and many women throughoutthe world are now dressed as eighteenth-century sailors. In all these and manyother areas, the naval historian has to be aware of what other historians arewriting if he is to do justice to his own subject, and explain its importance toothers. To do so he has to integrate a wide range of knowledge. It goes withoutsaying that this demands a great deal of reading and not inconsiderable literary

28  In 1069, 1101, 1215, 1405, 1462, 1469, 1487 and 1708.

Bernard Semmers Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica(Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), for example, is a valuable book which interprets its subject in sucha way as to avoid discussing either naval strategy or sea power.

30 Jonathan G. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the SailingNavy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989) pp. 114-117 & 230-233.

Jon T. Sumida, In Defettce of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy 1889-1914(Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989).

skills, so it is not surprising that successful naval histories which take this approachare very rare.

It could even be argued that successful navies and successful naval historiansboth possess a high level of managerial skill. Navies do not simply depend onone or two complex technologies; they have to combine a very wide range ofskills and trades, ashore and afloat, into an efficient whole. Failure in any one ofthese, or failure to connect them all into an effective machine, will nullify anyamount of excellence in the individual parts. For the historian the problem isequally in making a coherent narrative out of so wide a range of material. Clearlynaval history is not the totality of national history, yet it bears more or less on alarge fraction of that totality. To make the necessary connections, to demonstratethe relevance of naval to national history and vice versa, is not easy. It demandsconsiderable organizational and literary discipline to keep so wide a range andso large a volume of material under control.

For the British historian, moreover, the very concept of national historyinvolves subtleties and complications which have not yet been much recognizedin naval history. In countries which have been thoroughly overtaken by the ideaof the nation-state, it is possible (though not necessarily helpful) for historiansto assume that nation and state are identical. In Britain, a survivor of the olderideal of the supranational monarchy, the naval historian has to decide whosenaval history he is writing. Even in the modern era, and a fortiori in a historywhich reaches back into the Dark Ages, it is no longer acceptable to treat Britainand England as equivalent terms. A naval history of Britain has to be a navalhistory of its constituent parts, a Scottish, Irish and Welsh naval history as wellas an English one. Moreover it is not possible to study the naval history of theBritish Isles, especially in the early Middle Ages, without being struck by theconviction that there never was anything inevitable about a unitary state of GreatBritain, dominated by England. Such a state existed in embryo in the tenthcentury, and it collapsed as a result of foreign invasion, leaving the British Islespartitioned, and England incorporated into two foreign empires in succession;first the Danish, then the Norman-Angevin. It was English naval failure whichled to this conquest and collapse, and it was English naval weakness which keptthe British Isles divided for seven hundred years.

National histories and naval history are aspects of one another; to write navalhistory purely in English terms is not merely inadequate but impossible. Thisfact might be better understood if the naval history of the Middle Ages had beenattempted before. In fact the last attempt at a comprehensive and scholarly navalhistory of even a part of the period was published in 1847. As a result, a periodin which three successive English overseas empires rose and fell, and in whichmuch of the British Isles was for longer or shorter periods incorporated into

32 Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, A History of the Royal Navy (London: Colbourn, 1847) 2 volumes. Ithas very little before 1066 and nothing after 1422.

Rodger    127

foreign empires—empires necessarily based on sea power, or at least sea com-munications—has been ignored by naval historians, and treated by otherhistorians virtually without any reference to the sea. Inadequate as much existingnaval history is, the historian of, say, the eighteenth century can hardly ignoreit altogether. The medieval historian can, and does. Here the professionalchallenge to the naval historian is to master the sources for a period which is aptto appear formidable to the beginner. At bottom the difficulty is much the sameas that of technical history; it is no harder to master medieval Latin hands thanit is to understand the workings of a steam engine or a radar set, and any scholarof common intelligence and application ought to be capable of making a usefulcontribution to the subject. The prize is a valuable one, for it is not only medievalhistory which will appear in a very different light when we have studied theperiod when England was an overseas colony ruled from Lund or Fontevrauld,and when the English were the victims of the international slave trade.

The study of medieval naval history is valuable, moreover, not only in itself,but because it forcibly divests the historian of anachronistic nationalism. It is noteasy for even the least sensitive scholar to write of 'English' naval history in aperiod when the greatest 'English' naval base was Bayonne, and when 'English'fleets could be manned by men speaking Basque, Italian, Gascon and Gaelic.

The same consciousness has to be extended into more modern periods whenit makes better sense to think in terms of national history, for there can be nohistory less intelligible in narrowly nationalistic terms than the history of the sea.Naval history, like all maritime history, is of its essence the history of interactionbetween peoples. It cannot be written properly from the records of one countryalone, or from books in only one language. Yet in actual practice it is uncommonto read a work of naval history whose author has really attempted to assimilatethe history of other navies or other countries, let alone read works on his owncountry's history written in foreign languages, or explored foreign archives.When the attempt is made it sometimes inspires the thought that few thingscross frontiers more slowly than a reading list. It is impossible to write any generalnaval history of Britain without being able to read the common scholarly tonguesof Europe. Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian areevidently indispensable; Catalan, Arabic, Turkish, Russian and the Scandinavianlanguages highly desirable, to which the historian of the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries will want to add Chinese and Japanese. There are not many navalhistorians who can deploy all these, certainly not myself, and yet we have gotto accept that is what is necessary to do the job properly.

In the end we come to a simple, almost banal observation: to write a broadhistory over a long period the historian has to have broad knowledge. He has

33 In the later stages of the Scottish War of Independence, Edward II's squadrons in the Irish Seaincluded ships of Bayonne, Genoa, Bordeaux and the Western Isles, besides many ports in England,Wales and Ireland.

128    Writing A General Naval History

to have the ability, and of course the time, to read very widely, in manylanguages. He must have access to foreign archives and foreign books. He needsthe organizational and literary skills to assimilate and present the fruits of hisresearch. In naval history it almost always is "he", which perhaps is one reasonwhy so few authors match, or even approach, these demands. What is neededis not only some ability and experience, but good fortune as well. Like the goodgeneral, the good historian needs luck, the luck of time and money for manyyears' work, and such luck is not given to many scholars inside or outsideuniversities these days. Above all, he needs a certain sober boldness. Surveyingwith well-informed and realistic eye the difficulties of the undertaking, and theformidable range and depth of skills required to meet it, he will appreciate justhow far his own abilities fall short of the ideal. Yet if every scholar is deterredby the difficulties, the task will never be undertaken. Somebody has to beprepared to run risks. A general naval history would be a prize of great value,and if the first person to attempt it should fail altogether, he may still have themerit of stimulating other and better scholars to achieve it.

Toward a "New" Naval History

Dennis E. Showaiter

To speak of naval history as becalmed may be an exaggeration. Dr. NicholasRodger, however, certainly describes the need for a leadsman in the bowas the discipline navigates shoal 'waters. For three decades the "new militaryhistory" has dominated land-warfare studies to a point where the approach hasbecome quite middle-aged. Students of air power, with some notable excep-tions, have correspondingly accepted a broader view of their subject. Dr.Rodger, on the other hand, demonstrates trenchantly and cogently that "newnaval history" remains an unfortunate oxymoron.

In explaining the problem of writing naval history, Rodger focusses on navalhistorians. He describes authors who use national characteristics to explainoperational performance, who either lack technical knowledge or takeantiquarians' approaches to details of warship design and weapons systems, whotreat their subject in isolation from the social, economic, and even architecturalfactors that provide the matrices of naval warfare. His final challenge, calling forat least reading knowledge of over a dozen languages, will surely daunt the mostambitious of scholars. It is no less legitimate for being intimidating.

It is possible as well to approach the problem of writing naval history in astructural context. Two principal factors have combined to create the patternestablished in Rodger's essay. The first is ethnic. Modern naval history is notmerely Anglophone; it is Anglocentric. Its dominant practitioners are eitherBritish by heritage or adoption, or U.S. scholars influenced by British frames ofreference. Naval histories of other countries, France, Japan, Italy, tend to bewritten on British models. Germany offers a significant exception, but theapproach associated with scholars like Volker Berghahn and Wilhelm Deist hasbeen seriously challenged in recent years, and by no means dominated the subjecteven in its heyday during the 1970s. The same point can be made about theorists.Rodger mentions Wolfgang Wegener and R.V.P. Castex as strategic thinkerswho remain unknown outside academic circles, and were virtually ignored in

The best illustration of this development is the anthology edited by Horst Boog, The Conduct of the AirWar in the Second World War: An International Comparison (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).2 Cf. for example James J. Sadkovich, The Italian Nauy in World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press,1994) or Friedrich Ruge, Der Seekrieg 1939 bis 1945, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler, 1962).

their own milieux as well. Alfred Thayer Mahan may have been a U.S. citizen,but his mind, and arguably his soul, were as "British'* when it came to questionsof sea power as any admiral of the "Queen's Navee." In a broader context thegeopolitical conception of a Eurasian "heartland" whose control is the key toworld power found litde resonance among naval scholars even during its heydayin the period between the World Wars. The subsequent experiences of NaziGermany and the former USSR are frequently cited as prima facie evidence ofthe model's inadequacy in practical terms.

