DOING NAVAL HISTORY

JtLssays low&rcl Improvement

Edited by

John B. Hattendorf

Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History

Naval War College

DOING NAVAL HISTORY
Naval War College

Historical Monograph Series

No. 13

The Historical Monograph series are book-length studies of the history of naval

warfare, edited historical documents, conference proceedings, and bibliographies. They

are the products of the Naval War College's historical studies and are based, wholly or

in part, on source materials in the College's Naval Historical Collection. Financial

support for research projects, conference support and printing is provided by the Naval

War College Foundation.

Other volumes in the series are: No. 1. The Writings ofStephen B. Luce, edited byJohn D. Hayes andJohn B. Hattendorf

(1975).

No. 2. Charleston Blockade: The Journals ofJohn 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 ofthe Naval Profession,

by Ronald Spector (1977).

No. 4. The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919-1941, by

Michael Vlahos (1980).

No. 5. On His Majesty's Service: Observations of the British Home Fleet from the Diary,

Reports, and Letters ofJoseph H. Wellings, Assistant Naval Attache", London, 1940-41,

edited by John B. Hattendorf (1983).

No. 6. Angel on the Yardarm: The Beginnings ofFleet 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 ofthe Blue Uniform: Admiral Richard G. Colbert, U.S. Navy, and Allied

Naval Cooperation, by Joel J. Sokolsky (1991).

No. 9. The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking the

Centenary 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 SirJulian

Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, edited by James Goldrick and John B.

Hattendorf(1993).

No. 1 1 . Ubi Sumus?: The State ofNaval and Maritime History, edited byJohn B. Hattendorf

(1994).

No. 12. The Queenstoum Patrol, 1911: TheJournal of CommanderJoseph Knefler Taussig,

U.S. Navy, edited by William N. Still, Jr. (1995).
DOING NAVAL HISTORY

itlfssays 1 ©ware. Improvement

Edited by

John B. Hattendorf

Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History

Naval War College

NAVAL WAR COLLEGE PRESS

Newport, Rhode Island

1995
The cover illustration is from the

collections of the Naval War College Museum,

Newport, Rhode Island, and

taken from J. O. Davidson's "The President's

Vacation—Manoeuvres of the North Atlantic Squadron,"

Hayer's Weekly, vol. XXVIII, no. 1446 (6 September 1884),

pp. 582-83, illustrating a report that President Chester A. Arthur

visited the Naval Torpedo Station and observed fleet exercises at Newport, RJiode Island, on 28 August 1884.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doing naval history: essays toward improvement/edited by John B.

Hattendorf.

p. cm.—(Naval War College historical monograph series; no. 13)

"This volume had its origins in the papers presented at the Second

Yale-Naval War College Conference held at the Paul Mellon

British Art Center in New Haven, Connecticut, 2—4 June 1994"

Acknowledgments.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-884733-06-9

1. Naval history, Modern—19th century—Historiography—Congresses. 2. Naval history, Modern—20th

century—Historiography—Congresses. 3. Naval art and science

History—Historiography—Congresses. I. Hattendorf, John B. II. Yale—Naval War College Conference (2nd: 1994 : New Haven,

Conn.) III. Series: U.S. Naval War College historical monograph

series; no. 13.

V51.D65 1995 95-21546

359'.009—dc20 CIP
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 at Brown University. While he has also written on business history, his works in

the field ofmilitary history include DerStahlhelm (1966); Der Tirpitz Plan (1971);

Militarism (1981) and, with Wilhelm Deist, an edition of documents on Wilhelmian armaments policy (1988).

James Goldrick was born in 1958 andjoined the Royal Australian Navy in

1974. A Commander, he is currently Executive Officer of HMAS Perth. Other

sea postings have included command of HMAS Cessnock and exchange service

with the Royal Navy. His publications include The King's Ships Were at Sea: The

War in the North Sea, August 1914-February 1915 (1984) and co-editing Reflections on the Royal Australian Navy (1991) and Mahan is Not Enough (1993).

Paul G. Halpern is Professor of History at Florida State University. He is the author of The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914 (1971), The Naval

War 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 has

recently completed a biography of the Austrian naval commander, Admiral

Anton Haus.

John B. Hattendorfis the ErnestJ. King Professor ofMaritime History and

Director ofthe Advanced Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College,

Newport, Rhode Island. Among his most recent publications, he has edited Ubi

Sumus? The State ofNaval and Maritime History (1994) and Maritime History in the

Age ofDiscovery: 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 at Columbia University. Among his recent publications are The Meaning ofthe Nuclear

Revolution (1989), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World

Order, and The Logic ofImages in International Relations (1989). His Systems: Dynamics

and Effects will be published by Princeton University Press in 1997.

Paul M. Kennedy is Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He is the author or editor ofthirteen

works, including The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976), Strategy and

Diplomacy (1983), The War Plans of the Great Powers (1979), The Rise and Fall of

the Great Powers (1987), Grand Strategies in War and Peace (1991), and Preparing

for the Twenty-First Century (1993).

N.A.M. Rodger is a former Assistant Keeper in the Public Record Office,

and now Anderson Research Fellow ofthe National Maritime Museum, where

he is working on a new naval history of Britain. He has already published The

Wooden World, An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (1986) and The Insatiable Earl:

A Life ofJohn Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, 1118-1192 (1993.)
David A. Rosenberg is an associate professor of modern military and

diplomatic 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, articles

and short monographs on post-World War II naval and military history and the

history of nuclear strategy, he was awarded a five-year John D. and Catherine

T. MacArthur fellowship in 1988. He is an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval

Reserve who served on active duty with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in

Operation Desert Storm.

Dennis E. Showalter is Professor of History at The Colorado College. He

has 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 ofEmpires (1991) and The Wars ofFrederick the Great

(1995).

Mark R. Shulman is author of Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea

Power, 1 882-1 893 (1995), editor ofAn Admirals Yam: The Autobiography ofHarris

Laning and co-editor of The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western

World (1994). Educated at Yale (B.A.), Oxford (M.St.) and the University of

California at Berkeley (Ph.D), he taught at Yale University and worked at the

National Strategy Information Center, before joining the faculty ofthe Air War

College as Associate Professor of Military and Diplomatic History.

Jon Tetsuro Sumida received his B.A. (1971) from the University of

California, Santa Cruz, and his M.A. (1974) and Ph.D., (1982) from the

University of Chicago. His books are The Pollen Papers: The Privately Circulated

Printed Works of Arthur Hungerford Pollen, 1901-1916 (1984) and In Defence of

Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914 (1989;

paperback edition, 1993). Dr. Sumida is an associate professor of history at the

University of Maryland, College Park.

William R. Thompson is Professor ofPolitical Science and Director ofthe

Center for the Study ofInternational Relations at Indiana University. In addition

to serving currently as an editor of International Studies Quarterly, he is also the

coauthor of The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490-1990 (1994) and Leading

Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Politics and Economics (1995).

Robert S. Wood is the Chester W. Nimitz Professor of National Security

Affairs and Dean ofthe Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War

College. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University and received

his master's degree and his doctorate from Harvard University. He has previously

served on the faculties of Harvard and the University of Virginia. He has

published widely and has authored, coauthored, edited and contributed to many

books, of which his most recent is America the Vincible: U.S. Foreign Policyfor the

Twenty-First Century (1994).
Acknowledgments

This volume had its origins in the papers presented at the Second Yale—Naval

War College Conference held at the Paul Mellon British Art Center in New

Haven, Connecticut, 2-4 June 1994. I am grateful for the enthusiastic interest

of Professor Paul M. Kennedy at Yale, and the administrative support provided

through his International Security Studies program, particularly for the arrangements made by Dr. Mark Shulman, Ann Carter-Drier, and Ann Louise Antonoff

in New Haven, and from Mrs. Barbara Prisk and Lieutenant CommanderJ. T.

Dunigan at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the generous support ofthe Lynde and Harry Bradley

Foundation in making the conference possible.

All, but one, ofthe essays in this volume were first presented to the conference

in New Haven. Commander James Goldrick's essay, "The Problems of Naval

History" was given in December 1994 to a meeting ofthe Australian Association

for Maritime History. I am grateful for the opportunity to include it in this

volume.

In preparing this volume for publication at the Naval War College, I would

like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Dr. Mark Shulman; Mrs. Prisk,

Commander William S. Burns, and Dr. Peter Woolley in the Advanced

Research Department, and Mr. Robert E. Hobbs Jr. and Mrs. Allison Sylvia of

the College's Visual Information and Publications Department, Newport,

Rhode Island.

John B. Hattendorf

Imfrocracfiion

John B. Hattendorf

There is an old sailor's grave that lies not far from Portsmouth, New

Hampshire. On the moss-covered, native blue slate, one can still clearly

read 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 ofwhat this volume

is about. In 1993, at the first Yale—Naval War College conference, the

participants discussed the current state ofmaritime and naval history. While there

were exceptions to the rule, many agreed that much ofthe work that was being

published in the field was both relatively unsophisticated and outdated in its approach, particularly when contrasted to the best work on other themes in

current historical research. A follow-on seminar was held at New Haven not

to lament that fact, but to do something positive about it. While the old naval

history may well be food for worms, the substance of naval history should not

be lost because of it. Naval history needs to reappear in a new, corrected and

amended model, Unking it to general history while also improving methods for

the specialized study of the subject.

There are many dangers in making such a proposal. Perhaps, the first is the

problem presented by the very issue of discussing methodology. Joseph Strayer

once cautioned that "the more history we write the more we worry about the

value and nature of history." He pointed out that "The increase in the number

of books on historiography and historical methodology is proportionally far

greater than the increase in the number ofhistorians." There is always a danger

"Francis Winkley, boat builder & mariner, deceased October 9th 1818, aged 85." The stone is located

in 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 of

Naval and Maritime History (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1994).

Joseph R. Strayer, "Introduction," to Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (Manchester Manchester

University Press, 1954), p. vii.
2 Introduction

in concentrating too much on form and not substance, on theory and not

practice. Yet, I believe that the practice ofnaval history needs to examine better

methods and to improve itself. It needs a breath of fresh air. Sailors will

understand that for naval history, this could well be the "cat's paw" on the water

that signals a shift in the wind.

Too often, when the current generation ofnaval historians get together, they

lament their situation, complaining that they are unappreciated, unloved,

unread. For many ofus, it is very true, but we need to stand up and suggest how

the sub-specialty ofnaval history can improve itself. Before this conference took

place in New Haven, no group of historians had ever tried systematically to

suggest broad standards for this sub-specialty, listing the critical ideas, issues and

themes for naval historians to examine.

Specialists in any field often have difficulty in seeing beyond the boundaries

of 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 related

interests. For the New Haven conference, we asked several political scientists to

join a select band of historians. There undoubtedly will be those who see this as some kind of antinomian heresy, disregarding all accepted standards. On the

other hand, there will be those who will say that it is not enough; we should

have asked students of art and literature, sociology and anthropology and a host

ofothers. There is much substance to the latter criticism, but it is more than one

can sustain in a single conference or in a single volume. It is something that can

follow on from this volume.

Rather than to range widely and superficially across all sorts of topics, it is better to begin by looking in depth at the essential nature of navies. In this, all will agree that navies are instruments of government and operate as highly

technological organizations within the context of both domestic and foreign

politics, finance, technology, and bureaucracy. This range is as much the realm

of political scientists as it is of naval historians.

The process of pairing historians with political scientists, of course, has its dangers. As William Thompson has so righdy pointed out, one takes the risk

that forcing unlike animals to pull a wagon can sometimes result in inefficiency or even in accomplishing nothing at all. That is indeed the risk taken here, but

by avoiding disciplinary squabbles among specialists as well as ad hominem attacks

against each other, we have collectively tried to exchange ideas on approaches

to naval history. We publish them now as an attempt to stimulate thinking among

all who research, write, and read about navies. Let us all think more carefully

and fully about our craft, both in terms of the subject of navies and in terms of

the role of naval affairs in the context of wider events.

In this volume, Commander James Goldrick of the Royal Australian Navy

lays out the general problem facing modern naval historians. He shows how the

fundamental problem began with the introduction ofever more rapidly changing
Hattendorf 3

technologies in the nineteenth century. Demonstrating how this has affected

naval affairs, he suggests that historians need to reexamine naval operations more

carefully, taking what many historians might regard as a far-outdated topic and

applying more sophisticated approaches to it in order to deepen our understanding of the broad inter-relationships in naval affairs.

Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg make a compelling case by proposing an

entirely new approach to thinking about navies, outlining a methodology in

dealing with finance, bureaucracy and technology that could completely revise

standard naval histories. Their thoughts form the fundamental kernel from which

a very important new approach can develop. From a political scientist's perspective, Robert Jervis widens out the naval historians' perspective with his own

reflections on the general inter-relationship of technology and organizational

culture.

Since the time of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the study of naval history has been

linked with international affairs. In many respects naval historians have over

emphasized this relationship to the exclusion of domestic issues. In the 1970s,

Professor Volker Berghahn was one of the pioneers who opened up a new

perspective in German naval studies by showing the importance of domestic

politics. In this volume, Berghahn elucidates his most recent reflections on the

specific issues in German naval history. Commenting on it in terms of broad

political science, Robert Wood widens the discussion to suggest parallel and

diverging issues in American experience. Noting that domestic issues are essential

to understanding a navy in its external roles, Wood goes on to suggest that

examination of the characteristics of a regime are important to understanding

the character of its armed forces.

In looking at comparative naval history, Paul Halpern uses his detailed

knowledge of the First World War in the Mediterranean to discuss a range of

interesting issues posed by this particular time and place in naval history. In doing

this, Halpern provides a case study, focusing on the research problems posed

when examining several navies operating simultaneously, either as allies or

enemies. Through this perspective, one can deal with action and reaction

between navies and their relationships to different naval cultures. Complementing this, William Thompson takes an equally valid, but quite different perspective

on comparative history. Thompson takes the broad view, searching for comparisons over vast stretches of time. From this perspective, he suggests fifty-two

propositions about the nature of naval power, emphasizing strategic policy

orientations, the implications of domestic structures, conflict behavior and war

strategies.

Turning to the broad issues posed in writing a general naval history of a

particular country, Nicholas Rodger generalizes from his own current work in

preparing a multi-volume study on British naval history. He explains the range

of research and insights needed in relating the navy to general national history,
4 Introduction

making a clarion call for excellence. Commenting on this from the perspective

of an historian of armies, Dennis Showalter relates the specific issues of naval

history to the current trends and structural considerations in military history. He

suggests that in naval history the skills of the political scientist and the skills of

the historian might well converge, profitably producing a synthesis that fully

reflects common understanding.

Concluding the volume, Paul Kennedy uses the example of Admiral Tirpitz

and the development of the German Navy as a means to suggest the continued

need to develop wider, complementary levels of analysis in naval history.

Pointing to the inter-connectivity in naval affairs, he suggests the need to

understand the complex reality ofnaval affairs that range from social and cultural

issues to technology as well as to high politics and grand strategy. Carrying the

point further, Mark Shulman synthesizes the main points of these essays and

emphasizes the ever important issue of documentary research. His proposal for

an American naval records society, modeled on the example of the century-old

Navy Records Society in Britain, argues for both organizational support of the

sub-discipline ofnaval history as well as for the continuing need to make primary

source materials available to the general public and for professional officers,

researchers and writers.

The issues raised in this set ofessays are the key issues that we, as a group, feel are of salient importance in understanding the central issues in modern naval

history. These are the issues that Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg identify as comprising the "core" of naval history. They have taken a useful step in

identifying another range of issues as "cognate" naval history. This distinction

is a very important one, but as Paul Kennedy has suggested in his essay, it should

not be understood as the basis for creating an exclusivist approach, but rather

related 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 deserve

consideration and that contribute to knowledge in naval affairs. Cognate aspects

ofnaval affairs include such specialized areas as theory, art, literature, social affairs

and so on, that might also be considered aspects of another broad theme, such

as intellectual history, social history, art history, sociology, political science or

science and technology. Readers and practitioners of naval history must avoid

confusing the core and the cognate, but they should ignore neither the

inter-relationship nor disparage one over the other. When seen along side a full

appreciation of core naval history, cognate naval history becomes particularly

important in helping to define the place ofnaval affairs within the broad context

of general affairs.

Naval affairs, after all, are very often a special case of broader issues. On one

hand, they fall under the broad rubric of maritime history; on the other, they

relate to military issues. In the discussions that took place during the conference
Hattendorf 5

that led to the book Ubi Sumus?, many agreed that we must work to rejoin the

military and maritime aspects that have only recently become separated in North

American and British practices of historical writing.

In terms ofthe military dimension ofnaval affairs, it is important to understand

the navy as an instrument of national power, both in terms of the sources of its power and in its varying inter-relationships to the nation's diplomatic, military

and economic policies, strategies, operations and tactics. Within this context,

the issues ofjoint operations that has become so increasingly important in the

past fifty years are very important. But the scope is wider and moves beyond

operations to larger issues as well.

For navies, these broader issues lead naturally to commerce at sea, shipbuilding, seamen, port development and the many other issues of sea transportation:

the very stuff of maritime history. Maritime history is a broad theme within

general historical studies, that by its nature, cuts across standard disciplinary

boundaries. A student who pursues the theme may approach it from a variety

of 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, international

relations, 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 history

is a humanistic study ofthe many dimensions in man's relationship with the sea. Maritime history focuses on ships and the sailors who operated them, relating

an identifiable segment of society to a specific range of technological development and to the hostile geographical area covering seven-tenths of the globe.

The relative importance of maritime affairs varies from one period to another

in general history; it stands out in some periods and in some cultures and not in

others. For example, maritime affairs were an essential aspect ofgeneral European

and European colonial history in the period from the fifteenth century to the

twentieth century. Only recently, in the twentieth century, have alternative

means of communication and transport developed and displaced much of the

technological, social, economic and industrial fabric that surrounded commercial

maritime affairs, although a number of aspects continue, navies among them.

While the subject may seem to brighten and fade for the general historian, a

specialist in the subject ofmaritime history must keep in mind the continuity of

maritime 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 oflarger developments. In order to understand what

happened at sea and to analyze the effect of those events, one needs to relate

them and interpret them in the context of broad issues that were occurring on

land. 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-
6 Introduction

ing, navigation, naval gunnery and tactics, marine engineering, hydrography,

and so on. In order to understand these elements, which are key factors in

maritime history, maritime historians must explain them in terms ofthe broadest

context, while at the same time, they must come to grip with the details and

make sense of the specific developments within that special area. One of the main problems for maritime historians is the need to see events

at sea in terms of a variety of perspectives. For example, a ship that was built in

a particular country was a product ofcertain national political, economic, social,

technological and industrial factors. When the same ship sailed at sea, it entered

a different realm with an international dimension that may involve such

additional factors as wars, cross-cultural relations, imperial competition, scientific

research, the exchange of goods or the accumulation of capital through international trade.

Additionally, when ships left land and the network of activities that created

and prepared them, they spent long isolated periods at sea. This unusual

experience created a social dimension within the ships that, itself, became a new

factor, creating microcosms of land-based societies while bringing them into

various new environments and new experiences. These experiences, in turn,

were reflected back into land-based societies as sailors returned from the sea. In

this area, as in others, maritime affairs typically acted as both a conduit as well

as a separate channel of development. In this, they illustrate the relationship

between core and cognate histories.

Cognate naval history is as wide as naval experience, intellectual insight and

scholarship can make it. Historical sociologists, for example, have already made

some very interesting contributions as have art historians. Work is just

beginning in literature and naval fiction, although studies on some literary

figures such as Herman Melville whose work touched on the navy are well

established and the series ofvolumes in The Classics ofNaval Literature series

has established the beginnings for a canon to be considered. Among related

issues, those surrounding recent popular culture and naval fiction remain to

be 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 1 1 (Summer

1985), pp. 165-200; David Cordingly, Nicholas Pockock 1740-1821 (London: Conway, 1986); Deutches

Marine Institut und Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt, herausgeber, Seefahrt und Geschichte (Herford

und Bonn: Verlag E.S. Mitder & Sohn GMBH, 1986).

6 The Classics of Sea Power series (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984-present) has helped to

identify a basic canon.

7 The work of novelist Tom Clancy in the Cold War period, for example as well as the large range of

other periods in historical fiction could be examined. There are some works on naval fiction in the age ofsail. 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 naval

medicine and hydrography, but many of these tend to concentrate on earlier

periods, not the twentieth century. Certainly there are numerous other areas for

consideration. Contributions in these areas all contribute to our understanding

of the place of naval affairs in general history. The progress in historical

understanding that studies on earlier periods provide can guide development in

creating approaches to the different world and new issues posed by twentieth

century naval affairs.

Although focusing on ships and sailors, maritime and naval historians deal in

the interrelationship of events on land and at sea, dealing simultaneously with

integrated, parallel, and unique aspects. As maritime and naval historians move

forward in their researches, they must also strive to compare and to contrast

maritime events at different times, in different circumstances, and in different

contexts. As a theme in general history, maritime and naval history is not separate

from other aspects of historical study. Nevertheless, it involves a wide range of

specialized learning and knowledge that justifies the identification of maritime

and naval history as one of the many legitimate fields for historical research and

writing. Identifying the field in this way, however, neither removes it from the

accepted standards of the best historical scholarship nor creates any unique

standards or exclusive prerogatives for those who follow it. It merely recognizes

that the topic is broad enough to identify fully a range of specialization and that

it is complicated enough to sustain the wide-ranging work of a number of

scholars devoting their scholarly careers to working on differing aspects of the

theme.

To understand sea affairs, maritime and naval historians must analyze them

within the context of the broadest issues, while at the same time understanding

and explaining the specific maritime and naval aspects. Like any good piece of

historical analysis on a specific theme, historians working in maritime and naval

history strive to make a contribution to knowledge on a small, but not isolated

sector of that front. While they may limit themselves in scope to either

commercial maritime or naval matters, the questions that they answer must also

have a discernible relationship with problems of more general interest. In this it

is important to maintain an awareness of the relationship between core and

cognate historical work, between different and complementary methods, levels,

and approaches.

The hull of the old ship of naval history, stripped of her tackle and ornament

may well be food for worms, but the subject on which naval historians focus

should not be overlooked or lost. It can appear again in a new model, corrected

and 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 ofsail 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 volume

provide some valuable insights and offer stimulating ideas on new approaches

that promote excellence in doing naval history.
PARTI

Bureaucracy and Technology

The Problems of Modern Naval History

James Goldrick

This paper argues that modern naval history requires a new approach on the

part of naval historians to satisfy the demands of the subject. This new

approach must improve on previous historiography by focusing on the core roles

of navies and analyzing much more comprehensively the multitude of technological, financial and operational issues involved in decision making for naval

development. In so doing, historians of the modern era will need to achieve a technical mastery of their subject which has hitherto largely been confined to

students of the age of sail. In discussing modern naval history as a subject in itself, the first step is to

determine at what point in time navies entered a modern era. For the purposes

of this paper, a simple definition can be offered: modern naval history begins at the point when steam power becomes the principal propulsive mechanism for

combat. This occurred in the late 1840s, when the Anglo-French naval rivalry

saw the conversion of old ships of the line and the construction of screw

propelled sailing battleships.

The history of the age of fighting sail has been extensively treated and there

exists a body of scholarship which comprehends the administrative, social,

technological and operational aspects of that era. There is also an assumption

within this body of work that navies are legitimate subjects for examination in

their own right. Historians of the period frequently acknowledge that navies

represented in many ways the most sophisticated ofcontemporary organizations

which produced solutions to complex problems of logistics, materiel and

administration well before even the existence of such challenges had been

comprehended elsewhere within governments and societies at large. John

This paper was originally delivered in November 1994 to the Australian Association

for Maritime History (AAMH) as the inaugural Vaughan Evans Memorial Lecture. The

author wishes to acknowledge the ready co-operation of the AAMH in allowing the

inclusion of the paper within this volume.

See D.K. Brown, Before the Ironclad—Development ofShip Design, Propulsion and Armament in the Royal

Navy, 1815-1860 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), pp. 122-129.
1 2 The Problems of Modern Naval History

Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, was reflecting the judgement ofboth his

time 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 more

precautions to take and you and I are not capable ofjudging them.

The Admiralty, for example, was the greatest of the British Departments of

State for hundreds of years. One of the most prominent historians of the

eighteenth century navy, Nicholas Rodger, has written:

Before the twentieth century, no British government ever undertook a more

onerous task than providing a fleet, or faced in a more acute form the problems

ofadministration on a large scale. In early modern Europe, navies "were the largest,

costliest and technically the most advanced organizations of their day; the hazards

ofputting a fleet to sea in the sixteenth century were equivalent to those ofputting

a man on the moon in the twentieth.

That judgement is confirmed for the seventeenth century by such studies as Carla Rahn Phillips's Six Galleonsfor the King of Spain and Nicholas Rodger's

own work, the remarkable study of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century,

The Wooden World, goes far to demonstrate the continuing relative sophistication of naval activity. These two are certainly amongst the most outstanding of

recent years, but the point is that they represent only a small part of a substantial

and coherent body of work on sailing navies which has been built up since the

late nineteenth century.

The material covering the last hundred and fifty years does not possess the

same coherence nor the same serious attention to the history of navies in their

own right, as opposed to their influence on other affairs.

This is a serious claim that must be justified.

The fundamental cause is the issue oftechnology, which operates in two ways.

The first is the difficulty posed to the historian by the pace and scale of

technological change. The second is the "opacity" factor in technology. Broadly

stated, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the nature of the change

which it is undergoing becomes progressively more difficult to assess. This is simply 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 Galleonsfor 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.
Goldrick 13

ironclad Warrior were not simply profound in themselves, they had a visual

impact 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 snakes

amongst the rabbits.'* But no layman could now comprehend from the external

view the profound—even revolutionary—changes which have taken place

within warships in the last thirty years through the advent of the computer age.

Despite the fact that weapon ranges and operational horizons have extended five or six fold, the guided missile destroyer of 1965 looks little different to that of

today. But it is in no way the same ship.

On the question of pace and scale, it is more difficult to convey in any

straightforward fashion the extent to which the problems of naval warfare

became more complicated. One can best illustrate this by focusing on the threat

to the battleship and taking a sounding at thirty or twenty year intervals—with

a five year bracket in the Second World War. The progress between 1860 and

1945 demonstrates the point. (See Table 1) From the time at which the only

open water threats to a battleship were the elements or another battleship, we

have evolved to a situation in which it can be threatened on, over or under the

sea, in all weathers and at all times of day. This table should not, of course, be

considered in only one dimension. The battleship itself, with its remarkable

capacity to absorb punishment and its heavy (and eventually radar equipped) gun

armament, represented a formidable proposition to anything which came within

range of its weapons. These qualities go some way to explain the retention of

the battleship past the Second World War, and even the temporary return to

service of the type during the 1980s.

The problem of understanding naval warfare becomes progressively more

profound as we move from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. There is another factor, which complicated contemporary analysis—that is, the definition

and planning of naval technological policy—-just as much as it has made life

difficult for the historian. This is the effective absence of fleet-on-fleet encounters from the onset of steam propulsion until the Russo-Japanese War in

1904. Apart from the Battle ofLissa in 1866, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95,

and certain actions in the American Civil War—and these were usually related

to attacks on land fortifications—the battles which did take place were generally

individual ship-on-ship encounters and rarely involved the great powers.

The result was that operational art transferred itself from a basis of practical

experience to a largely theoretical and thus unprovable level. In modern terms,

it was impossible to validate fully either materiel or tactics because there was no

test ofwar. Thus, the development ofdoctrine, the planning to operate and fight

at sea, had to proceed almost wholly on the basis of theories which, however

well conceived, were resting on intrinsically uncertain foundations.

7 Oscar Parkes, British Battleships 1860-1950 (London: Seeley, Service & Co, 1957), p. 15.
14 The Problems of Modern Naval History

At the same time, the fact that technology was evolving in new ways and at an uncertain pace meant that the context in which decisions were made was

itself evolving continuously and unpredictably. In some circumstances, and there

are parallels here in the revolution in modern computing, the context for

technological and operational decision making could experience profound

changes within months, not the years or decades with which earlier eras tended

to deal. If the resulting problems which contemporary decision makers faced

could be appalling, we should not be surprised that their complexity has often

proved too much for historians.

The researcher's problems are magnified because navies operate on three

interconnected levels in relation to making policy for war fighting. The most

difficult for the external observer to assess is the organization of a navy to face

current threats, the development of doctrine and policy for the operation of

existing ships and equipment. This is the work offleet staffs, tactical schools and

supporting commands. It is inherently highly classified and the associated

documentation both arcane and transient, if it exists at all. Historical analysis of

the material which does exist in archives requires a sophisticated understanding

of the subjects under examination. This is because the original audience for any

document already comprehended the problems and the circumstances involved

and 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 which

could be achieved.

The second level is the modification of existing systems to meet perceived

deficiencies, achieve new capabilities or match emerging threats. Although the
Goldrick 15

intent is similar, this differs from the base level in that the nature and extent of

the work required are such as to put it outside the capability of the seagoing

forces to implement with their own resources or with those of the customary

supporting organizations. The historian can more easily understand these processes because approaches to external authorities and the involvement ofmain naval

staffs inevitably require comprehensive documentation in the process ofjustifying the allocation of funds.

The third level provides at once the clearest and also the most treacherous

ground for the historian. This is the determination of the future force structure,

the processes by which staff requirements are originated and developed for new

ships and new equipment. The clarity derives from the fact that much of the

process is comprehensively documented; the treachery is due to the reality that

not all staff requirements are generated according to technical or even strategic

imperatives. Some may be what are, in work-place negotiations, termed as "ambit claims." Others may be stalking horses to put pressure on competing

projects or to satisfy an external authority, particularly political. It is also the case

that some critical staff requirements may never be produced at all, because the

staff capacity does not exist to do the analysis. What the historian sees may

therefore not be what he wants or needs.

Let me illustrate the difficulties of the modern naval historian with two

historical problems, still not wholly resolved, both related to the Royal Navy in

the twentieth century. The first is in the origins of the battle cruiser, brainchild

of Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher. The second concerns the evolution of the

aircraft carrier.

The Battle Cruiser

In 1906, the British commissioned the all big gun, turbine-engined Dreadnought. Heavily armored, firing twice the broadside of any contemporary

batdeship and several knots faster, she represented such a leap in all round fighting

powers that, at a stroke, she rendered obsolete the battle fleets of every navy in

the world and set the standard for future capital ship construction.

Two years later there appeared the first of the battle cruisers, the Invincible

class. These ships combined almost the firepower of the Dreadnought with much

higher 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 seems

that the battle cruiser would only be useful so long as no opponent built ships

which werejust as fast and as heavily gunned but were more adequately armored.

The battle cruiser emerged at a time when the British were increasingly

focused upon the threat from Germany, the geography of which dictated a preoccupation with the prospect ofa general fleet action, something which the

Germans would have to seek ifthey were to avoid being blockaded in their ports

by the Royal Navy. The likely battleground, the southern North Sea, was also
16 The Problems of Modern Naval History

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

When the Great War came, the battle cruiser, at least the British version, bore

out the forebodings ofthe 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 separate

type, the battle cruiser did not survive that experience in the Royal Navy and

even the last to commission, the ill—fated Hood, was more accurately described

as a fast battleship, with imperfect rather than inadequate armor. Thus the

judgement of history runs. Thatjudgement is wrong or, to put it most charitably, grossly oversimplified.

Recent research is only beginning to make clear the tangle offinancial, technical

and strategic issues which were mixed up in the genesis and later development

of 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—conceived

brainchild of a single man who would not acknowledge the central flaw in his

theories. The original idea behind the battle cruiser was not to be part of the

batde fleet, but to hunt down the enemy cruisers and merchant raiders which

threatened British shipping routes and which Fisher believed to be the greatest

danger to Britain's well being. At the turn ofthe century, the perceived maritime

threat was not Germany alone, but France and Russia, which in concert

represented not only an increasing material force in their developing battle fleets

but a widely dispersed one with their numerous cruisers.

This dispersal would present almost insuperable difficulties to the hard pressed

Royal Navy. Britain not only had to match the European powers in battleship

construction, but build equally expensive and manpower intensive armored

cruisers for commerce protection. Even for the United Kingdom, the financial

implications of attempting to maintain superiority at all points and against all rivals were too much.

8 See the author's book, The King's Ships Were at Sea: The War in the North Sea August 1914—February

1915 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984).

See, as a recent and prominent example, Robert K. Massie Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming 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 University

of Maryland and to Dr. Nicholas Lambert ofWolfson College, Oxford University. This brief synthesis,

however, is only a summary of some of the judgments which may be drawn from research to date. The

nature of both historians' work is such that they—and we—are learning all the time. See Jon Tetsuro

Sumida, 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 paper

delivered to the Eleventh Naval History Symposium, Annapolis, October 1993. See also: Nicholas

Lambert "Admiral Sir John Fisher and the Concept of Flotilla Defence 1904-09," Journal of Modem

History, (Fall 1995), forthcoming; and "British Naval Policy 1913/14: Financial Limitation and Strategic

Revolution," Journal of Military History, (Fall 1995), forthcoming.
Goldrick 17

Fisher's interest in alternative approaches was crystallized when he commanded the Mediterranean Fleet during the Boer War and at a nadir of British

prestige in Europe. He seized on torpedo craft, including the submersibles which

were beginning to demonstrate their operational potential, as the best means of

neutralizing enemy battle fleets close to their own ports and bases. This concept

of"flotilla defence" would be combined with fast, long ranged and heavily armed

ships to hunt down and destroy enemy commerce raiders. Such a force mix held

the possibility not only of holding at bay any possible anti-British coalition but

doing so at relatively limited cost.