The general acceptance of the British approach to naval history owes muchto British naval successes. Whatever its specific ups and downs between theDutch Wars and Napoleon's final exile, the Royal Navy in 1815 bestrode theworld like a colossus. Frederick the Great was as accurate as he was cynical inasserting that history is written by winners. Doctrine tends as well to beestablished either in imitation of or reaction to the last war's victors. The JeuneEcole of the late nineteenth century had principled adherents. Yet even in France,its country of origin, high-tech guerre de course was widely regarded as a solutionfaute de mieux.

The Royal Navy's physical ascendancy, moreover, overlapped the emergenceof history as an academic discipline. Scholars seeking topics found rich sourcesin the records of one of the era's most heavily-bureaucratized institutions. Theyalso found ready to hand a theoretical debate that has continued ever since toshape naval history. Medieval England had no naval strategy to speak of,especially compared to the state's conduct of land warfare. Neither did Scotland.Far from being a protection, the English Channel was a highway for at leastsixteen major invasions between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. QueenElizabeth's navy was a defensive force, not an instrument of power projection.

Beginning in the mid-1600s, however, English political and naval plannersbegan integrating four points previously considered in isolation into a singleconcept. Continental Europe was developing an essentially stable balance ofpower sustained by standing armies. Such armies were viewed across the channelas expensive and threatening to the "liberties of Englishmen."   Nor could they

3 Philip A. Crowl, "Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian," in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of ModemStrategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 444-477.

4 Paul Kennedy, "Mahan versus Mackindcr," in Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870-1945 (London: Fontanapaperback, 1984), pp. 41-86. The chapter on geopolitics in Edward M. Earle, ed., Makers of ModemStrategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943) was omitted entirely from the revised edition of1986, edited by Peter Paret.

5 Volkmar Bueb, Die "Junge Schule" derfranzbsischen Marine.. Strategic und Politik 1875-1900, (Boppardam BJiein: Boldt, 1971).

6 David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot: Scolar Press,1992); and Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 99-100.

Lois G. Schwoerer, "No Standing Armies!" The Antimilitary Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

win decisive victories against their essentially-similar opponents. ThereforeEngland could best serve her own and Europe's interests by participating incoalitions against over-ambitious states like the France of Louis XIV. Suchparticipation would best involve disrupting the enemy's maritime trade—anincreasingly-important point in the Age of Mercantilism—and using sea poweras a force multiplier for the state's limited land forces. Raids and "descents" werealmost as important to this strategy of "alliance, encirclement, and attrition" asthe contingents assigned to the coalition forces that confronted France in the

o

cockpit of the Low Countries.

From its inception this approach was challenged by the argument that itssuccess depended on continental allies willing to accept—or unable to avoid—the military effort necessary to complement the effect of Britain's wooden walls.But in a context of "perfect states," whose rulers owed allegiance neitherupwards nor downwards and were able to conduct foreign policy in whatamounted to a vacuum, Britain's self-defined role as paymaster and purveyor toa series of Grand Alliances gave the blue-water strategy a credibility it arguablylost in the middle third of the nineteenth century when conscript armies andcomprehensive railroad systems diminished the capacity of Britain to intervenemilitarily in Europe and the objective value of that intervention. At the sametime the absence of any serious rival altered the Royal Navy's actual role froma cutting-edge instrument of great-power politics to something prefiguringStarfleet in the popular television series Star Trek: The Next Generation: a policeforce exercising gunboat diplomacy, often in the name of an internationalcommunity perfectly willing to shelter beneath the British umbrella.

The Royal Navy and its historians were saved from this seemingly-ingloriousfate by Alfred Thayer Mahan. To the concept of blue-water strategy Mahangrafted that of the decisive battle—a combination making his theories particularlyattractive to Britain's embryonic maritime rivals, Germany and the U.S. Insteadof playing the British game of attrition, a stacked deck at the turn of the centuryin view of Britain's geostrategic position, the rising maritime powers could aimfor a decisive action, overthrowing their prospective adversaries in a singleafternoon in the fashion of Napoleon or Moltke the Elder. In Imperial Germany,a risk navy evolved into a challenge navy. A United States whose overseas

The best overview of this complex subject is Robert D. Mcjimsey "Reflections on the Blue-waterStrategy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century," unpublished ms.. Cf. John B. Hattendorf,"Alliance, Encirclement and Attrition: British Grand Strategy in the War of the Spanish Succession" inPaul M. Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991),pp. 11-30.

9 Cf. Michael Howard, The Continental Commitmetit (London: Temple Smith, 1972); and Paul M.Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1976); and Howard's "TheWorld According to Henry," Foreign Affairs, LXXIII (1994), p. 138.

10 Raymond C. Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), isa solid case study of this development.

holdings were minuscule nevertheless concentrated on developing a battle fleetable to challenge all comers, no matter how unlikely the combinations.

The result has been an intellectual are" perdue process: an acceptance of seapower as a "thing in itself' by other states as the originator of the conceptincreasingly found itself locked into a continental commitment. The Royal Navyof World War II waged, again^awte de mieux, a brown-water, coastal war againstits principal enemy while Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine projected the construe-tion of a world-striding battle fleet in its Z-Plan. On the other side of theglobe, Japan and the U.S. fought a naval war in Mahanian terms—a strategicversion of art imitating life. Even the USSR succumbed eventually to the lureof an ocean-going navy—a fata morgana whose pursuit contributed its fair shareto the Soviet system's eventual economic collapse.

U.S. scholars and strategists in the course of the twentieth century have foundthe original concept of the blue-water doctrine at least as attractive as itsMahanian modifications. In global terms the U.S. is a geostrategic island, andfor most of this century its navy has been used as a power-projection force inmuch the way the Royal Navy was from the late seventeenth to the earlynineteenth centuries. For the U.S., World War I was a "descent" in the classicBritish model of a commitment not involving the state's total resources,undertaken in the context of an alliance whose other members had already donemost of the dirty work.    The European Theater of Operations in World War

11 reflected a similar pattern, with the Soviet Union playing the role of theAustrian Empire and Britain substituting for the Netherlands. In the Pacific, theU.S. Navy evolved into a major combined-arms force, controlling its own landand air forces. At the same time, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa its fiercest battleswere fought to support ground operations—a fact highlighted by AdmiralRaymond Spruance's decision to eschew seeking a Mahanian victory at theBattle of the Philippine Sea in favor of protecting the Marianas beachheads.During and after the Cold War the U.S. Navy assumed its British predecessor's

1 * Cf. Holger Herwig, "Luxury Fleet": The Imperial German Navy 1888-1918 (London: Allen & Unwin,1980); and George W. Baer, Otte Hundred Years of Sea Power. The U.S. Navy, 1890-1990 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1994).

12 Cf. Corelli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1991); and Jost DiilfFer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine: Reichspolitik und Flottenbau1920 by 1939 (Diisseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1973), pp. 495 ff.

13 Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign, World War II: The U.S.-Japanese Naval War, 1941-1945(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), is a useful recent overview with a strategic-operational focus.Cf. Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1941-1945 (Annapolis: Naval InstitutePress, 1978).

14 Cf. David Trask, The AEF and Coalition War-Making (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993);and Robert D. Mcjimsey, "England's 'Descent' on France and the Origins of the Blue Water Strategy,"unpublished ms.

15 The best discussion of this controversial issue remains Thomas B. Bucll, The Quiet Warrior: ABiography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), pp. 257 ff.

role as the front line symbol and guarantor of American power, in the contextof a Soviet rival whose throwaway surface-ship designs harked strongly to theJeune Ecole.

British paradigms, in short, fit the U.S. Navy's missions and mentalite com-fortably enough to discourage any systematic search for alternatives. Works likeKenneth Hagan's This People's Navy, critiquing the "insular navy" model instrategic contexts, remain not merely exceptions but anomalies.17 To establishthe point that naval history and naval strategy have to date essentially beendefined by paradigms made in Britain is not to deny completely the validity ofthose paradigms. Colin Gray, in a recent update of the blue-water thesis, makesa compelling case for sea power as an instrument of leverage. It can transportresources to a specific theater of operations. It can protract a conflict and set itsterms acting as a barrier to the physical occupation Gray accepts as the ultimatearbiter of any war. This interpretation is a step away from Mahan, but wouldhave found vocal supporters in any Parliament after the Stuart Restoration. Theconsequence of the position's strength, however, has been to discourage alternateintellectual approaches to the practical questions of sea power and the intellectualproblems of writing naval history.

This limitation in turn reinforces the second structural factor shaping the studyof naval history. Navies are the most self-referencing of armed forces, and canpossess a correspondingly powerful dynamic. Sparta's navy remained marginalbecause its very existence threatened the balance of Spartan society. Warshipsare communities in ways army or air force formations are not. In the MiddleAges, sailors were a breed apart. Ship's officers and ordinary seamen shared abroad spectrum of bonds no landsman was seen as able to understand. In theearly modern era "tarpaulins" may have given way to "gentlemen" on quarter-decks, but the relationships remained. Not only warrant officers but forecastlehands regularly followed "their" captains from commission to commission inthe Georgian navy.

The heritage of community endures even as larger fleets and bureaucratizedpersonnel policies made such direct, comprehensive personal loyalties impossible.

Michael T. Isenberg, Shield of the Republic. The United States Navy in an Era of Cold War and ViolentPeace, 1945-1962 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). Cf. Bradley F. Klein, "Hegemony and StrategicCulture: American Power Projection and Alliance Defense Politics," Review of International Studies, XIV(April 1988), pp. 38-48.

17  Kenneth Hagan, This People's Navy. The Making of American Sea Power (NewYork: Free Press, 1991).

1 ft #-■■*■

Colin Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power. The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War (New York: FreePress, 1992), pp. 278 ff.

19 Caroline Falkner, "Sparta and the Sea: A History of Spartan Sea-Power C. 706-C.373 B.C.," PhDDissertation, University of Alberta, 1993.

20 N.A.M. Rodger, The Woodett World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986). Cf.Jaap R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Sixteenth and Eighteetith Centuries (Columbia, S.C.: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1993).

It endures not least because a warship's crew shares its fate in common. Aninfantryman can find a convenient hiding place and report to whatever remainsof his unit once the fighting dies down. A sailor has no such option. A shirker,whatever his reasons, has no place to hide and no way to mask the loss of hisplace as a man among men—which is why, perhaps, crew morale in the Age ofFighting Sail tended to collapse all at once rather than by degrees. Commonbehavior is less shameful behavior. As much to the point, senior officers, eventhe most senior, share identical risks. Tromp, Nelson, Beatty, Jellicoe—all rodetheir flagships into battle. Not until World War II did it become possible, andarguably preferable, for admirals to control operations from land-based com-munication centers. But if Karl Donitz and Chester Nimitz did not lead theirfleets in person, the same cannot be said for Spruance, Halsey, Sir Bruce Fraser,and Gunther Liitgens. Nor did the new style of command receive universalapprobation. The disgruntled commander of a German destroyer flotilla in

Norway in 1943 grumbled that "we had hundreds of admirals on land, and only

„2lone at sea.

One result is that the problem of "abstraction" in writing military historydescribed by John Keegan has had significantly less impact on the conceptualizingof operational naval history. When everyone is literally in the same boat, evenretrospective intellectual approaches are likely to be highly personal; and scholarstend to take their cues from their sources. The particularization of naval history,in other words, reflects the nature of naval combat.

A second reason for the self-referencing nature of navies is their developingrole as symbols of the states to which they belong. In its context Nicholas Rodgershows the way by his statement that warships involve the most advanced andcomplex technologies of their eras. The Athenian trireme, the eighteenth-cen-tury ship of the line, the modern super-carrier—each epitomizes the achieve-ments of the cultures that produced them. Their names reflect a state'sgeography, its history, and the spiritual qualities it considers valuable. Warshipsare indeed, in the words of Robert O'Connell, "sacred vessels" whose expend-ability not infrequently reflects moral as well as operational considerations. TheBritish Army could suffer 60,000 casualties in a single day, but Jellicoe couldhave lost Britain's war in an afternoon. Given that context it is understandablethat much naval writing is not only national in focus, but reflects particularnational mythologies in ways military history does not. And icons are seldomnoted for humility.

Naval solipsism has been reinforced by a third factor: the emergence ofprofessionalism. Arguably as early as the seventeenth century, certainly by the

21 Rolf Johannesson, quoted in J. Steinhoff, et. ai, eds. Voices From the Third Reich: An Oral History,ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989), p. 178.

22 Robert L. O'Connell. Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Boulder:Westview, 1991).

eighteenth, navies began a steady process of evolution away from the "seafaring"model both socially and technically. As late as the Revolutionary/-Napoleonicera the differences between a merchant sailor and a man o' war's man werelargely situational. By 1914, on the other hand, every major navy accepted thepremise that sailors and officers were best shaped by training rather thanexperience. Navies correspondingly evolved as bureaucratic and military or-ganizations, relating to other, similar organizations. Only recently has the processof reintegrating navies into general maritime history recommenced.

A fourth point contributing to the self-referencing nature of naval writing isthat navies themselves tend to be symmetrical, at least in general terms. This ingood part reflects the nature of the medium in which they operate. The world'soceans imposed their own constraints on ship design, particularly before theintroduction of steam technology. The oared galleys that dominated theMediterranean for two millennia did not transplant well to the English Channelor the North Sea. On the other hand the large and clumsy gunships constructedby the northern maritime powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century couldnot operate effectively outside their own waters. The eventual result was thedevelopment of the general purpose warship: a process of evolution beginningwith the Spanish and Portuguese galleons and culminating in the fleets of theRevolutionary and Napoleonic era whose ship designs, from the humble cuttersand gun-brigs to the majestic three-deckers, were essentially similar. Frenchnaval architects on the whole produced ships of the line individually better thantheir British counterparts. The U.S., with a small navy, favored individual shipspowerful enough to dominate any one-on-one contest. It remains, however,difficult for any but the experts to tell at a glance a French frigate from its British,Dutch, or Spanish counterpart.

Asymmetry was not inevitably a recipe for disaster. In the early sixteenthcentury Asian and Middle Eastern states saw Europeans win an empire by gunsand sails. Within fifty years, however, Muslim flotillas of small, shallow-draftvessels were able to overcome European-style gunships even in the open sea.Nevertheless it is unusual for a state with great-power pretensions to choose toconstruct a navy essentially different from those of its rivals. The Muslim statesof Indonesia, for example, constructed ocean-going ships as western models asearly as the 1560s, and were increasingly able to fight their European counterpartson even terms. In the 1840s and 50s France experimented with alternate forcestructures based on new combinations of technologies: shell guns, steam power,

23 See particularly John Hattendorf, ed., Ubi Sumus?: The State of Naval and Maritime History (Newport:Naval War College Press, 1994).

24 John F. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys. Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea inthe Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), remains the standard account.

25 Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires (New York: Minerva Press, 1965); and Parker, MilitaryRevolution, pp. 105 ff.

and armor plate. Britain first reacted, then took the lead in these fields. ThomasJefferson's gunboats, the torpedo vessels of France'sjeune Ecole, and the fast attackcraft that formed the backbone of Soviet Russia's surface fleet from the 1950sto the 1970s each represented conscious efforts to establish a paradigm shift inthe definition of naval power. In each case the states involved ultimatelyabandoned the effort as unprofitable. The balances between Britain and Ger-many prior to World War I and France and Italy in the 1930s are more typical.It is anomalous for a sea power to maintain a force structure essentially differentfrom its neighbors' by choice, as opposed to weakness—usually financial.

The symmetrical character of navies in turn encourages concentration ondetails of tactics and technology. Nuances acquire special importance when likeengages like on land, in the air, and particularly at sea. Concentration on thesenuances correspondingly handicaps that search for a broader perspective Profes-sor Rodger urges in his essay. The relative neglect of relevant primary sourcesin naval history stressed by Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg exacerbates theproblem from a different angle. How much must scholars know before they canresponsibly consider writing comprehensive studies even of particular aspects ofthis subject?

Navies do not exist in vacuums, even though their historians sometimes actas if that were the case. Operationally they depend on bases. Even with modernfleet trains and nuclear power, human and material factors limit the time warshipscan spend at sea. Economically, navies continue to concentrate public resourcesin a highly-visible fashion. Socially, navies both establish and expand parameterseven for individuals. Joining the Navy to see the world is a concept almost asattractive in the information-saturated 1990s as it was during the author'smidwestern adolescence four decades earlier.

Yet despite the comprehensive integration of naval forces into wider systems,naval history tends to remain a thing in itself, written in paradigms structuredby nationalism and shaped by navies' self-referencing nature. Nicholas Rodgercogently analyzes the ways individual historians can break their matrices. Whatcan be done to challenge the structural constraints described in the present essay?A useful and obvious beginning involves encouraging a "new naval history" thatrecognizes the pivotal military and moral place of navies in the states that createand sustain them. This process is well under way. As yet, however, this form ofnaval history is still at the maritime equivalent of the stage Allan Millett describesas "struggling through the wire."