The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 and the progressive engagement of

France and Russia in an Entente with Britain would change the strategic situation

profoundly in the next few years, but it is important to remember that these

political developments were by no means as coherent or comprehensible at the

time as they appear now. In particular, the Royal Navy, despite a progressive

concentration of forces into British home waters, never ceased to regard its strategic problems without some recognition of the continuing needs of the

Mediterranean and other stations further afield. That such a wider view of

strategy existed between 1904 and 1914 has not always been recognized by

historians 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 in

range and accuracy which within a few years extended fighting ranges from 2

to 3,000 meters to as much as 8,000. At this point, however, manual aiming and

prediction of individual weapons began to become difficult to the point of

ineffectiveness. At the time in which the dreadnought and battle cruiser designs

were being put into production, the Royal Navy embarked upon an extensive

program of experiments to develop computerized gunnery fire control systems.

The long and complex story of that program and its eventual misdirection is outside my scope. The key issues, however, can be highlighted by pointing out

two things. First, British gunnery policy changed direction drastically at least

four times in the decade before 1914. Such changes of direction, however illconceived in retrospect, were not driven by a desire to increase or to minimize

the fighting range for its own sake, but because those responsible for the fighting

efficiency ofthe Royal Navy were convinced that they were necessary to achieve

superiority in battle. This situation alone is indicative of the uncertainty of the

development processes. It must be understood that naval decision making at the

first and second levels, within which this situation existed, is more often focused

on solving contemporary problems within a limited time scale rather than

achieving an "ideal" solution. In short, the question is "how?" not "what if?"

Second, the technology issue was never confined to the gunnery fire control

problem alone. At one point, it became apparent that the new "capped" armor

piercing shell was capable ofpenetrating any armor at ranges of 6,000 meters or
1 8 The Problems of Modern Naval History

less.

11 This obviously lent weight to the concept of a fast, heavily armed ship

which would close to overwhelm an opponent with her weight of fire. Third,

the torpedo was itself gaining in range and capability through improved

propulsion and accompanying increases in size. The advantage retained by the

gun since the invention of quick firing weapons late in the previous century was

thus being subjected to serious erosion. Sophisticated fire control might hold

the potential for recovery.

In these circumstances, a vision of the battle cruiser developed in which it seemed possible to marry a predictive fire control system with the fast ship to

produce a vessel which could not only dictate the fighting range but which could

score hits at a distance at which it would be effectively invulnerable to less

sophisticated opposition. It is not surprising that armor seemed superfluous to

Fisher.

The criticism of Fisher's schemes has been that, however elegant the combination ofbattle cruiser and fire control might seem, it could only be temporary.

It is an axiom of competitive technological development that the greatest step

towards duplicating an innovation is the recognition itself that the innovation

has been achieved. Britain's rivals would eventually produce their own fire

control 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 itselfhad improved Britain's position by imposing

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

1 o which 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 rapid

developments in technology changed the fundamental measures by which force

structures and thus the balance of power were judged from types to capabilities.

Relationships between capabilities were inherently dynamic, not static. Without

the test of battle, this meant that the uncertainty over judgements as to relative

strengths greatly increased. In turn, the advantage, at least in the perceptions

which affect decision making for future force structures, the 'third level' already

described, had to lie with the latest innovation, the 'super weapon' whose

potential could only be guessed at. The capability issue possessed another element. Hitherto, naval force structures 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.
Goldrick 19

each other with relative ease. Battleships fought battleships; cruisers and scouts

expected to face other cruisers and scouts. The advent of the torpedo was but

the first step in the breakdown ofthis system. It conferred what Corbett described

as "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 its implications, but not enough. Their thinking was too fixated upon the vulnerability of a British Fleet in close blockade. Such a policy was not just itself

vulnerable to technical change; it remained valid only so long as the British

strategies did not alter. What Fisher seems to have grasped is that force structures are best defined by the tasks which navies must undertake to meet national

interests and not an overreaching requirement to destroy the enemy's main fleet

for its own sake. To the technological thrust towards asymmetry, he thus added

a strategic one.

All this reversed the assumption which had supported British policy for most

of the nineteenth century that the Royal Navy would follow innovation rather

than initiate it. The reversion was the more logical because it reflected the reality

that a precondition of the old policy, Britain's overwhelming economic and

industrial strength, no longer applied. I should add that this policy had in no way

limited the Royal Navy's approach to development once a weapon was

introduced into the order ofbattle elsewhere. Other navies might be the first to secure 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 maritime

combat, but as a weapon which represented, even had it been brought to

perfection through the installation of effective fire control, but one element in

an attempt to preserve strategic advantage by technical innovation in a period

of financial semi-crisis.

There is a connection for Australia in all this. Battle cruisers were utilized in

the role of anti-commerce raiders only once, in 1914, culminating in the

destruction of the armored cruisers ofthe German East Asiatic Squadron by the

heavy guns of the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible at the First Battle of the

Falkland Islands in December that year. The British ships had the spectacular

role. Less well—known is the fact that the battle cruiser Australia, commissioned

into the Royal Australian Navy only a year earlier, was the principal reason why

the German cruisers never entered Australian waters. The eight twelve inch guns

of the Australia represented perhaps the most effective—and timely—strategic

deterrent in which Australia has invested.

The Aircraft Carrier

Let me turn to my second case study. The Royal Navy and its senior

commanders 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.
20 The Problems of Modern Naval History

development ofthe aircraft carrier and ofnaval aviation between 1919 and 1939,

particularly by comparison with the Americans and Japanese. More than one

commentator has laid these failures directly at the door of conservative admirals

preoccupied with the big gun to the exclusion of all else. In consequence,

British carriers were operating fragile biplanes and unsuitable conversions ofland

aircraft 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 on

the battleship undoubtedly played its role. So did the vexed question of divided

control which occupied the central staffs of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air

Force for most ofthe inter-war period. Consider, however, other circumstances.

First, the pre- 1939 aircraft carrier was not an "all weather*' system. It could not

operate aircraft in rough seas or in poor visibility—and often not at night.

Second, economic conditions meant that the Royal Navy was forced to operate

small and elderly conversions for much longer than it desired. Such ships carried

too few machines to mount the large scale strike operations staged by the Pacific

powers. There was also too few aircraft. Money for naval aviation had to be

found within a budget over-stressed by the need to maintain large operational

forces world-wide as a result ofBritain's strategic over-extension. A large carrier

cost more to operate than a battleship.

British naval aviation suffered from conservatism from the bottom. This was

a curious and largely unrecognized result ofthe fact that the creation ofa separate

Royal Air Force in 1918 robbed the Royal Navy ofthe cream ofits experienced

personnel. In the United States and Imperial Japanese Navies, commanders with

flying experience forced the pace, taking risks with aircraft and ships which

resulted in higher casualty rates but also produced much more efficient and faster

operating cycles. American and Japanese carriers could launch and recover

aircraft more rapidly than the British and could marshal their machines in the

air more quickly. For example, it was British doctrine that each aircraft had to

be struck down to the hangar deck after it had landed on before the next would

be allowed onto the flight deck. This meant an interval between aircraft of up

to three minutes—between four and six times more than the intervals achieved

by the other carrier navies. Conversely, the British, who had adopted closed

hangars, 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 Ships

and their Aircraft (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988); Geoffrey Till, Air Power and the Royal Navy

1911-1945: 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 Development

of 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 the Lessons of 1914-1918" From the Dardanelles to Oran: Studies ofthe Royal Navy in War and Peace 1915-1940

(London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 56-57.
Goldrick 21

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 and

reduce the effective operational ranges for their aircraft by about one—third

compared to the Americans or the Japanese. When this means the difference

between 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 one

hour before dawn and a carrier force in the east is pitted against a heavy cruiser

force in the west. At 0500, each side detects radio transmissions from the other

and, thus, knows the bearing but not the range ofthe opposition. Although each

assumes that the opposition is in the vicinity, they are in fact one hundred miles

apart. Each determines to launch a scouting aircraft at dawn since their aircraft

cannot operate at night. In each case, the scout is a Fairey IIIF biplane; the

cruiser's machine is a float plane, the carrier's, a land plane. Each has a speed of

one hundred knots. The weather is clear and the sea slight, apparently ideal

conditions for air operations at sea. But note the first problem for the carrier—the

wind is from the west, which means that the ship must steam towards the cruisers

when launching or recovering aircraft. If she is operating any kind of air patrols

this means that, at best, she cannot make ground to the east to keep her distance

from the cruisers. In reality, she could well be making ground to the west, despite

her best intentions.

If all the equipment works and, accepting favorable times for the carrier to

recover the scout and organize an eighteen aircraft strike (which against a three

cruiser force is a threat but not necessarily a decisive one), we get the following

figures: The carrier's aircraft would be able to achieve a strike when the cruisers

were still out ofrange at thirty-two miles. But, ifthe radio ofthe scouting aircraft

failed—and this was a not uncommon occurrence—the equation becomes very

different. The cruisers are approaching gun range at fourteen miles. This may

perhaps 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 of

superiority were too small to do otherwise.

An associated question is why the British exhibited so little apparent interest

in single-seat fighters for air defense? First, such aircraft were oflittle use in other

roles, with minimal range, no load carrying capability and very tentative

navigation over water'—important considerations when a carrier could not carry

many aircraft in the first place. Second, and more importantly, small carriers with

limited capacity simply could not carry enough fighters to maintain a credible

air 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 fighters

and for them to gain height and enter the action before the attackers launched

their bombs or torpedoes. The emphasis on anti-aircraft fire rather than air cover

must 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 exonerate

the Royal Navy from its use of air power, nor are they complete in themselves.

Nevertheless, they should indicate that there were other key issues than

interservice politics or institutional conservatism. It is an error to mislabel simple

truth as simplicity; it is equally wrong to mistake a simple explanation for the

whole truth.

Conclusion

What points can be drawn from these examples? The first is the straightforward

one that naval history is not easy. If we are to achieve any improvement in our

understanding of navies in the machine age, there must be a new approach to the

subject, one which integrates the elements of technology, finance, strategy, operations and personnel in achieving an understanding of the subject. I hasten to add

that 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 that

only extensive and lengthy study and a deep comprehension of the issues will

suffice. A recent example of the problem is John Keegan, a military historian of

great talent whose study ofland warfare, The Face ofBattle, combines magisterial

authority with a remarkably fluent and gripping style. By comparison, his 1988

book Hie Price ofAdmiralty: The Evolution ofNaval Warfare maintains the quality

ofprose, but possesses nothing like the insight ofhis military work. It takes a long

time to "grow" expert naval historians and they do not necessarily come from

the backgrounds which might be expected. Amongst the finest recent work on

the 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 in

relation to the tasks which navies exist to undertake in war. I cannot stress this point

too much. For too long, the tendency has been to examine navies in relation to

their effect on other issues, such as diplomacy. This is to confuse the shadow with

the substance. Despite the rhetoric encompassing the many uses ofmaritime power

and, in particular, the diplomatic uses ofa navy in peacetime as a means ofexerting

national influence and demonstrating national presence, it is their warfighting roles which determine the force structures and organizations of navies.

In this context little has changed from the navies of the sailing age. "Take it

all in all." said John Ruskin, "a Ship of the Line is the most honourable thing

that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced." The implicit point

remains: the achievements of the gregarious animal. The interest to outsiders in

the navy for its own sake derives from the fact that navies remain amongst the

most 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: Naval

Institute 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 social

interaction. They must possess the capacity to adapt constantly to changing

environments and to changing equipment. They must be capable of operating

at great distances from any base, efficiently under threat of attack, while

maintaining crew cohesion and morale. I would suggest that the complexity of

the entire problem is so great that navies remain inherently at the leading edge

of problem solving in many areas, not least of them social.

Given this inherent complexity, it is axiomatic that valid histories must possess

equally sophisticated methodologies which achieve a synthesis ofarchival and other

sources and are written with an appropriate level oftechnical understanding of the subject.

My favorable citation of much recent work in naval history makes it clear that I think 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 examined

in anything like the necessary detail. I return to my earlier point about combat at sea being the touchstone of naval history, the proof of the extent to which navies

achieved the reality of their own self images. We need to extend the same

methodologies 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 the

First and Second World Wars. The legacy of the official histories is no longer

enough, even if we accept the political and security constraints under which they

were written. Indeed, the discoveries ofthe 1904-1914 period and in other periods,

such as the development of naval aviation, suggest that much of what we have

accepted as valid "core" history is in fact mistaken.

The acknowledgement of the importance of signals intelligence which

followed on the revelations concerning Allied cryptological successes against the

Germans 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 and

operational issues and accept that the result may not be as we expected and may

differ 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 apparent

aspects of the early electronic age, such as radar. This will be neither easy nor

quick, but it will be well worth the effort.

18 An Australian example of the emerging intelligence history work which places signals intelligence

in the correct context is: David Stevens, "The Role ofRadio Intelligence in the Anti-Submarine War

Around Australia, 1942-45," Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 25 (October 1994), pp. 23-30.

See also, as an example, David Zimmerman, The Great Naval Battle of Ottawa (Toronto: University

ofToronto Press, 1989).

20 The author is indebted to Dr. David Rosenberg and Dr.Jon Sumida, whose much more sophisticated

arguments for the improvement ofnaval history are contained in the following chapter on "Machines,

Manufacturing, Management and Money: The Study of Navies as Complex Organisations and the

Transformation ofTwentieth Century Naval History." See also, David Alan Rosenberg, "Process: The

Realities 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 SirJulian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert 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 ofconcentration appears

to be upon the brink of major change with respect to sources, methods,

conceptual frameworks, and standards. For present purposes, the twentieth

century means the one hundred years from the late 1880s to the late 1980s, a period of rapid technological advance and chronic great power antagonism,

punctuated by global conflict that involved naval operations of unprecedented

scale. During this era of industrialized naval rivalry and war, the major powers

built large and technically up-to-date fleets. These forces were manned by a highly skilled labor force and led by well educated professionals. The ships and

personnel, in turn, had to be supported by a considerable industrial establishment

and administered by a complex bureaucracy. And the costs ofall ofthis imposed

a substantial financial burden upon the state. Much ofwhat shaped the character

of 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. The

quantity of writing on naval technology is admittedly considerable, but often

strong on description at the expense of analysis and concentrated to an overwhelming degree on warships and warship design, with relatively little attention

devoted to the systematic examination of significant technical infrastructure

that is, such matters as gunlaying and fire control mechanisms, data transmission

systems (within ships, between ships, and from ship to shore), optical and

electronic sensors, and the finer points of steam, gas turbine, or nuclear

engineering. There are a number of historical studies of naval personnel, but in

general these have failed to explore the relationship between social characteristics

and dynamics on the one hand, and institutional function and effectiveness on

the other. Books dealing with the warship construction industry of any country
26 Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

and its connection to the civilian shipbuilding sector and the economy as a whole

are remarkably few. The history of naval administration over the past hundred

years has attracted so little scholarship that more is known about that subject in

the age of sail than in the age of steam. And the taking into account of naval

finance at best rarely proceeds beyond discussion of aggregate annual expenditure, and practically never addresses borrowing or the distribution of spending

between personnel, shipbuilding, ship maintenance, training, administration,

and the subheadings thereof.

Naval technical, personnel, economic, administrative, and financial questions

were also interrelated. The characteristics ofwarships were decided by deliberations that were concerned with much more than strategy, tactics, and naval

architecture. The size, kind, and numbers of units were always to a greater or

lesser degree limited by financial and industrial considerations. The design,

development, and production of ordnance and other equipment were more or

less influenced by not only the availability of capital and labor, but by the nature

of the procurement bureaucracy. The effectiveness of fighting vessels in war

depended 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 the

logistical apparatus on the other—that is upon a combination of technical,

human, administrative, and economic factors. But given incomplete or overgeneralized understandings of naval machines, men, manufacturing, management, and money, important questions about the connections between them

have for the most part not even been asked, to say nothing of being answered.

These large deficiencies in knowledge about basic issues, however, have until

recently caused few difficulties for most historians of twentieth century naval

affairs. To understand this situation, it is first necessary to describe the nature of

the various forms ofnaval history as it is generally practiced and their relationships

to each other. Serious naval history—which for present purposes includes official

and for want of a better term quasi-scholarly as well as academic works—may

be divided into three groups—core, ancillary, and cognate.

Core naval history consists of the standard narrative histories of naval policy

and operations—set up either as national or comparative accounts—which

establish the master plot. Their authors sometimes acknowledged the influence

of technical, economic, administrative, and financial factors, but did not investigate these matters rigorously in their own terms. Ancillary naval history

consists of those studies that deal primarily with naval machines, men (including

biography) manufacturing, and management. The members ofthis group either

accept the core histories as given or ignore them altogether, and generally fail to 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. Navy

official histories of naval shipbuilding, administration, and logistics) elements of this genre should be
Rosenberg and Sumida 27

Cognate naval history stands apart from the first two. It consists ofworks that

are concerned with navies in the past, but written mainly from the standpoint

of fields distinct from naval history, such as political, diplomatic, economic,

social, cultural, intellectual, technical, maritime, or Braudelian 'total'

11 1 1

"\ history; or even different disciplines, such as political science or sociology; or interdisciplinary specializations such as international security or strategic

studies. The main focus ofthis 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 administrative

items can be found in Robert Greenhalgh Albion, comp., Naval & Maritime History: An Annotated

Bibliography. 4th edition, revised and expanded. (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport for the Munson Institute ofAmerican 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 & Maritime

History: An Annotated Bibliography (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport for the Munson Institute ofAmerican

Maritime Studies, 1988)]. There are no studies devoted exclusively to naval finance that can be

considered ancillary naval history. 3 For example, see Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power during

the 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 ofTexas Press, 1958) and The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909- 1922 (Austin: University

of 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 ofthe economic history sub fields ofbusiness

and financial history, see Hugh B. Peebles, Warshipbuilding on the Clyde: Naval Orders and the Prosperity

of the Clyde Shipbuilding Industry, 1889-1939 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), and Philip Pugh, The

Cost ofSeapower: The Influence ofMoney on Naval Affairsfrom 1815 to the Presetit Day (London: Conway

Maritime Press, 1986).

For example, see Frederick S. Harrod, Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modem Naval

Enlisted 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 ofa Navy: The Development ofBritish Naval Strategic

Thought, 1867-1914 (Chicago: University ofChicago 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 ofthe Sea: The History and Strategy ofMaritime Empires

(New York: William Morrow, 1974).

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

1 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, 1880

to 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 of

Power: Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
28 Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

affairs, or the general life of a maritime state or region; or navies as exemplars of

certain economic, social, cultural, technical, political, or strategic phenomena.

Cognate naval history, while in large part dependent on the master plot provided

by the core history, differs from ancillary naval history by engaging the large

questions and employing the methodologies characteristic of each of their

respective fields.

Naval history thus embraces a wide and disparate range ofactivity. Core naval

history, by its focus on policy and operations and exclusion of their institutional

context, closely resembles classical or mainstream military history, ofwhich it is often considered to be a sub-field. Ancillary naval history is largely the preserve

of antiquarianism or otherwise ahistorical hyper-specialization. And cognate

naval history is simply the name given to various enterprises that involve the

study ofnaval affairs but which are actually variants ofnon-naval fields ofhistory.

For these reasons, there is no particular "how of doing" naval history—its ways

and means may be those of virtually any branch of history and in some cases even non-history. Like Gertrude Stein's city of Oakland, there is, from the

standpoint of practice, "no there there."

Beyond the common subject of navies in the past, what the varieties of naval

history do share is at least rough agreement about what navies were meant to

do 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. This

is particularly so in the case of the literature devoted to the twentieth century's

two largest navies, which set the standard for the genre. The core naval histories

of Britain from the 1880s to 1945, which consist of multi-volume works based

on access to large quantities ofofficial documents and providing comprehensive

treatment, are widely considered to be authoritative. The core history of the

United States Navy for the same period, though less complete, is respected as essentially 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 the Pre-Dreadttought Era, 1880-1905 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940); idem., From the Dreadnought to Scapa 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 comparative

twentieth century naval history based on serious archival research, see Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean

Situation 1908-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); The Naual War in the Mediterranean

1914-1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), and A Naual History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval

Institute, 1994). For the most recent one-volume general histories of British naval operations of the

world wars, which do not offer fundamentally different interpretations than their multi-volume

predecessors, 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.
Rosenberg and Sumida 29

lack of access to important classified sources, equals and in important respects

surpasses the quality of its pre-nuclear era counterparts.

The core histories of the British and American navies, in short, are widely

regarded as being, if not definitive, close to it. And because this happy condition

was achieved without recourse to systematic examination of technical, personnel, economic, administrative, or financial matters, it has seemed as if the

commitment of efforts in those directions would result in little except detail

improvement. The negative effect of this impression has in turn been exacer- bated by the fact that the extraction of meaningful conclusions about matters

related to machines, men, manufacturing, management, and money require a great deal of specialized knowledge and significant amounts of technical skill.

The marginality of ancillary naval history can thus be attributed in large part to

a combination of small demand and the difficulty of supply.

But the finality of the core accounts can be questioned on three grounds. In

the first place, in spite of the skill, diligence, and intelligence of their authors,

the scope ofinquiry and the volume ofavailable archival materials were too great

to allow detailed research into all matters of importance. Secondly, at the time

that they were written, a large number ofdocuments, including major collections

of private papers, were for a variety of reasons unknown or otherwise unavailable. And thirdly, the creators of the core naval histories deployed the rhetoric

and methods of traditional political, diplomatic, and military history, which

limited their perspectives and precluded the application of new and powerful

techniques—such as systematic quantitative analysis or interest group behavior

studies—that had been developed in other areas of history. In short, that which

could be examined was so vast as to preclude careful measurement by a single

scholar in a reasonable length of time, the dossier was incomplete, and the

manner of investigation relatively unsophisticated.

Eric J. Grove, Vanguard to Trident: British Naval Policy Since World War 11 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987). Grove's monograph, indeed, to a far greater extent than its Royal Navy core history

predecessors, takes account oftechnical, economic, administrative, and financial factors. This contributes

strongly to its success, whose nature is such that Grove's work may be to a certain degree exempt from

the kind of wholesale reevaluation being recommended for the core naval histories of the pre-1945

period. The high standards ofanalysis and research set by Grove's volume are not, unfortunately, matched

by Michael T. Isenberg's Shield of the Republic: The United States Navy in an Era of Cold War and Violent

Peace, 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 Royal

Navy in the early twentieth century, see Jon Tetsuro Sumida, "Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought:

The Sources ofNaval Mythology,"Journal ofMilitary History, 59 (October 1995). For broader discussion

ofthe important methodological issues at stake, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation ofHistory

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1965; first published, 1931). For the new techniques in political history

developed between the World Wars that might have informed, if not been applied to, the study of the

British and American navies, see Lewis Namier, The Structure ofPolitics at the Accession of George III, second

ed. (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, Battleship

Building and Party Politics in Germany, 1894-1901, Pauline R. and Eugene N. Anderson, trans. (Chicago:
30 Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

Such general criticism aside, two recent developments have challenged the

integrity of the core naval histories in fundamental ways. In the first place, a number of new monographs that deploy novel analytical techniques based on

the use of a wide range of previously unexploited sources have discredited

important sections of the core history of the pre-1945 Royal Navy. And

secondly, a complex model of institutional function tailored to describe the

decision-making processes of the United States Navy in the nuclear era, calls

into question to many of the basic assumptions underlying virtually all historical

1 1 writing about naval policy-making from 1945 through the 1980s. Much of

the latter work, indeed, is applicable to the first half of the twentieth century

and to the navy of Britain, neatly complementing the new model monographs

by in effect codifying the methodological agenda implicit in their choice of

subjects and presentation of argument.

The new model monographs employ, and the decision-making process

analysis approach calls for, the integrated examination of technical, personnel,

economic, administrative, and financial factors in order to reinterpret the course

of policy-making and its consequences in operations. The adjustments of

portions of the main narrative structure of the pre-1945 period, which amount

to radical alteration and not mere modification, take the form of either direct

changes in the existing record or additions to the record that put what was already

known into a different perspective. In effect, this work violates the boundaries

of the established core/ancillary division of labor by weaving together subject

materials from both categories to renovate the core. Integration is facilitated by

the exploitation of large quantities of previously unavailable or unexploited

evidence 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 the Wars: A Reappraisal ofRearmament (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988); Nicholas A. Lambert, "The

Influence ofthe 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 Military

History, 59 (October 1995); idem., "British Naval Policy, 1913-14: Financial Limitation and Strategic

Revolution,"Joimw/ ofModern History (forthcoming); Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defettce ofNaval Supremacy:

Finatice, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914 (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989; paperback

edition, 1993); idem., "British Naval Administration and Policy in the Age of Fisher," Journal ofMilitary

History, 54 (January 1990); idem., "'The Best Laid Plans': The Development of British Battle Fleet

Tactics, 1919-1942," International History Review, 14 (November 1992); idem., "British Naval

Operational Logistics, 19U-1918,"Journal ofMilitary History, 57 (July 1993); idem., "Forging the Trident:

British Naval Industrial Logistics, 1914-1918," in John A. Lynn, Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare

from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 1993); and idem., "The Quest for Reach: The

Development 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 James

Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds, Mahan is Not Enough: The Proceedings ofa Conferettce on the Works

of SirJulian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1993).
Rosenberg and Sumida 31

There are reasons why factors related to machines, men, manufacturing,

management, and money play so important a role in the making of works that

pose fundamental challenges to the existing master plot. The existing core naval

history placed these subjects in conceptual "black boxes" whose outputs were

held to be secondary to primary concerns defined by matters that were considered to be more directly related to policy and operations. The internal

dynamics of these black boxes, moreover, were implicitly dismissed as being of

even lesser significance. What the new model monographs have done by one

means 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 by

the black boxes—and therefore held to be separate—were not only connected

to each other at many points, but indeed, by the very nature oftheir interactions,

affected the making of policy and operations to such a degree as to count as a kind of output as well.

Much of the conviction of the new model scholarship is to be found only in

their presentation ofthe particulars oftheir specific subjects. Nevertheless a good

deal of what has just been explained may be illustrated by a broad comparison

of 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 financial

matters to extreme degrees. For example, the basic structure of fleets and

functions of its constituents are generally considered to be fixed. The character

and training of personnel are rarely considered, with emphasis on the human

factor most often addressed only with regard to the personalities of top commanders. Production capacity is assumed to be available and the relationship of

naval building to the rest of a nation's armaments manufacturing effort a matter

oflittle interest. Bureaucracy is usually viewed as a given, and even when assigned

valence it most often takes the negative form of being no more than an

impediment 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 more

complex and open to considerably wider variation. The structure of fleets and

the functions of warships are treated as the hotly controversial questions that

they often were, and the myriad technical, human, economic, administrative,

and financial considerations that affected the strategic, tactical, and logistical

discussion given a much greater measure of their due.

The particular practical experiences of officers in dealing with complicated

and changing technology within the contexts of a difficult physical environment—namely the sea—and a complex institutional setting, have been found

to have had a powerful influence on decision-making. The distribution of

limited manufacturing assets between competing armed services and the civilian

economy in wartime is considered to have been a centrally important strategic
32 Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

issue, and also an extremely difficult problem ofpolitics and administration. The

careful scrutiny of bureaucratic organization, procedures, and cognizance have

revealed previously unknown and substantive connections between the work of

administration on the one hand, and policy and strategy on the other, whose

effects were both enabling or disabling depending on circumstances. And finally,

the examination of the specific terms of naval finance has clearly established that

changes in the availability of money and shifts in its distribution among major

spending categories had a major impact on the direction of naval policy in

peacetime.

In the course of placing such issues on the table as significant factors

influencing policy and—through the function or malfunction ofmachines, men,

administration, and organization in war—operations, the new model

monographs and decision-making process analysis approach has raised questions

about other important matters which have previously been relegated to the

sidelines or ignored altogether. These include naval officer education, training,

promotion paths, and formation of interest groups based on weapons specialization, service association, or social background; the professional, as opposed to

strictly social, experience of the naval rank and file, especially that of the

technically skilled ratings; the nature of the naval labor market, that is, the effect

of supply and demand on the quality and quantity of the naval work force;

considerations affecting reserves and preparations for the wartime expansion of

naval manpower; naval logistics, both industrial and operational; fleet training;

naval intelligence in general, and naval industrial intelligence in particular; even

the 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 human

organizations that exist in relation to and even in competition with other such

bodies within the same national structure, should be a prerequisite to the study

of policy and operations. By opening up the black boxes of naval technology,

personnel, economics, administration, and finance, its practitioners have in effect

revealed 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 and

efficiency. Navies, they have suggested, might instead be better understood as institutions whose manifold dimension, variations in major characteristics, and

potential for radical reformation need to be taken into consideration when

investigating the conscious or even unconscious (that is, irrational psychological or cultural) motives underlying the behavior of naval decision-makers. Equally,

appreciation of these same characteristics—that is, complexity, variety, and

susceptibility to change—ought to inform evaluations of civil-naval relations,

including naval legislative politics, the propagandization ofthe electorate, or the

build-up of the military-industrial complex.
Rosenberg and Sumida 33

As in the case of those advances in science that have often resulted in

fundamental changes in general outlook, the propositions put forward by the

new model monographs are based on empirical research that in both qualitative

and quantitative terms represent a considerable advance over what has previously

been accepted as sufficient. In part this has simply been the result of the great

influx of government documents and private collections of papers into archives

during the twenty-plus years since the publication of the core histories, which

provided much additional historical fodder for those that came afterward. In

addition, however, the authors of the new model histories examined sources

that dealt with technical, personnel, economic, administrative, and financial

matters, which had been largely overlooked and which existed in quantity. Their

studies also utilized basic engineering and accounting analytical techniques to

make sense ofsubstantial masses oftechnical and financial papers, producing new

data sets that could be used to enhance the study of naval policy formulation.

The effects ofthis work have been both to alter perspectives and reveal a plethora

of detail that had previously been obscured, which has provided much of the

evidentiary foundation for the challenges thus far to sections ofthe core histories.

The generation of new points of view and achievement of clearer resolution

has raised questions about the historical methodology that created the core

histories as well as about the integrity of their narratives. This is because the new

findings about finance and technology, when combined with the careful

consideration of other evidence, have indicated that the internal communications of the government within and between departments cannot be taken at face value as was done to a very great extent in the core histories. This has three

serious implications. In the first place, it means that even supposedly confidential

and authoritative policy documents must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and

criticism. In the second place, in the absence oftrustworthy and clear statements,

proximate estimates of the decision-making process and its outcomes may have

to be inferred or synthesized from inexplicit materials, such as financial statements or analysis of the technical characteristics of major weapons, using

specialized analytical techniques. And thirdly, it may in fact be impossible to

construct even inexact descriptions ofwhat the decision-making process and its outcomes were because of the shortcomings of the sources, leaving the presentation of likely alternatives as the best that can be accomplished.

Besides calling into question the basic narrative integrity of the core naval

histories ofthe British and American navies, and the methodology that produced

This can be called "consilience ofinduction," a phrase coined by the nineteenth century philosopher

of science William Whewell to describe the practice of coordinating findings from a number of

independent data sets to reach conclusions about a particular historical pattern, for which see Stephen

Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature ofHistory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989),

p. 282.

23

Ibid.
34 Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

it, the new model monographs and decision-making process analysis approach

make it possible to broaden and sophisticate the study of navies as complex

organizations. Three areas seem likely to become important focal points of

inquiry: the social and cultural context of service and civilian naval decisionmaking, the role ofcontingency in the shaping ofthe course of naval affairs, and

the relationship of the history of navies to general history.

Over the past three decades, several historians of twentieth century naval

affairs have maintained that the socio-cultural characteristics of naval officers as a group have heavily influenced and even determined the course of naval

policy-making. The naval history literature had for all intents and purposes not

taken account of this factor, and the general proposition that it was an issue of

considerable significance is a worthy one. Unfortunately, the exaggeration of

claims, the dependence upon anecdote rather than the deployment ofsystematic

argument, and inadequate or faulty evidence has compromised much ofthe value

A. of this work, and thus restricted its influence. On the other hand, the

proliferation of well founded and conceptually advanced writing on navies as institutions will provide the basis for more sensible analyses of the social and

cultural context ofnaval officer behavior, and that ofpoliticians and bureaucrats

as well. This should establish socio-cultural analysis as a much larger and more

important form of naval history than is currently the case. A detailed understanding of the organization of navies and the multiple and

interlocking processes that constitute their internal dynamics and relationships

to other departments of state and the political system in general, may also make

it possible to consider the operation of chance to a far greater extent than has

been 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 decisionmaking at the highest level were exposed to disruption by happenings at lower

levels whose outcomes were unpredictable. In effect, this would amount to the

application of Clausewitz's concept of friction to non-combatant activity,

usefully updated perhaps by contributions from recent work in chaos and

complexity theory. In the second place, recognition that crucial decisions

could depend upon chance must raise the question of the viability of alternative

major outcomes. This would mitigate the tendency towards determinism,

which would, among other things, perhaps temper the confidence of those

engaged 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," History

Theory, 30 (1991).