26 C.I. Hamilton, Anglo-Fretich Naval Rivalry 1840-1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

27 Spencer C. Tucker, The Jeffersonian Gunboat Navy (Columbia, S.C.: University of South CarolinaPress, 1993), is a particularly stimulating reinterpretation of the first of these examples. Cf. Ray Walsen,Frattce's Search for a Battle Fleet: Naval Policy and Naval Power (New York: Garland, 1992); and RobertHerrick, Soviet Naval Theory and Policy: Gorshkov's Inheritance (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988).

A parallel process involves taking advantage of navies* symmetry to establishcomparative models that cross political boundaries. Arthur Marder's work onAnglo-Japanese naval connections comes readily to mind. The model establishedby Robert O'Connell in Sacred Vessels invites extension in both space and time.What factors make a particular warship design "sacred" at a specific time andplace? What is the comparative fate of heretics? Does the "religion" fade awayslowly, or alter in a paradigm shift along the lines suggested by Thomas Kuhn?Does it exist in reality as opposed to mythology? The British government andthe Royal Navy, for example, seemed willing if not necessarily eager to abandonthe cult of the battleship by the 1920s.28

Another approach to naval history as a concept involves determining andbalancing navies as institutions with navies as communities. Current emphasison evaluating navies in structural terms must not obscure the fact that a fleet isnot merely an organization. Executives caught in mergers tend to look to theirown golden parachutes. This is a logical, perhaps a necessary, consequence ofmodern industrial economies. It is also an absolute contrast to the ethos bestexpressed in the words of Admiral Aubrey Fitch to the captain of the sinkingU.S.S. Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea: "Well, Ted, let's get the menoff."

The specific concept of naval community has broader societal implications aswell. What Paul Kennedy calls a "ship's culture" creates general models ofbehavior and attitude stressing group identity as well as group loyalty. Mavericksare a greater irritant in a wardroom than an officers' mess, simply because theyare more difficult to avoid politely. To what extent does this culture persist evenin modern navies, where increasingly-high percentages of senior officers spendincreasingly little time afloat? The marginalization of A.H. Pollen in Britain andHyman Rickover in the U.S. invite comparative analysis in this context.Navies also offer a significant—and neglected—source of material to contem-porary students of the problem of developing a consciousness of community inincreasingly entropic societies.

Thus far my proposals have been conventional—the kinds of things apromising graduate student might expect to hear from an advisor. A secondapproach to writing general naval history involves establishing an alternative tothe "British" blue-water model that I have argued continues to dominatethoughts and emotions on the subject. Nicholas Rodger has argued its limitations

28  R.C. Gamble, "Decline of the Dreadnought: Britain and the Washington Naval Conference,1921-1922," PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1993.

Cf. Jon Sumida, ed., The Pollen Papers: The Privately Circulated Printed Works of Arthur HungerfordPollen, 1901-1916 (London: Navy Records Society, 1984); and Theodore Rockwell, The Rickover Effect:How Otie Man Made a Difference (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1992).

30  On this subject generally see Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and theCommunitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993).

138    Toward a "New" Naval History

even in an English context. It is ironic that medieval England maintained acontinental position without a navy, but abandoned that strategy almost con-currently with developing a dominant batde fleet. Considered comparatively,Britain's circumstances are unique. The differences between the naval experien-ces of Great Britain and the U.S. have already been discussed. Japan, the statethat most directly copied the Royal Navy, pursued at least since the 1890s anational strategy depending on the direct extension of Japanese power onto theAsian mainland. Japan's "blue water" enemy, the U.S., was acquired in a fitof strategic absent-mindedness, arguably by both sides. Until at least the early1930s the potential adversaries' principal operational problem was getting closeenough to each other to fight a Mahanian battle. As late as 1943, when the rivalnavies clashed off Guadalcanal, they did so at fingers' ends.

The dominant historical model of naval forces has involved choices. Seapowers as a general rule have as well extensive land frontiers continentalcommitments that cannot be avoided, that hugely expensive, and that areultimately crucial to a system's survival in a way fleets are not. The Athenianfleet depended ultimately on Athens's walls for its security and survival, andAthens proved unable to maintain its position as a city fortress defending itselfpassively against the armies of its Peloponnesian rivals. By the eighteenth century,the Dutch Republic was spending four times as much on its army as its navy.From Louis XIV to Charles de Gaulle, France's geostrategic position has beenJanus-faced, simultaneously looking outward to Africa, Asia and North Americaand inward to Austria and Germany.

Nor have even the wealthiest and most cohesive states been able to sustainsimultaneously a dominant army and a preeminent navy. Balance-of-powerpolitics and, to paraphrase Paul Kennedy, "military overstretch" compelled hardchoices for democratic Athens, Imperial Germany, and Cold War America,whose dual predominance was as fortuitous as it was temporary and as costly asit was effective.

In this context a plausible approach to writing general naval history involvesaddressing systematically and comparatively the problem of choice in state policy,strategic planning, and force structures. Here the skills of the historian and thepolitical scientist might well converge, each building on the more specializedwork done in the earlier stages of creating a "new naval history." The synthesisproduced by this approach, will be unique in the discipline of military historyby being true syntheses, reflecting the networks of common points of commonpoints discussed earlier that make navies symmetrical as well as self-referencing.

31 Though not without conflict. See F.R. Dickinson, "World War I and Japan: The Dissipation ofConsensual Continentalism, 1914-1919," PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 1993.

32 Cf. Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945 (Annapolis:Naval Institute Press, 1991); and Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal (New York: Random House, 1990).

33 Bruijn, Dutch Navy, p. 216.

Showalter    139

If Nicholas Rodger's call to individual excellence is combined with this essay'sfocus on structural consideration, the results may well resemble those inmountaineering since the 1930s, as human virtuosity began combining withstate-of-the-art tools in scaling forces hitherto deemed insurmountable.

PART V

Reflections

Ckapter 10

Levels of Approach and Contexts in

Naval History:

Admiral Tirpitz and the Origins of Fascism

Paul M. Kennedy

This volume of essays, as I see it, is about historical methodology, aboutlevels of approach, and also about the contexts within which one can studynaval history. I use the words "levels*' and "contexts" in the plural sense becauseI believe there is no single, orthodox way of doing naval history. Indeed, thevery purpose of bringing out this collection is to articulate some very differentapproaches and schools of thought. In organizing this second Yale-Naval WarCollege conference in June 1994, John Hattendorf, Mark Shulman and I wantedthose differences described, criticized, defended—and compared. We wanted tosee what was special about, or particular to, the study of naval history; and wealso wanted to know how it related to military history more generally, and tothe discipline of history itself. We wondered if there could be constructed somemore "total" way of studying the subject. Finally, we wanted people who wereoutside a history department to look at what we historians are doing, and to offerthoughts on our methodologies, our levels of approach, and our contextualtreatments of naval history: hence, our delight when political scientists RobertJervis, William Thompson and Robert Wood accepted, no doubt with somebemusement, the invitation to contribute.

In the first Yale-Naval War College conference in June 1993, we put thesimple question, "Who is doing naval history and where?" In this volume, thequestion really is, "What sort of naval history is being done, and shouldbe done?"It seems to me, in looking at the historiography of nineteenth and twentieth-century naval history, including very recent writings, the field is strangelyuneven.

Naval historians have been pretty good at naval policy and strategy, becausethat is what might be called the "high politics" of naval history, and because theAdmiralty, Cabinet and C.I.D. records, and their American and German

The proceedings of this conference are published with additional essays in John B. Hattendorf, ed.,Ubi SumusP: The State of Naval and Maritime History (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1994).

equivalents, are so accessible. This does not mean that our interpretations ofnaval policy are unanimous and uncontroversial. One of the more interestingdevelopments in recent years has been the way in which Jon Sumida and nowNicholas Lambert are reinterpreting what some regard as the "Arthur Marderperiod" of pre-1914 British naval policy. They, in particular, have been and areactively involved in that advanced level of historical recovery.

On the other hand, we are behind-hand, but getting better, in the criticallyimportant field of understanding how navies, as complex and mammoth or-ganizations, really functioned: how they were built, supplied, refueled, repaired,how they adopted new technology, how they recruited and trained theirpersonnel, how they were financed. This is real grunt work, involving years ofresearch in the archives on records that deal with some of the "non-high-politics" aspects of naval administration. One simply does not understand thecourse of the Battle of the Atlantic until one understands shipping and shipbuild-ing policies, but to many that seems much less romantic than retelling the taleof "Sink the Bismarck."

We, as naval historians, are not very good at a "history from below" approachto modern naval history; we have no twentieth-century equivalent to NicholasRodger's The Wooden World; and there is little or nothing on what might becalled "the face of battle" approach, empathetically reconstructing the actions,feelings, habits of ordinary seamen, gunners, petty-officers and the like. Why isthere, for example, no counterpart to Craig Cameron's wonderful new study,American Samurai, which gets into the mental world of the U.S. marine? Whycan't we recover the mental world of the crew of a Grand Fleet battleship orthe marine garrison of the Singapore base in the 1930s?