For a provocative exploration of this theme, see Gould, Wonderful Life.
Rosenberg and Sumida 35

The point of considering alternative outcomes, it needs to be said, is not to

indulge in the treacherous practice of "what if history, but rather to gain a greater appreciation ofthe extent to which naval policy makers were confronted

by a difficult range of choices. Current standard histories typically judge policy or operational outcomes as good or bad, accordingly assign praise or blame to

those held responsible, and sometimes attempt to draw lessons. But if events in

certain instances could possibly or even probably have turned out differently

than they did, decision-makers of the day who in hindsight selected the wrong

options may be, if not forgiven, at least better understood, and the temptation

to moralize resisted. And improved understanding and judgmental restraint in

this area is important, because it may serve as the basis for an assessment of

twentieth century naval policy making as a human organizational activity of not

merely great difficulty, but in its time one of unique formidability. This

proposition bears directly on the third category of analytical focus, a new

perspective on the relation of naval to general history.

From the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth century, the leaders of

major navies were confronted by technical, personnel, economic, administrative,

and financial problems that were arguably of greater scale, difficulty, and

complexity than that facing the executives of any other department of state or

private corporation. Rapid technological change resulted in the swift depreciation of capital, whose periodic replacement by novel and usually larger, more

complicated, and costlier equipment almost invariably required retraining and

upgrading of the work force, improvements in productive capacity, the extension of bureaucracy, and increased expenditure. And higher spending, in

particular, over time was bound to cause serious political complications. It should

not, therefore, be surprising that the twentieth century is Uttered with naval

errors of prediction with regard to choice of equipment, warship types, force

structure, doctrine, tactics, and strategy given the hostile characteristics of the

terrain that had to be negotiated.

In the later twentieth century, the problems that had formerly been the

exclusive property of navies became more widely distributed as armies

mechanized, air forces expanded and improved, and businesses discovered that

timely responses to increasingly rapid changes in technology were essential for

success. Thus the experience ofnavies, in light ofmore recent history, may take

on a different appearance. Naval leaders as a group have not infrequently been

depicted as technologically conservative and tradition-bound, and as such

constituting reactionary subcultures isolated from surrounding progressive industrial society. The present brief survey has attempted to suggest the utility of

following a different analytical tack—namely, that navies engaged problems of

a kind that would not confront other major organizations until much later, and

that their record of occasional predictive failure should not obscure the fact that
36 Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management,

they carried burdens and developed solutions that made them precursors of, and

perhaps 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 work

described in this paper amount to more than revisionism. The phenomenon

being depicted is not mere improvement or development of a field, but a reordering of its basic components to such a degree that its fundamental nature

is transformed. Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book on the structure of scientific

revolutions, called such an event a "paradigm shift." For Kuhn, the concept

of a paradigm had multiple aspects, which allowed manifold applications, but

essentially it meant a sense of problem-solving program and method that was

the common intellectual property ofan entire field. A paradigm, in other words,

defined identity.

Kuhn's model may be applied usefully to the discussion of the present and

future condition of twentieth naval history as a serious scholarly undertaking. In

the case of the existing paradigm for naval history, the doing of it involves the

study of navies in the past without much quibbling over questions of what

purpose or which procedure. Naval history as such is thus an activity defined by

subject rather than method. Such looseness has had its advantages, for it has

allowed scholars from different historical fields and even different disciplines

altogether to participate in an occupation that might otherwise have had many

fewer practitioners. There are, however, serious drawbacks. While eclecticism

has enlarged and enriched the field, it has also perforce resulted in a lack offocus

and uncertain standards. There is little discussion—let alone agreement—about

what major questions ought to be priority targets of investigation, and what

methods might or might not be deployed or developed to address them. And

in their absence, important subjects have been mishandled in a variety of ways.

The disparate and uneven quality of the twentieth century naval historical

paradigm, moreover, has been growing. With core naval history presumed to

be settled, and ancillary naval history dismissed and thus neutralized as a major

influence, cognate naval history has become by apparent default the only area ofdynamism and growth. This has had two consequences. First, it has reinforced

the tendency to make the study of naval affairs a sub—department of many other

fields or disciplines, increasing the difficulty of conceiving of naval history as an

intellectually coherent activity on its own. And second, in the absence ofa sound

core naval history, the development of much cognate naval history has been

limited or even compromised by insufficient or faulty information and analysis

about basic things.

In addition to the propensity to disintegrate because ofthe action ofinternally

generated centrifugal forces, the existing twentieth century naval historical

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second Edition (Chicago: University of

Chicago, 1970; first published 1962).
Rosenberg and Sumida 37

paradigm has been subjected to strong external pressure via the already described

assaults by the new model monographs on the core naval history. These attacks,

at one level, have served a purely destructive purpose by overturning important

sections of the master plot. In this sense, the new model monographs have

corresponded to Kuhn's anomalies—that is, experiments that produce results

inconsistent with what might be expected if the existing scientific paradigm was

sound. The multiplication of anomalies, Kuhn maintained, caused crises that

were only resolvable by the adoption of a new paradigm that convincingly

accounted for all or almost all recognized phenomena. The possibility of such a paradigm shift in naval history has been at least indicated by the amount ofnaval

historical anomaly produced thus far. At a second level, however, the new model monographs and the decisionmaking process analysis approach have gone beyond the generation ofanomalies

by providing the groundwork for a basic rearrangement of the present structure

ofwhat is now called twentieth century naval history. In the new structure, core

and aspects of ancillary naval history are to be integrated in order to achieve a fundamental reconstruction ofthe former, which in turn should provide sounder

foundations for cognate naval history. The renovation of core naval history will

be no mean task. The problems to be solved—such as the influence of finance

on policy, or industrial logistics on strategy—are important, and the

methodological instruments necessary to accomplish the solutions— such as

statistical or technical analysis—are in many cases difficult to manipulate. It is an

undertaking that cannot be accomplished by a single scholar or even a single

generation of scholars. It is, in short, work that is properly the responsibility of

an autonomous field.

Such a field would not supplant what has been called twentieth century naval

history in its entirety, but take its place within a larger framework that would.

For heuristic purposes, the latter might be called 'the historical study oftwentieth

century naval affairs,' while the former would assume the name 'twentieth

century naval history.' Twentieth century naval history would consist of a reformed core supported by ancillary naval history as before. The historical study

oftwentieth century naval affairs would constitute an activity that included naval

history on the one hand, and the various forms of cognate naval history viewed

as variants of other historical fields or disciplines on the other. Though naval

history would be privileged in this arrangement by virtue of the fact that it was

primarily responsible for the condition of the master plot, upon which cognate

naval history is necessarily heavily dependent, this would not preclude the

exertion ofstrong influence on naval history by cognate history contingent upon

circumstances.

Kuhnian paradigm shift as applied to the transformation ofwhat was formerly

called twentieth century naval history can now be described. Fundamentally, it

is 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 distinct

problem-solving program and methodology, but still related to cognate naval

history under what might be called the 'grand field' title of the historical study

of twentieth century naval affairs. The main outcome of such changes should

be scholarly study of naval history that is much more dynamic, disciplined, and

directed towards engagement with important issues that would otherwise have

been ignored. The new naval history, because of the wide disparity between

armies and navies with respect to environment and technology, will differ from

the '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 of

whatever stripe for the purposes of extravagant theorizing or unrestrained

prognostication should be reduced.

Large gaps in the printed record limit the applicability of many of the new

model techniques of twentieth century naval history to previous times. Much

of what has been described nevertheless might well be applied with profit to

earlier periods. Michael Oppenheim, the great historian of naval administration

as it was practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, investigated his

subject 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 1 909 he argued that naval administration was

the somewhat ugly scaffolding without which the building of Naval History is impossible, and the understanding of it still less possible. That is to say that, in the

past, other things being equal or nearly so, campaigns were won in the dockyards

and administrative departments rather than by the Admirals.

It may be appropriate, therefore, to reason by way ofanalogy—allowing for the

differences in the degree of mechanization, and the slower pace of technical

progress—and suggest that the practice of naval history for at least the sixteenth,

seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries may be subject to some ofthe

same sort ofalterations that have been described for that ofthe industrial period.

2 For a recent exploration of aspects of the new military history, see "Proceedings of the Symposium

on '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 military

history," see John Childs in The Nine Years' War and the British Army 1688-1697: The Operations in the Low Countries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 2-3. Michael Oppenheim to Sir John Fisher, 20 January 1909, quoted in Sumida, "British Naval

Administration 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, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), Jan Glete, Navies

and 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 of

the Georgian Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986).
Rosenberg and Sumida 39

How quickly changes will come is impossible to predict, but the prospects

for rapid advance are not fair. There are few historians of naval affairs of any

kind to start with, and fewer still who are likely to pursue the course of

scholarship just presented. Moreover, assistant professorships for historians of all description are hard to come by, and this is particularly so for those whose

subjects involve armed forces; a significant increase in the number of new

academics committed to the historical study of navies is thus highly unlikely,

and this constraint at the entry level is to be especially regretted because the

development of novel ideas and methods suit the temperament and energy of

the young. And finally, it needs to be said that the new model naval history

requires the learning of specialized skills and the investment of relatively large

amounts of labor in proportion to the output of publishable work, which must

further tend to the discouragement of would-be practitioners.

Doing naval history as it should be done, in conclusion, requires the

overcoming of great obstacles, and in this sense it may resemble the actual task

ofmaintaining and deploying a large and effective fleet. This paper's propositions

with regard to an incipient transformation of program and method may thus

serve as no more than a distant beacon. The will to change and confidence in

its benefits, upon which most future action will depend, must come from another

source. This was described by Kuhn, when he wrote that the person "who

embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the

evidence provided by problem-solving." That individual, he maintained, must

believe that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that

confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few." "A

decision 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 agenda

for a field about ofwhich he knows little. Political science did not separate from

history so very many years ago and scholars in the two fields study many ofthe same

phenomena and read many of each other's works. Nevertheless, our separation is deep enough so that we sometimes talk in different languages.

How we proceed depends in large part on exactly what questions we are trying to answer (although of course the reciprocal also is true—the approaches

we use influence the questions we see as interesting and important, sometimes

unproductively, as in the law of the instrument, but often productively). We

will never have one theory of naval history, let alone one theory of history. A

student of the role of navies in international conflict, for example, will use

different concepts, examine different data, and employ different methodologies

than the person who wants to know how navies influenced and were influenced

by 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 happens

elsewhere, but only that we are not doing a terrible injustice to the world we

want to understand by the boundaries we draw, which tell us what we are not

going to examine. There is something of a paradox here in that we need to be

able to isolate the field of naval history on order to study it and yet part of what

makes the field so interesting is the links it has to many other areas

e.g., foreign

policy, organizational theory, the uses oftechnology. Boundaries include as well

as exclude, and the second criteria for a field ofstudy is that the factors and events

inside it are closely related to each other and to the phenomena we seek to

understand. There is then some coherence both in the world we are trying to

explain and in the fields of study we have constructed. For Sumida and

Rosenberg, what makes naval history both coherent and distinctive is that navies

are organizations which touch on, integrate, and embody very different tasks

and elements. In too many previous investigations, the topics of finance,

1 See the essay by Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg in this volume.
42 Navies, Politics, and Political Science

manufacturing, and technology have been treated as peripheral if not as outside

the boundaries. But they are central to navies as organizations and so must be

the 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 the

separation is simplified and somewhat misleading. Perhaps the first thing a student of international politics wants to know is what difference navies

make—i.e., how alternative organizations, technologies, strategies, and tactics

contribute to national power and patterns of international politics. Since we are not alone in being especially interested in inadvertent and unnecessary wars and

the related question of how the attempts by a state to gain security can make

others less secure despite the fact that this is not the state's intention (a

phenomenon known as the security dilemma), let us take this as the first

example.

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 the

motive for Germany's building a battle fleet in the early twentieth century was

the fear that Germany eventually would come into conflict with Great Britain

and that, absent a fleet, Britain could sever Germany's access to colonies and

overseas trade. Britain, being an island and dependent on the seas, understandably

if not entirely correctly viewed the German fleet as a luxury and, indeed, as in

indication of hostile German intentions. To a significant extent, it was. But it was not entirely hypocritical of German leaders to see the fleet as necessary for

self-defense: it would reduce German vulnerability to Great Britain during a war

and, for this reason, reduce British leverage over Germany in peacetime. These

were legitimate objectives that would have been pursued by even a status quo

Germany. Nevertheless, the effect was to decrease British security. This meant

that even if both states desired mutual security, their naval policies would have

increased the frictions between them. To overstate the case, Germany could

only be secure if it had a fleet large enough to break a British blockade; Britain

could only be secure if its fleet could sweep all before it and keep the seas open

for British trade. Under some geographical and technological conditions, these

goals could be compatible. In the early twentieth century they were not.

I have argued elsewhere that if both sides adopted the doctrine of Mutual

Assured Destruction (MAD) during the Cold War, mutual security could have

been gained more readily through deployment of SLBMs than by land-based

missiles. 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 in International 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.
Jervis 43

weapons, MAD can be difficult to maintain, especially if the missiles have

multiple 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 nuclear

missiles. Not only are these relatively invulnerable, but they cannot readily be

used to attack each other. Thus, an increase in the number ofAmerican SLBMS

would not impinge on Soviet second-strike capability and, under the idealized

assumption of mutual acceptance of MAD, what little military competition

operated 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 the

security dilemma. That is, the forces and tactics called for would menace the

Soviet Union even if that country did not have aggressive intentions because it placed a premium on striking first and called for actions which would have had

the effect—and sometimes (but only sometimes)—the intent of crippling the

USSR's retaliatory capability.

As the discussion of the Maritime Strategy illustrates, the security dilemma

can operate at the level of tactics as well as strategy. That is, some technologies

and tactics generate incentives to strike first. In such a situation fighting may

occur even though neither side wants it: each knows that despite a mutual

interest 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 navies

are more prone to destabilizing dynamics of this kind than are armies. While

there are cases ofisolated inadvertent exchanges between land units, these rarely

spread very far. But ships not only carry more national prestige, they operate in

fleets and the potential for undesired escalation is very great. Historically, the

obvious example is the battle of Navarino, although I grant it would be better

for 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 that

the unauthorized activities of the American navy could easily have set off a dangerous Soviet response. But on closer examination it appears that the navy

was 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 give

us a nice example of naval forces increasing the dangers of inadvertent war. The

Soviet and American fleets were dangerously deployed during the October 1973

4 See, for example, John Mearsheimer, "A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence

in Europe," International Security, 1 1 (Fall 1986), pp. 3-57. Also, James D. Watkins, et. ai, The Maritime

Strategy, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Supplement, (January 1986).

The general situation is well described by the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is closely related to the

security dilemma. For a good discussion of how actors can cooperate in such a situation, see Kenneth

Oye, 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), chapter

4.
44 Navies, Politics, and Political Science

Middle East war. Each navy felt—probably correctly—that there were great

incentives to strike first. Thus it appears that war could have grown out of each

fleet's attempts to protect itself. Furthermore, the civilian leaders, at least on the

American side, were blissfully unaware of the significance of the naval deploy-

„ 8 ments.

This brings up two additional related reasons why navies may be especially

prone to be destabilizing. First, because of technology and traditions, ship

captains have a great deal of individual autonomy. I also suspect that they are more prone to ignore orders—after all, it was a naval hero who put the glass to

his blind eye. Of course unauthorized actions may reduce rather than increase

the dangers of inadvertent war: military leaders are often less bellicose than their

civilian counterparts and more aware of the danger of events getting out of

control. But people on the spot are likely to feel great pressures to protect their

military units even if doing so makes the world more dangerous. Second, as the

1973 example illustrates, civilian leaders are likely to know and understand even

less about naval plans and behavior than about those of the other armed services.

Outsiders find navies especially hard to comprehend and while they are likely

to enjoy photogenic rides on ships, they rarely know what fleets do under

everyday situations, let alone how they will operate in a crisis. Complementing

this civilian ignorance is the fact that, at least in the post-war U.S., naval officers

seem to pay less attention to politico-military issues than do their counterparts

in other services. (This fact requires an explanation. One obvious component is the great stress placed on competence in commanding ships for naval promotion

and the concomitant devaluation oftime spent in Washington. But whether this

can be explained by the inherent requirements of navies or whether it is more

cultural is an open question. Comparisons to other countries and other periods

of time would be useful.)

Of course countries rarely seek security or other goals unilaterally; alliances are an essential part of international politics. Here navies play a number of

interesting roles which we need to know more about. First (although not

necessarily most important), when navies work together the individuals involved

develop transnational ties which can influence national policy. Each navy can

become a lobby for the strengthening ofthe political connections with the other.

Furthermore, naval officers in country A may conspire with their colleagues in

country B to get the political leaders of their country to adopt policies that will serve both the national interest as they see it and the interest oftheir organization

(of course these two are likely to be seen as consistent if not identical). Thus

country 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 University

Press, 1991).
Jervis 45

of their fleet by getting the admirals of country B to persuade B's leaders to

request greater naval support from A. In other cases, the transnational ties may

affect less visible behavior. Thus it seems that a significant amount ofthe military

assistance that the U.S. provided to Great Britain in the Falklands-Malvinas War

not only went through informal naval channels, but was not explicitly authorized

by the civilian leaders.

On a broader political level, political relations can both influence and be

influenced by perceived naval requirements, which in turn change with changing technologies, national goals, and international configurations. The need for

naval bases can drive the state to seek either good relations with or the

domination ofcountries which could menace those bases, even ifthose countries

are of no intrinsic importance to the state. Of course the existence of good or bad relations with various countries is itselfan important determinant ofthe need

for naval forces, and this in turn influences both the kind ofnavy that is required

and the bases that are available and must be sought.

Navies influence domestic politics—and indeed other aspects of domestic

life—as well as foreign affairs. This topic is sufficiently large and far from my

expertise that I only wish to note that it appears to be underappreciated and

understudied. Since armies often stage coups it is impossible to overlook their

political roles. But just because navies are offshore does not mean they are without influence, both direct and indirect. Not only are they potent instruments

of violence, but they can create or undermine the legitimacy and influence of

groups and ideologies within the country. Furthermore, they can lead and shape

other institutions by the examples they set and the demands they make on the

rest of society. In many eras, they are the largest, most complex, and most

technically advanced organizations in their countries. Although determining

their 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 ofpolitical science

was lowered still more when he saw a study that treated him as a dependent

variable. "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 well

as the influence of navies (and, as previously noted, the relations often are reciprocal) . Somewhat artificially, we can divide naval policy into procurement,

strategy, tactics and, although it is not quite on the same level and indeed

influences the first three, propensity to innovate. These interact to produce naval

capability. They in turn are influenced by the state's external environment,

domestic politics, bureaucratic politics, and the autonomous beliefs and values

ofthe decision-makers. Technology and organizational culture are also crucial

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

and, to some extent, intervene between the causes I have listed and the aspects

of naval policy we are trying to explain. We can summarize this scheme as follows:

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT PROCUREMENT

DOMESTIC POLITICS TECHNOLOGY

AVAILABLE

STRATEGY

CAPABILITY

BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS ORGANIZATIONAL

CULTURE

TACTICS

DECISION-MAKING PROPENSITY

TO INNOVATE

Although the diagram does not provide any answers, it does frame a number

of questions about the connections that operate. Ofcourse almost everything is connected to everything else, and in an earlier draft of this paper I drew in the

arrows only to find that they filled the page. But a few connections are absent

and others are weak. Earlier I talked about naval policy and foreign policy. The

latter to some extent influences if not dictates the former, but only at the most

general level. The development of tactics presumably is related to the identity

of the adversary only to the extent that different potential adversaries have

different kinds of navies. Some connections are important but indirect and

obscure, however. Navies often choose among competing tactics, and to the

extent that different naval leaders would choose differently, anything that affects

the identity of the leaders can affect the tactics adopted. General foreign policy

can certainly influence who is selected for top positions, and so the choice of

tactics could be an unintended by-product of foreign policy disputes. Another

indirect linkage is that a popular foreign policy could encourage military

spending 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 policy

than others. In pre-World War I Germany, the growing middle class supported

and benefitted from a large navy and in post-War America congressional districts

with many naval bases had an interest in maintaining a large fleet. But we

probably 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 and

Collaboration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 3-24. The division into four

levels is taken fromjervis, Perception and Misperception, chapter 1.
Jervis 47

in which new technologies were adopted or the interaction of individuals of

varying ethnicities and class backgrounds in the ship-bome societies.

Students of arms races—at least of certain methodological and ideological

persuasions—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 the

adversary, analyzing what others are doing, adapting its behavior to maximize

the chances of winning the next war, and in general responding to external

pressures and opportunities. Quite a different view sees countries as a whole,

military organizations in general, and perhaps navies in particular as being guided

not by the outside world but by internal impulses. To what extent, then, are

navies, like many other bureaucracies, operating on auto-pilot? When and under

what conditions do they follow their own impulses, cultures, and conceptions

ofinterest 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 they

will fight? Is such information diligently sought, adequately processed, and

accurately assessed? Or are views of the external world rationalizations more

than rationales?

It should be noted, however, that even if the sources of naval conduct are

internal, there may be important external effects, which in turn feed back and

affect the state's security and naval policy. Thus even if Wilhelmine Germany

developed a strong navy in part to strengthen the regime domestically, this action

changed the international environment and menaced Great Britain. The effect

is especially pronounced because not only are states generally slow to see that

others are being driven by domestic concerns, but they are prone to "worst case

analysis" which justifies their assuming that the latter's arms will be directed

against them no matter what its motives are.

Innovation

It is a commonplace that navies are even more hide-bound than most

bureaucracies. Even if this characterization is correct, it may be a blessing for

national policy, especially if other navies behave similarly. The country, and the

world, might not be better off if military organizations were quicker to develop

ingenious methods ofdestruction. But, assuming the characterization is true, we

want to know what the reasons are. Is conservatism impelled by the requirements

of building and running ships and fleets? Or is the explanation more sociological—the nature of the personnel recruited, the promotion system used, or the

kind of close-knit society that almost inevitably develops among a group of

people who interact mostly with each other?

If either of these determinisms operates, we would expect navies of one

country 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 the

German navy or American about the American navy. This would simplify our

scholarship: to understand the navy we are studying, we would not have to delve

deeply into the political or cultural characteristics of the society at large.

It seems likely that navies, as other organizations, are more prone to adopt

innovations swiftly if they assist the organization in better carrying out a mission

it already sees as central than if the innovation serves a mission that is new,

different, and, especially, conflictive with established ones. Adopting a better

airplane is relatively easy; adopting aircraft at all is not. Such developments

require 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 potent

within 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. Organizational maintenance is not always the highest priority; officers do realize that they

need to win the next war. This debate has been conducted largely within the

context of ground and air forces. Examining this question for navies, although

not any more likely to yield definitive answers, should be valuable by explicating

the links, or lack thereof, among the external environment, internal perspectives

and interests, and naval behavior. It should help tell us the extent to which the

navy is following its organizational imperatives and is acting in a world of its own.

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 ofPublic

Administration, 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. Cornell

University Press, 1991).
Jervis 49

But we should not overlook the element of chance and accident in innovation. Often a fundamental change is made possible by previous developments

that were pursued for other reasons. Organizations produce an array of innovation candidates whose fates may be determined by how they coincide with

essentially unrelated problems and opportunities. Thus the chances of adopting

a newly-developed safety device will be increased if an accident occurs even if

the 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 may

reflect my own ignorance, it is far from clear to me that it would have been

worthwhile for the U.S. to have developed nuclear submarines had not SLBMs

been developed later; anti-submarine warfare efforts might have been better

pursued with other instruments. If this line of argument is correct, then neither

the external environment nor internally-generated impulses of the bureaucracy

entirely determine what will happen. This may reduce the extent to which we

can generalize, which would just show the importance of history and the limits

of political science.

15 See Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational

Choice," 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 excellent

discussion and critique, see Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, 3rd ed. (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1986), pp. 131-54.

PART II

Domestic Politics

Navies and Domestic Factors

Volker Berghahn

Ifone tries to discover a dominant perspective that pervades military history

as a genre, it is probably fair to say that most scholars stress the role armed

forces play in the context of a particular country's external security. Armies,

navies, and air forces exist and overwhelmingly tend to be justified, by contemporaries as well as retrospective historians, as defensive establishments against

external enemies. This interpretation sounds particularly plausible to those who

start from the assumption that to this day the international system is anarchic and

ruled by the principle of cut-throat competition among the nation states that

emerged from the Peace of Westphalia. In this Social Darwinist world, it is argued, some states will always be tempted, in the absence of a central policing

authority, to move into perceived power vacuums around them. In this case armed forces are created and maintained for the purpose of external conquest.

And they will be successful, if their neighbors cannot defend themselves and/or

fail in maintaining a balance of power, often in alliance with others, against the

presumed aggressor.

This "primacy offoreign policy" perspective has been challenged many times

by those who argue that a nation's foreign and security policy is much less, and

certainly not exclusively, determined by external pressures. It could even be

argued that during the 1960s and 1970s the balance of scholarly activity swung

in the opposite direction when the advocates of the "primacy of domestic

politics" approach began to gain ground. In the United States, this latter approach

was most powerfully represented by the Williams School. While William A.

Williams was concerned with the overall design ofAmerican foreign policy since

the eighteenth century, the most heated debates arose over the question of the

origins and propellants of the Cold War. Here it was the "revisionists" who, in

a number of studies, put the case against those who had seen U.S. diplomacy

and 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 title Precarious Balance. But it can also be spotted in most books on international history and politics that espouse geopolitical and realpolitische approaches. L. Dehio, Precarious Balatice: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle (New York: Vintage, 1965).
54 Navies and Domestic Factors

expansionism and imperialism. In the long-term this particular controversy has

been moving toward a position that stresses the interaction of domestic and

external factors. Moreover, its protagonists have focused on the tendency of

decision-makers to overestimate foreign threats and to assume the worst case; they have introduced social-psychological factors and refused to see foreign

policy-making as something that is predetermined by the unchanging "laws" of

an anarchic international system. Indeed, they say it is only with the benefit of

hindsight that the aggressiveness of another power turns out to have been less

serious than had been assumed at the time.

While this appears to be a more widely accepted view among experts of

American foreign and security policy, the debate on German foreign policy has

taken a different turn. Here the rise ofthe "primacy of domestic politics" school

in the 1960s and 1970s did not end in an intermediate position. Prominent and

influential analysts have revived Dehio's notions of power-politics and once

again highlighted Germany's situation "in the middle of Europe." This return

to the positions of the 1950s is based on an unfortunate ignoring of research

results and has blocked the kind of developments that have taken place with

regard to the Cold War debate in the U.S. The overall thrust of this essay is therefore to appeal to the protagonists of the "primacy of foreign policy" to

advance toward more sophisticated approaches that incorporate domestic factors.

The appeal is by implication also directed at military and naval historians who

tend to start from the above-mentioned Social Darwinist vision of the international system and whose tools ofanalysis have hence remained rather traditional.

The case for the importance of domestic factors can be made most plausibly

for the land forces of the great powers in Europe prior to 1914; for it is often

forgotten that armies have never been just instruments for waging external war. They were always also available for civil war; they could be moved against a foreign enemy, but tended to be no less well prepared to quell domestic unrest

and revolutionary movements. Governments and professional military of the

nineteenth century were acutely aware of this function of their land forces, and

the experience of the 1848 Revolutions acted as a powerful incentive not to

ignore it. While the military archives of European powers contain relevant

material 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 (New

York: Norton, 1970); W.A. Williams, The Tragedy ofAmerican Diplomacy 2nd edition. (New York: Dell,

1972); G. Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1972); Lloyd Gardner, Architects of

Illusion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).

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

Long Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

4 H.-U. Wehler, The German Empire (Leamington Spa: Berg Publ., 1985); K. Hildebrand, "Staatskunst

oder Systemzwang," Historische Zeitschrift, 228 (1979), pp. 624fT; D. Calleo, The German Problem

Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); M. Sturmer, Das ruhelose Reich (Berlin:

Severin & Siedler, 1983); G. Schollgen, Escape into War> (Oxford: Berg Publ., 1990).
Berghahn 55

the Prusso-German Army. In light of Germany's exposed geopolitical position

in the heart of Europe, it is also the most telling case when we remember that

Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and his military advisers always claimed

to be haunted by the "nightmare ofhostile foreign coalitions" and for this reason had repeatedly argued for increased defense expenditure. However, in the 1 890s

this argument largely disappeared from the arsenal of the professional officer

corps and did so for a full quarter ofa century. There were no increases in defense

spending to deal with foreign threats and Germany's exposed position in the

heart of Europe. It was only after twenty-five years of stagnation that sharp

increases in Army expenditure were once more demanded and approved in

1912-13. How can this be explained? Could it be that domestic considerations

even came to outweigh diplomatic ones?

In his memoirs, published in 1933, General Karl von Einem, the Prussian

War Minister between 1903 and 1909, blamed the civilian government and the

Reich Parliament for a policy ofinaction that he now argued had had disastrous

consequences for Germany's military power in World War I. Einem had

conveniently forgotten that it had been the Army itself that had adopted this

policy after the last major Army bill of 1893. Indeed, around the turn of century

he, at this time still a department head in the Prussian War Ministry, had railed

at the "rage de nombre" that he believed motivated Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief

of the General Staff. Later, as War Minister, he let repeated opportunities slip

by to increase the size of the Army. In 1905 he wrote for Schlieffen's benefit a long "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 ofview of the formation ofnew units and the establishment

ofnew troops, the development ofthe Army can, at the present time, be regarded

as being by and large complete. The question ofwhether the number of cadres is sufficient to meet the case of war can, in my view, on the whole be answered in

the affirmative. This also applies to the further question of whether the number

of soldiers is large enough to secure the adequate strength of the existing cadres

as well as the training ofsufficient recruits so that the required reserve and Landwehr

units may be formed in the case of war.

In 1909, Einem was still arguing against the "people who never cease wanting

to expand the Army." That this was also the position of his successor, General

Josias 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.
56 Navies and Domestic Factors

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in 1910. He confirmed that he had no plans

to increase the size of the Army, although Germany's international situation did

not look at all comfortable. In 1904 the Entente Cordiale had been formed

between England and France. Three years later this arrangement had been

extended 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, ifthe "primacy offoreign policy" was really the all-motivating

force, Heeringen might have done something to strengthen the Army. Instead

he 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. . „10

politics.

The political considerations emerge from Einem's memorandum of 1905 in

which had admitted to Schlieffen that there were "weaknesses and gaps" and in

particular "a not inconsiderable shortage of officers." This shortage could, of

course, be overcome, but only at the cost of lowering "the standards regarding

family background etc. of officer aspirants." If such a policy were adopted,

however, "we can no longer prevent acceptance, on an increased scale, of

democratic and other elements which are not suited to the officer class." Einem

added that for the same reason it was dangerous to increase the intake ofordinary

conscripts which would similarly "weaken the Army."

It is not too difficult to see what the Kaiser and his military advisors were

worried about. They feared that a further expansion of the Army would

undermine the homogeneity of the officer corps in which the percentage of

aristocratic and devoutly conservative officers had already experienced a decline

for lack of suitable candidates. An influx of officers of bourgeois background

was thought to create problems not in a foreign war, but in the eventuality of

internal unrest. Could bourgeois officers, possibly from liberal families, be relied

upon to give tough orders to shoot on demonstrators, strikers, or insurgents?

Ordinary recruits caused similar concerns among the arch-conservative officer

corps. In an age ofrapid demographic change, industrialization, and urbanization

a growing number of those who were drafted into the Army came from

working-class background. Would these soldiers not refuse to obey orders in a

civil 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 be

relied upon to defend the existing order, the monarchical system would be

doomed. It was this nightmare that led Einem and his colleagues to pursue their

peculiar armaments policy after the mid-1 890s.

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).
Berghahn 57

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 ofgrowing 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 navies

having a clearly recognizable domestic function. War ships are not suitable for

fighting civil wars, except perhaps in marginal operations, such as the shelling

of insurgent towns in coastal waters. The conclusion that naval historians have

tended to draw from this is that naval armaments are the clearest and most

unambiguous reflection of the "primacy of foreign policy." Ships are built

because of a perceived need to acquire or to protect overseas possessions and to

defend the country against an external aggressor. This is also how Admiral Alfred

Tirpitz justified the stepping-up of ship-building in Germany from 1897, and

so did historians of the interwar years and of the post- 1945 period. Walther

Hubatsch was the prime protagonist of this position in the 1950s. Jiirgen

Rohwer and others made this case in subsequent decades, mainly by conducting

elaborate comparisons with the building programs of other European countries

to which, they maintain, Tirpitz merely reacted defensively, demanding no more

than a 'measure' ofsea power to protect Germany's overseas commercial interests

and small colonial empire.

The problem with this position was that the German Navy files, fully

accessible to research for the first time only since the 1 960s, told a different story,

even if looked at from the angle of the "primacy offoreign policy." There was,

to begin with, the blunt memorandum that Tirpitz produced for the Kaiser in

June 1897 in which he pinpointed Britain, the first sea power, as Germany's

"most dangerous enemy" against whom any naval building ultimately had to be

directed. Subsequent work showed that Tirpitz wanted to build, until 1920

and in several carefully calculated smaller steps, some sixty capital ships to be

concentrated 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 kaiserliche Deutschland (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 and

W. 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.
58 Navies and Domestic Factors

launch an attack against the Reich, this battle fleet, in line with accepted doctrine

on relative strengths required in a naval engagement, was to have a "genuine

chance of victory'* in the North Sea. If, on the other hand, the Royal Navy did

not start a war, the sheer size of the German battle-fleet was to be used by the

Kaiser and his advisors as a power-political lever with which they expected to

wring territorial concessions from the British at the negotiating table. At a time

when old empires, like the Portuguese one, were crumbling and many people

expected a "reordering of the world," the Kaiser wanted to be able to raise his

voice and to bully other powers into making concessions.