We are reasonably good at writing about relationships between naval policyand domestic politics, partly again because of the sources, partly because of theinfluence of Volker Berghahn. But there is still a lot to do. There is no reallygood study, to my mind, of the navalist lobby in twentieth—century Britain, orin the United States for that matter. Those are scarcely unimportant topics.

What is most important here is not the type of naval history that an individualscholar does, but that scholars all strive to understand better the relationshipbetween the different approaches, or, perhaps better, between different levels ofenquiry in naval history. I do not have a fixed model, but it might be possibleto approach the subject in the following way: at the bottom level there is the

2 See the works of Jon Sumida, in particular, and also of Kevin Smith's very fine dissertation"Anglo-American shipping policies and the crisis of supply in the Second World War." PhD dissertation,Yale, 1990.

3 N.A.M. Rodger The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986).

4 Craig Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First MarineDivision, 1941-1951. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

5 Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz Plan (Diisseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971).

basic unit, the warship and its crew, one of the levels of historical recovery atwhich we are not very good. Then there is the larger body, the Channel Fleetor the Pacific Station, parts of the geopolitical jigsaw-puzzle that make up a GreatPower's global projections of naval power. Then there is the relationship of navalpolicy to what the Army and Air Force is doing, to the diplomatic priorities ofthe country, to its alliance system—a level at which much of our writing hasconcentrated, and in the process of which becomes less naval history per se andmore the naval dimension of national strategy, as is the case, for example, withmy own Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. There is also, perhaps a bit belowthat level, the research that focuses upon how the creation and procurement ofa naval equipment relates to the national economy, to business, to domesticpolitics, to pressure groups, to propaganda campaigns, in which respect we haveproduced a mixed bag of results, some striking successes and some glowing gaps.Finally—though you may wish to add to my list—there is the level at whichmodern naval history relates to general maritime history, or to the overall historyof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in which respect we have not yetbegun to conceptualize, let alone write anything of substance.

As an example of the various levels, contexts and approaches in naval history,I want to use the theme of "Tirpitz and the Rise of Fascism" to reverse our wayof looking at things. I do not want to talk about the "fleet that Tirpitz built,"nor the construction programs, the personnel policies, the finances, the opera-tions plans—all of which has been treated by scholars. Rather, I want to turnthe telescope around, and peer down the wrong way, and to talk about how abattleship navy fitted into Tirpitz's ideological and political vision, and, moregenerally, how his vision reflects certain larger changes in European culture asit moved from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

Naval officers often try to suggest that they are not very political: they areplain, simple fighting men like Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O'Brian novels. Mostof us know better than that—the Fishers and Rickovers were intensely politicalpersons, who really rather relished intrigue and maneuvers, and thought theywere good at it. But by political I do not just mean good at defending one's turf.Tirpitz was a superb bureaucratic in-fighter. I mean that there was also a larger,more profound political and ideological vision—about Germany, about thenature of German society, and about Germany's place in the changing contextof world politics—that informed and drove much of what Tirpitz did.

Tirpitz's background is well known. He came from a mid nineteenth-centurybourgeois service family—his father was a judge—and he was inculcated withmost of the traditional values of that society. Intellectually, he does seem to havebeen deeply affected by attending Treitschke's lectures on politics at theUniversity of Berlin. This comes out not only in his Memoirs but, more reliably,

6 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1977).

in his private correspondence and comments. Treitschke's nationalistic conceptof a specifically German culture unity, of Deutschtum, involved an unrelentingand inevitable struggle against other nations and peoples—to modern politicalscientists, Tirpitz imbibed an out-and-out "realist" interpretation of worldaffairs. If Germany was not to go under, all Germans had to work together, hadto have a national cultural understanding of the high stakes involved, and hadto understand the way in which modern industry and technology were trans-forming the German economy and Germany's place in the world. Germany'sfast growing industry, trade, wealth made her potentially one of the three orfour Great World Powers of the coming Twentieth Century. These factors alsoincreased Germany's dependency upon others, especially upon Britain, unlessthe Germans were far-sighted enough to create a substantial navy to protect theirlong-term interests. Although originally a torpedo officer, Tirpitz was fanaticabout the concept of the large battleship as the core of naval power, and he reallydid fight hard against the diversion of funds to cruisers, submarines, even flotillas.

This vision, this program, made him many enemies, as Volker Berghahn,Holger Herwig and other historians have shown: the Army, the East-ElbianJunkers, the Treasury, the more liberal and socialist political parties all opposedhim. That he was so successful for so long was precisely because he was political.He knew how to find allies, how to orchestrate a navalist press campaign.

What interests me in particular was the intensity of Tirpitz's Social-Darwinianvision, his acute dislike of what he regarded as imported English liberal ideas,and the peculiarity of his love-hate relationship to England (which he sharedwith many Germans, from Max Weber to the Kaiser). This comes out a littlein his official memoranda—for example his 1897 Rominten memorandum toWilhelm, with its references to rising world Empires, the impetus of economicgrowth, the stark choice Germany faced of either competing or falling into thesecond-grade ranks of the nations of the world.

Where one really finds this ideology in his private political correspondence,in the Tirpitz papers—which again raised the issue of whether one can do navalhistory based upon the official files alone. And just look at the people with whomhe corresponds about this vision of Deutschtum: Houston Stewart Chamberlain,the Englishman turned German, whose book was one of the seminal texts forGerman cultural nationalists; Oswald Spengler, already exchanging ideas withTirpitz about the differences between a healthy, holistic German Kultur and thematerialist, atomistic societies of the British and Americans; Dietrich Schafer,hypernationalist, professor, Pan-German, navalist radical, founder of the GermanArmy League. Almost every luminary of pre-1914, radical right, proto-fascistthought and politics has some connection here. Later on, there is the personalbond to Ludendorf. And it is no surprise that in 1917, a year after Tirpitz was

Houston Steward Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Translated by John Leesfrom the German, Grundlagen des Neunzehnjahrhunderts. (London: J. Lane, 1910).

dismissed from office, he co-founds the Vaterlandspartei, a radical-right party thatsought to bring the correct, healthy, firm national policies that Germany neededin its time of external crisis. It is also no surprise that his Memoirs are full ofbitterness, not so much against the British (who had acted as he had forecast—ruthlessly, concentrated, unwaveringly defending their selfish national interests),but against German weaknesses: disunity, the traitors within, the short-sighteddiplomats, the feckless Kaiser. It is no surprise that many regarded Tirpitz as oneof the leading right-wing figures of early Weimar Germany, deeply involved inanti-democratic intrigues. Many courted him assiduously, including the earlyNational Socialists, who were eager to obtain his support and approval. This waswhere his ideological trajectory had taken him. Perhaps his TreitschkeanSocial-Darwinian ideology had hardened over time, as he became older andmore disappointed. Much of his vision had been there, in the 1890s, informinghis conception of world politics and Germany's place in it.

How common is this trajectory? How many other European figures, borninto nineteenth-century families with a generally Liberal culture in regard toparliamentarism, politics, trade, international relations changed over time tobecome much more nationalist and proto-fascist? How many British imperialists,like Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner, originally began as Liberals? Howmany Italians, like Mussolini, metamorphosized from Left to Right? As an aside,one wonders whether there were parallels in the American or Japanese ex-perience?

The Liberal creed came under pressure from the rising demands of theworking classes, the return of protectionism during the Great Depression, theinfluence of Bismarck's "blood and iron" policies, the impact of Social-Dar-winian and racist thought, the vulgarization of the press, the focus upon imperialconquest and wars, the influence of patriotic pressure groups. The Liberal creedran out of steam as it entered the twentieth century, losing defectors to the Left,to the newer Socialists, and losing to a new Right, less agrarian, aristocratic,conservative, much more radicalized and modern.

It is within this larger European-wide historical context—the swift in-dustrialization, the fears of internal stability, the rise of Germany, the decline ofLiberalism, the coming of mass politics, mass education, mass media—that wehave to set Tirpitz's unease about Germany's condition, his cultural andideological preferences and, last but not least, his Tirpitz Plan. If a large, modernbattle fleet was, as Mahan and most of the German Flottenprofessoren wereteaching, the power-political instrument necessary for the success of Deutschtumin the Great-Power, Darwinian struggle ahead, and if that instrument were tobe protected from domestic interference, there really was no alternative. Op-ponents in the service had to be silenced, the Kaiser's support constandy sought,public opinion constandy cultivated. Diplomatic and strategical changes, like thecoming of the Anglo-French entente and the stationing of British battle squadrons

148    Approach and Contexts in Naval History

in the North Sea, also could not be allowed to affect the Plan. Alternativeweapons, such as U-boats and coastal defense expenditures, had to be battled.Only the battle fleet could be what Tirpitz frequently described as the "lever ofworld politics."