Klaus Hildebrand was among those who in the 1970s drew attention to the

radical character of Tirpitz's program. This program amounted, he argued, to

nothing less than a move to revolutionize the international system either by

shifting the existing balance of power, so to speak, in one afternoon during the

victorious battle against the Royal Navy in the North Sea or through insistent

demands to be allocated sizeable colonial possessions. German naval and

Weltpolitik, Hildebrand concluded, was "quite certainly" inspired by "revolutionary intentions." The Kaiser and his advisors wanted to "shake the global Pax

Britannica" and to effect a new balance of power in the world. He also had no

doubt that this design had disastrous consequences for Germany and the rest of

the world. It triggered the Anglo-German arms race, once the British became

aware of Germany's "revolutionary challenge," before the naval competition

escalated into a general race on land that involved all the major powers of the

European continent. The Tirpitz Plan thus became a key factor in the outbreak

ofWorldWarl.

Hildebrand never investigated the question as to why the Kaiser and his

advisors should, at the turn of the century, have promoted a naval armaments

policy that was admittedly designed to overthrow the international status quo.

There was, of course, an explanation, first put forward in the 1920s by the

German historian Eckart Kehr, that might have merited further inquiry.

According to this view, the Imperial government decided to challenge the

international distribution of power in order to avoid having to change the

domestic status quo that had increasingly come under pressure from reformist

forces that demanded a modernization and parliamentarization of the by then

old-fashioned Prusso-German constitutional order of 1871. But instead of

grappling with this view, Hildebrand in effect joined forces with another

influential 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., "Anglophobia

and Weltpolitik," in Kehr, ed., Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1977).

21 M. Sturmer, "Deutscher Flottenbau und europaische Weltpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg," in
Berghahn 59

time the geopolitical arguments of the 1950s and "the deeply pessimistic power

theory of Friedrich Meinecke, Ludwig Dehio, [and] Gerhard Ritter." Accordingly Stunner had begun to publish books on Germany as "the land in the

middle" and spoke of the country's difficult and exposed position in the heart

as a tragic "conditio Borussica".

Above all, Stunner began to polemicize against a "modern school of historiography that believes in the 'primacy of domestic politics' and presents it as a doctrine," lumping its advocates together with representatives of "Marxist and

vulgar-Marxist theorems." This school, he asserted, "draws from the 'critical

theory' of the Frankfurt School . . . the idea of a society optimized by social

science [einer sozialunssenschaftlich optimierten Gesellschaft] , with external relations

that are fundamentally peaceful." Whoever takes such a view, Sturmer concluded, has little understanding for notions of power politics. He confronts

"manifestations of power, hunger for power, and the disintegration of power

speechlessly and without analytical tools. Hubris and nemesis cannot be found

in the name index of this kind of historiography."

Stunner's and Hildebrand's intellectual trajectories from the 1960s to the 1980s

will be of considerable interest to future historians of postwar German historical

writing. Overall their return to the positions of Dehio and Ritter will have to be

seen in the larger context of the "conservative turn" that many West German

historians completed in this period. It is certainly no coincidence that both ofthem

played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit and have been laboring hard to diminish

the influence of leftist and liberal historians and to help create a new historical

consciousness—a key concern that emerged from the debate on Ernst Nolte's

hypotheses concerning the origins and status ofthe Holocaust in modern history.

The trouble is that, just as Nolte had to ignore tangible evidence relating to

the Nazi "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," Sturmer chose to overlook

primary material on the calculations underlying the Kaiser's naval armaments

program held at the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg. This material showed

that the Tirpitz Plan had, if nothing else, a dual purpose: It was to challenge the

Royal Navy and the international status quo in the way that has already been

explained. But it was also to shield the German Navy from the legislative powers

of the Reichstag. The building of the above-mentioned sixty battle ships was

projected in such a way that an Aetemat, an iron budget, would be established

at the end of the building period. This would have created for the Kaiser a

large monarchical zone that was free from interference by the legislature. An

Deutsches Marine-Institut, ed., Die deutsche Flotte im Spannungsfeld der Politik, 1 848-1985 (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.
60 Navies and Domestic Factors

Aetemat would have made certain that the naval budget could not be reduced

by a majority vote in Parliament. Its power to appropriate resources on a regular

basis would have been decisively undermined. The Kaiser as the supreme

commander of the Navy could have used it as he saw fit in international politics,

without having to fear budgetary sanctions from deputies that disapproved of

his use of the Navy.

The Aetemat question has to be seen in the larger context ofanother domestic

factor, i.e., the universal suffrage in Germany. For reasons of his own which had

nothing to do with the idea ofdemocracy, Bismarck had introduced the suffrage

for all males over twenty-four when he founded the Reich. He and even more

so his successors bitterly came to regret this step. For, while Bismarck had

counted on the conservative vote ofthe agrarian population that he, the Prussian

landowner knew so well, the momentous industrialization and urbanization of

Germany in the final decades of the ninteenth century had created an urban

proletariat that did not vote conservative. Worse, a growing number of

Germany's working men voted for the Social Democrats who spoke of radical

change and even revolution. Small wonder that the Reich government, and the

political forces supporting it, increasingly came to worry about the day when

the Social Democrats might attract a majority ofthe voters and its representatives

might refuse to accept, or amend beyond recognition, bills that were crucial to

the conduct of government. Small wonder also that far-sighted politicians like

Tirpitz tried to forestall precisely such a situation by immunizing the naval budget

from cuts by a left-wing Reichstag majority.

This is why the Kaiser's proposed navy has been called a "fleet against two

parliaments," the British and the German one. The link between the two was

not just a power-political one in the international sense, i.e., a challenge to the

Royal Navy and Britain's global position; it was also a constitutional one. Unlike

its British counterpart, the German Reichstag was not the power center of the

political system. The prerogatives of the crown under Prusso-German constitutionalism were still decisively greater than those of, say, Queen Victoria, the

Kaiser's grandmother. In the eyes of the Kaiser and his advisors everything had

to be done to preserve this state of affairs. For Reichstag deputies, on the other

hand, who were not arch-conservative monarchists, the British parliamentary

system, whose members participated in the nomination ofthe executive and had

the a say in crucial decisions of the state, had long appeared as a goal to work

for. Tirpitz's response to these aspirations that were not lost on him was to try

to block and to divert them toward the grandiose vision of a "great overseas

policy." As he put it in 1895:

26

24 T.S. Hamerow, "The Origins ofMass 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.
Berghahn 61

In my view Germany will quickly sink back from her position as a great power

in the coming century, if we do not now promote energetically, expeditiously,

and systematically our general maritime interests, to no small degree also because

there lies, in the new great national task and the economic gains to accrue from

it, a strong palliative against educated and uneducated Social Democrats.

It may be argued that Tirpitz's concerns with domestic politics and the threat

of parliamentarization and democratization are uniquely German. British or French naval ministers, by contrast, who were answerable to their national

assemblies in the first place, can be assumed to have been much less worried

about parliamentary interference in their building plans although closer scrutiny

is likely to reveal resentments and attempts to contain deputies' "meddling" in

military matters. However, it may be hypothesized that the monarchical governments of Austria-Hungary and Russia were strongly moved by internal considerations when they looked at naval appropriations and at how the demand

for, and spread of, representative government might sooner or later affect their

monarch's power position in the field ofnaval armaments. In short, the question

that confronted Tirpitz might with profit also be posed when analyzing other

national experiences with "navies and domestic factors."

There is yet another such factor that the modern naval historian should be

fully informed of: finance and taxation. The mobilization of military means of

violence raises for any complex society the question of how the material and

financial resources for the build-up are to be extracted. This in turn will

unavoidably result in domestic disagreements over how much a society should

spend on armaments and how this expenditure is to be distributed on different

shoulders in the shape ofdirect and indirect taxes. The pre-1914 Anglo-German

naval arms race offers a particularly instructive lesson in the importance of this

perspective.

However, ambitious, indeed megalomaniac, Germany's pre-1914 naval

policy may appear to have been with the benefit of hindsight, its protagonists

thought that it had been carefully designed in terms of all its implications. This

applied also to the financial sacrifices that the building of a sixty-ship battle fleet

would require from the German people. Created at a time of economic boom

and general optimism about the country's future, the revenue from indirect taxes

was expected to cover all the current costs ofthe naval budget, while loans were

to provide for any additional expenditure. With the Army, for reasons that

have 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 ofan Iron Budget aroused the interest of other naval ministries in Europe.

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

29 Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan, pp. 27 Iff.
62 Navies and Domestic Factors

budget, the introduction of higher agricultural tariffs in 1902 was expected to

put all military expenditure on a sound basis. Since the expansion ofthe number

of ships was staggered over a longer time-span, the growth in the budget was to

be made good by the anticipated growing tax revenue. Unfortunately for Tirpitz the actual development of the early years of the

twentieth century turned out to be different. To begin with, growth in revenue

was not as fast as expected. But what put Tirpitz's optimistic calculations of the

turn of the century into a fatal tail-spin was that Britain, suspicious of what the

Germans were up to, added a qualitative dimension to the quantitative naval

arms race that had gotten underway by about 1903. With the British decision

to 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 could

manage; rather London now also engaged him in a competition to build bigger

and bigger ships.

Worse from a budgetary point of view, they were more and more expensive

ships. By 1907, it was clear that the next navy bill would require resources that

could no longer be raised through the Reich's system of indirect taxes. Direct

taxes on wealth and income also had to be increased. The stage had thus been

set for a major political battle: indirect taxes—so far the mainstay of naval

finance—had hit the mass of the population harder than the well-to-do.

Working-class families spent a major percentage oftheir weekly budget on food.

Once rent and other necessities had been deducted, little was left for savings and

leisure. This is why higher grain tariffs had imposed greater burdens on the poor

than on the rich whose expenditure percentages on food were considerably

lower. The penny on the loaf of bread had thus become a critical issue. Some

of the revenue for the next navy bill had to be taken from the wealthy through

higher income taxes and death duties.

Knowing that an equalization of the burdens of armaments were a political

necessity, if a revolt of the voters and a further leftward shift in domestic politics

was to be avoided, Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow prepared a finance

bill that was to raise some 500 million marks. Four-fifths of the sum was to be

levied by higher indirect taxes on tobacco, beer, and other "small pleasures" of

the "little man." The rest, 100 million in all, was to be taken from the rich by

means of a Reich death duty. The alternative would have been to abandon the

naval arms race with Britain, as the shipping-magnate Albert Ballin had suggested

in 1908. Fully aware of the dangers, both foreign and domestic, ofa stepped-up

arms race, he warned that "we cannot afford a race in dreadnoughts against the

much wealthier British."' However, this solution was even more unpalatable

to 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. Best and A. Wheatcroft, eds., War, Ecotwmy and the Military Mind (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 71.
Berghahn 63

Before we look at the outcome ofthe huge struggle that ensued in 1909 over

Billow's finance bill, it is worth remembering that Britain was faced with very

similar questions. Her situation was exacerbated by the fact that the Liberals,

who had come to power in 1905, were also wedded to introducing a social

insurance system. Having failed to achieve budgetary relief with the help of an

international agreement to reduce armaments, largely because—significantly

enough—the Kaiser refused to go along, the Liberal Cabinet in London adopted

a solution that War Minister Richard Haldane had outlined in 1908. "We

should," he argued, "boldly take our stand now on the facts and proclaim a policy of taking, mainly by direct taxation, such a toll from the increase and

growth of wealth in this country as will enable us to provide (1) the increasing

cost of social reform, (2) national defense, and (3) a margin in aid of the sinking

fund." In short, the additional financial burdens were to be put squarely on the

shoulders of the well-to-do tax-payers. Haldane also had a rationale for this

strategy. "It will," he added, "commend itself to many timid people as a bulwark against a nationalization of wealth."

This was also Bulow's argument on the other side of the English Channel

when he launched his elaborate propaganda campaign to sell his tax package.

Unless the rich, for the first time, bore a slightly fuller share of military

expenditure, the injustices of the tax system would be grist to the mills of the

Social Democrats. Hearing a compelling argument about who it was who refused

to bear his share, voters would move to the Left in ever larger numbers. The

Reich government, unable to cobble together acceptable majorities in the

Reichstag, would find it even more difficult to get legislation passed. The

executive would be paralyzed and be forced to rule by decree. In a letter of

August 1908, the Reich Chancellor wrote that the government must do its utmost to "convince the German people that morally and materially, this reform

is matter of life and death** for the country.

He quickly ran into the fierce opposition of the Conservatives whose voters

had much to lose from higher direct taxation. As their leader, Ernst von

Heydebrand und der Lasa expressed it, direct tax rights must not fall "into the

hands of a parliamentary body elected on the basis of equal suffrage." What

Biilow was proposing was thus the thin end ofthe wedge. It had to be prevented

at all cost to close the door on a future expropriation of the wealthy by means

of a steep progression in direct taxes. The Conservatives introduced an alternative 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 and

Unwin, 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.
64 Navies and Domestic Factors

be raised through higher consumer taxes and stamp duties; the remaining 100

million marks were to be contributed by the Federal states. When this budget

found a majority and Billow's was narrowly defeated, the Reich Chancellor had

little choice but to resign.

Reich finances continued to be in a weak state, unleashing major conflicts in

the government between those who believed that the Tirpitz Plan offered

Germany's only hope for a successful future among the great powers and those

who wanted to reduce the naval build-up and come to an understanding with

Britain, Tirpitz's arch enemy. Worse were the electoral repercussions. Many

voters were so disgusted with what the Conservatives had done that they

registered their protest at the next poll by supporting parties which had opposed

the Conservative bill. The first ominous signs of a rebellion could be detected

in the results ofthe 1910 Prussian elections. Although their chances ofcompeting

on equal terms with the Conservatives were severely limited by the three-class

voting (restricted suffrage) system, the Left made tangible gains. But the most

impressive breakthrough came during the 1912 Reichstag elections in which

the Social Democrats obtained over four million votes and moved into the

Reichstag as the largest party, holding 110 seats. In light of these dramatic domestic developments, it is difficult to see how

the modern naval historian can do without a good knowledge of fiscal and

economic history. Certainly the entire subsequent course of the German naval

development up to 1914 cannot be understood without the chronic lack offunds

that affected all aspects of naval life: ship-building, recruitment, training, technological and tactical innovation, preparedness for war. Tirpitz's concern with

the disruptive influence of the Reichstag and with the creation of an Aetemat

may have been a peculiarity of monarchical government in the age of increased

political participation. The problem of mobilizing resources for stepped-up

armaments in an arms race situation, by contrast, was a problem that affected all modern states whatever their constitutional order. It determined the viability of

entire societies—and not just in the pre-1914 period. It is an aspect that deeply

impacts upon all countries to this day. The Soviet-American arms race of the

early 1980s provides a recent example: President Reagan's "Star Wars" program

was probably the final step of the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, leading to the

collapse of communism; but it almost bankrupted the United States, with

consequences to American society that are still being felt today. There is another

factor that modern naval history has increasingly become aware of: the economic

and technological infrastructure that is capable of producing the most advanced

instruments of warfare. Since the nineteenth century, ship-building capacities

have 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 new

relationship developed between industrial capitalism and the national government that was preparing for war. Statesmen may have had their own domesticpolitical and imperial reasons for naval building; private ship-yards were

interested in the idea for economic gain and, in economically hard times, in

order to stabilize the manufacturing sector ofthe economy. A particularly blatant

example of this kind of consideration is to be found in a letter that Prince zu

Salm, the President ofthe German Navy League, sent to Tirpitz on 3 December

1901. Bemoaning the temporary recession and growing unemployment, he

urged the Reich government to revive the economy with the help offresh orders

for warships, expecting from it a rise in related stocks and a consolidation of the

market.

Nor is it a coincidence that pressure to increase the building tempo emerged

in 1908 at the time ofanother recession in the ship-building industry. As Robert

Count Zedlitz-Trutzschler, the Marshall of the Kaiser's Court, recorded on 9

April 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 concern

frequently before.

However, the navy-industry link reaches beyond the macro-economic level of

conjunctural ups and downs in the national or world economy. It also goes beyond

the research that Clive Trebilcock has undertaken with regard to Britain in an effort

to calculate technological and economic spin-off effects from naval armaments.

Rather there is the often intriguing and underresearched field ofcooperation,

but also of conflict between industry and naval bureaucracies in technologically

advanced countries. Thanks not least to the work ofMichael Epkenhans a good

deal of information has recently become available on the relationship between

Krupp and the Imperial Navy. If there emerged something like an embryonic

"military-industrial complex," it was certainly not always a cozy marriage. This

research shows that, however welcome state orders were, business was jealously

guarding its decision-making powers against governmental interference. Conversely, the navy, especially at a time when it was starved of funds, repeatedly

tried to squeeze Krupp's enormous profits by promoting competition between

steel 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 link

between domestic and electoral politics was established that deserves much more

intensive study than has been undertaken for most industrial nations so far. The least the naval historian who inclines toward a geopolitical view can

therefore do is to be aware of the constant interaction of domestic and

international factors and explicitly to incorporate the former perspective into his

analysis. Armaments and their economic implications, as Gustav Schmidt has

demonstrated, frequently acted as a hinge between the two spheres. All this is not meant to imply that we must stop studying battles, the design of ships, or

the state of the international system and its perception by politicians and

populations in individual nation states. However, at the end of the twentieth

century naval history can no longer be written and, even less, taught without a

full understanding of the domestic context in which navies operate.

42 G. Schmidt, The Politics and Economics ofAppeasement (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).
Domestic Factors, Regime Characteristics,

and Naval Forces

Robert S. Wood

It may seem banal in itselfto suggest that domestic factors shape the size, shape,

and character of naval forces. The key issues, then, are ones of degree and

kind of influence, as well as whether or not the scholarly community is adequately or correctly assessing this influence. Beyond this general problem,

there is a broader concern about the relationship between the character of a regime and the character of its military forces. Although his paper assesses the

specific domestic factors that shaped German naval forces prior to World War

I. Professor Volker Berghahn's study particularly points, consciously or not,

toward this broader "regime" consideration. The following observations are thus

keyed on his analysis.

Berghahn's paper on navies and domestic factors does two things: first, it gives a useful and interesting perspective on the domestic calculations that shaped

German naval developments prior to World War I; second, it seeks, if not to

dismiss, at least to question analyses that would attribute to power political

calculations the dominant influences in those naval developments. As to the latter

aspect ofhis paper, many readers will probably be tempted to shrug their shoulder

and exclaim: "But of course! Does anyone seriously believe that any military

developments are simply responses to the general problem of international

anarchy and to external challenges posed by other states?" Such a perspective

would have to assume that states are simply inert "billiard balls" whose motion

is determined by the impact of external stimuli. It is useful, therefore, to look

more closely at the "primacy of foreign policy" perspective and to determine

what is at stake in this approach.

In most respects, the primacy of foreign policy concept is not an analytical

perspective at all, but a doctrinal or policy position. It is grounded in an

understanding ofinternational politics that divides the world into politically-independent states who claim sovereign authority to define their internal affairs

and external interests and to advance and defend their individual regimes and

collective objectives. In a heterogenous world of scarcity, the definition of

international politics as "anarchical" generally entails interstate competition and
68 Domestic Factors, Regime Characteristics,

a high degree of militarization of foreign policy. Even if one details the degree

of actual political and economic interdependence, as well as social integration,

in the world, the fragmentation of power and the continuing dominance of the

state as the focus for social aspirations and control are still salient features in

international politics. But, not all interstate systems are alike and the degree and

level of cooperation, as well as of competition, are not foreordained by the

general context of anarchy or specific external "threats." Both the nature of the

regimes of the several states and the concept of interests held by the peoples and

leaders of those states are crucial in determining one's international posture and

therefore the shape ofone's military power. One may analyze the policies chosen

and justified by a particular regime, but one should avoid smuggling into one's

analysis a determinism that neither the context of international politics nor the

particulars of a regime could possibly sustain. Again, however, one might be led

to remark that this must be patently true.

Therefore, to reject the claim that constitutional and policy prescriptions are in some near absolute sense determined by the necessities of the external

environment is to repudiate those policy makers and the social groups who seem

served by such a claim, as well as the academic scribblers who put their talents

at the service ofthose leaders and groups. The "primacy offoreign policy," from

this point of view, is an attempt by those entrusted with foreign and military

policy to avoid scrutiny from other agencies of government and to shield their

decisions from public inquiry. There is a particular scholarly perspective that

sustains this attempt.

The viewpoint of those who embrace what Berghahn calls the "geopolitical

and realpolitische approach" can thus be simply stated: In the absence in the

international system ofpolitical power ofeither a central authority or an effective

legal order, statesmen are driven to follow certain norms often associated with

the concepts of reason of state, power politics, and balance ofpower. In a world

of precarious external security and internal order, the notion of reason of state points to the belief that those entrusted with state authority have, if required, an

extra-constitutional right to use whatever means are necessary to preserve or

enlarge the power of the state. Logically related to this idea is power politics,

that is, the accepted use offorce by sovereign states to achieve political objectives.

A world of states animated by the demands of reason of state and employing

power politics leads naturally to the balance of power. The balance of power,

in the words of Frederick von Gentz is "that constitution of neighboring and

more or less connected states by means of which no one of them can damage

another in its independence or essential rights without being restricted somewhere, and therefore endangering itself." The primacy of foreign policy is thus seen as a logical concomitant of this perspective.

1 Quoted in Edward Vost Gulik, Europe's Classical Balatice of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1955), p. 81.
Wood 69

The primacy offoreign policy is a constitutional and policy claim. That claim

asserts that the need to protect the state from external menace requires, first, a separation of international from domestic politics; and second, the freedom of

the rulers to mobilize all instruments ofpower and shape policy as circumstances

warrant, unencumbered by normal domestic political constraints. Peoples in

oceanic powers, such as the United Kingdom, have been reluctant to embrace

such an uninhibited sphere of political power. But, even the father of liberal

political philosophy, John Locke, divided executive power into two spheres,

ordinary executive power and what he called "federative*' power, the latter being

essentially compatible with the extra or supra-constitutional claims of the

primacy of foreign policy. If the American founders followed Locke in many

things, they clearly did not follow him in this. The American constitution admits

ofno claim to foreign policy primacy. Not only were there no persistent threats

to U.S. security that would have justified such a claim, but it was felt that the

protection ofliberal democratic order within would be jeopardized by any such

claim. Although from the beginning of the republic, there have been political

and legal assertions of such a right, the weight of tradition and the relatively

detached geographical position of the United States have on balance worked

against such claims. We will return to this in a moment. It is worth noting at

this point, however, that Berghahn focuses on continental and particularly

German politics and here the relative attachment of states to each other can

plausibly be seen as exacerbating the "security dilemma" and thus sustaining the

claim to foreign policy primacy.

In the matter of pre-World War I German naval developments, Berghahn

counters the "continentalist" claim to foreign policy primacy on two grounds.

First, he disputes the contention that the presumed encirclement entailed by the

Anglo-French entente in 1904 and the addition of the 1907 Anglo-Russian

accord to the French-Russian alliance, compelled the German naval response.

He appears to make this case by alluding to the fact that there were policy

alternatives, including naval arms agreements, that could have been pursued

more vigorously. At the same time, he also notes that the size and character of

the actual naval developments were heavily influenced by the desire to maintain

German social arrangements and to insulate the defense, including naval, budgets

from parliamentary scrutiny. Now these latter points do demonstrate that

domestic factors shaped naval developments, but they hardly touch the dragon

that he is trying to slay, foreign policy primacy. Surely, no commentator denies

any domestic influences; the issue is whether those influences decisively determined the rationale for and the object of the navy. It is hard to imagine any

serious scholar evaluating military developments as a response exclusively either

to domestic factors or to external factors. Moreover, his citation of Tirpitz's

memorandum which implied that German naval developments could lead to a fundamental 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 not

in his citation of specific domestic factors that shaped the navy, but in his

second, and principal, analysis of the nature of the political regime as a whole.

Germany was not simply some generic state existing in some abstract

anarchical international order. It represented a particular internal pattern of

values and power, ofsocial groups and diverse interests. As such, German leaders

interpreted the challenges and opportunities of the external environment so as to sustain a particular vision of international power and a specific social pattern

within. This was as true ofnaval as ofother military developments. The weltpolitik

of pre-World War I Germany was not abstractly required by the specifics of

international anarchy at that time nor was the size and structure of the fleet and

the 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 in

shaping military and naval policies than the character ofexternal dangers. At this

point, however, one could well ask how the geopolitical position of Germany

molded the regime and thus influenced its responses—proving what a seamless

web domestic and international factors might be! This latter concern takes us back to the position of the United States mentioned earlier.

If one were to ask which was more decisive in predisposing the Americans

toward a certain skepticism toward claims of foreign policy primacy—the

geographical detachment ofthe United States (what one commentator described

as a weak neighbor to the North, a weak neighbor to the South, fish to the East

and fish to the West) or its political culture derived from British history and the

English Enlightenment—the answer would have to be "yes!" Whatever the

explanation, however, I suspect that some commentators might, in a kind of

reversal of Berghahn's approach to Germany, seek to correct the "primacy of

domestic policy" perspective as governing the American external posture and

military developments. Here, as with Berghahn's explanation of German naval

policy, an examination of the nature of the American regime might provide a suggestive approach to how American leadership interprets the external world

and shapes its military and naval forces. One could make a credible case that in

the absence ofan overwhelming clear and present external danger (which is most

of the time), U.S. naval developments will be determined by the resources

allocated, the object ofpolitical-military engagements, and doctrines concerning

the use of force—all of which are probably less determined by international

anarchy and specific external challenges than by the character or the regime.

In the same way Berghahn challenged, or at least qualified, the geopolitical

explanation of pre-World War I German naval developments, so analysts have

questioned Cold War explanations for the U.S. Maritime Strategy and naval

build-up in the early 1980s. This is often expressed in the query, was the maritime

strategy a war-fighting strategy or a budgetary strategy? The maritime strategy

and 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, would

be global in character. It was presented as an attempt to use the mobility and

technological sophistication of naval power, not only to secure control of those

sea areas critical to the projection and sustainment of U.S. and allied forces in

Eurasia, but to attack from the peripheries of the Soviet Union and Warsaw

powers operational, logistical, and economic capabilities critical to the Soviet

war effort. Attack submarines, carrier battle forces, maritime patrol aircraft,

information systems, and missile developments were all justified on these

grounds. Critics, however, said that the real target was the share of a growing

and then contracting—defense budget. The general threat of the Soviet Union

insured that the rationale for the naval budget would be a general war-fighting

capability, but the motivation for it was largely bureaucratic and domestic. So

self-evident is it that general geopolitical and domestic concerns intertwine that

this debate is not very interesting as a stark "either/or" proposition, even if one

chooses to weigh the respective factors. Again, however, Berghahn suggests an

approach that holds some interesting promise: regime considerations.

The fact that the United States is separated from many of its key interests by

oceanic expanses is probably still a vital beginning for any examination of both

the character ofits institutions and its forces and strategy. Beyond this, however,

one should push further the question to what degree the American historical

experience, its current social patterns, the structure of its political institutions,

its internal political struggles, shape not only the general U.S. external posture

but the types, sizes, structures, and strategic-doctrinal approaches of its armed

forces? Aside from revealing the peculiarities ofvarious doctrinaires in historical

debate, one might find nothing particularly exceptional in Berghahn's

demonstration that domestic factors should not be ignored in explaining German

naval development. On the other hand, to recover the almost Aristotelian

concept of constitution or regime and bring that perspective to a systematic

analysis of military and naval matters may both provide useful insights and

continue to contain the propensity toward "billiard ball" explanations.

PART III

Comparative 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 War

this has generally meant the British and the German navies, joined by the time

of the Second World War by the navies ofJapan and the United States. The

navies ofother powers appear at best in supporting roles, often relegated to acting

in certain well defined and possibly confined areas. This does not mean the

medium sized or smaller navies are without interest. They often represented

considerable financial sacrifices to their own nations, they interacted and

influenced each other, and in their own terms might often have enjoyed a measure of success. They were also small or medium sized only in comparison

to the leading fleets. France, Italy, Russia and, until 1918, Austria, possessed

naval forces whose potential could not be ignored. They all played an important

role in furthering the diplomatic objectives oftheir countries or at the very least

defending their own coastlines and colonies. The same could be said for smaller

navies of, for example, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

For the purposes ofthis paper comparative naval history might be considered

the inclusion of more than one navy in the same study. It is not necessarily a formal comparison, that is the British did the matter this way and the French

that way, although certainly this could be involved. The comparison is apt to

be less direct and often the term "comparative" would mean the study of

different navies acting in the same geographical area. This paper will also

concentrate on navies beyond the three British, American and German most

studied by Anglo-American historians, and to remain within reasonable proportions will focus on the past century. The major objective will be to suggest

subjects that need further study.

One might also question the utility ofputting "comparative naval history" in

a separate category. The basic methodology for this field is not really different

from that employed by someone working in British or American naval history.

There is the same need to establish what happened, and equally important, and

perhaps more difficult, why it happened. The historian would use all material

which sheds light on the subject, starting with the available naval papers both

official and private and when appropriate going on to political and diplomatic
76 Comparative Naval History

and the all important financial records. By now we all realize that navies do not

exist in a vacuum, that they are a product of their societies and time and they

are constrained by financial as well as geographical realities, human factors such

as the pool of manpower available to man those ships and infrastructure, notably

the dockyards to build and maintain ships and the administration to provision

and fuel them. Naval history is also influenced more than many other types of

history by technology. The concept of "holistic naval history" is now popular

and certainly can also be applied to comparative naval history.

There is nothing here that is really different in comparative naval history

except that by definition it will involve more than one navy. This is all fairly

obvious, but there are certain aspects that make comparative naval history

different. The first is that of language. Comparative naval history will usually

involve using more than one language, quite possibly two or more. There is no

way to disguise the fact that this is a major problem. Unfortunately, there is not

necessarily any correlation between a talent for languages and an interest in naval

history. Certainly, there are some who have a gift for languages or have inherited

another tongue through family background. The historian who specializes in

one country should, over a period ofyears, acquire by painful hard work a certain

fluency in that particular language. But, in comparative naval history, one will

soon move into areas requiring languages beyond the one with which they are

familiar. The problem can be compounded by unfamiliar handwriting, employing script which does not use Roman characters, and, in the case of languages

like Russian and Japanese, a completely different alphabet. Technology has

actually added to the difficulty. Until recently, the average historian spent most

of his effort on reading; writing and speaking were secondary. Now, oral history

programs are being established and the naval historian is faced with the problem

of understanding rapidly spoken and, frequently, colloquial speech. Written

transcripts of recordings are the exception rather than the rule. Certainly these

are obstacles, not absolute barriers. However, they work against comparative

history for one is now forced to balance the possible results with the frequently

enormous effort to learn the language. Is it worth it? At times the comparative

historian, who is not a specialist in a particular national field, may conclude it is not. After all, there is only so much time available and it will be more costeffective to work in more familiar areas. One will then forsake possibly

interesting fields of study. Russian and Japanese topics are obvious examples.

Collaborative works with other historians may offer at least a partial solution to

the problem.

There is another area where comparative naval history will encounter

particular 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 no

substitute for actually understanding the text) see Marc Vigje, Catalogue des Archives Orales (Vincennes:

Service historique de la Marine, 1981).
Halpern 77

twentieth century in never having had to suffer enemy occupation. This has not

been true of other nations. Archives have been destroyed, deliberately burned,

or looted. This is particularly true in France, where the Germans made a systematic effort to exploit French archives during the occupation. The fate of

many of these archives is unknown. The French Foreign Ministry was able to

reconstitute many of its lost archives from embassy and consular records. The

French Navy has not been that fortunate. The result is, in contrast to earlier

periods, the records of the inter-war period contain many gaps. In fact, one of

the interesting subjects for further study, not strictly naval, would be to attempt

to trace the activities ofthese German archival teams by using essentially German

records. Who were they? What were they after? What did they publish beyond

the German "White books" on the origins ofthe war? And finally, can we learn

anything of the fate of these records? The hope that some might turn up in the

former German Democratic Republic seems to be fading. The occupation of

France 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 was

organized with a Marinesektion at the Ministry of War in Vienna. The major

fleet base and the headquarters of the Flottenkommandant was in Pola. So too

were other important naval establishments such as the Marinetechnischen

Kommittee. Those duplicates or copies ofreports that were sent to Vienna have

probably survived. Unfortunately, the originals and many important records

never left Pola. At the time of the collapse in 1918, one Austrian officer in his

report ofthis period described how he was burning sensitive material before the

Italians arrived. The Italians did acquire a large amount of material which they

carted off to Rome and intended to use in their detailed histories for internal

naval use. The mass ofthis former Austrian material is still in Rome, only roughly

catalogued, and is an important potential source, although it is not clear how

much may turn out to be relatively routine and how much ofgreat importance.

In an ideal world, a historian will find in the naval or other archives the

important plans, correspondence between the titular head of the naval and the

most important commanders-in-chiefs, justifications for the naval budget,

reports by naval attaches on potential enemies or allies, estimates ofthe potential

threat, and, in time of war, the reports of proceedings and the whole multitude

of supporting records which will help to explain not only what happened, but

why. The official records will be supplemented by private collections of diaries

and letters which will provide insight into the personalities and internal politics

ofthe organization, the sort ofrevealing information given when people are not

2 A brief interview with Ursula Rudt von Collenberg, one ofthose who worked at the French Foreign

Ministry, is in David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History ofthe German Occupation, 1940-1944

(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p.244.
78 Comparative Naval History

writing for the record to justify their actions and to protect and to advance their

careers. That is the ideal world. In practice, comparative naval historians, like

any other naval historian, must take what they can find, assuming the archives

are even open to them. This is no different than what any naval historian has to

contend with, but it may involve countries where the navy does not occupy the

same relative position that it has in Great Britain or in the United States and

where the cadre of supporting literature is likely to be neither as extensive nor

as well developed. However, just as naval designers must make the inevitable

trade-offs between speed, protection and armament, those in comparative naval

history must sacrifice depth for breadth, if they are to keep their published work

within manageable proportions. They must often, of necessity, rely heavily on

the work of others for a foundation. This can pose a problem in areas where the

literature is relatively restricted, but it can also signal those subjects where there

is the need for further research.

The author of this paper has specialized in the Mediterranean area and the

navies discussed in this paper naturally reflect this. The Baltic during 1914-1918

has also been the subject ofrecent study. The author's experience has reinforced

the conviction that, in order to do comparative naval history, one needs a solid

body of studies, based on national fields to support it. Certainly, a successful

account of a limited period of time can be written on a comparative basis, but

anyone who has done this is likely to realize that there is far more to the story

than one can include and keep the work within manageable proportions. To

put it another way, in comparative history, one is looking at a navy or navies on

a horizontal basis, over a relatively short time, as compared to the national history

which 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 to

summarize prior work when necessary. But in order to do this, it is necessary to

have that solid foundation of studies for each navy. Unfortunately, such studies

are not available for all navies.

This is particularly true in regard to the history of the French Navy over the

past 150 years. It is somewhat misleading to stress Anglo-Saxon indifference to

the naval history ofFrance. The French, themselves, have this problem. A noted

French archivist, Etienne Taillemite, recently published a work called L'Histoire

ignoree de la marinefran$aise. The title tells it all, the "unknown history" of the

French Navy. The author is not referring to obscure events, either. He is talking

about the major facets ofFrench naval history and the relative lack ofknowledge

about them in France. He has a point. Although more than three quarters of his

book concerns the pre-1815 era, the more modern period is no exception. Of

four important monographs—as opposed to general histories—on the French

Navy 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).
Halpern 79

two are by Americans and one by a German. There is certainly, at least, one

subject during this period that is worthy of further examination, notably the

naval operations conducted by Admiral Courbet against the Chinese in the

1880's. These involve rivalry over Tonkin, an undeclared war with China, with

the interplay between purely domestic politics and foreign relations, colonialism

and, naturally, some naval operations that are very interesting in themselves.

The French Navy is badly in need ofa study ofits experience during the First

World War. The operations are reasonably well covered in the series ofvolumes

by A. Thomazi, which are based on the records in the Service Historique. They

are, however, largely confined to the operations themselves. The broader picture

would include the relation of the navy with the other branches of the government and with parliament, the struggle for scarce resources to manufacture guns

and ammunition or to build light craft to fight submarines, the allocation of

precious manpower, the role of the merchant marine and the hesitant response

to the submarine challenge. There were fierce personal rivalries within the

French Navy, partially illuminated by the parliamentary inquiry into the escape

of the Goeben and Breslau. We need to know more about them, which admirals

were in which "equipe" and what were the possible effects on operations and

strategy. In 1917, it appears that political pressure forced the creation of the

Direction generale de la guerre sous-marine (DGGSM) to counter the horrific

losses from submarines. There is much more to be learned about this and the

possible similarities to the British debate over the introduction of convoys.

Furthermore, is there any link between serving in the DGGSM and careers during 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, the

navy had considerable success in its building program by the outbreak of the

Second World War. The French were particularly strong in fast, light cruisers

and destroyers, exactly the sort of craft they had not had in 1914-1918. They

had two modern battle-cruisers in service, two modern battleships nearing

completion, and even a pair of aircraft carriers on the stocks when the collapse

came 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 by

Stephen S. Roberts (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Ray Walser, France's Searchfor 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: Harald

Boldt, 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 navale dans I'Adriatique (Paris: Payot, 1925); id., La Guerre navale aux Dardanelles (Paris: Payot, 1926); id., La

Guerre navale dans la Mkditerranke (Paris: Payot, 1929). See also the relevant chapters in Vice-Admiral

Salaun, La Marinefrancaise (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1934).

A good example focused on one campaign is George H. Cassar, The French and the Dardanelles: A

study offailure in the conduct ofwar (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971).
80 Comparative Naval History

much concern on the part of Churchill. But what of the fleet on the outbreak

ofthe war? Did things look better than they really were? What ofnaval aviation?

How did the navy sell itself to parliament and to the nation at large, in order to

obtain the considerable resources it eventually enjoyed?

There has been an interesting study of the French naval officer corps during

the interwar period. Ronald Chalmers Hood gave his book the title, Royal

Republicans, 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 history

collection which became available at the Service Historique. This would have

broadened his selection. His approach, as the title suggests, was largely sociological and he paid little attention to the 1914-1918 experience. But, it was a good

beginning and it suggests an interesting avenue of investigation. He labeled

certain admirals as "progressive." On checking their careers after reading his

book, it became apparent that they may have had a common thread during the

war, notably association in one way or another with the DGGSM. We need

further study ofcertain important individuals, such as Georges Leygues, Minister

of Marine in 1917-20 and 1925-33, and the Chiefs of the Naval Staff, Admirals

Salaiin, Violette, Durand-Viel and, of course, Darlan. The grandson of Leygues

has published a biography ofhis grandfather, which includes extensive quotations

from 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. Herve

Coutau-Begarie and Claude Huan have written an excellent biography of the

controversial Darlan. They naturally concentrate, as have most historians, on

Darlan's role in the Vichy government, but their chapters on the pre-1940 period

are invaluable. From the point ofview ofnaval historians, Darlan's career before

the war is of equal, if not greater, importance than his participation in Petain's

government, the subject most historians have concentrated upon.

The literature in regard to ships, their specifications and design and

chronological history has always been much better than the literature about why

those ships were built in the first place and how they were supposed to be

employed. This situation is, of course, not confined to the French. The late

Henri Le Masson did publish an extremely detailed work on torpedo craft under

the auspices of the Academie de Marine which included an analysis of tactics

and strategy. Unfortunately, the trend has been in the opposite direction.

Ronald Chalmers Hood, Royal Republicans: The French Naval Dyttasties Between the World Wars (Baton

Rouge: 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 been

supplemented 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 work

on French submarines, Du Nautilus (1800) au Redoutable (Paris: Presses de la Cite, 1969).
Halpern 81

Recently, the French publisher Marines Editions et Realisations has started a

series on French warships, similar to the Anglo-American "The Anatomy ofthe

Ship," although with far fewer drawings of internal detail. These volumes are heavy on technical detail and seem to be aimed as much at the ship-modeler as at the historian. Nevertheless, a historian can gather many useful details and, in

the volume on the Dunkerque and Strasbourg, Admiral Louzeau speaks of the

serious error of conception in grouping their main armament forward, an error repeated in the Richelieu class battleships which followed. There are similar

sentiments in Jean Labayle-Couhat's preface to the volume on the Richelieu to

indicate that the rationale for this design must have caused considerable debate,

possibly with strategic and tactical implications. Labayle-Couhat has even more

interesting remarks in his preface to the volume on the 7,600-ton cruisers. This

time, he comments on the excessive dispersion of the fire from their 152mm

primary armament. He attributes this to the lack ofinterest in materiel and claims

that, after the First World War, the naval staff was primarily concerned with

tactics and strategy and on the organization of command. Materiel questions

were left to technicians, often younger officers unable to complete with highly

touted engineers seeking perfection. The validity of these assertions is certainly

an interesting subject for further research.

Unfortunately, this is the period of French naval history where the gaps in

the archives are likely to be most serious. The authors of the ship monographs

have obviously found much technical detail in the central archives at Vincennes

and the local archives in Brest and Toulon. But, for the higher direction of the

navy, it is apparent that important files in the nature of the correspondence

between the Minister of Marine and the Chief of Naval Staff are likely to be

missing. Here, the naval historian will have to work around the gaps, perhaps

trying the alternate approach. Fortunately, the collection ofprivate papers at the

archives 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 side

of the correspondence is missing, possibly the carbon copy or original can be

found in the records of either the originator or the addressee. There is also the

possibility that naval documents or papers relating to the navy can be found in

the archives of other services or of bodies dealing with national defense. A

notable example would be the files of the Conseil superieur de la Defense

nationale at the Service Historique de TArmee de Terre. The papers ofstatesmen,

such as Edouard Daladier, may also be ofvalue. 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 et Realisations, 1992), p.7. See also: id, Le cuirasseJem Bart (Bourg-en-Bresse: Marines Editions et Realisations, 1992).

Jean Labayle-Couhat inJean Moulin, Les croiseurs de 1600 tonnes (Bourg-en-Bresse: Marines Editions

et Realisations, n.d. [1993]), p. 5.
82 Comparative Naval History

studies of French defense policy or diplomacy in recent years and a careful

analysis of their bibliographies might yield useful suggestions.

14

In the final

analysis, however, one will have to reconcile oneself to the fact that these

alternate sources probably will not be adequate compensation for the missing

files at the Service historique de la Marine. One will have to work with a lower

level of documentation than would be the case for studies of earlier periods.

The great rival ofthe French Navy in the Mediterranean was the Italian Navy

and it remains an important, but underdeveloped, field of study. The Italian

Navy was large, excessively large according to some, in comparison to the

resources ofthe state. Italian naval designers aroused considerable interest abroad

with their innovative designs. The story of how the Italian Navy was able to

obtain so much from the state is an interesting one, which is closely linked to

the development of heavy industry in Italy. Certain areas of that industry were

described by one historian as a hot-house product fed by expensive naval

orders. With this in mind, a full biography of Ispettore del Genio Navale

Benedetto Brin, Minister ofMarine in 1876-8, 1884-91, 1896-8, would be most

instructive. Apparently, it was easier to obtain funding for new construction

than it was for more mundane subjects such as maintenance and training. What

is 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 is sometimes forgotten that the Italian Navy was a new and initially somewhat

artificial creation. The united Kingdom of Italy did not exist until 1861 and, as the famous Piedmontese statesman and writer Massimo d'Azeglio put it, "Now

that we have made Italy it remains to make the Italians." The navy was created

from an amalgamation of Piedmontese and Neapolitan naval forces, which had

been hostile to one another. The difficulties in integration were a factor in the

disastrous performance in 1866. How did one integrate this navy? What, for

example, were the careers of former Neapolitan officers and ratings? Were

conscious steps taken by the navy towards nation building similar to those in the

army? In the latter, troops were deliberately stationed away from their local

provinces, a practice that was expensive and slowed mobilization.

Examples would be Robert J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military

Planning, 1933-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); William I. Shorrock, From

Ally 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 dal 1885 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 Los

Angeles: 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's

Press, 1989),pp.21-22.
Halpern 83

As in the case ofFrance, the role ofthe Italian Navy during World War I also

needs to be studied. The massive eight volume study, La Marina italiana nella

grande guerra, has concentrated on operations. However, we need to know far

more about the inner workings of the high command. Ezio Ferrante, making

use of the hitherto unknown private papers of Thaon di Revel, has made an

excellent start which needs to be expanded to other leaders. The papers of the

Casa di Savoia, if they are ever made public, would be crucial, since both King

Victor Emmanuel III and his cousin, the commander ofthe fleet at the beginning

of 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 aspect

of the war may have been even stronger than in France, for Italian coastal cities

on the Adriatic were literally on the front line. Furthermore, there were also a

series of disasters, such as the loss of the battleships Benedetto Brin and Leonardo

da Vinci, which were attributed to sabotage, supposedly confirmed by the Italian

agents who broke into the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Zurich in 1917. This

subject has been the stuff of myth-making, indeed, there have been documentaries on Italian television which sensationalized it. The naval disasters during

the war did produce lengthy parliamentary inquiries with extensive reports. It

is now the task of the historian to shift through this mass of material and to try

to separate truth from fiction and to establish what probably happened. The

Italians have been heavily criticized by their British and French allies, quite often

with good reason. Efficiency may not always have been a strong point. The

reasons for this should be analyzed. On the other hand, it is now important to

see things from the perspective of the Italian Navy, why they took actions and

made claims that seem to others mere sacro egoismo. It is also time to lay to rest

the old canards about Italian lack ofcourage, reflected in thejibe ofthe American

general 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 of

JeUicoe or Beatty or Scheer to foolishly risk ships is regarded as common sense. Why should the same action by Thaon di Revel, under comparable circumstances, be regarded any differently?

The Italian Navy in the interwar period also needs attention. How did the

navy fare under the Fascist regime, particularly when Mussolini, himself,

assumed the duties of Minister of Marine during much of the period? How did

they 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 Grande

Guerra 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, 3June 1918, quoted in Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man ofSecrets, volume I: 1877-1918

(London: Collins, 1970), p. 559.
84 Comparative Naval History

Rome can be supplemented with valuable insights from the reports of the

German naval attaches in Rome. The question of naval aviation, the decision

not to build aircraft carriers, relations with the Italian Air Force and cooperation

or the lack of cooperation between the air service and the naval service are

particularly important questions in the light of the experiences of the Second

World War.23

The Italian Navy is well served by the traditional ship books. Indeed, the

Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare was a pioneer in the field, launching a series

ofwell illustrated and authoritative books on different types ofships in the 1960s.

1 A Some of these titles have been revised and reprinted. In the scope and variety

of its publications, the Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare has been extremely

ambitious, publishing books that would probably be left to commercial publishers in other countries.

It is nice to know the technical specifications of warships, the dates of their

launching and so forth. But, as is often the case, there is a need to integrate this

sort ofmaterial into the history ofthe navy as a whole. Biographies for twentieth

century naval figures are also important and useful. Just as we need studies of

Benedetto Brin, Cuniberti and the Duke of the Abruzzi for the earlier period,

so, too, we need studies of figures such as Admirals Domenico Cavagnari, head

of the navy in 1933-1940, and his successor Arturo Riccardi, head of the navy

in 1940-1943. This is a period when the historian will have a particularly difficult

time navigating through the controversies and apologia associated with these

disastrous years in Italian history.

Writing the history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy has its own set of

challenges. Perhaps, the first is to convince people that it even needs to be done.

American, British and German historians with their vision of great encounters

like Jutland or the great air-sea carrier centered battles ofthe Second World War

are inclined not to take the subject seriously. Even those who specialize in the

Habsburg Monarchy are sometimes guilty of this fault. A recent, and otherwise

superb 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, Erminio

Bagnasco, La Portaerei tiella Marina italiana. Idee, progetti e realizzazione dalla origini ad oggi. Supplement

to Riuista Marittima (December, 1989); idem., "Una portaerei mancata: La Francisco Carracciolo. Altra ocasione 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 cacciatorpediniere

italiani (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 italiane nella 2 guerra mondiale" . The original tides had the imprint ofEdizioni Bizzari of Rome, which appears

to have been subsequently absorbed by Edizioni Ateneo. The series was resumed in 1993 by Ermanno

Albertelli of Parma.
Halpern 85

"a rather useless navy" and the author, in order to keep the study from becoming

too long, chose largely to exclude the navy from the analysis. This may, at least

partially, be due to the fact the author is of Hungarian origin and, therefore,

underlines one ofthe major difficulties the navy faced. Since 1867, the Habsburg

Monarchy was a Dual Monarchy and Hungarian assent for naval expenditure

was hard to obtain. Hungary is basically an inland state with little natural interest

in the sea, although it should not be forgotten that before 1918 the Hungarians

controlled 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 have

an important influence on the general naval situation. The development of

navalism in as complex a structure as the Habsburg Monarchy was one of the

more interesting phenomena of the time. Furthermore, the Austrians were not

mere 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 if

that 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 Dual

Monarchy, and, while the point can be endlessly debated, it is quite possible that

without a serious fleet the hard-pressed Monarchy might have faced invasion in

the South and might have had to fight on yet another front.

The financial aspect of Austria's naval growth is obviously of importance, as

is the creation ofa naval infrastructure ofshipyards and armaments manufacturers

that accompanied it. The political—one is tempted to say diplomatic—wheeling

and dealing that freed the necessary sums ofmoney for the navy is also ofinterest.

We now have an excellent analysis of the period based on archival research.

This demonstrates how useful a full biography of Admiral Rudolf Graf Montecuccoli would be. Montecuccoli was Marinekommandant from October 1904

to February 1913, a period when the very nature ofthe Austro-Hungarian Navy

was transformed.

Certainly, the same attention should also be paid to the naval officer corps

that has been paid to army officers. The multi-national character of the navy

must have posed special problems of command. How successful were they in

overcoming these complexities? For example, in January 1909 a category of

reservists had to be retained beyond their normal date of release because of the

Bosnian crisis. The men affected were ordered to assemble on the quarterdeck

of the flagship following Sunday Mass. The admiral commanding the squadron

made the announcement in German, followed by his chief of staff, a Croatian,

26 Istvan Deak, Beyond Natiottalism: A Social and Political History ofthe 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, Industrial Development and the Politics of Dualism (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1994).
86 Comparative Naval History

who repeated it in Serbo-Croatian. Other officers made the announcement in

Hungarian and in Italian, while the chief surgeon concluded with the announcement in Czech. The admiral, then, called for "Three cheers for the

Kaiser" and believed the performance appeared to have had at least some effect

on the dissatisfied long-serving reservists. Perhaps, but studies on this subject

seems to concentrate on failure, notably the Cattaro mutiny of February 1918.

We need to know about the successes. Cattaro was an aberration and not the

rule, probably due to factors other than nationality problems.

The history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy has a problem which may not be

solved. The after-action reports of proceedings were usually forwarded in copy

to the Marinesektion in Vienna. These can be quite extensive and were the basis

for the semi-official history by Hans Hugo Sokol, Osterreich-Ungarns Seekrieg,

published in 1933. The problem is, we know what happened, but we do not

always know why. The internal fleet memoranda often did not leave Pola and

they have disappeared. It is frustrating to see in the report, for example, from

the battleship squadron commander the statement that a conference of captains

was held in the Flottenkommandant's quarters. There is no indication of what

was discussed or decided. There are equally intriguing plans for sizeable warships,

including battle cruisers. The rationale beyond these giants, which seem of

questionable use in the Adriatic, is not given. Was there collaboration concerning naval designs between the Austrian and German navies? Are Austrian plans

for huge capital ships an example ofnavalism gone wild? The answers probably

lie in the missing archives of the Marinetechnischen Kommitee in Pola. Will

there be any clues in the largely unworked Austrian records in Rome? The

future historian of the Habsburg Navy during the twentieth century is going to

have to sort through those records. It is known that they include decoded

Austrian intercepts of Italian wireless messages. A careful correlation of this

material may indicate the Austrians had something akin to Room 40 at the

Admiralty 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 naval

history 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 und

Revolution (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 der

Zeit 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 this material for the Mitteilungen des Osterreichischeti Staatsarchius.
Halpern 87

the two was not one of unbounded confidence and sharing. The Germans had

a tendency not to take their Austrian allies seriously. The Austrians, in turn,

could be resentful of the Germans, whom many felt did not understand their

situation, although the Marinekommandant, Admiral Anton Haus, would

become a strong supporter of Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare cam33

paign.

The Austrian archives do contain raw materials for further study of one aspect

of the war at sea. The Allied barrage of the Straits of Otranto is widely considered

to have been a failure. The number of submarines destroyed by the barrage were

in no way proportionate to the effort put into it. Proponents of the barrage always

argued that, at the very least, it would exhaust submarine crews and restrict their

operations. In other words, there were intangible benefits to the barrage that do not

show up in mere numbers ofsubmarines destroyed. Because the German submarines

operated from the Austrian bases, copies of the submarine logs were given to the

Austrian authorities. The majority of these logs and those of Austrian submarines

have probably survived. It should now be possible to go carefully through them and

to note the circumstances of passing through the barrage. How many times did a submarine have to dive? How long did it stay down? What did the submarine

commander see? Drifters? Destroyers? How far off? Did the activities of the

American submarine chasers in the final months of the war have any effect? What

percentage ofthe passage was made at night? The experiences ofsubmarines seem

to have varied gready, but this is not surprising, since the numbers of drifters and

other small craft the allies were able to put on the barrage also varied gready. The

information could then be correlated with the British reports ofproceedings at the

Public Record Office to establish the strength of the barrage at different intervals.

Because the number of submarines using this route was relatively limited and easy

to establish and the area to be covered also relatively confined, it should be possible

to establish once and for all where the barrage was effective, where it was not and

the real reasons for its apparent failure.

The account of how the French, Austrian and Italian navies, joined by their

stronger allies, the British and Germans, competed with and then fought against

each 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 and

monographs to form the basis for a similar study ofthe interwar period, although

the 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-Hungarian

leadership during the First World War published by the Militarhistorischen Dienstes.

34 Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1971); idem., The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918 (London: Allen and

Unwin/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 en Mediterrank, 1914-1918 (Paris: Payot, 1931).
88 Comparative Naval History

There is one aspect of the pre-World War I competition that might receive

further study. This concerns the naval missions which the Great Powers were

prepared to send to the navies that they wanted to influence. The British wound

up in the embarrassing situation of having naval missions on opposing sides

Greece and Turkey—during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. There should

be sufficient material in diplomatic and naval archives (and possibly the records

ofprivate firms) ofthe powers involved to study more closely these missions and

their links with armaments sales. Naturally, this study ofnaval missions could be

extended to other navies and other periods.

The Baltic area during the First World War is another theme where

comparative naval history would be promising. It has probably not received the

attention it deserves. Here, we have the Germans contending against the

Russians, who fight a very singular type of naval war, employing mines

extensively and coordinating their defense with coastal batteries on shore. The

situation is complicated when the British send submarines to operate in the Baltic

and give the Germans the problem of defending their shipping against them.

The Swedish Navy also comes to play a potentially important role, eventually

forming convoys and escorting traffic within Swedish territorial waters. The

Germans are usually, but not always, the beneficiaries ofthis. The Russian Navy

before the 1917 revolution is far from unsuccessful. Among the interesting

points, the story is well known of how the Russians turned over to the British

the German code books taken from the wreck of the Magdeburg. But did the

Russians keep a copy for themselves? There is some evidence that the Russians

were able to read intercepted German wireless traffic and, at times, acted upon

it. Furthermore, the German Navy, in the early stages of the war, was a very

different navy in the North Sea than in the Baltic, where they used their

obsolescent warships. Ofcourse, should they had chosen to withdraw from the

North Sea, they could have achieved overwhelming superiority over the

Russians. But, if they chose to face the British, the advantage might have been

with the Russians, particularly as the new Russian dreadnoughts of the pre-war

building program began to enter service. The interplay between North Sea and

Baltic, on the German side, is interesting, particularly, since the titular German

naval commander was Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the Kaiser's brother. Since

there is some doubt as to Prince Heinrich's competence, a study of German

command relationships should prove unusually interesting. The interplay between naval force and diplomacy is also important, with enforcement of the

Allied 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 Diplomatic

Biography (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.
Halpern 89

The Baltic was also the scene of one of the major amphibious operations during

the war, OPERATION ALBION—the German capture of Osel island and the

Gulf of Riga in October 1917. ALBION used to be studied at the U.S. Naval

War College in the interwar period, along with Gallipoli, as an example of a combined operation.

Those interested in combined operations, that is navies operating together

with land forces, should not forget the riverine operations of the First World

War. While the Mesopotamian campaign is fairly well known in English-speaking countries, the Danube operations are not. A modern study of the Serbian

campaign of 1914-1915 and the Romanian campaign of 1916 should be most

rewarding.

This brings one to another neglected topic, that ofneutral navies during times

of war. The Swedish Navy in the Baltic has already been mentioned, but what

of the Royal Netherlands Navy? The Dutch had the misfortune to have the

proverbial pair ofeight hundred pound gorillas fighting on their doorstep. What,

ifanything, 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. One

is impressed, when reading accounts of the Emden in the waters of the Netherlands East Indies, at how frequently the Germans encountered a Dutch warship

of superior strength, whenever they tried to use Dutch territorial waters. There

is an interesting story here, if only to verify the theory that has been advanced

that the Dutch were rigidly acting to enforce their neutrality so as to avoid giving

the Japanese an excuse to move.

Other neutral navies are also of interest, notably the Danes and the Norwegians. They controlled strategic waterways and it would be nice to know

more of their plans about, for example, mining the Belts to forestall possible

German intervention.

TheJapanese Navy during the 1914-1918 war also needs more attention from

historians. Undoubtedly, active operations by the Japanese, in which shots were

fired in anger and losses sustained, were restricted to the 1914 siege of the

German colony ofTsingtao and to the 1917 operations in which destroyers were

sent to assist the hard pressed Allies in the Mediterranean. However, theJapanese

very actively exercised sea power, escorting the Imperial convoys from Australia

and exerting that steady pressure which drove von Spee's German squadron

westward to South American waters. The Japanese Navy joined the hunt for

the German raider, Emden, and it was only due to the decision of the convoy

commander that it was HMAS Sydney, and not the Japanese battle cruiser Ibuki,

which finished off the German cruiser. By the time Spee's squadron was

eliminated 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 the

many demands on the Royal Navy in the first months of the war, the British
90 Comparative Naval History

official historian, Sir Julian Corbett, admitted that it was hard to see how they

could have acted so effectively in eastern waters without Japanese assistance. In

1917, the Japanese were again active in the Indian Ocean, when the German

raider Wolfwas on the loose. In writing ofthese operations, Corbett's successor,

Sir Henry Newbolt, remarked that, in the Indian Ocean, the Japanese became

the preponderant partner. These Japanese operations involved regular use of

Singapore as a base as well as other ports of the British Empire. What ambitions

did this awaken within the Japanese Navy? What lessons might have been learned

about submarine warfare (and forgotten) in the Mediterranean? These operations

seem controversial in Japan and one post-1945 historian even appears to infer

the Mediterranean destroyers were a mercenary squadron. In this, historians

have studied the role ofJapan on a diplomatic level and as the background for

internal politics in Japan, but how did things appear to the naval leaders in the

First World War era?

There is another aspect of the World War that would lend itself to the

comparative approach, that is, one that is comparative in the sense that the

archives of different nations would be used. This concerns the German Etappe

system of using German merchant ships in neutral countries and specially

chartered neutral merchantmen, anxious for a profit, to supply German warships

at large at the beginning of the war. This was obviously a diminishing asset, but

it would be useful to take a close look at how effective or ineffective it might

have been. The files of the Etappen system were allegedly burnt immediately

after the First World War, to protect those who might have assisted the

Germans. However, it should be possible to uncover at least some ofthe work

through alternate files or ship's logs. Furthermore, the German diplomatic

records, especially the consular records, might contain considerable information.

This was the sort of activity one would expect consuls to be heavily involved

in. Certainly, British diplomats and consuls did what they could to frustrate the

Germans and there should also be material on this in the British and French

archives.

What of good old fashioned operational history? Of course, there is still a need for operational history—good operational history. Navies are meant to

fight when necessary. When they do, there should be an accurate account of

what happened and why. This sounds obvious, but in doing comparative naval

history, one will run into areas where it is not the general rule. This would be

36 Julian S. Corbett and Henry Newbolt, History ofthe 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., Military

Effectiveness. (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988), Volume I: The First World War, pp. 237-9, and 247, note

19. 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 permit

a British historian to consult files dated after 1935. This, of course, would still leave plenty of leeway for the historian of the First World War.

There are three broad categories of literature dealing with Russian naval

operations during the First World War. First, we have those works written by

emigres, anxious to justify the old Imperial Russian Navy in which they served

and to rectify slights or lack of appreciation for Russian naval effort which, they

insist, 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 fact

they were writing in exile, frequently deprived ofwritten records and forced to

rely 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 point

of view to put across. The most accessible example of this literature, to those

who do not read Russian, is the translation of The Fleet in the First World War,

done under the auspices ofthe Smithsonian Institution and the National Science

Foundation. Portions ofthis seem at best fanciful. The fact that the translation

was 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 eyes

of their German enemies. While the volumes of Der Krieg zur See dealing with

the Baltic or the Black Sea are extremely detailed, they are obviously written

from the German point of view, with all the disadvantages this implies.

It can be difficult to reconcile the three types ofaccounts. The language barrier

has cut off historians from making even the best use ofemigre literature. A good

attempt to rectify this was made by a retired Australian naval officer, fluent in

Russian, in a study of the Black Sea Fleet. It is a useful beginning and cites

many unfamiliar works published in the Russian language by emigres, but does

not include any archival work.

In addition to the Russian archives that are, at least, partially open, there are other opportunities in Russia to supplement them. The same historian who

found the naval archives closed for material after 1935 also found that the Naval

Museum in Saint Petersburg had an extensive manuscript collection. There

seemed to have been almost a compulsion for people to put their recollections

on paper in a land where the official version of history was subject to change. It now 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 ofthe Russian Fleet (English

translation. 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 Navy

and its leaders. The fact that the period of the First World War might be

considered less sensitive than more recent years may also facilitate the work of

the historian. Those working in more recent periods face serious problems, with

access to the archives subject to the prevailing political winds and subject to

capricious decisions which may be based on political connections and, in some

cases, "on who offers the highest bid."

One journal, Warship International, has recently begun to publish translated

material from Russian sources. The bias is naturally towards subjects involving

more recent naval construction. The somewhat fragmented form in which the

information is presented can also be confusing. Nevertheless, it is exciting to

read, for one can feel a sense of uncovering the raw materials of history. The

recent publication in Russia of the memoirs of Admiral I. K. Grigorovitch,

Minister of Marine 1911-17, indicates that we may now be proceeding beyond

technical specifications of ships to matters involving policy. It will be up to a future historian to put this material together and to interpret it. The subject of

the Russian Navy in the twentieth century is one of the great opportunities for

historians, provided they have the linguistic skills, and given the uncertain

conditions in Russia today, a cast-iron stomach, the willingness to tolerate

uncomfortable living conditions and the ability to wheel and deal with local

officials.

This paper has shown a preference for the pre-World War II period, based

largely on the author's special interests and past work. The post-World War II period, however, can also be productive. Once again the French Navy, after its archives are opened to a reasonable degree, will be very interesting. The study

would examine its renaissance after 1945 and its transformation, from a heterogeneous collection ofsurviving pre-war ships, borrowed and ex-German

ships, into a modern force which now plays the major role in France's nuclear

defense. The French decision to develop nuclear powered ballistic missile

submarines, largely on their own, owes much to Charles De Gaulle's conceptions

of the Fifth Republic and of French grandeur, but it must also have involved an

enormous effort and required a considerable portion ofthe state's resources. The

French remain one ofthe few naval powers currendy to have a full-sized nuclear

powered aircraft carrier under construction. Furthermore, aside from the purely

material aspect, the story ofhealing a navy that had been sharply divided between

Vichy and Free French sentiments should be equally fascinating.

41 Mark Kramer, "Archival Research in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls", Cold War International History

Project 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 on

Desiderata In Comparative Naval History

William R. Thompson

The structure of this volume pairs an historian with a political scientist to

discuss preferences for future research in various areas ofnaval history. The

historian advances his preferences first; the political scientist follows with

comments on the first paper, ideally without degenerating into inter-disciplinary

squabbles over assumptions and methods. This strategy is an old device for

pairing odd couple animals to pull wagons (for instance, a mule and a horse with

readers permitted to assign their own disciplinary labels to the different animals).

Presumably, the basic idea is that the wagon ends up being pulled more

effectively 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 cooperate

in pulling the wagon either at all or in the appropriate direction.

I am happy to make the attempt to move the wagon of comparative naval

history subject to the following qualifications. One, my observations are made

as more of a consumer than a producer of naval history. This caveat grants me

license to behave like the proverbial rich, but uneducated, art collector who

knows what he likes when he sees it, even if he does not fully understand the

art history context from which a piece has emerged.

Two, I frequently find myself uncomfortable with the mainstream assumptions of both the historical and political science disciplines. Whether horse or mule, it is difficult to conceal maverick orientations that, no doubt, will spiral

to the surface from time to time. In the process, some of my observations will

seem mild, while others may appear more radical. There is no need to apologize

in advance for radical observations. The point, instead, is that any perceived

extremism in my observations probably will appear equally extremist to both

historians and political scientists.

Three, I have no real quarrel with Professor Halpern's desire to have more

historical work done on major power navies in World War I. I agree that we

need more analysis along the lines he specifies. In any event, this is his area of

specialization and I lack any authority to quibble with his sense of priorities.

However, I do have some different ideas about what comparison involves, why
94 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

one might wish to engage in it, and what questions in naval history are most

susceptible to comparative inquiry. Thus, rather than focusing on World War I naval history, my own topical and temporal approach will be somewhat broader

and certainly more eclectic in pursuit ofdifferent types ofcomparative strategies.