I come back, finally, to the issue of different levels of approach, and to contextsin naval history. At the largest level, there are the transformations and modern-ization of European society as the nineteenth century leads into the twentieth.This is accompanied by newer technologies, new forms of communication,social changes, pressures upon existing organizations, political parties, armedservices, established religions and much more. There are also changes in theworld of ideas and ideologies, as many people begin to question mid-nineteenthcentury assumptions. At the national level there may be differentiated responses,due to different political cultures, economies, constitutions, even geography, butmost countries felt these pressures for change. Within governments and theirdepartments, various transformations also took place, perhaps nowhere moredramatically than in navies because that was where the technological pace ofchange is fastest, and also because the ideology of imperialism and navalism hadpointed to navies as being an integral part of the solution to the challenges posedby the international anarchy and by the propensity to turbulence. Every GreatPower in this period, and many a small power, decided that it needed a largerand more powerful fleet. The shipbuilding industries were waiting to supplythem.

What type of fleet? What mix of ships? What design? What communicationssystems, what fire control? What type of fuel? Where to base the ships, whereto train the personnel? What tactics to practice, what operational and strategicalassumptions? How one was to choose the answers to these complex andinterrelated questions was an immense problem, not only because this was aperiod of rapid technological change, but also because there were a variety ofviewpoints about naval strategy. Which was best, which most plausibly an-ticipated the coming conflict, which was consistent with the existing evidence,which seemed to work and which needed to be amended?

It is at this level of analysis—how the naval system really works in practice—that Jon Sumida and Nicholas Lambert and David Rosenberg are doing suchwonderful work. We have, to repeat, not got down to the unit level and theship level. That may come, although we might anticipate formidablemethodological difficulties there. My point is that I believe that there is aninterconnectedness from bottom to top, and from top to bottom. The challengeis to understand those linkages. What Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg aredoing, as I see it, is not so much producing a new Kuhnian paradigm, a newway of explaining anomalous behavior patterns, but rather to say: "Look, toomuch writing on naval history remains on the fourth or fifth floor, whereCabinets and other bodies took decisions and made assumptions about naval

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policy. That process is described as naval history, but the really interesting workto be done is at the third and second floors, where one sees the navies grapplingwith the world of naval reality: technology, design, firepower, personnel, tactics,strategic options, and so on. Because we know so little about this massive,complex reality, this is where we need the next generation of naval historiansto be working. This is why our naval history is special."

To which I would only say "Amen"—except that, even while that criticalgrunt work is being done, it will be important not to lose sight of the otherlevels. We can not give the impression that only levels two and three count.Historical experience exists, and can be recaptured, in many different forms.What an integrated naval history can do is to remind us all, including non-navalhistorians, of another way of looking at the seamless web, another perfectlylegitimate and intelligent way of seeking to understand the past. That is whatnaval historians do better than most, when we understand the full dimension ofour subject.

Hitting the Target: Perspectives onDoing Naval History

Mark R. Shulman1

Naval historians would do well to remember Admiral Sir John Fisher. TheFirst Sea Lord once commented of his famed gunnery inspector PercyScott, "I don't care if he drinks, gambles, and womanizes; he hits the target." Ina frequently obtuse discipline, we have sometimes lost sight of the bull's-eyeourselves. In opening this volume with an epitaph, John Hattendorf gives us allhope for revitalization.

Still, Hattendorf implies another outcome. Should naval historians fail to riseto the methodological challenges of new history, should they remain technologi-cally ill-tutored, should they continue to slight bureaucratic process or therealities of naval operations, naval history as a scholarly field of enquiry may soonrequire its own elegy. For the most part, as James Goldrick notes, naval historiansdo not even deserve the navies about which they write. More than otherhistorians, we tend either to hagiography or monocausal interpretations.

Compounding the sin, our subjects are among the most influential institutionsin history in addition to being among the most technical and arcane. Operationaldoctrine has become particularly difficult to understand in the twentieth centurydue to rapid technical and theoretical innovation. Goldrick challenges thehistorian: "In some circumstances, and there are parallels here in the revolutionin modern computing, the context for technological and operational decisionmaking could experience profound changes within months, not the years ordecades with which earlier eras tended to deal." Are we capable of understandingand explaining these military-technical revolutions? Setting first-rate goals,Commander Goldrick admonishes us to do better and to take the work of JonSumida as a standard of excellence.

Sumida and David Rosenberg boldly chart a new direction for naval history,one that rejects the old "core" histories and the "master plans" that havedominated the field since its origins a century ago. Navalist historians of AlfredThayer Mahan's generation emphasized great men and great battles. Doing so,

The author would like to thank John Hattendorf, Kenneth J. Hagan and Paul Kennedy for valuablediscussions that helped to shape this essay.

they produced highly flawed history, ignorant of the real under-pinnings ofstrength. Subsequent historians have blithely followed the navalists' path. Greatwriters—Arthur J. Marder and Samuel Eliot Morison among them—fell victimto Mahanian propaganda, even while the services themselves were moving in avariety of creative directions. Fixated on the process of building battleship-dominated fleets, these historians misconstrued how the US and Royal Naviesreally functioned. Sumida and Rosenberg argue, in effect, that navies have beenfar better than their historians, paying more attention to the sinews of war thanhave their chroniclers.

Calling for a shift in approaches, Sumida and Rosenberg argue for a non-teleological history of sea power. They note that the core histories are riddenwith provincial nationalism and favor the role of the great ships as vehicles forachieving national greatness, as it was conceived of by Whig historians of thelate nineteenth century. True military effectiveness, Sumida and Rosenbergwould argue, was not made inevitable by dreadnoughts. Rather it was achievedby careful attention to making an effective bureaucracy that ensured that fundswere well-spent on technological improvements to a variety of fighting systemsthat enabled the great navies to beat all comers. Jacky Fisher understood that, ifE.B. Potter did not.

Political scientist Robert Jervis echoes this argument, suggesting that "it maybe useful to think of navies as causes and as effects.'* In contrast to Mahan andhis followers who had portrayed navies as the cause of national greatness, Jervisconcurs with Sumida and Rosenberg; nothing was inevitable. Furthermore,navies have historically played a variety of roles. Stronger fleets, for instance,might not always have enhanced a nation's defenses, because they can generatesecurity dilemmas in which "attempts by a state to gain security can make othersless secure despite the fact that this is not the state's intention." Indeed, thiscomplicated dynamic helps to explain the origins of the First World War.

Volker Berghahn picks up on this point more specifically, addressing theGerman domestic political and social concerns that helped generate the Anglo-German security dilemma of 1889-1914. "The Tirpitz Plan had, if nothing else,a dual purpose: It was to challenge the Royal Navy and the international statusquo . . . [and] it was also to shield the German Navy from the legislative powersof the Reichstag." Traditional realist theories of the origins of the genericsecurity dilemma frequently ignore the domestic pressures to build powerfulforces. Berghahn presents a more balanced portrait of the 1897 bill. "The Kaiser'sproposed navy has been called a fleet against two parliaments.'" Because of theeffectiveness of Kaiser's bureaucracy and Tirpitz's technological and politicalsavvy, the impact of this political move was magnified many times over. Jervis

2 In labelling and analyzing dynamics such as the security dilemma, political science offers one of itsgreatest services to historians. While historians might implicitly acknowledge them, particularly on acase by case basis, we need the theory to understand how timeless and pervasive they are.

notes, "Thus even if Wilhemine Germany developed a strong navy in part tostrengthen the regime domestically, this action changed the international en-vironment and menaced Great Britain." It activated a security dilemma, trappingboth powers into a race for security—a race that seemed inevitably to bring war.

Germany's security dilemma would not have occurred if the internationalthreat it presented were not strong and real. German financial and technologicalskills made the High Seas Fleet a very real threat to the British. This too involvedmajor domestic political changes, far more than the Prussian military would haveliked. No longer could the wealthy alone shoulder the burden of increasinglycomplicated and expensive weapons systems. Financing the great battleshipsrequired a shift in the tax burden from the upper to the middle classes ofGermany—a transition understood by all to have a fundamental impact on theGerman polity, including a weakening of the old elite relative to the growingmiddle classes.

Paul Kennedy's remarks on Alfred Tirpitz's career following the Great Waroffer some fascinating insights into this situation, suggesting another new avenuefor naval historians. Where others have seen navalists as apolitical, Kennedypoints to their dedicated social agenda. To some extent they are merely a slightlyexaggerated version of the typical military conservative. Kennedy's argument,however, seems to point us in another direction. In it, navalism cloaks domesticpolitical agendas in the garb of realpolitik. Going beyond the conservatism, thenavalists, at least some of those who built great fleets before 1917, were hopingto reorder society more along the lines of their beloved services, with structureand hierarchy. They intended to channel the resources of the middle classes intothe strengthening of the state. They were always looking for foreign threats tojustify their attempts to "bring the correct, healthy, firm national policies" tothe Vaterland. An extension to Kennedy's argument might note the role of thesepolitics in shaping today's "realist" school of international relations.