Professor Halpern presents one model of comparative naval history—the

analysis of two or more navies operating within a specific milieu such as World

War I. More generally, any study that involves "more than one navy in the same

study" qualifies as comparative in nature according to this approach. In such a model, comparison tends toward the more implicit end of the continuum and,

in fact, is often missing altogether as different stories are pursued separately. Of

course, the extent to which that generalization is true ultimately depends on the

analysis and the analyst.

The relatively implicit comparative approach is not something to reject out

of hand. The vast majority of the histories that have been generated have been

produced on its premise:

There is the . . . need to establish what happened, and equally important, and

perhaps more difficult, why it happened. The historian would use all material

which sheds light on the subject, starting with the available naval papers—both

official and private—and when appropriate going on to political and diplomatic

and the all important financial records.

This is precisely what most historians do. They discern a significant hole in

our information and comprehension base and try to fill it by examining the

relevant archives for documents that speak to the what and why of human

behavior. Much of our consequent information base is predicated on just such

an approach. I, for one non-historian, would be among the last to suggest that

we have no need for what might be described as "conventional" history. My

own work on developing data bases on some 270 military coups in fifty-nine

states (1946-1970) and five hundred years ofconcentration and deconcentration

in the distribution of sea and land power has relied heavily on conventional

historical narratives. An ongoing project involving a contrarian approach to the

question 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 one

does when one is examining non-British or non-American phenomena. This peculiar idea is well

institutionalized in American political science as well where students of domestic politics either study

American 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 for such 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); George

Modelski 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 ofthe Global

Powers. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
Thompson 95

labor-intensive examination of the political histories of a large number of

persistent democracies, intermittent democracies, and non-democracies. Such

an undertaking would be impossible without the availability ofextensive political

and 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 that

underlies an appreciation for straightforward and conventional approaches to

telling historical stories. It is self-interest pure and simple. Historical information

and analysis is indispensable in its own right and for those of us who repackage

it. Nevertheless, there are other approaches to what comparison entails. One

area of disagreement involves analytical motivations. How do we select the

questions that we pursue? The implicit comparison approach often is motivated

primarily by the perceived need to fill gaps in our information base. The rationale

is not unlike the one some mountain climbers use when asked why they climb

mountains—because they are there. Similarly, voids in our information are filled

because they are there. For instance, we know quite a bit about British naval

operations in World War I and comparatively less about the activities of the

Austro-Hungarian or Italian navies. That observation represents onejustification

for analyzing, comparatively or otherwise, the activities ofthe Austro-Hungarian

and Italian navies during World War I. However, another approach to comparison—and one that is much more

explicit 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 naval

preparations for war to generate a partial answer to the arms race question. The

answer would be partial because there were other naval arms races worth

examining (in particular, the celebrated Anglo-German one) and non-naval arms

races to evaluate as well.

A major difference between the implicit and explicit comparisons, then, is a matter of case justification. In the implicit case, it suffices to note that we do not

know as much as we would like about the naval activities of state X. In the

explicit case, the state of our information base is secondary to the more specific

concern with locating possible participants in a naval arms race that may have

preceded World War I. We may not know much about Chilean and Brazilian

navy 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 another

are essentially ahistorical. The prevailing assumption is that it must be something about democratic

institutions that produce the selectively peaceful behavior. Just what that might be is the subject of

considerable analytical debate in international relations. My contention is that a more important

contribution to resolving the puzzle is found in the geopolitical milieus that have not only produced or

facilitated the survival of democratic regimes but that have also made less aggressive foreign policies more probable.
96 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

have engaged in naval arms races, it would not have affected the outbreak of

World War I. Only if our question about the causal relationship between naval

arms races and war was stated in the most general way would all states, navies

and wars become pertinent.

A third difference between what I am calling implicit and explicit comparisons

is how we arrive at answers to our questions. What does it mean to explain

something? I certainly do not wish to get into issues ofthe philosophy ofscience

and the philosophy of history by raising this question. Nor do I wish to suggest

that there is only one valid way to attempt to answer questions. However, I think it is fair to say that more general answers (to general questions) are apt to

be 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 been

no war between major powers since 1945. Whether the post-1945 era deserves

to be characterized as truly or relatively peaceful is a much different question.

Nor does the long peace conceptualization mean to suggest that major power

conflict has been either absent or even always non-violent. The observation is only that the major powers have not gone to war with each other in some fifty

years, 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 nuclear

bombs and missiles has made a World War III, if not unthinkable, at least,

considerably unlikely. The specter of nuclear war, along with other factors such

as economic interdependence, contributes to the notion that war no longer

makes any political-economic sense for the combatants. More would be lost

than might possibly be gained. Finally, bipolarity stresses the idea that international systems dominated by two, roughly equal, major powers are more stable

and less prone to showdowns than are multipolar systems.

The problem is that the contemporary long peace is not quite as unusual as one might think. There was, for example, no inter-major power warfare

between 1816 and 1853 and 1872 and 1903. Now, it may very well be the case

that the latest "long peace" has a different etiology than its two immediate

predecessors. But that is something that requires demonstration. Moreover, the

absence of nuclear weapons, bipolarity, and widespread feelings about the

irrationality of war in the two earlier "long peaces" suggests that there may be

more 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 should

note 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 least one 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: William

Morrow, 1974) argues that these long peaces are actually "naval peaces."
Thompson 97

peaces happen. So, the approach to comparison also depends on the question.

Some questions clearly demand explicit comparison while others may not. Ifwe

ask what did Russian naval decision-makers think about their strategic options

in 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 in

the midst of a crisis involving the deployment of naval forces, comparative

approaches begin to appear more attractive. It is certainly possible to answer this

last question in a non-comparative mode, but there will always be some residual

doubts and room for reinterpretation of the evidence. No matter how good the

archival resources or how talented the historian, the reconstruction of the past

tends to be an imperfect process subject to periodic revision.

A comparative approach would involve examining two or more decisions to

go to war in roughly similar situations. This might mean comparing war decisions

on both sides of a crisis. Or, it might require finding cases of a certain type that

permit the analyst to reduce the number of possible explanations to something

reasonably manageable and still generate a more general explanation of the type

of 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 delineated

while others are more than a bit hazy. Some theories are arrived at deductively

while others are more inductive in origin. Whatever the case, the contention is that we all, albeit to a varying extent, operate with them in our analyses. The

question is not whether we, as analysts, engage in analysis with or without the

aid oftheories but, rather, how explicitly we make use oftheory in our analysis.

The more explicit the use of theory, the more likely that some type of explicit

comparison will be found to be analytically useful.

These fairly abstract points about the desirability of explicit comparison can

be made more concretely by referring to two illustrations ofwhat 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? Not

everyone may agree that these two works are unquestionably comparative

analyses, but they approximate my own criteria.

Kennedy's examination of the naval history of Britain focuses primarily on

one navy, but it qualifies as a comparative analysis because it asks general

questions about the role of sea power (the timing of its salience and its relationship to economic and land power), and then proceeds to explore these

general questions by studying the evolution of the British navy's role in foreign

policy and war strategies. Basically, it represents a further testing of some of the

arguments advanced in an earlier comparative undertaking, Mahan's The In6 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall ofBritish 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).
98 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

Jluence of Sea Power Upon History. The chapters are arranged chronologically: to

1603, 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 about

British naval supremacy is followed as it unfolds much as any other narrative

story might do. If the different time periods had been compared explicitly to see whether the answer changed depending on when one asked the question, that

alone would have qualified it as a comparative work.

The more overt comparative element, however, is the continued analysis of

the Mahanian argument or, more accurately, the Mahan-Mackinder debate. The

generalizations at stake initially were meant to apply to more than one state. The analytical interaction between a general argument and a specific case therefore, 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 for

narrative convenience as they are for delineating the changing parameters ofthe

factors involved in the interactions among land, sea, and economic power. For

that matter, an entirely different approach might have been taken that would

have 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 and

France). Whether the answers to the general questions that would have emerged

with these alternative foci might have been any different from the ones found

in Kennedy is beside the point. There are several ways to skin the comparative

cat. Kennedy's analysis of the rise and fall of the Britain and its naval lead

represents one way to harness historical narrative to the pursuit of answers to

general questions about comparative naval activities.

A second example, Hamilton's Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840-1870 might

seem more obviously "comparative" since it is about the rivalry and naval

interactions of two states (Britain and France). But it does not take on the

structure that it might have—that is, switching back and forth from chapter to

chapter and country to country. The focus is placed on the rivalry and not

national historical narrative. Individual book chapters are organized around

different angles or vantage points (e.g., diplomacy and technological change,

tactics and strategy, personnel, dockyards, and so forth). The basic questions

concern the origins and termination of the rivalry and the role of naval changes

in shaping the nature and course of the rivalry. In the pursuit of these general

questions, Hamilton makes a strong case for naval considerations having played

a significant role in the unfolding of the rivalry.

What do these examples have in common? Other than the ubiquity of the

British navy and the high quality of the analyses undertaken, both works are about 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 strongly

influenced by the British example in their geopolitical writings.
Thompson 99

strong naval twists. In what circumstances is sea power superior to land power?

What drives rivalries between competing naval powers? They also share singular

foci, with one analysis concentrating on a single navy and the other a single

rivalry. The number ofnavies does not really matter. What matters is the nature

of the analytical enterprise. As long as the authors in question are grappling

explicitly with general questions, they are engaged in a collective endeavor that

draws upon past attempts to explain behavior and serves as a stepping stone to

further efforts. As long as the collective endeavor is characterized by multiple

cases, it is sufficient to allow an author with one case to participate in comparative

analysis.

Yet even so, both illustrations suggest other dimensions ofcomparability. One

draws upon change over time. The interaction of pertinent factors in different

ways at different times can certainly be compared. The other examines the

interactions oftwo states that, while involved in the same rivalry, need not have

the same response to various technological changes or retain similar international

positions over time. Comparison thrives on variance. If nothing changes or all actors act alike, there is little point in engaging in comparison. Because things

change and because all actors do not act alike, we, as analysts, are presented with

opportunities to explain via careful comparisons of selected similarities and

differences.

One other common denominator in the Kennedy and Hamilton examples is the breadth oftheir inquiries. Neither author is concerned exclusively with naval

matters. Few would challenge the generalization that navies operate in geopolitical-economic contexts and are highly sensitive to technological change. As a consequence, 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 symmetrical

and asymmetrical interaction of these factors. It is certainly possible to study the

biographies of admirals (or able—bodied seamen), battle tactics, and ship construction details from a comparative perspective. But unless these foci are harnessed to larger questions, their appeal tends to remain limited to aficionados

of such topics.

Putting aside biographies, tactics, and marine architecture, there are a number

of middle-range phenomena in international relations to which comparative

naval history can contribute. Most involve the interaction between states and

the role of navies in shaping the natures of these interactions. One topic,

represented by Kennedy, is the question of grand strategy. How do decisionmakers determine (assuming that they do) what national goals to pursue and

how and when do they draw upon the tool box of alternative resources

(including navies) to implement these goals? How has the tool box itselfevolved?

9 An exception perhaps is John Keegan, lite Price ofAdmiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare. (New

York: Penguin, 1988).
100 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

What are the historical relationships among land, sea, and air power? Alternatively, who wins and what is the relationship between winning and the strategies

chosen?

Another complex of interactive processes with significant naval inputs are the

rivalries 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 the

possible exception of rivalries, have received substantial treatment, the precise role

of navies in them is less than clear. Are crises involving primarily naval resources

less likely to break out into warfare because the bargaining instruments can be

manipulated in more flexible fashions? Are all arms races subject to the same

underlying dynamics or are naval arms races different from other types ofweapons?

The likelihood of all naval arms races operating similarly seems low, inasmuch as some 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

"y technological change forestall or accelerate the probability of conflict?

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

damage on opponents, ifthey 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 ofthe 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 and

Mediterranean 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 on

Aticient History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

11 John Arquilla, Dubious Battles: Aggression Defeat and the International System. (New York: Crane

Russak, 1992); Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine, eds. The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the 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, and

The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War. (New York: Free Press, 1992); John

B. Hattendorf, "Alliance, Encirclement and Attrition: British Grand Strategy in the War of the Spanish

Succession, 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 History

Review, 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 ofthe Anglo-German

Dreadnought Race, 1905-1916." Peace Science Society (International) Papers, 24 (1975), pp. 26-48; John

H. Maurer, "The Anglo-German Naval Rivalry and Informal Arms Control, 1912-1914." Journal of

Conflict Resolution, 36 (1992), pp. 263-87 ; Richard J. Stoll, "Steaming in the Dark? Rules, Rivals, and

the British Navy, 1860-1913." Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (1992), pp. 284-308; and David D'Lugo

and 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: Cornell

University Press, 1993).
Thompson 1 01

Can sea powers deter land powers as readily (assuming for the sake of

argument that they do) as they deter other sea powers? Or, is it possible that it

is extremely difficult for sea powers to convince land powers (and vice versa) that

they mean what they threaten?

It was suggested earlier that we know much less about rivalries than one might

think. What was meant is that we have a great deal of descriptive material about

the ways in which specific rivalries have worked. But we do not know the

general answers to questions about why rivalries begin, why they end, or what

sorts offactors escalate or deescalate the processes ofcompetition and conflict.

4

Since we do not have much in the way of general answers, it is less surprising

that we also lack understanding about how naval rivalries might or might not

differ from other types of rivalries. For instance, Hamilton argues that naval

rivalries are in many respects easier to control than rivalries on land, but his

1840-1870 case involved a pair ofstates 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 acutely

threatened by the emergence of a new and adjacent rival (Germany). Which

factor mattered most in accounting for the demise of the Anglo-French naval

rivalry? The point is that we probably cannot answer this question very well if

we are restricted to the one rivalry. More rivalries are needed. More comparative

analyses are needed.

The contribution of comparative naval history is by no means restricted to

questions of grand strategy, rivalries, crises, arms races, and deterrence. Navies

figure prominently in the annals ofEuropean state building in the sense that sea powers tended to build much different states than did land powers. This is an

area in which we have only scratched the surface in coming to grips with an

understanding of the emergence of liberal republican and more democratic

political regimes. Sea power was important to many of the early institutional

manifestations of democratic regimes just as it was critical to the subsequent

diffusion and protection of such regimes.

Another line ofinquiry that has hardly been begun is assessing the possibly critical

role played by the development ofnaval infrastructure and related industries in the

13 We have several studies ofTirpitz'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 spectacularly unsuccessful in one instance. Ifone suspects, on the other hand, that it was a domestic ploy to buy time and

resources from a resistant legislature in order to build a fully competitive navy, then it must be seen as something 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 rather than 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 on

Dynamics ofEnduring Rivalries (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University, May, 1993) advances a number

of 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 ofKentucky, 1994) for a crude sub along these lines.
102 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

economic development of the world economy core. Shipbuilding complexes,

as for example in Venice, England, and the Netherlands, were among the earliest

manifestations of relatively sophisticated industrial plants. In later periods, we

have the related but somewhat different processes related to emerging economic

sectors vital to naval construction seeking protection and government contracts

in the downswings of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. We also

have various types of disguised and open industrial policies in the twentieth

century by which defense research contracts encouraged the development of

important industrial sectors. What role, then, should we attribute to the

development ofnavies in fostering modern economic growth and development?

So far, I have been discussing the mild observations on possible avenues of

inquiry for comparative naval history. They are considered "mild'* because there

is little controversy that the topics mentioned have very specific connections to

naval matters. Navies presumably matter to grand strategy, rivalries, arms races,

crises, deterrence, state building, and economic development. Exactly how

much they matter may not be clear but most observers would not object linking

navies to these various phenomena. All need and deserve more comparative

analytical attention.

In the second section of this essay, I turn to what I suspect will be seen as more radical observations. These comments will take two forms. One is that we

need more attention to what might be called thalassological perspectives on

human behavior. Thalassological interpretations elevate the role of naval and

maritime elements as unusually critical to an understanding of how the world

has worked and continues to work. Naval history in general has a tendency to

be relegated to the margins because its interests often seem too narrow or obscure

unless of course dramatic sea battles are underway. Some naval history topics are narrow and obscure but thalassological perspectives would suggest that naval

history in general deserves a central place because of its impact in shaping world

politics and the world economy.

A second type of even more radical observation is related to the earlier

comment that naval history is difficult to disentangle from its geopoliticaleconomic context and its sensitivity to technological change. I will suggest that

history (and the social sciences) have not been as good at explaining long-term

change as they are at short-term changes. To explain long-term change, we may

need to develop a new type ofinterdisciplinary expertise in which comparative

naval history is likely to play a prominent role.

More Radical Observations

The first more radical observation is neither naval history per se nor fully

thalassological in nature. It concerns a social science theory about long cycles in

leadership that features a prominent place for history and for naval power. Its
Thompson 103

link to comparative naval history is that it offers some general arguments about

world system dynamics that could be explored by comparative naval historians.

The theory gives particular emphasis to two dynamics. The first has to do

with intermittent spurts of radical innovation that tend to be monopolized

initially by a pioneer economy and state. The radical innovations in commerce

and industry elevate the pioneering state into a leading position in the world

economy. But uneven growth is destabilizing. Some states appear to be moving

ahead of their competitors. Conversely, some states appear to be falling behind.

Global war breaks out as a challenger takes on the declining incumbent system

leader and its allies in a showdown struggle over who will make policy and rules

for global politics and economics. In the five global wars fought to date

(1494-1516, 1580-1608, 1688-1713, 1792-1815, and 1914-1945), either anew

lead economy usually allied to the declining incumbent or a renewed incumbent

has defeated the challenger and its allies.

The challenger, whose decision-makers may not fully realize the extent ofits challenge actually initiates a bid for regional hegemony predicated in part on its preponderance in land power capabilities. Maritime powers, depending on their

location, view this bid as a direct or indirect threat. If their home base is located

within the threatened region, the threat is acute. If the home base is located

outside the region, the threat is potentially acute. Hegemony in the world's most

important region would create an impressive foundation for launching a genuinely global challenge. Either way, maritime powers have powerful incentives to ally with one another and with other equally threatened, continental

powers that can provide ground troops for the coalition against the regional

threat.

The global war that ensues thus tends to reduce itself to a regional leader,

primarily oriented toward land combat, fighting, ultimately unsuccessfully, on

two fronts against a coalition of states combining sea and land power. The

maritime leader of the winning coalition emerges from the global war as the

system's leading military-political and economic power, thanks in part to the

economic resources generated by the previous innovation surge that have paid

for the sinews of global war. One of the benefits ofvictorious global war participation is a newly acquired

monopoly in the possession of capabilities of global reach. The term "global" as used 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 Global

Politics, 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 Global

Struggle, 1490-1990. (Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 1994); and Karen A. Rasler and William

R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping ofthe Global Powers. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989),

among other places.
104 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

capabilities of global reach have been, and continue to be, blue water navies. At

the end of the global war, then, a new global order can be created because one

state possesses a technological and naval edge over its potential opponents.

Another benefit of winning a global war is the greatly enhanced probability

ofa second surge ofradical economic innovation. By extending the leader's edge

even further, the several decades immediately after the conclusion of the global

war tend to be the most opportune period for imposing some semblance of

policy management and order. But just as technological innovation tends to be

spatially and temporally concentrated, it also tends eventually to diffuse and move

on to more propitious centers. Diffusion means some competitors are likely to

catch up to the incumbent leader. Shifts in the locus of innovation mean that

new leaders are likely to emerge.

As a consequence, the global system has developed a cycle ofrising and falling

leadership, buoyed by a pair of innovation waves and highly uneven economic

growth, and punctuated by primitive and bloody leadership selection process.

The pattern is one of a surge of radical economic innovation and the development of a new foundation for economic leadership, followed by global war and

a reconcentration of naval capabilities, followed by a period of the global

preeminence ofa single state and a second surge in radical economic innovation,

followed by a period of deconcentration in economic and naval leadership until

a new wave of long-term economic growth establishes the circumstances for

repeating the cycle.

Considerations of space and time permit only a cursory outline ofleadership

long cycle theory. Suffice it to say that a fair amount of empirical support has

been generated for this perspective. Modelski and Thompson develop and

examine a five hundred year series on the distribution of naval power and found

the five predicted cycles of naval leadership (Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain

I, Britain II, and the United States). Rasler and Thompson develop and contrast

five hundred year series on the distribution of army and naval power and

documents the pattern ofpartially dissynchronized cycles of land and sea power

concentration and their relationship to global war. In addition, the theoretical

and quantitative relationships among leading sector economic growth rates,

economic leadership, naval leadership, and global war are predicted and confirmed in Rasler and Thompson. Modelski and Thompson develop empirical

series 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 ofthe Global Powers. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

George Modelski and William R. Thompson Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of

Global Economics and Politics. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995).
Thompson 105

document the existence and timing ofpaired innovation waves that extend back

to tenth century China. The coevolving relationships among innovation waves,

global war, and naval power concentration are also predicted and documented

in Modelski and Thompson.

The point of this brief overview of recent research in world politics is to

suggest that powerful theoretical arguments and empirical evidence exist to

demonstrate the salience and centrality of sea power not only to the dynamics

ofworld politics, but also to long-term economic growth and a variety of other

topics. Comparative naval history is not merely interesting to its devotees; it is also critical (or at least has the potential to be critical) to an understanding of

basic political and economic processes as they have evolved over the last

millennium. If the long cycle perspective has the story right, comparative naval

history should not be simply a sideshow speciality within the larger undertakings

ofmilitary and diplomatic history. Questions ofnaval leadership and its exercise,

as well as the opposition to it, represent a respectable proportion ofthe dynamics

of world order and disorder. These are questions that students of comparative

naval history are well equipped to address.

I appreciate that everyone has not yet warmly embraced the long cycle

perspective and its arguments. However, there is a second set of arguments that

have a longer pedigree and yet advance similar or overlapping contentions to

those found in the long cycle literature. I refer to the full-fledged, thalassological

arguments of classical geopolitics that focus on the differentiation and tensions

between maritime (sea) and continental (land) powers. While the long cycle

perspective is restricted to the past one thousand years, classical geopolitics has

an even longer temporal scope. The suggestion that I wish to make in this regard

is that students ofcomparative naval history should be addressing the validity of

these thalassological arguments more often than they do. They deserve to be

addressed with greater frequency than they are not merely because they are about

navies or because they, by the nature of their arguments, give navies and their

histories great importance. These reasons are not to be dismissed as trivial but

the major reason classical geopolitics deserves greater attention is that there is considerable explanatory potential in their arguments. There is also considerable

face validity to their arguments. Yet, somehow, they have been largely shunted

aside in the late twentieth century to make room for more fashionable topics.

The question is whether some ofthe more fashionable approaches to accounting

for human behavior possess as much explanatory potential as old-fashioned

geopolitical contentions.

That is indeed a question. The suggestion here is not that we should adopt

geopolitical lenses because they impart received wisdom. Rather, the geopolitical arguments deserve more attention from students ofcomparative naval history

21 Ibid.
106 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

because the arguments are interesting and focused on important issues ofconcern

to naval history. Students of comparative naval history also have considerable

expertise on naval matters that is essential to assessing the value and liabilities of

geopolitical propositions. If they also encourage students of comparative naval

history to broaden their perspective to encompass more territorially-based

phenomena (in order to compare sea and land power), so much the better.

Ofcourse, it is one thing to say that we should pay more attention to classical

geopolitical arguments. It is quite another to specify just what the arguments are about and what needs to be done. Toward this end, I have assembled fifty-two

geopolitical propositions of the thalassological persuasion from a fairly recent

literature. The inventory is not meant to exhaust the potential set ofpropositions

that deserve attention. On the contrary, the fifty-two listed below were

brought together quite quickly to illustrate the ready availability ofstrong claims

about how sea power works and what influence it has over other processes.

The propositions tend to fall into one of three general categories. The first

one concerns strategic policy orientations, how they are adopted, and what

conditions favor adopting maritime versus continental vantage points. The

second set focus on the domestic implications of maritime orientations. Strong

claims are made linking basic regime and societal types as derivatives of

geopolitical orientations. The third set of propositions are focused on how

maritime and continental powers fight one another and why continental powers

tend to lose.

No claim is made that these fifty-two propositions are all likely to be equally

supported by historical evidence. Some, no doubt, are too extreme while others

may be applicable only to limited periods oftime. A few ofthe propositions may

even contradict others in the inventory. But that is precisely the point. We do

not know how consistent or well supported these generalizations are or where

they do and do not apply. We should know more about them for they are not

only very much about navies, they also link navies to the worlds in which they

operate in nonidiosyncratic ways. And presumably, that is one of the main

reasons why analysts engage themselves in comparative naval history.

The propositions are drawn exclusively from Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History

and Strategy of Maritime Empires. (New York: William Morrow, 1974) and Clark G. Reynolds, History

and the Sea: Essays on Maritime Strategies. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Peter

Padfield, Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigns in the Rise of the West, Vol. 1. (London: Roudedge

and 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 Advantage

of Navies in War. (New York: Free Press, 1992. Another source of maritime/continental power

distinctions 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 ofStructural 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).
Thompson 107

Thalassological Propositions: Strategic Policy Orientations

1

.

Two separate strategic policies recur throughout history as great maritime

and continental powers have confronted one another. Despite the transitions

from the oared galley to the sailing ship, to the steam and nuclear-driven ship

and notwithstanding the appearance of aircraft, missiles, and nuclear weapons,

seapower and land power have continued to be distinguishable. This strategic

dichotomy is far and away the most powerful single theoretical tool for any

attempt to understand how and why particular states, empires, and alliances have

functioned as security communities.

2. Every country has a principal environmental orientation to its security

concerns, either maritime or continental. Geographically conditioned traditions

and 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 sea power.

4. Unless the maritime element within a state or the maritime state itself

was actually or virtually isolated from domination by the state's continental ruling

factions or foreign enemies and was situated along important shipping lanes for

trade, it could not break away to evolve independendy as an ocean-oriented

state.5. Maritime powers base their national political and economic policies and

strategies chiefly on trade, overseas possessions or dependencies, and naval forces.

6. Maritime power implies diffused, commercial-industrial power. Successful maritime powers are allowed by geographical circumstances to concentrate

a relatively greater share of their resources on market-acquiring efforts.

7. The commercial drives of a maritime power make profit all-important

and once the cost of holding a colony exceeds its return, the tendency will be

to 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 the

nation's defensive structure, dominating the defensive policies of the home

government, maintaining a generally offensive stance, and operating mainly on

the blue water of the high seas. Maritime excellence can be developed and

sustained only if there is an absence of intense competition for scarce resources with the army. Consequently, maritime armies are usually small by contrast to

those of continental states, so that for large-scale land operations, the maritime

nation 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 maintaining

their economic wealth through overseas trade, have sought to enforce a reasonable state of international order on the high seas so that the economic

lifeblood for their merchant economy should not be interrupted or threatened.

Navies maintain that order by policing the trade routes.
108 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

10. Domination of the seas by a great maritime power in the cause of

economic and thus political stability has resulted in protracted periods ofseeming

peace. Each Pax has really been a naval peace, where supremacy at sea provides

a major deterrent against serious challenge by unfriendly opponents.

11. Continental powers rely chiefly upon the produce of the national

homeland and whatever political or economic advantage they can gain from

their neighbors.

12. Continental powers have depended upon overland communications for

their economic wealth and upon large armies and fortifications for their political

and military security. Continental armies are usually defensive in character. The

military history of modern continental Europe has been written largely in terms

of armed frontier quarrels. Wars over disputed borderlands and improved

security have been the rule. Attempts at outright permanent conquest of

neighboring great powers have been the exception and invariably unsuccessful

over the long-term.

13. For continental powers, the army (and lately, in combination with the

land-based air force) has been the main strategic arm of the nation's defense. Its navy usually maintains a defensive strategic stance.

14. The attempts of continental powers to operate navies has been frustrated

not only by geographic limitations but by related political, cultural and social

considerations. Decision makers, preoccupied with defending the status quo at home and preserving their government from internal upheaval and external

attack, have little appreciation for overseas enterprises and tend to be too rigid

to adopt the techniques and innovations of the maritime powers. Investments

are made primarily in the army. The navy is subordinated to continental

objectives and assigned army transport and commerce raiding missions.

15. When continental powers have attempted to create a maritime empire

replete with a navy, the navy soon discovers itself outside the mainstream of

internal politics and national life, and eventually manipulated into virtual

extinction by dominant, army-supported factions.

Domestic Structure and Implications

16. Maritime powers, in comparison to continental powers, are more politically and religiously liberal, economically competitive and wealthy, technologically innovative and advanced, industrially sophisticated, socially cosmopolitan

and diversified, intellectually creative, and thus culturally dynamic. As such, the

relative progressiveness of peoples with close physical proximity to the sea has

been a major element not only in the naval experience of each such people but

for civilization as a whole. It is not necessarily the sole determining force but

rather one important catalyst for change and growth.

17. Maritime supremacies all evolved into catalysts of change, in relative

contrast to continental counterparts, as explorers of physical and intellectual
Thompson 109

worlds. They developed maritime industries, navigational techniques and engineering sciences with which to utilize the sea and thereby stimulated a genuinely high level of technology and industry.

18. Maritime insularity has been a key ingredient in intellectual ferment, the

growth of applied technology and the fostering of democracy. If a maritime

population can rely upon a formidable navy operating literally out of sight of

their homeland to insure insularity, they can ignore such culturally inhibiting

forces as military frontiers and forts, military strongmen and despots, standing

alliances, frequent invasions and wars, and the whole mosaic of problems

involved in counter-attacking, defeating, occupying, and reconstructing an

enemy nation.

19. The growth of the merchant class has been more rapid and pronounced

in countries that depend on overseas trade. Continental states have taken decades

longer than their maritime counterparts to bridge or close the great gap between

aristocracy and peasants.

20. Land power implies concentrated central power.

21. Continental powers are based on conquest and must therefore hold

conquered people by armed force and suppress centrifugal tendencies. The

stronger the centrifugal tendencies, the greater the repression that will be used.

Maritime powers are not subject to the same compulsions principally because

their sources ofstrength are diffused and flow upwards from commercial groups

and corporations, not downwards by dictation. In addition, the colonies of a maritime power, whether overseas settlements in the historic sense or overseas corporations in the modern sense, are separated one from another and from the

mother country and there is not the same need for a powerful central control.

22. The stability, loyalty, and trustworthiness of overseas colonies and

dependencies are directly proportional to the strength of the mother navy.

23. It is not the forms of society and government which help to determine

whether a nation will become a successful sea power, but the reverse: more open

forms of society and government are more likely to develop in maritime power

states. 24. Continental powers are trapped in economic straitjackets from which

there is no escape, dependent on maritime competitors for manufactured goods

and foreign bankers, businessmen, and shipping to manage large economic

affairs.

25. A continental power cannot become an efficient industrial power unless

it changes itself into a maritime power. If it does so, its forms of government

and society will also change.

26. A continental power cannot build its industrial base in the same way as a maritime power without freeing its subject population to become market-acquiring commercial agents, thus increasing their centrifugal tendencies and

increasing the need for central control.
110 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

27. If the tensions between central and diffused control result in the breakup

of the continental power, it loses its formidable strength; if they result in the

victory ofthe market-acquiring groups, the state changes its nature and becomes

a maritime power itself; if they result in a victory for central control, the

market-acquiring tendencies are suppressed and neither industry nor commerce

will be efficient.

28. The social system of a maritime power is homogeneous, working

upwards from each individual within it, a dynamic whole in which the successful

rise, the unsuccessful fall. A continental power, by contrast, is based on central

control, hence devolved rights and duties which are the reverse ofthe sea power's

dynamic.

29. The differences between maritime and continental powers are most

marked when the power is on the upward slope ofits cycle. Developing maritime

powers are characterized by very high social mobility and a slackening of

constraints such as guild ties, while developing continental powers are marked

by rigid social orders. The decline of maritime powers is accompanied by social

ossification, the decline of continental powers is characterized by tendencies

toward greater social movement. If the decline is catastrophic, the movement

will be revolutionary.

30. Due to a mixture oforganizational emphasis on individualism, discipline,

and insulation from domestic politics, navies have usually been among the least

political and most stable of institutions in maritime nations. Naval officers, due

to their technical orientations, inexperience in commanding large numbers of

men, and infrequent contact with governmental organizations, have tended to

remain aloof from politics or to adopt a seemingly safer, conservative approach

to politics.

31. Agriculturally (and later industrially) based, continental powers have

depended mostly on the mobilizing, disciplining, and administration of large

armies for defense and the effect has been a general tendency toward

authoritarian government. Given the sprawling landmass ofthe continental state, a strong authoritarian government is the primary requirement for manning and

maintaining a large standing army and fixed fortifications for external security.

32. With creativity constrained to political utility, the cultures of continental

powers are generally bland and backward. Philosophy, art, science, and technology 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 is happening 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
Thompson 111

interconnection, organization, and purposeful application of the warmaking

potential of a coalition.

35. Maritime and continental powers often have had great difficulties in

reaching the enemy's center of strategic gravity for the purpose of forcing a favorable decision. Since maritime powers typically can be beaten only at sea and continental power can be beaten only on land, struggles between maritime

and continental states tend towards stalemate.

36. In major conflicts between maritime and continental powers or coalitions, each side must pursue a mixed strategy embracing both land and sea elements. These conflicts develop into contests to determine which side is better

able to translate its original, environmentally specific, comparative advantage

into success in the environment favored by the enemy.