Commenting on the notion of the primat der innen-politik, Robert Woodresponds, "But of course! Does anyone seriously believe that any militarydevelopments are simply responses to the general problem of internationalanarchy and to external challenges posed by other states?" Lacking a clear andpresent danger, Wood notes, states have little more than domestic politics toguide their preparations for war. As war becomes imminent, however, they mustface the international realities. It is at that point that comparative history becomesparticularly valuable.

Paul Halpem provides a case study of how one can break out of nationalisticthinking. Having mastered the relevant languages, scripts, and archives, he

For one influential example, Samuel Huntington's seminal work on The Soldier and the State alsomarginalizes and plays down the politics of naval officers, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1957). For comparison, see Vincent Davis The Admirals' Lobby (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1967).

demonstrates latitudinal comparisons in a single period, especially for evaluatingthe question of which has primacy when: domestic or international politics?Echoing Kennedy's remarks on the domestic agendas of navalists, Halpern offersthe quintessential case ofjean Darlan. In the late nineteenth-century Italian navy,Halpern also finds a test for the understanding the role that finance and industryplay in shaping foreign policy and reflecting domestic policy. Berghahn's workargues that navalism was highly important in determining the shape of themodern German polity. My own book makes a similar argument for the UnitedStates. Tirpitz and Mahan had contemporaries in Italy who also saw the manifoldways in which a navy's technological, financial and industrial progress wouldpropel a nation to great power status.

Halpern's contribution also suggests the need for more research on the roleof finance, along the lines suggested by Sumida and Rosenberg. As with the caseof Britain's services during the Great War, the Austrian navy's greatest enemywas frequently its sister service—the army. Rather than "jointness," Halpernpointedly refers to the interdepartmental politics as "diplomacy."

If Halpern's comparisons of contemporaneous navies and armies can be calledlatitudinal, William Thompson's approach is longitudinal. Examination of tenor more centuries of sea power gives his work a perspective remarkable for itsbreadth and its ability to transcend the historical moment. As such, it offers muchto students of navies, sea power, and international relations.

This rich set of data allows Thompson to compare the evolution of great seapowers, sometimes centuries apart. While the historian might balk at thisapproach at first glance, he or she must keep in mind how few of the parametersof sea power have fundamentally changed over the centuries. The physicalgeography has remained the same for tens of thousands of years. Moreover,twentieth-century battles almost invariably have taken place in the same loca-tions as those of centuries prior. Also, the fundamental unit of politicalinteraction, the nation-state, has remained pre-eminent for at least three butpossibly as many as ten centuries. Even the building blocks of sea power—shipsand fleets—retained many of their essential characteristics between Actium and

4 See Richard A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 1908-1915 (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1975); Berghahn, Die Tirpitz-Plan (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971); Shulman, Navalism and theEmergettce of US Naval Power, 1882-1893 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995).

5 See Jon T. Sumida, "Forging the Trident: British Naval Industrial Logistics, 1914-1918H in John A.Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder: WestviewPress, 1993); and Lawrence Sondhaus, The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867-1918: Navalism,Industrial Development and the Politics of Dualism (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1994).

6 This observation is laid out most succinctly in Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (NewYork: Free Press, 1991).

7 The primacy of the nation state is being challenged. See Roy Godson, "Transstate Security," inGodson, Richard Shultz, and George Quester, Security Studies for the Twenty-First Century (Washington:Brassey's, forthcoming) for this thesis and a survey of the literature.

Dogger Bank. As Thompson notes in his final proposition, "There are no trendsextant—technological, economic, political, or military—which suggest an im-minent diminution in the strategic leverage of sea power. If the coming of therailroad, internal combustion engine, and missile, nuclear, and space eras couldnot demote the strategic value of sea power significantly, it is difficult to see whatcould emerge to do so over the next several decades."

This remarkable data base has allowed Thompson to derive dozens ofgenerally applicable axioms about the nature of sea power, hegemony, interna-tional relations, war and peace, and even polities and regimes. These fifty-two"Thalassological Propositions" could easily generate hundreds of specific histori-cal studies to test them. Thompson challenges the historians to move beyondnarrow studies and to examine general propositions. He challenges us to puthistory to the test; what can it teach us?

Implicitly Thompson asks if we should be leaving the lessons of history topractitioners of all other disciplines besides history. Recently several of the verybest military and diplomatic historians have also attempted to nudge theprofession into taking up that gauntlet. Michael Howard's The Lessons of Historydoes so in a gently gracious way, nonetheless reminding us of the costs ofmisinterpretation. Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, with fewer apologies,encourage the use of the past. Eliot Cohen and John Gooch sharply point to thecosts of failing to learn from history. And yet, naval historians have been amongthose most hesitant to draw lessons from a rich and varied data set.

Nicholas Rodger's work rivals Thompson's for its longitudinal span andHalpern's for its latitudinal scope. His current project analyses the various Britishnavies over ten centuries as they interacted with dozens of rivals and allies acrossthe globe. And yet, he acknowledges great impediments to improving the fieldof naval history. "There are real obstacles, both practical and psychological, tomastering high technologies, especially more or less completely extinct tech-nologies" such as weapons system long abandoned. The same must be said forattempting to understand defunct bureaucracies, especially those in countriesthat have suffered the ruination of war or accident. To this must be added theburden of speaking and reading a Babel of tongues, for navies invariably linkpeoples of different languages. This myriad of structural impediments has led,according to Rodger, to naval history falling into two mutually exclusive camps.

8 See also Colin S. Gray, The Leverage of Seapower (New York: The Free Press, 1992) for a recentexposition on the timelessness of sea power. Also see Geoffrey Till, editor, Seapower: Theory and Practice(Portland, Oregon: International Specialized Book Services, 1994).

9 Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Ernest May,Lessons from the Past: the Use and Mis-use of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1973); May and Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History forDecision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986); Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: TheAnatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990). See also the varieties of reactions to PaulKennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987).

On the one hand, [are] those with an education as historians, more or lessaccustomed to taking a large view and to locating their findings in an historicalcontext. . . . Those who do understand, on the other hand, sometimes display anarrowly antiquarian pleasure in the amassing of facts, or supposed facts, withoutasking themselves why they are interesting or important. They may even claimthat technology alone is a sufficient explanation for the course of naval history.

These are two hands of the same beast: ignorance about the highly technical butextremely influential roles that science, finance, and administration play insociety. Fortunately, he notes, good technical histories are now being written.Currently, it appears that the Military Technical Revolution (or Revolution inMilitary Affairs) of the 1990s may be accelerating this trend, driving researchinto the roles technological change plays in shaping and reflecting the evolutionof strategy.

Military historian Dennis Showalter comments on other impediments to theimprovement of naval history as a field. He notes the Anglo-centricity of theprofession—a bias which leads one to find lessons from the British and Americanexperiences. These are critical but by no means the only histories worthexploring. Showalter also notes the insularity of naval communities, at least asfar as they relate to (or fail to) their home societies. He explains, "Navies are themost self-referencing of armed forces, and can possess a correspondingly power-ful dynamic." This particularization, Showalter suggests, is reflected in theisolation of the discipline.

Each writer notes ways to improve "Doing Naval History." Each of theirvalid and useful insights calls for a systematic response and leads me to make amodest proposal. It offers prescriptions in three crucial areas: the procurementand use of resources for understanding history, the writing of history, and itsteaching. Each of these calls for the establishment of an American Naval RecordsSociety (ANRS).

Resources

Like its British counterpart, an American NRS could publish edited docu-ments and it could also help to promote and to coordinate research, writing, andteaching at every level. Much as the British society operates, an American NRSwould publish key source materials for its open membership, allowing scholars

10 For some interesting works, see John W. Bodnar, "The Military Technical Revolution: FromHardware to Information," Naval War College Review, 46 (Summer 1993), pp. ; Martin van Creveld,Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991); Stephen P. Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovationand the Modem Military (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Andrew F. Krepinevich, "Keeping Pacewith the Military Technical Revolution," Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 1994); and N.A.Lomov, ed., Scientific-Technical Progress and the Revolution in Military Affairs: A Soviet View (Moscow,1972; Washington, DC: GPO, 1980).

11 Indeed, Showalter might have noted that a preponderance of the contributors to this volume haveeither written on British history or have studied or taught at English universities.

to identify and elucidate key sources for insights into naval history. In the past, theNaval Institute Press in Annapolis and the Naval Historical Center in Washingtonhave performed these tasks, and they should be encouraged to continue them. Butan ANRS could provide a broader selection base of documents, exploring issuesand insights independent from market forces and service image.