37. The offensive is the stronger form of combat at sea because 1) an

opponent has practically unlimited possibilities for evading a defender's forces

and falling by surprise on some part of the defender's commitment and 2) the

inventory of capital ships is relatively small and, therefore, sinking one or more

of them tends to be an event of unusual strategic significance.

38. Continental powers can win wars against maritime powers if they are able to deny a tolerable level ofsea control to their maritime-dependent enemies.

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

40. Although maritime powers cannot win wars at sea against continental

powers, command of the relevant sea areas is an indispensable enabler for

eventual victory in war. 41 . Superior sea power typically functions to permit its owner to use time in

the search for advantage. Sea power allows the protraction ofconflict and tends

to set up a frustrated continental enemy to overreach on land.

42. Because of the unity of the oceans, the coalition superior at sea has the

advantage in waging a global war.

43. An important advantage in sea power translates into the ability to control

the geostrategic terms of engagement in war. Another advantage is greater time

to knit together the stronger coalition.

44. When frustrated by their inability to bring a conflict to an immediate

satisfactory conclusion, a continental power or a maritime power typically will

attempt what it can with the limited strategic reach ofthe preferred and available

instrument of excellence.

45. A continental power confronting a maritime power will: a) at sea, resort

to a raiding strategy, assaulting the maritime communications of the sea power

enemy while endeavoring to avoid the concentrated strength of its naval forces;

b) on land, attempt to eliminate continental allies of the maritime power so that

the maritime power-led coalition will be unable to wage war on land; c) invade

the maritime power.
112 Some Mild and Radical Observations on Desiderata

46. The only effective response to a determined guerre de course is the

expedient ofconvoying in order to oblige raiders to place themselves in the way

of maximum harm.

47. Maritime powers have had to seek to acquire land power; continental powers

have had to seek to acquire sea power. Different patterns ofrelative advantage have

manifested themselves in ancient and medieval times as contrasted with the modern

period. In the former era, great continental states persistendy acquired the sea power

necessary to defeat maritime foes. In the latter period, no sea-oriented coalition of

states has lost a conflict with a continental enemy.

48. Continental powers must contend with more friction than must maritime

powers. Physical and political geography impedes the extension, consolidation, and

exploitation of land power in ways that have no approximate parallels at sea. The

balance of advantage tends to shift to the maritime power in protracted conflict

because dominant land power generates countervailing opposition that can be

enlisted in a common antihegemonic cause by a preeminent maritime power.

49. Maritime powers are capable ofstrategic overreach at sea but continental

powers perennially overreach themselves even in their own preferred environment of combat. Preponderant land power is far more likely, in effect, to wreak

its own destruction than is preponderant sea power. Maritime powers are more

likely to make better use of their superiority at sea for the generation and

regeneration of landward fighting strength than continental powers have been

able to turn advantage on the continent into the power of decision at and from

the sea. 50. Continental power decision makers repeatedly have succumbed to the

temptation to believe that their army can defeat the grand strategy of the

opposing maritime power-led coalition.

51. Maritime powers and continental powers focus strategic confidence in

their traditional military instrument of excellence. An essentially maritime or

continental tradition more often than not leads to the misuse and underappreciation of the traditionally non-preferred military instrument. This underappreciation translates into less deterrent leverage than there should be for both sides of

a sea power-land power confrontations.

52. There are no trends extant—technological, economic, political, or

military—which suggest an iniminent dimunition in the strategic leverage of sea power. If the coming of the railroad, internal combustion engine, and missile,

nuclear, and space eras could not demote the strategic value ofsea power significantly, 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," paper

delivered to the Workshop on Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences (Seattle, Washington:

University ofWashington, May, 1994).
Thompson 113

short-term changes than they are in dealing with long-term changes. One reason

is that the social sciences have become increasingly ahistorical.

4 Another reason

is the marked preference for equilibrium-type models that assume simple and

stable worlds. Still another reason is the insistence that behavior be meditated

via human agents and usually in a rational choice format. It cannot be denied

that these attributes of contemporary social scientific inquiry facilitate parsimonious theory construction and quantitative analysis. But at what cost?

One of the costs is that social scientists tend to overcompartmentalize

themselves. Most economists deal only with "economics." Most political

scientists restrict themselves to "politics." Most geographers study only "geography." To be sure, there are notable exceptions that include the hybrid

specialties such as international political economy. Yet the problem is that causal

chains in the social sciences, and especially for long-term phenomena, are frequently 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 then

stop the analysis in hopes that some other analyst will pick up the rest ofthe trail. Sometimes that happens but usually it does not.

Thompson argues that long-term social science problems can be conceptualized as occurring within a matrix ofreciprocally interdependent subsystems:

politics, technology, economics, population, culture, and energy/environment.

Each subsystem has a past that creates path-dependent tendencies. Each

subsystem encompasses a network ofchanging causal relationships. Each subsystem is also linked to each of the other subsystems in variably asymmetric and

symmetrical ways. Thus, the parts are evolving over time and so is the whole.

The point is that we have done a relatively betterjob in deciphering how the

parts work than we have in mapping the interdependences and the evolution

or coevolution of the whole. This problem seems tailor made for comparative

naval historians. References to at least four of the main six subsystems (politics,

technology, economics, and energy/environment) are quite common in comparative naval history. They are fairly common because they are so inescapable

in unraveling questions pertaining to the development and employment ofnaval

forces. And who should be more sensitive to path-dependencies than historians?

What is needed, however, are more self-conscious, explicit, and generalizable

attempts to decipher how the parts fit together to make the whole. Therein lies

the rub. Many naval historians are unlikely to embrace such a task eagerly. When

they 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 characteristic

is very helpful in unraveling long-term processes ofchange.

25 William R. Thompson, "Ten Centuries of Global Political- Economic Coevolution," paper

delivered to the Workshop on Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences (Seattle, Washington:

University ofWashington, 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, it

is something that at least needs to be tried more often than it is. Comparative

naval historians might find that they are more used to dealing with the inherent

interdependent complexities than many other types of analysts.

Conclusion

In sum, there are indeed a number of gaps in our understanding of how the

world 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 single

navy'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 be

done narrowly or very broadly. The range runs from old-fashioned "saltwater

narratives" to the complexities of coevolving subsystems. The comparisons that

may 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. We

all have our own preferences on how to choose among these options. There

seems little point in arguing for the superiority of one approach over another as long as the comparative analysis ofnaval history, in all its possible manifestations,

continues to be attempted.
PART IV

General Naval History

Considerations On Writing A General

Naval History

N. A. M. Rodger

Asrecently as twenty years ago, it was possible for weighty scholarly opinion

to insist that naval history ought to be regarded as a branch of military

rather than maritime history, on the grounds that it dealt only with chronicles

of war service, and could not pretend to the broad sweep of more serious

historical subjects. We have come a long way since then, but it is still easy

enough to discern traces of the habits and attitudes which led the Royal Dutch

Academy of Sciences to give that verdict, and it seems clear that one ofthe most

urgent tasks of the naval historian today, perhaps the single most urgent task, is to reconnect his subject to the main stream ofhistorical scholarship. This means

not only demonstrating its relevance to other historians, but also incorporating

their insights into naval history. The two processes are of course mutually

supportive. The same applies to integrating the naval history ofBritain with that

of other countries; a full comparative history is a formidable undertaking, but

no 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 perfectly

possible to dismiss the problem ofwriting naval history as non-existent; to claim

that there is, or ought to be, nothing in naval history which is not present in the

work of all good historians. To a considerable extent this is true. The qualities

required of the naval historian are those required of all historians, and the

weaknesses of the subject correspond to a failure to attain the best professional

standards. All historians would agree on the importance of basic scholarship, of

* J.R. Bruijn, "Geschiedschrijving van de Marine", Tijdschrifi voor Zeegeschiedatis, XIII (1994), pp. 3-17

at p. 3, referring to Rapport over de huidige stand en toekomstige planning van net wetenschappelijk onderzoek

der Nederlandse geschiedenis, samengesteld door de Historisch- Wetenschappelijke Commissie der Koninklijke

Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Amsterdam, 1974).

2 But see, for example, Christian Buchet, La hue pour I'hpace Caraibe et lafacade atlantique de I'Amerique

Centrale et du Sud (1672- 1 763) (Paris: Librairie de 1' Inde 1991) 2 volumes; J.R. McNeill, Atlantic Empires

o/Fratice and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1 700- 1 763 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1985); Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard

University Press, 1971), and The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918 (Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 1987).
1 1 8 Writing A General Naval History

a thorough knowledge of the sources. At the level of the monograph this must

mean the documentary sources; at the level of synthesis, the printed authorities.

If naval historians were in the habit of thoroughly exploiting the archives, and

of reading all the relevant literature (including that in foreign languages), many

of the defects of the subject would disappear. It is equally obvious that the naval

historian, like any other historian, must deploy the intellectual skills to analyze

and explain his material, and the literary ability to make it intelligible and

interesting to the reader. It could be argued, therefore, that there is nothing

required for naval history but common professional standards.

If so, the common professional standards are not as common as they should

be. It is not necessary to be an advanced adherent of the Annates school to be

dissatisfied with narrative history unaccompanied by any serious attempt to

analyze causes and effects. Naval history is certainly one of the few historical

subjects in which there are authors who still think that success or failure can be

explained by references, overt or implied, to the innate superiority of national

character. 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 in

securing the independence of the United States, does not scruple to imply that

it was largely American ships which were responsible, and stops only just short

ofclaiming that the United States Navy was founded in 1775. This sort ofthing

easily explains the indifferent reputation ofnaval history among other historians,

and it would be possible to compile a considerable list ofbooks on naval history

published in recent years, not only in English, which make no serious attempt

to analyze cause and effect, still less to locate naval history in its national and

international contexts. If this is what naval history is like, then other historians

may argue with some plausibility that it is simply bad history.

It is not surprising that much of the bad naval history is written by authors

who lack a professional training as historians. Retired naval officers will naturally

tend 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 with

detachment. But this does not sufficiently explain the problem. History is,

happily, one of the few academic disciplines in which it is still possible for the

amateur to make serious contributions, and non-professional historians have

published and continue to publish many valuable studies which do authors and

subject credit. Professional historians, moreover, are themselves perfectly capable

ofnationalist bias, tunnel vision and professional incompetence, and these defects are 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 standing

as 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).
Rodger 119

Nothing succeeds like success, and what we need are some signal successes to

turn the tide.

It might be easier for naval historians to analyze cause and effect if the subject

had attracted more theorists. Always most popular among the pragmatic historians of the English-speaking world, naval history tends in practice to have

lacked convincing theoretical structures. Mahan rather implied than advanced

his own ideas, leaving his works to be pillaged by interested observers in search

ofjustification for well or less well-conceived policies. Such foreign theorists

as Wegener and Castex remained until recently untranslated and unread

outside their own countries. By far the most enduring influence has been Sir

Julian 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 political

scientist: he did not attempt to explain why navies exist, or how and why some

nations have supported successful navies, some unsuccessful ones, and some none

at all. For writers of his generation it could be more or less taken for granted that

the Navy had made the Empire, and the Empire had made Britain great. We

can see now that this line, if not necessarily wrong in itself, raises more questions

than it answers. If navies are necessary to empire, and empire is necessary to

greatness, the connections between them ought to be closer and clearer than

they actually were. Why did medieval England attempt at vast cost to sustain an

overseas empire without a navy, when Anglo-Saxon England had successfully

employed one? If the meaning of a navy is to be sought in connection with

empire, what was the point of Queen Elizabeth's navy? No-one now would

seriously argue that she had, or intended to have an overseas empire, but she

unquestionably had a powerful modern fleet. In this she contrasts sharply with

Philip II of Spain, who had the greatest oceanic empire in the world, but no

regular navy outside the Mediterranean. We might equally note that the sun

did not begin to set on the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century, by

which 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 College

Press, 1993).

Wolfgang Wegener, Die Seestrategie des Weltkrieges (Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1929); The Naval Strategy of

the 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 by

Eugenia 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 the

literature on naval strategy in all languages.

Julian S. Corbett, Some Priticiples of Maritime Strategy (London, 1911; Edited with an introduction by

Eric Grove (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986).

Even the Irish expedition was undertaken reluctantly, right at the end of her reign, long after the

Tudor fleet was well established. Excepting the Portuguese galleons, after the occupation of that country in 1580.
1 20 Writing A General Naval History

while the British were careless enough to lose two empires (in the Americas in

the 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, but

approximately in the interval between the dissolution of one empire and the

construction of another.

The Dutch and Portuguese maintained the longest-lived of all European

colonial empires with the feeblest ofEuropean navies. These are obvious puzzles,

largely ignored, which would be easier to explain if more attention had been

offered to matters of theory. Only now, with the appearance ofJan Glete's

Navies and Nations, have we acquired a coherent theoretical interpretation of

navies in terms of Continental ideas of staatenbildung. This is a rich and powerful

synthesis of international naval history, stiffened by a valuable theoretical

framework, which ought in time to advance the subject to a much higher

intellectual level. It is also one of the first books to confront a very obvious

problem in naval history. For the historian of the seventeenth to twentieth

centuries it is possible, indeed customary, to define the subject as the history of

an institution, the Navy. This is not realistic or satisfactory for any period, for

no navy of any nation has ever monopolized naval warfare, nor could any navy

in any period be regarded as an autonomous institution divorced from the state

and society which it represents. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

moreover, this interpretation is simply impossible, for in this period a state navy

was only one of a range of possibilities for making war at sea. Elizabeth I of

England had a permanent navy, recognizably of the modern type, but almost

none of its personnel were in her full-time service. Administrators, admirals,

officers and men were also private merchants, contractors, shipowners, shipmasters and seamen, investors and participants in privateering operations. The

Queen herself contributed her ships to privateering cruises as a private investor.

The Navy Royal was only one, admittedly important, section ofa national naval

capability most of which did not belong to the crown.

In Spain, the same was even more true. Philip II possessed as many as seven

navies, but all were regional forces belonging to constituent parts ofhis empire

11 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seameti, Pirates and the Anglo-American World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), applies French

Marxist thinking of thirty years ago to maritime social history, but is open to the same objection as it was; 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: Scolar

Press, 1992).

14 The galley fleets of the Crown of Aragon at Barcelona, the Viceroy of Sicily at Naples, and the

Crown of Castille at Seville; The Armada de Flandes at Brill (until 1577) and later Dunkirk, the Armada

de Barlovento in the Caribbean, the Armada del Mar del Sur in the Pacific, and the Portuguese fleet

(after 1580).
Rodger 121

rather than to the whole, and only one was capable of operations on the high

seas. None of them was much involved in the principal 'naval' activity of the

empire, the escorting of the annual plate fleets across the Atlantic, which was

undertaken by a squadron ofarmed merchantmen, the Guarda de Indias, provided

by a chartered merchant guild, the Casa de Contratacion in Seville, from the

proceeds of a compulsory levy on the value of cargoes shipped under escort.

15 Even this system was simplicity itself compared with Dutch naval forces in the

seventeenth century, which were provided by five independent provincial

admiralties, the States General on behalf of the Republic, two joint-stock

companies (the East and West India Companies), several insurance syndicates

and a great number ofprivateer owners. Yet these were the instruments which

raised the Dutch Republic to be the greatest naval power and the wealthiest

trading nation in the world, and to write of this rise as though only the State's

fleet were involved would be palpably absurd. So any comprehensive naval

history 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 good

historians, or prevents them from reaching the best standards. One answer is certainly that it is seen as a difficult as well as an unrewarding subject. Historians

who have attempted to write naval history—and perhaps even more, those who

have not—perceive particular difficulties in the subject. Firstly, naval history is above all technical history. In every era ofhistory, warships and sea fighting have

involved the most advanced and complex technologies of the period. It is impossible to understand or explain what went on at sea without coming to grips

with the technologies concerned. Historians are aware of this, and one suspects

that many ofthem are daunted by it. There are real obstacles, both practical and

psychological, to mastering high technologies, especially more or less completely

extinct technologies. On a psychological level, historians with no education in

mathematics or science (which includes a large majority of British historians,

myself among them) are easily frightened by high technology. It may not be as difficult as it looks, but it looks difficult enough, and those who have mastered,

say, navigation or naval architecture, do not always go out oftheir way to explain

themselves to the uninitiated. These, moreover, are current technologies with

living experts to write and speak about them; it is much harder to learn how to

handle a large ship under sail. Few historians will have the opportunity to get

much experience at sea, and in any case a modern sail-training ship differs so much from, say, a seventeenth or eighteenth-century warship that the experience 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 ofAmsterdam, ofthe Maze (at Rotterdam), ofZealand (at Middleburg), ofFriesland

(at Harlingen), and ofthe North Quarter (alternating every six months between Hoorn and Enkhuizen).

17 Jaap R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy ofthe Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, S.C.: University

of South Carolina Press, 1993).
122 Writing A General Naval History

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

1 r knowledge. 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 ofhistory, 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 ofnaval history: "The evolution ofa 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 of

the Cross-Channel Operation, 1066," in R. Allen Brown, ed., Anglo-Norman Studies VII: Proceedings of

the Battle Conference 1984. (Woodbridge: 1985), pp. 105-131; and Christine and Gerald Grainge, "The

Pevensey Expedition: Brilliantly Executed Plan or Near Disaster?," Mariner's Mirror, LXXIX (1993) pp. 261-273. Gillmor is painfully ignorant ofthe sea, the Grainges offer the yachtsman's view ofthe eleventh

century; both fall into strange errors.

19 Boris Rankov, "Reconstructing the Past: The Operation of the Trireme Reconstruction Otympias

in 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.
Rodger 123

encouraging signs of renaissance in the subject is a consciousness on both sides

of this divide that it needs to be bridged. It is too soon to say that it has

disappeared, but for the good ofthe subject it ought to, and anyone who tackles

naval history has got to be prepared to link the technical and the general. It is encouraging that so much good technical history about ships and weapons has

been published in recent years, advancing our knowledge enormously, and

making it possible for the technically illiterate to acquire the essentials of the

subject. The importance of mastering the technology of naval history runs well

beyond naval history itself. Only when naval historians have mastered this

essential aspect of their subject will they be properly equipped to convey its importance to non-specialists. For want of technical literacy, historians of other

disciplines can and do fall into serious errors in treating ofmaritime affairs, and

it is the business of the naval historian to be able to correct them.

There is, however, much more to writing any overview ofnaval history than

integrating and explaining complex technologies. Naval history of its nature

touches on many areas ofnational history which are commonly studied separately. Anyone who wants to write the history ofa navy, still more the naval history

ofa 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 to

study the social history of seafaring in ignorance of social history at large. So

much is obvious, but the converse is true as well, and we are still some way from

demonstrating to social historians that their subject is incomplete so long as it excludes one ofthe largest and most distinctive occupations. Economic, colonial

and imperial historians, keenly interested in the linked debates on how and why

the European empires rose and fell, and to whose profit, cannot and do not

ignore the role of sea power, but it is characteristic and deplorable that their

work has not much influenced naval historians. Those who should be most

interested in the question of what navies achieved and how, are not always

familiar with the theories of, for instance, Frederic Lane or Niels Steensgaard.

A considerable body of research now exists on the relations of government

economic and fiscal policy, economic growth, foreign trade and naval power,

but it has not yet been integrated into naval history as it should. Among the

economic 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 Historical Review, 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's

Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648- 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Historians

of trades-unions or radical social movements may not be able to tell us everything about life at sea, but

they 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.
124 Writing A General Naval History

long been a matter of debate. One ofthe critical issues is the role of capital: how

much was needed, when, and where, and whence did it come? It seems to be

clear that the colonial trades, especially from the West and East Indies, were

crucial generators of liquid capital for investment elsewhere. It is less clear that

the availability of this capital was essential to industrial development, but it certainly supplied the credit structure which supported the British war effort.

This credit structure has itself been identified by James C.Riley as one of the

foundations of British superiority over France, and his (admittedly technical)

works on the operation of international capital markets ought to be invoked

early in any discussion of the ingredients of naval power. There is much still to

debate, but the relevance of colonial trade and forms of government debt to sea power are obvious, and naval historians should be participating fully in the

discussion. 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 the

significance ofnaval history to their work. A good case can be made that chronic

indebtedness resulting from unsustainable naval expansion was the fundamental

(as distinct from precipitating) factor in the decline of the Dutch in the early

eighteenth 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 often

noticed.

Similar comments might be made of political history. Though naval strength

has been a prominent political issue in Britain since the fourteenth century at

latest, naval history still tends to shy away from discussing politics, without which

there is no possibility of explaining the formation of naval policy and strategy,

and indeed many other aspects ofnaval history. We cannot, for example, analyze

the reputation of Lord Howe before and after the battle of the 1st June 1794

without recalling that he was a survivor of a generation of senior officers who

had split the fleet on political lines, that as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1788

his handling of promotions had aroused such fury that attempts were made to

impeach him, and that as commander-in-chief in 1790 he had been extremely

unpopular. It is equally unrealistic to describe the course of high politics with

no reference to the Navy at many critical points in history, such as the installation

of Edward IV, the rise and fall of the English republic, and the revolution of

1688. The illusion is widespread that the sea has insulated Britain from invasion.

In fact English or Scottish regimes have been overthrown by seaborne invasions

at 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 Economic

and Financial Toll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

26 N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life ofJohn Montagu, Fourth Earl ofSandwich 1718-1792 (New

York: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp. 254-255 and 308-309.

27 In 1139, 1153, 1326, 1332, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688.
Rodger 125

successful landings ofmajor forces. These figures take no account oflesser raids

and landings, they ignore all expeditions which did not succeed in putting troops

ashore, and they do not include landings in Ireland. This does not altogether

justify political historians in overlooking the threat of invasion, nor naval

historians in overlooking the fact of it. In more recent periods when enemy

landings have been avoided, naval policy has continued to be a central theme in

high politics, and an indispensable study for anyone interested in explaining the course of naval policy. It is impossible to explain British naval strength in the

eighteenth century, for example, without understanding why the varied

ideologies of Whigs and Tories, Havoverians and Jacobites, King's Friends and

Patriots, led all ofthem for different reasons to support a strong navy. Conversely,

historians of political ideas can hardly describe their subject fully without

reference to national defence, always the most expensive and difficult of any

government's responsibilities.

Similar comments could be made about a wide range of historical specialties

which need to be integrated with naval history. Industrial history cannot be

written without reference to the dockyards, until recently the largest and most

complex industrial enterprises in the world, and the first to adopt machine tools.

There is a crucial relationship, still very ill-explored, between the development

of the blast-furnace and of iron founding technology, and the adoption of iron

guns at sea. Architectural history requires reference to dockyard buildings,

pioneers in several building and civil engineering techniques, notably wide-span

iron roofs. The religious history ofthe Navy is important not only as an aspect

ofreligious and social history in general, but for its impact on many other aspects

of naval affairs. It is, for instance, quite unrealistic to discuss the Royal Navy's

failure to profit from Arthur Pollen's revolutionary fire-control equipment,

without mentioning that Pollen belonged to a prominent Roman Catholic

family in an age when most naval officers were strongly anti-Catholic. Even

sartorial history ought to notice that most men and many women throughout

the world are now dressed as eighteenth-century sailors. In all these and many

other areas, the naval historian has to be aware of what other historians are writing if he is to do justice to his own subject, and explain its importance to

others. To do so he has to integrate a wide range ofknowledge. It goes without

saying 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 such

a 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 Sailing

Navy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989) pp. 114-117 & 230-233.

Jon T. Sumida, In Defettce ofNaval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy 1889-1914

(Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989).
1 26 Writing A General Naval History

skills, so it is not surprising that successful naval histories which take this approach

are very rare.

It could even be argued that successful navies and successful naval historians

both possess a high level of managerial skill. Navies do not simply depend on

one or two complex technologies; they have to combine a very wide range of

skills and trades, ashore and afloat, into an efficient whole. Failure in any one of

these, or failure to connect them all into an effective machine, will nullify any

amount of excellence in the individual parts. For the historian the problem is equally in making a coherent narrative out ofso wide a range ofmaterial. Clearly

naval history is not the totality of national history, yet it bears more or less on a large fraction ofthat totality. To make the necessary connections, to demonstrate

the relevance of naval to national history and vice versa, is not easy. It demands

considerable organizational and literary discipline to keep so wide a range and

so large a volume of material under control.

For the British historian, moreover, the very concept of national history

involves subtleties and complications which have not yet been much recognized

in naval history. In countries which have been thoroughly overtaken by the idea

of the nation-state, it is possible (though not necessarily helpful) for historians

to assume that nation and state are identical. In Britain, a survivor of the older

ideal of the supranational monarchy, the naval historian has to decide whose

naval history he is writing. Even in the modern era, and a fortiori in a history

which reaches back into the Dark Ages, it is no longer acceptable to treat Britain

and England as equivalent terms. A naval history of Britain has to be a naval

history of its constituent parts, a Scottish, Irish and Welsh naval history as well

as an English one. Moreover it is not possible to study the naval history of the

British Isles, especially in the early Middle Ages, without being struck by the

conviction that there never was anything inevitable about a unitary state ofGreat

Britain, dominated by England. Such a state existed in embryo in the tenth

century, and it collapsed as a result of foreign invasion, leaving the British Isles

partitioned, and England incorporated into two foreign empires in succession;

first the Danish, then the Norman-Angevin. It was English naval failure which

led to this conquest and collapse, and it was English naval weakness which kept

the British Isles divided for seven hundred years.

National histories and naval history are aspects ofone another; to write naval

history purely in English terms is not merely inadequate but impossible. This

fact might be better understood if the naval history ofthe Middle Ages had been

attempted before. In fact the last attempt at a comprehensive and scholarly naval

history of even a part of the period was published in 1847. As a result, a period

in which three successive English overseas empires rose and fell, and in which

much 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. It has very little before 1066 and nothing after 1422.
Rodger 127

foreign empires—empires necessarily based on sea power, or at least sea communications—has been ignored by naval historians, and treated by other

historians virtually without any reference to the sea. Inadequate as much existing

naval history is, the historian of, say, the eighteenth century can hardly ignore

it altogether. The medieval historian can, and does. Here the professional

challenge to the naval historian is to master the sources for a period which is apt

to appear formidable to the beginner. At bottom the difficulty is much the same

as that of technical history; it is no harder to master medieval Latin hands than

it is to understand the workings ofa steam engine or a radar set, and any scholar

of common intelligence and application ought to be capable of making a useful

contribution to the subject. The prize is a valuable one, for it is not only medieval

history which will appear in a very different light when we have studied the

period 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 ofanachronistic nationalism. It is not

easy for even the least sensitive scholar to write of 'English' naval history in a period 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 when

it makes better sense to think in terms of national history, for there can be no

history less intelligible in narrowly nationalistic terms than the history ofthe sea. Naval history, like all maritime history, is ofits essence the history ofinteraction

between peoples. It cannot be written properly from the records ofone country

alone, or from books in only one language. Yet in actual practice it is uncommon

to read a work of naval history whose author has really attempted to assimilate

the history of other navies or other countries, let alone read works on his own

country's history written in foreign languages, or explored foreign archives.

When the attempt is made it sometimes inspires the thought that few things

cross frontiers more slowly than a reading list. It is impossible to write any general

naval history ofBritain without being able to read the common scholarly tongues

of Europe. Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are evidently indispensable; Catalan, Arabic, Turkish, Russian and the Scandinavian

languages highly desirable, to which the historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will want to add Chinese andJapanese. There are not many naval

historians who can deploy all these, certainly not myself, and yet we have got

to 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 broad

history 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 Sea included ships of Bayonne, Genoa, Bordeaux and the Western Isles, besides many ports in England,

Wales and Ireland.
1 28 Writing A General Naval History

to have the ability, and of course the time, to read very widely, in many

languages. He must have access to foreign archives and foreign books. He needs

the organizational and literary skills to assimilate and present the fruits of his

research. In naval history it almost always is "he", which perhaps is one reason why so few authors match, or even approach, these demands. What is needed

is not only some ability and experience, but good fortune as well. Like the good

general, the good historian needs luck, the luck of time and money for many

years' work, and such luck is not given to many scholars inside or outside

universities these days. Above all, he needs a certain sober boldness. Surveying

with well-informed and realistic eye the difficulties of the undertaking, and the

formidable range and depth of skills required to meet it, he will appreciate just

how far his own abilities fall short of the ideal. Yet if every scholar is deterred

by the difficulties, the task will never be undertaken. Somebody has to be

prepared 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 the

merit of stimulating other and better scholars to achieve it.
Toward a "New" Naval History

Dennis E. Showaiter

Tospeak ofnaval history as becalmed may be an exaggeration. Dr. Nicholas

Rodger, however, certainly describes the need for a leadsman in the bow

as the discipline navigates shoal 'waters. For three decades the "new military

history" has dominated land-warfare studies to a point where the approach has

become quite middle-aged. Students of air power, with some notable exceptions, have correspondingly accepted a broader view of their subject. Dr.

Rodger, on the other hand, demonstrates trenchantly and cogently that "new

naval history" remains an unfortunate oxymoron.

In explaining the problem ofwriting naval history, Rodger focusses on naval

historians. He describes authors who use national characteristics to explain

operational performance, who either lack technical knowledge or take

antiquarians' approaches to details ofwarship design and weapons systems, who

treat their subject in isolation from the social, economic, and even architectural

factors that provide the matrices ofnaval warfare. His final challenge, calling for

at least reading knowledge ofover a dozen languages, will surely daunt the most

ambitious of scholars. It is no less legitimate for being intimidating.

It is possible as well to approach the problem of writing naval history in a

structural context. Two principal factors have combined to create the pattern

established in Rodger's essay. The first is ethnic. Modern naval history is not

merely Anglophone; it is Anglocentric. Its dominant practitioners are either

British by heritage or adoption, or U.S. scholars influenced by British frames of

reference. Naval histories of other countries, France, Japan, Italy, tend to be

written on British models. Germany offers a significant exception, but the

approach associated with scholars like Volker Berghahn and Wilhelm Deist has

been seriously challenged in recent years, and by no means dominated the subject

even 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 thinkers

who 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 Air

War 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).
1 30 Toward a "New" Naval History

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 questions

of sea power as any admiral of the "Queen's Navee." In a broader context the

geopolitical conception of a Eurasian "heartland" whose control is the key to

world power found litde resonance among naval scholars even during its heyday

in the period between the World Wars. The subsequent experiences of Nazi

Germany and the former USSR are frequently cited as prima facie evidence of

the model's inadequacy in practical terms.

The general acceptance of the British approach to naval history owes much

to British naval successes. Whatever its specific ups and downs between the

Dutch Wars and Napoleon's final exile, the Royal Navy in 1815 bestrode the

world like a colossus. Frederick the Great was as accurate as he was cynical in

asserting that history is written by winners. Doctrine tends as well to be

established either in imitation of or reaction to the last war's victors. TheJeune

Ecole ofthe late nineteenth century had principled adherents. Yet even in France,

its country of origin, high-tech guerre de course was widely regarded as a solution

faute de mieux.

The Royal Navy's physical ascendancy, moreover, overlapped the emergence

of history as an academic discipline. Scholars seeking topics found rich sources

in the records of one ofthe era's most heavily-bureaucratized institutions. They

also found ready to hand a theoretical debate that has continued ever since to

shape naval history. Medieval England had no naval strategy to speak of,

especially compared to the state's conduct ofland warfare. Neither did Scotland.

Far from being a protection, the English Channel was a highway for at least

sixteen major invasions between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Queen

Elizabeth's navy was a defensive force, not an instrument ofpower projection.

Beginning in the mid-1 600s, however, English political and naval planners

began integrating four points previously considered in isolation into a single

concept. Continental Europe was developing an essentially stable balance of

power sustained by standing armies. Such armies were viewed across the channel

as expensive and threatening to the "liberties ofEnglishmen." Nor could they

3 Philip A. Crowl, "Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian," in Peter Paret, ed., Makers ofModem

Strategyfrom 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: Fontana

paperback, 1984), pp. 41-86. The chapter on geopolitics in Edward M. Earle, ed., Makers of Modem

Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943) was omitted entirely from the revised edition of

1986, edited by Peter Paret.

5 Volkmar Bueb, Die "Junge Schule" derfranzbsischen Marine.. Strategic und Politik 1875-1900, (Boppard

am 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 ofthe 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).
Showalter 131

win decisive victories against their essentially-similar opponents. Therefore

England could best serve her own and Europe's interests by participating in

coalitions against over-ambitious states like the France of Louis XIV. Such

participation would best involve disrupting the enemy's maritime trade—an

increasingly-important point in the Age of Mercantilism—and using sea power

as a force multiplier for the state's limited land forces. Raids and "descents" were

almost as important to this strategy of "alliance, encirclement, and attrition" as the 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 its success depended on continental allies willing to accept—or unable to avoid

the military effort necessary to complement the effect ofBritain's wooden walls.

But in a context of "perfect states," whose rulers owed allegiance neither

upwards nor downwards and were able to conduct foreign policy in what

amounted to a vacuum, Britain's self-defined role as paymaster and purveyor to

a series of Grand Alliances gave the blue-water strategy a credibility it arguably

lost in the middle third of the nineteenth century when conscript armies and

comprehensive railroad systems diminished the capacity of Britain to intervene

militarily in Europe and the objective value of that intervention. At the same

time the absence of any serious rival altered the Royal Navy's actual role from

a cutting-edge instrument of great-power politics to something prefiguring

Starfleet in the popular television series Star Trek: The Next Generation: a police

force exercising gunboat diplomacy, often in the name of an international

community perfectly willing to shelter beneath the British umbrella.