Electronic data storage and retrieval systems open myriad possibilities for anANRS. These machines have vastly reduced the costs for preparing andreproducing documentary collections in several areas. Furthermore, they offerunparalleled access. Text can be stored in previously inconceivable quantities.Furthermore, cross-indexing is far simpler, faster and more efficient, allowingusers to access any stored information almost instantaneously. The hardware forsuch a storage system is not expensive, and the prices are moving down, ratherthan up. In the early 1980s, $400-500 would buy a drive that supported a diskcapable of storing 250 pages. Today that much would purchase a 100-megabytehard disk that stores 75,000 pages.

Compact Disks with Read-Only Memory (CD-ROM) are also proliferating,with most new personal computers including that technology only recentlyavailable just to the wealthiest of institutional buyers. Their storage and retrievalcapacities are measured in the gigabytes (billions of bytes). So great is theircapacity that they can store images as well as text. For instance, completefacsimiles of The Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers are currently being stored onCD-ROM. Their editor notes that twenty disks store the images that wouldotherwise have required some 200 reels of microfilm. "Jukebox CD-ROMplayers hold up to 64 discs at a time and make any of over 1.5 million imagesavailable to a researcher in less than 5 seconds." The CD-ROM edition of theOxford English Dictionary "allows scholars to accomplish tasks almost impossiblein the printed volumes. . . . For example, one can . . . determine which wordsEnglish colonists appropriated from the Indian tribes of North America."

Beyond CD-ROM the ambitious can turn to on-line electronic data bases.Already the University of California's Thesaurus Linguae Grecae encompasses a57 million-word collection of 99 percent of all extant Greek writings fromHomer to 600 A.D. The American and French Research on the Treasury ofthe French Language (ARTFL) is nearly three times that size. Anyone whohas ever used Lexis/Nexis will testify to the remarkable power and flexibility ofthese systems. Furthermore, with the growth of the internet, such databasescould be filled in (either manually or with scanners) from an unlimited number

David Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions: The Promise and Problems of Technology," DocumentaryEditing, 16 (September 1994), pp. 70-77. Figures cited are from page 71.

Martha L. Benner, "The Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers: The Development of the Complete FacsimileEdition on CD-ROM" Documentary Editing, 16 (December, 1994). pp. 100-107. Quotations are fromBenner, "Lincoln" 101 and Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions," p. 71.14  Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions," p. 71.

of remote locations. Professors with teams of bursary students or scholarsworking in libraries around the globe could input sources and documents. Allthis appears to require an agency to house, coordinate, regulate and disseminatethese products. Printed volumes could simply extract from and refer to theselarger collections, providing more complete explanatory annotation. How elsewill we ever hope to see the sources for naval or maritime history of im-poverished or out of the way countries? How else will anyone be able to affordto write truly multi-national history?

Next among the NRS's tasks would be promotion and coordination of thefield. The U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center already does some admirablepromoting, but more could surely be done and best by a non-service institution.For example, when the Smithsonian Institution abolishes its last curatorship innaval history should the NHC protest? I think not. But a consortium ofconcerned historians might be able to lobby for its maintenance. The same wouldgo for the chairs at Stanford and Harvard universities—both of which 'weredonated for naval and maritime history and neither of which is filled by a navalor maritime historian. When the American Historical Association fails to includeany panels on naval history for years running, should the navy intercede? No,but the NRS could coordinate a couple of panels—panels integrated within theregular program instead of marginalized in a special sub-meeting. They couldbe even further integrated, with non-naval historians or even non-historians ascommentators—thus providing different and useful perspectives. They couldalso mix senior and junior practitioners to provide the professional encourage-ment younger people need in these tough times.

Writing

This present volume—along with its predecessor, John Hattendorf s UbiSutnus? (with its extraordinary breadth of coverage)—bring out the varieties ofstrengths and weaknesses in the writing of naval and maritime history across theglobe. In terms of this broad scope, one is drawn immediately to the UnitedStates Navy (USN), because of its great importance. Despite numerous con-tributions to American naval history, writers on this subject have rarely shownthe conceptual and methodological innovation one would expect, given thecurrent importance of their topic. While the writing of the history of the USNhas come far in the past quarter century, we have miles to go before we sleep.These short-comings have been illuminated elsewhere.    Suffice it to say here,

15 A partial list of these series might include: ships' musters and logs, reports on fleet exercises, mens'medical records, blue-prints and technical details of construction, and Congressional hearings—all ofwhich would be far more useful if stored in digjtalized and manipulable form. The US Naval AcademyArchives and Museum has collected its pictures on one such laser disk that might provide a model forthis type of collection.

16 See Kenneth J. Hagan and Shulman, "Mahan Plus One Hundred: The Status of US Naval History,"and David A. Rosenberg, "Beyond Toddlerhood: Thoughts on the Future of American Naval History"

Shulman     159

that it needs to embrace methodologies of newer and brighter fields in the studyof the history of culture, society, technology, finance, and administration.17 Themere fact of an ANRS with newsletters, publications, and meetings might breathnew life into the field.

In particular, the ANRS could also coordinate research, most crucially at theinternational level. Presaging the comments in this volume of Professors Halpernand Rodger, Ronald Spector has pointed out that the languages one would needto write a histoire totale of the Pacific War would include not only English andJapanese, and Russian, French and Dutch, but also the various Polynesian,Micronesian, Melanesian, and Chinese tongues. Only a group of historians (andprobably anthropologists as well) could begin this effort. Working through thealready established International Commission on Military History and itsAmerican branch (USCMH), the ANRS could bring together a panel of scholarson this topics, as well as for such studies of more regionalized topics as a strategichistory of the North Sea, or a social history of sailors in the Far East—includingthe multi-ethnic communities that fed them in Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong,San Francisco, Honolulu, and New York. Because the sea does indeed connectall things, its human history should provide the bulk of any truly internationalhistory. And yet, no man or woman can attempt it alone.

Teaching

An American NRS could also coordinate teaching—the third major area inneed of change. Although each teacher's courses are highly personal, few wouldfail to benefit from a support network providing suggested syllabi with readings,themes, goals and even possible lecture topics. Currently, young professors startfrom scratch. There does not even exist a syllabus bank, let alone a centralaudio-visual collection from which he or she can order slides or movies—vir-tually required media for teaching the MTV generation. While this video-

1 ft

literacy should not be pandered to, neither should it be ignored.

The American NRS could also teach graduate and undergraduate students,much as the mid-west consortium for military history allows for a sharing of

in John B. Hactendorf, ed., Ubi Sumus? The State of Naval and Maritime History (Newport: Naval WarCollege Press, 1994).

17 See this author's "Why Men Fight" in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, (Autumn1995) of the following remarkable books which approach army or marine combat units from innovativeperspectives informed by new social and cultural history: Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945,German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1985) and Hitler's Army (New York:Oxford University Press, 1991); Craig Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conductof Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); andLeonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division DuringWorld War I (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).

The mid-west consortium has arrangements to institutionalize this cooperation by covering theexpenses of one professor each term to visit a sister institution for teaching and advising and also arrangesfor commensurate relief of his other departmental burdens.

160    Perspectives on Doing Naval History

scarce resources. The approach here would be two-fold: first with a summerinstitute and the second through shared advisors. A biennial summer instituteon naval history would allow graduate students from programs around thecountry to gather for one intensive course of study in the history, historiographyand methodology of naval history. Team-taught to cover more fields, this coursewould provide the well-spring for growth that the profession needs. The secondstage would be a consortium through which Ph.D. students would be able tocontact appropriate advisors as they commence their dissertation research. Usingtelephones, facsimile machines, modems and even the US postal service, agraduate student ought to be able to seek and find knowledgeable advisors forhis or her research and writing.

Conclusion

Thucydides set the highest standards in his multi-disciplinary examination ofpolicy, society, logistics, command, and joint operations at the start of his Historyof the Peloponnesian War. "My history is an everlasting possession, not a prizecomposition which is heard and forgotten." Hard-working, resourceful andintelligent, today's naval historians should aim to do no less. An independentANRS could foster breadth of research, creativity and coordination in writingand effectiveness in teaching. It could do so in an inexpensive, non-ideologicalforum. While it would not solve our problems, it could offer a venue for criticalimprovements in research, writing and teaching.

19 At very least, there ought be a syllabus bank—which would cost only reproduction and mailing andcould be billed at a fee for service rate. Alternatively, the service could be available through electronicmail at no cost. Later a further service could be added of a week-long seminar on "Teaching NavalHistory;" this would be more expensive (c. $1500 per student, plus professors). Similar courses arealready offered to ROTC and NROTC instructors but are not generally open to academic faculty.

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