The Royal Navy and its historians were saved from this seemingly-inglorious

fate by Alfred Thayer Mahan. To the concept of blue-water strategy Mahan

grafted that ofthe decisive battle—a combination making his theories particularly

attractive to Britain's embryonic maritime rivals, Germany and the U.S. Instead

ofplaying the British game ofattrition, a stacked deck at the turn ofthe century

in view ofBritain's geostrategic position, the rising maritime powers could aim

for a decisive action, overthrowing their prospective adversaries in a single

afternoon in the fashion ofNapoleon 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-water

Strategy 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" in Paul 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 "The

World 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), is a solid case study of this development.
132 Toward a "New" Naval History

holdings were minuscule nevertheless concentrated on developing a battle fleet

able to challenge all comers, no matter how unlikely the combinations.

The result has been an intellectual are" perdue process: an acceptance of sea power as a "thing in itself' by other states as the originator of the concept

increasingly found itselflocked into a continental commitment. The Royal Navy

ofWorld War II waged, again^awte de mieux, a brown-water, coastal war against

its principal enemy while Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine projected the construetion of a world-striding battle fleet in its Z-Plan. On the other side of the

globe, Japan and the U.S. fought a naval war in Mahanian terms—a strategic

version ofart imitating life. Even the USSR succumbed eventually to the lure

of an ocean-going navy

afata morgana whose pursuit contributed its fair share

to the Soviet system's eventual economic collapse.

U.S. scholars and strategists in the course ofthe twentieth century have found

the original concept of the blue-water doctrine at least as attractive as its Mahanian modifications. In global terms the U.S. is a geostrategic island, and

for most of this century its navy has been used as a power-projection force in

much the way the Royal Navy was from the late seventeenth to the early

nineteenth centuries. For the U.S., World War I was a "descent" in the classic

British model of a commitment not involving the state's total resources,

undertaken in the context ofan alliance whose other members had already done

most 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 the

Austrian Empire and Britain substituting for the Netherlands. In the Pacific, the

U.S. Navy evolved into a major combined-arms force, controlling its own land

and air forces. At the same time, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa its fiercest battles

were fought to support ground operations—a fact highlighted by Admiral

Raymond Spruance's decision to eschew seeking a Mahanian victory at the

Battle 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 (New

York: W.W. Norton, 1991); and Jost DiilfFer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine: Reichspolitik und Flottenbau 1920 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 ImperialJapanese Navy, 1941-1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 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 ofthe Blue Water Strategy,"

unpublished ms.

15 The best discussion of this controversial issue remains Thomas B. Bucll, The Quiet Warrior: A

Biography ofAdmiral Raymond A. Spruance (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), pp. 257 ff.
Showalter 133

role as the front line symbol and guarantor of American power, in the context

of a Soviet rival whose throwaway surface-ship designs harked strongly to the

Jeune Ecole.

British paradigms, in short, fit the U.S. Navy's missions and mentalite comfortably enough to discourage any systematic search for alternatives. Works like

Kenneth Hagan's This People's Navy, critiquing the "insular navy" model in

strategic contexts, remain not merely exceptions but anomalies. 17 To establish

the point that naval history and naval strategy have to date essentially been

defined by paradigms made in Britain is not to deny completely the validity of

those paradigms. Colin Gray, in a recent update of the blue-water thesis, makes

a compelling case for sea power as an instrument of leverage. It can transport resources to a specific theater of operations. It can protract a conflict and set its terms acting as a barrier to the physical occupation Gray accepts as the ultimate

arbiter of any war. This interpretation is a step away from Mahan, but would

have found vocal supporters in any Parliament after the Stuart Restoration. The

consequence ofthe position's strength, however, has been to discourage alternate

intellectual approaches to the practical questions ofsea power and the intellectual

problems of writing naval history.

This limitation in turn reinforces the second structural factor shaping the study

of naval history. Navies are the most self-referencing of armed forces, and can

possess a correspondingly powerful dynamic. Sparta's navy remained marginal

because its very existence threatened the balance of Spartan society. Warships

are communities in ways army or air force formations are not. In the Middle

Ages, sailors were a breed apart. Ship's officers and ordinary seamen shared a broad spectrum of bonds no landsman was seen as able to understand. In the

early modern era "tarpaulins" may have given way to "gentlemen" on quarterdecks, but the relationships remained. Not only warrant officers but forecastle

hands regularly followed "their" captains from commission to commission in

the Georgian navy.

The heritage of community endures even as larger fleets and bureaucratized

personnel 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 Violent

Peace, 1945-1962 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). Cf. Bradley F. Klein, "Hegemony and Strategic

Culture: American Power Projection and Alliance Defense Politics," Review ofInternational Studies, XIV

(April 1988), pp. 38-48.

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

1 ft #-* Colin Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power. The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War (New York: Free

Press, 1992), pp. 278 ff. 19 Caroline Falkner, "Sparta and the Sea: A History of Spartan Sea-Power C. 706-C.373 B.C.," PhD

Dissertation, University of Alberta, 1993.

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

South Carolina Press, 1993).
1 34 Toward a "New" Naval History

It endures not least because a warship's crew shares its fate in common. An

infantryman can find a convenient hiding place and report to whatever remains

of 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 his

place as a man among men—which is why, perhaps, crew morale in the Age of

Fighting Sail tended to collapse all at once rather than by degrees. Common

behavior is less shameful behavior. As much to the point, senior officers, even

the most senior, share identical risks. Tromp, Nelson, Beatty, Jellicoe—all rode

their flagships into battle. Not until World War II did it become possible, and

arguably preferable, for admirals to control operations from land-based communication centers. But if Karl Donitz and Chester Nimitz did not lead their

fleets in person, the same cannot be said for Spruance, Halsey, Sir Bruce Fraser,

and Gunther Liitgens. Nor did the new style of command receive universal

approbation. The disgruntled commander of a German destroyer flotilla in

Norway in 1943 grumbled that "we had hundreds ofadmirals on land, and only

„2l

one at sea. One result is that the problem of "abstraction" in writing military history

described byJohn Keegan has had significantly less impact on the conceptualizing

of operational naval history. When everyone is literally in the same boat, even

retrospective intellectual approaches are likely to be highly personal; and scholars

tend to take their cues from their sources. The particularization ofnaval history,

in other words, reflects the nature of naval combat.

A second reason for the self-referencing nature of navies is their developing

role as symbols ofthe states to which they belong. In its context Nicholas Rodger

shows the way by his statement that warships involve the most advanced and

complex technologies of their eras. The Athenian trireme, the eighteenth-century ship of the line, the modern super-carrier—each epitomizes the achievements of the cultures that produced them. Their names reflect a state's geography, its history, and the spiritual qualities it considers valuable. Warships

are indeed, in the words of Robert O'Connell, "sacred vessels" whose expendability not infrequently reflects moral as well as operational considerations. The

British Army could suffer 60,000 casualties in a single day, but Jellicoe could

have lost Britain's war in an afternoon. Given that context it is understandable

that much naval writing is not only national in focus, but reflects particular

national mythologies in ways military history does not. And icons are seldom

noted for humility.

Naval solipsism has been reinforced by a third factor: the emergence of

professionalism. Arguably as early as the seventeenth century, certainly by the

21 RolfJohannesson, 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 ofthe Battleship and the Rise ofthe U.S. Navy (Boulder:

Westview, 1991).
Showalter 1 35

eighteenth, navies began a steady process ofevolution away from the "seafaring"

model both socially and technically. As late as the Revolutionary/-Napoleonic

era the differences between a merchant sailor and a man o' war's man were

largely situational. By 1914, on the other hand, every major navy accepted the

premise that sailors and officers were best shaped by training rather than

experience. Navies correspondingly evolved as bureaucratic and military organizations, relating to other, similar organizations. Only recently has the process

of reintegrating navies into general maritime history recommenced.

A fourth point contributing to the self-referencing nature of naval writing is that navies themselves tend to be symmetrical, at least in general terms. This in

good part reflects the nature ofthe medium in which they operate. The world's

oceans imposed their own constraints on ship design, particularly before the

introduction of steam technology. The oared galleys that dominated the

Mediterranean for two millennia did not transplant well to the English Channel

or the North Sea. On the other hand the large and clumsy gunships constructed

by the northern maritime powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could

not operate effectively outside their own waters. The eventual result was the

development of the general purpose warship: a process of evolution beginning

with the Spanish and Portuguese galleons and culminating in the fleets of the

Revolutionary and Napoleonic era whose ship designs, from the humble cutters

and gun-brigs to the majestic three-deckers, were essentially similar. French

naval architects on the whole produced ships ofthe line individually better than

their British counterparts. The U.S., with a small navy, favored individual ships

powerful 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 sixteenth

century Asian and Middle Eastern states saw Europeans win an empire by guns

and sails. Within fifty years, however, Muslim flotillas of small, shallow-draft

vessels 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 to

construct a navy essentially different from those of its rivals. The Muslim states of Indonesia, for example, constructed ocean-going ships as western models as early as the 1560s, and were increasingly able to fight their European counterparts

on even terms. In the 1840s and 50s France experimented with alternate force

structures based on new combinations oftechnologies: shell guns, steam power,

23 See particularly John Hattendorf, ed., Ubi Sumus?: The State ofNaval and Maritime History (Newport:

Naval War College Press, 1994).

24 John F. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys. Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 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, Military

Revolution, pp. 105 ff.
1 36 Toward a "New" Naval History

and armor plate. Britain first reacted, then took the lead in these fields. Thomas

Jefferson's gunboats, the torpedo vessels ofFrance'sjeune Ecole, and the fast attack

craft that formed the backbone of Soviet Russia's surface fleet from the 1950s

to the 1970s each represented conscious efforts to establish a paradigm shift in

the definition of naval power. In each case the states involved ultimately

abandoned the effort as unprofitable. The balances between Britain and Germany 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 different

from its neighbors' by choice, as opposed to weakness—usually financial.

The symmetrical character of navies in turn encourages concentration on

details of tactics and technology. Nuances acquire special importance when like

engages like on land, in the air, and particularly at sea. Concentration on these

nuances correspondingly handicaps that search for a broader perspective Professor Rodger urges in his essay. The relative neglect of relevant primary sources

in naval history stressed by Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg exacerbates the

problem from a different angle. How much must scholars know before they can

responsibly consider writing comprehensive studies even ofparticular aspects of

this subject?

Navies do not exist in vacuums, even though their historians sometimes act

as if that were the case. Operationally they depend on bases. Even with modern

fleet trains and nuclear power, human and material factors limit the time warships

can spend at sea. Economically, navies continue to concentrate public resources

in a highly-visible fashion. Socially, navies both establish and expand parameters

even for individuals. Joining the Navy to see the world is a concept almost as attractive in the information-saturated 1990s as it was during the author's

midwestern adolescence four decades earlier.

Yet despite the comprehensive integration ofnaval forces into wider systems,

naval history tends to remain a thing in itself, written in paradigms structured

by nationalism and shaped by navies' self-referencing nature. Nicholas Rodger

cogently analyzes the ways individual historians can break their matrices. What

can be done to challenge the structural constraints described in the present essay?

A useful and obvious beginning involves encouraging a "new naval history" that

recognizes the pivotal military and moral place of navies in the states that create

and sustain them. This process is well under way. As yet, however, this form of

naval history is still at the maritime equivalent ofthe stage Allan Millett describes

as "struggling through the wire."

26 C.I. Hamilton, Anglo-Fretich Naval Rivalry 1840-1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

27 Spencer C. Tucker, TheJeffersonian Gunboat Navy (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina

Press, 1993), is a particularly stimulating reinterpretation ofthe first ofthese examples. Cf. Ray Walsen,

Frattce's Search for a Battle Fleet: Naval Policy and Naval Power (New York: Garland, 1992); and Robert

Herrick, Soviet Naval Theory and Policy: Gorshkov's Inheritance (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988).
Showalter 137

A parallel process involves taking advantage of navies* symmetry to establish

comparative models that cross political boundaries. Arthur Marder's work on

Anglo-Japanese naval connections comes readily to mind. The model established

by 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 and

place? What is the comparative fate of heretics? Does the "religion" fade away

slowly, 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 and

the Royal Navy, for example, seemed willing ifnot necessarily eager to abandon

the cult of the battleship by the 1920s.

28

Another approach to naval history as a concept involves determining and

balancing navies as institutions with navies as communities. Current emphasis

on evaluating navies in structural terms must not obscure the fact that a fleet is not merely an organization. Executives caught in mergers tend to look to their

own golden parachutes. This is a logical, perhaps a necessary, consequence of

modern industrial economies. It is also an absolute contrast to the ethos best

expressed in the words of Admiral Aubrey Fitch to the captain of the sinking

U.S.S. Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea: "Well, Ted, let's get the men

off."

The specific concept of naval community has broader societal implications as well. What Paul Kennedy calls a "ship's culture" creates general models of

behavior and attitude stressing group identity as well as group loyalty. Mavericks

are a greater irritant in a wardroom than an officers' mess, simply because they

are more difficult to avoid politely. To what extent does this culture persist even

in modern navies, where increasingly-high percentages of senior officers spend

increasingly little time afloat? The marginalization ofA.H. Pollen in Britain and

Hyman Rickover in the U.S. invite comparative analysis in this context.

Navies also offer a significant—and neglected—source of material to contemporary students of the problem of developing a consciousness of community in

increasingly entropic societies.

Thus far my proposals have been conventional—the kinds of things a promising graduate student might expect to hear from an advisor. A second

approach to writing general naval history involves establishing an alternative to

the "British" blue-water model that I have argued continues to dominate

thoughts 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 Hungerford

Pollen, 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 the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993).
1 38 Toward a "New" Naval History

even in an English context. It is ironic that medieval England maintained a continental position without a navy, but abandoned that strategy almost concurrently with developing a dominant batde fleet. Considered comparatively,

Britain's circumstances are unique. The differences between the naval experiences of Great Britain and the U.S. have already been discussed. Japan, the state

that most directly copied the Royal Navy, pursued at least since the 1890s a national strategy depending on the direct extension ofJapanese power onto the

Asian mainland. Japan's "blue water" enemy, the U.S., was acquired in a fit of strategic absent-mindedness, arguably by both sides. Until at least the early

1930s the potential adversaries' principal operational problem was getting close

enough to each other to fight a Mahanian battle. As late as 1943, when the rival

navies clashed off Guadalcanal, they did so at fingers' ends.

The dominant historical model of naval forces has involved choices. Sea

powers as a general rule have as well extensive land frontiers continental

commitments that cannot be avoided, that hugely expensive, and that are ultimately crucial to a system's survival in a way fleets are not. The Athenian

fleet depended ultimately on Athens's walls for its security and survival, and

Athens proved unable to maintain its position as a city fortress defending itself

passively against the armies ofits 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 been

Janus-faced, simultaneously looking outward to Africa, Asia and North America

and inward to Austria and Germany.

Nor have even the wealthiest and most cohesive states been able to sustain

simultaneously a dominant army and a preeminent navy. Balance-of-power

politics and, to paraphrase Paul Kennedy, "military overstretch" compelled hard

choices for democratic Athens, Imperial Germany, and Cold War America,

whose dual predominance was as fortuitous as it was temporary and as costly as

it was effective.

In this context a plausible approach to writing general naval history involves

addressing systematically and comparatively the problem ofchoice in state policy,

strategic planning, and force structures. Here the skills of the historian and the

political scientist might well converge, each building on the more specialized

work done in the earlier stages ofcreating a "new naval history." The synthesis

produced by this approach, will be unique in the discipline of military history

by being true syntheses, reflecting the networks ofcommon points of common

points 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 of

Consensual 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's

focus on structural consideration, the results may well resemble those in

mountaineering since the 1930s, as human virtuosity began combining with

state-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, about

levels of approach, and also about the contexts within which one can study

naval history. I use the words "levels*' and "contexts" in the plural sense because

I believe there is no single, orthodox way of doing naval history. Indeed, the

very purpose of bringing out this collection is to articulate some very different

approaches and schools of thought. In organizing this second Yale-Naval War

College conference inJune 1994, John Hattendorf, Mark Shulman and I wanted

those differences described, criticized, defended—and compared. We wanted to see what was special about, or particular to, the study of naval history; and we

also wanted to know how it related to military history more generally, and to

the discipline of history itself. We wondered if there could be constructed some

more "total" way of studying the subject. Finally, we wanted people who were

outside a history department to look at what we historians are doing, and to offer

thoughts on our methodologies, our levels of approach, and our contextual

treatments of naval history: hence, our delight when political scientists Robert

Jervis, William Thompson and Robert Wood accepted, no doubt with some

bemusement, the invitation to contribute.

In the first Yale-Naval War College conference in June 1993, we put the

simple question, "Who is doing naval history and where?" In this volume, the

question really is, "What sort ofnaval history is being done, and shouldbe done?"

It seems to me, in looking at the historiography of nineteenth and twentiethcentury naval history, including very recent writings, the field is strangely

uneven.

Naval historians have been pretty good at naval policy and strategy, because

that is what might be called the "high politics" ofnaval history, and because the

Admiralty, 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).
1 44 Approach and Contexts in Naval History

equivalents, are so accessible. This does not mean that our interpretations of

naval policy are unanimous and uncontroversial. One of the more interesting

developments in recent years has been the way in which Jon Sumida and now

Nicholas Lambert are reinterpreting what some regard as the "Arthur Marder

period" ofpre-1914 British naval policy. They, in particular, have been and are

actively involved in that advanced level of historical recovery.

On the other hand, we are behind-hand, but getting better, in the critically

important field of understanding how navies, as complex and mammoth organizations, really functioned: how they were built, supplied, refueled, repaired,

how they adopted new technology, how they recruited and trained their

personnel, how they were financed. This is real grunt work, involving years of

research in the archives on records that deal with some of the "non-highpolitics" aspects of naval administration. One simply does not understand the course ofthe Battle ofthe Atlantic until one understands shipping and shipbuilding policies, but to many that seems much less romantic than retelling the tale

of "Sink the Bismarck."

We, as naval historians, are not very good at a "history from below" approach

to modern naval history; we have no twentieth-century equivalent to Nicholas

Rodger's The Wooden World; and there is little or nothing on what might be

called "the face of battle" approach, empathetically reconstructing the actions,

feelings, habits of ordinary seamen, gunners, petty-officers and the like. Why is there, for example, no counterpart to Craig Cameron's wonderful new study,

American Samurai, which gets into the mental world of the U.S. marine? Why

can't we recover the mental world of the crew of a Grand Fleet battleship or

the marine garrison of the Singapore base in the 1930s?

We are reasonably good at writing about relationships between naval policy

and domestic politics, partly again because of the sources, partly because of the

influence of Volker Berghahn. But there is still a lot to do. There is no really

good study, to my mind, of the navalist lobby in twentieth—century Britain, or

in 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 individual

scholar does, but that scholars all strive to understand better the relationship

between the different approaches, or, perhaps better, between different levels of

enquiry in naval history. I do not have a fixed model, but it might be possible

to 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 ofsupply 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 Marine

Division, 1941-1951. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

5 Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz Plan (Diisseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971).
Kennedy 1 45

basic unit, the warship and its crew, one of the levels of historical recovery at which we are not very good. Then there is the larger body, the Channel Fleet or the Pacific Station, parts ofthe geopoliticaljigsaw-puzzle that make up a Great

Power's global projections ofnaval power. Then there is the relationship ofnaval

policy to what the Army and Air Force is doing, to the diplomatic priorities of

the country, to its alliance system—a level at which much of our writing has

concentrated, and in the process of which becomes less naval history per se and

more the naval dimension of national strategy, as is the case, for example, with

my own Rise and Fall ofBritish Naval Mastery. There is also, perhaps a bit below

that level, the research that focuses upon how the creation and procurement of

a naval equipment relates to the national economy, to business, to domestic

politics, to pressure groups, to propaganda campaigns, in which respect we have

produced a mixed bag ofresults, some striking successes and some glowing gaps.

Finally—though you may wish to add to my list—there is the level at which

modern naval history relates to general maritime history, or to the overall history

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in which respect we have not yet

begun to conceptualize, let alone write anything of substance.

As an example ofthe various levels, contexts and approaches in naval history,

I want to use the theme of "Tirpitz and the Rise of Fascism" to reverse our way

of 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 operations plans—all of which has been treated by scholars. Rather, I want to turn

the telescope around, and peer down the wrong way, and to talk about how a

battleship navy fitted into Tirpitz's ideological and political vision, and, more

generally, how his vision reflects certain larger changes in European culture as

it moved from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

Naval officers often try to suggest that they are not very political: they are

plain, simple fighting men like Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O'Brian novels. Most

of us know better than that—the Fishers and Rickovers were intensely political

persons, who really rather relished intrigue and maneuvers, and thought they

were 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 the

nature of German society, and about Germany's place in the changing context

of world politics—that informed and drove much of what Tirpitz did.

Tirpitz's background is well known. He came from a mid nineteenth-century

bourgeois service family—his father was a judge—and he was inculcated with

most ofthe traditional values ofthat society. Intellectually, he does seem to have

been deeply affected by attending Treitschke's lectures on politics at the

University ofBerlin. 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).
146 Approach and Contexts in Naval History

in his private correspondence and comments. Treitschke's nationalistic concept

of a specifically German culture unity, of Deutschtum, involved an unrelenting

and inevitable struggle against other nations and peoples—to modern political

scientists, Tirpitz imbibed an out-and-out "realist" interpretation of world

affairs. If Germany was not to go under, all Germans had to work together, had

to have a national cultural understanding of the high stakes involved, and had

to understand the way in which modern industry and technology were transforming the German economy and Germany's place in the world. Germany's

fast growing industry, trade, wealth made her potentially one of the three or

four Great World Powers of the coming Twentieth Century. These factors also

increased Germany's dependency upon others, especially upon Britain, unless

the Germans were far-sighted enough to create a substantial navy to protect their

long-term interests. Although originally a torpedo officer, Tirpitz was fanatic

about the concept ofthe large battleship as the core ofnaval power, and he really

did fight hard against the diversion offunds 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-Elbian

Junkers, the Treasury, the more liberal and socialist political parties all opposed

him. 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 ofTirpitz's Social-Darwinian

vision, his acute dislike of what he regarded as imported English liberal ideas,

and the peculiarity of his love-hate relationship to England (which he shared

with many Germans, from Max Weber to the Kaiser). This comes out a little in his official memoranda—for example his 1897 Rominten memorandum to

Wilhelm, with its references to rising world Empires, the impetus of economic

growth, the stark choice Germany faced of either competing or falling into the

second-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 ofwhether one can do naval

history based upon the official files alone. Andjust look at the people with whom

he corresponds about this vision of Deutschtum: Houston Stewart Chamberlain,

the Englishman turned German, whose book was one of the seminal texts for

German cultural nationalists; Oswald Spengler, already exchanging ideas with

Tirpitz about the differences between a healthy, holistic German Kultur and the

materialist, atomistic societies of the British and Americans; Dietrich Schafer,

hypernationalist, professor, Pan-German, navalist radical, founder ofthe German

Army League. Almost every luminary of pre-1914, radical right, proto-fascist

thought and politics has some connection here. Later on, there is the personal

bond 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 Lees from the German, Grundlagen des Neunzehnjahrhunderts. (London: J. Lane, 1910).
Kennedy 1 47

dismissed from office, he co-founds the Vaterlandspartei, a radical-right party that

sought to bring the correct, healthy, firm national policies that Germany needed

in its time of external crisis. It is also no surprise that his Memoirs are full of

bitterness, 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-sighted

diplomats, the feckless Kaiser. It is no surprise that many regarded Tirpitz as one

of the leading right-wing figures ofearly Weimar Germany, deeply involved in

anti-democratic intrigues. Many courted him assiduously, including the early

National Socialists, who were eager to obtain his support and approval. This was

where his ideological trajectory had taken him. Perhaps his Treitschkean

Social-Darwinian ideology had hardened over time, as he became older and

more disappointed. Much of his vision had been there, in the 1890s, informing

his conception of world politics and Germany's place in it. How common is this trajectory? How many other European figures, born

into nineteenth-century families with a generally Liberal culture in regard to

parliamentarism, politics, trade, international relations changed over time to

become much more nationalist and proto-fascist? How many British imperialists,

like Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner, originally began as Liberals? How

many Italians, like Mussolini, metamorphosized from Left to Right? As an aside,

one wonders whether there were parallels in the American or Japanese experience?

The Liberal creed came under pressure from the rising demands of the

working classes, the return of protectionism during the Great Depression, the

influence of Bismarck's "blood and iron" policies, the impact of Social-Darwinian and racist thought, the vulgarization ofthe press, the focus upon imperial

conquest and wars, the influence ofpatriotic pressure groups. The Liberal creed

ran out ofsteam 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 industrialization, the fears ofinternal stability, the rise of Germany, the decline of

Liberalism, the coming of mass politics, mass education, mass media—that we

have to set Tirpitz's unease about Germany's condition, his cultural and

ideological preferences and, last but not least, his Tirpitz Plan. Ifa large, modern

battle fleet was, as Mahan and most of the German Flottenprofessoren were

teaching, the power-political instrument necessary for the success of Deutschtum

in the Great-Power, Darwinian struggle ahead, and if that instrument were to

be protected from domestic interference, there really was no alternative. Opponents in the service had to be silenced, the Kaiser's support constandy sought,

public opinion constandy cultivated. Diplomatic and strategical changes, like the

coming ofthe Anglo-French entente and the stationing ofBritish battle squadrons
148 Approach and Contexts in Naval History

in the North Sea, also could not be allowed to affect the Plan. Alternative

weapons, 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 of

world politics."

I come back, finally, to the issue of different levels of approach, and to contexts

in naval history. At the largest level, there are the transformations and modernization 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, armed

services, established religions and much more. There are also changes in the

world ofideas and ideologies, as many people begin to question mid-nineteenth

century assumptions. At the national level there may be differentiated responses,

due to different political cultures, economies, constitutions, even geography, but

most countries felt these pressures for change. Within governments and their

departments, various transformations also took place, perhaps nowhere more

dramatically than in navies because that was where the technological pace of

change is fastest, and also because the ideology of imperialism and navalism had

pointed to navies as being an integral part ofthe solution to the challenges posed

by the international anarchy and by the propensity to turbulence. Every Great

Power in this period, and many a small power, decided that it needed a larger

and more powerful fleet. The shipbuilding industries were waiting to supply

them.

What type of fleet? What mix of ships? What design? What communications

systems, what fire control? What type of fuel? Where to base the ships, where

to train the personnel? What tactics to practice, what operational and strategical

assumptions? How one was to choose the answers to these complex and

interrelated questions was an immense problem, not only because this was a period of rapid technological change, but also because there were a variety of

viewpoints about naval strategy. Which was best, which most plausibly anticipated 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 such

wonderful work. We have, to repeat, not got down to the unit level and the

ship level. That may come, although we might anticipate formidable

methodological difficulties there. My point is that I believe that there is an

interconnectedness from bottom to top, and from top to bottom. The challenge

is to understand those linkages. What Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg are doing, as I see it, is not so much producing a new Kuhnian paradigm, a new

way of explaining anomalous behavior patterns, but rather to say: "Look, too

much writing on naval history remains on the fourth or fifth floor, where

Cabinets and other bodies took decisions and made assumptions about naval
Kennedy 149

policy. That process is described as naval history, but the really interesting work

to be done is at the third and second floors, where one sees the navies grappling

with the world ofnaval 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 historians

to be working. This is why our naval history is special."

To which I would only say "Amen"—except that, even while that critical

grunt work is being done, it will be important not to lose sight of the other

levels. 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-naval

historians, of another way of looking at the seamless web, another perfectly

legitimate and intelligent way of seeking to understand the past. That is what

naval historians do better than most, when we understand the full dimension of

our subject.

Hitting the Target: Perspectives on

Doing Naval History

Mark R. Shulman1

Naval historians would do well to remember Admiral Sir John Fisher. The

First Sea Lord once commented of his famed gunnery inspector Percy

Scott, "I don't care if he drinks, gambles, and womanizes; he hits the target." In

a frequently obtuse discipline, we have sometimes lost sight of the bull's-eye

ourselves. In opening this volume with an epitaph, John Hattendorf gives us all hope for revitalization.

Still, Hattendorfimplies another outcome. Should naval historians fail to rise

to the methodological challenges ofnew history, should they remain technologically ill-tutored, should they continue to slight bureaucratic process or the

realities ofnaval operations, naval history as a scholarly field ofenquiry may soon

require its own elegy. For the most part, as James Goldrick notes, naval historians

do not even deserve the navies about which they write. More than other

historians, we tend either to hagiography or monocausal interpretations.

Compounding the sin, our subjects are among the most influential institutions

in history in addition to being among the most technical and arcane. Operational

doctrine has become particularly difficult to understand in the twentieth century

due to rapid technical and theoretical innovation. Goldrick challenges the

historian: "In some circumstances, and there are parallels here in the revolution

in modern computing, the context for technological and operational decision

making could experience profound changes within months, not the years or

decades with which earlier eras tended to deal." Are we capable ofunderstanding

and explaining these military-technical revolutions? Setting first-rate goals,

Commander Goldrick admonishes us to do better and to take the work ofJon

Sumida 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 have

dominated the field since its origins a century ago. Navalist historians of Alfred

Thayer 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 valuable

discussions that helped to shape this essay.
152 Perspectives on Doing Naval History

they produced highly flawed history, ignorant of the real under-pinnings of

strength. Subsequent historians have blithely followed the navalists' path. Great

writers—Arthur J. Marder and Samuel Eliot Morison among them—fell victim

to Mahanian propaganda, even while the services themselves were moving in a variety of creative directions. Fixated on the process of building battleshipdominated fleets, these historians misconstrued how the US and Royal Navies

really functioned. Sumida and Rosenberg argue, in effect, that navies have been

far better than their historians, paying more attention to the sinews of war than

have their chroniclers.

Calling for a shift in approaches, Sumida and Rosenberg argue for a nonteleological history of sea power. They note that the core histories are ridden

with provincial nationalism and favor the role of the great ships as vehicles for

achieving national greatness, as it was conceived of by Whig historians of the

late nineteenth century. True military effectiveness, Sumida and Rosenberg

would argue, was not made inevitable by dreadnoughts. Rather it was achieved

by careful attention to making an effective bureaucracy that ensured that funds

were well-spent on technological improvements to a variety of fighting systems

that enabled the great navies to beat all comers. Jacky Fisher understood that, if

E.B. Potter did not.

Political scientist Robert Jervis echoes this argument, suggesting that "it may

be useful to think of navies as causes and as effects.'* In contrast to Mahan and

his followers who had portrayed navies as the cause of national greatness, Jervis

concurs 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 generate

security dilemmas in which "attempts by a state to gain security can make others

less secure despite the fact that this is not the state's intention." Indeed, this

complicated dynamic helps to explain the origins of the First World War.

Volker Berghahn picks up on this point more specifically, addressing the

German domestic political and social concerns that helped generate the AngloGerman 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 status

quo . . . [and] it was also to shield the German Navy from the legislative powers

of the Reichstag." Traditional realist theories of the origins of the generic

security dilemma frequently ignore the domestic pressures to build powerful

forces. Berghahn presents a more balanced portrait ofthe 1897 bill. "The Kaiser's

proposed navy has been called a fleet against two parliaments.'" Because of the

effectiveness of Kaiser's bureaucracy and Tirpitz's technological and political

savvy, 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 its greatest services to historians. While historians might implicitly acknowledge them, particularly on a case by case basis, we need the theory to understand how timeless and pervasive they are.
Shulman 153

notes, "Thus even if Wilhemine Germany developed a strong navy in part to

strengthen the regime domestically, this action changed the international environment and menaced Great Britain." It activated a security dilemma, trapping

both powers into a race for security—a race that seemed inevitably to bring war. Germany's security dilemma would not have occurred if the international

threat it presented were not strong and real. German financial and technological

skills made the High Seas Fleet a very real threat to the British. This too involved

major domestic political changes, far more than the Prussian military would have

liked. No longer could the wealthy alone shoulder the burden of increasingly

complicated and expensive weapons systems. Financing the great battleships

required a shift in the tax burden from the upper to the middle classes of

Germany—a transition understood by all to have a fundamental impact on the

German polity, including a weakening of the old elite relative to the growing

middle classes.

Paul Kennedy's remarks on Alfred Tirpitz's career following the Great War

offer some fascinating insights into this situation, suggesting another new avenue

for naval historians. Where others have seen navalists as apolitical, Kennedy

points to their dedicated social agenda. To some extent they are merely a slightly

exaggerated version of the typical military conservative. Kennedy's argument,

however, seems to point us in another direction. In it, navalism cloaks domestic

political agendas in the garb of realpolitik. Going beyond the conservatism, the

navalists, at least some of those who built great fleets before 1917, were hoping

to reorder society more along the lines of their beloved services, with structure

and hierarchy. They intended to channel the resources ofthe middle classes into

the strengthening of the state. They were always looking for foreign threats to

justify their attempts to "bring the correct, healthy, firm national policies" to

the Vaterland. An extension to Kennedy's argument might note the role ofthese

politics in shaping today's "realist" school of international relations.

Commenting on the notion of the primat der innen-politik, Robert Wood

responds, "But of course! Does anyone seriously believe that any military

developments are simply responses to the general problem of international

anarchy and to external challenges posed by other states?" Lacking a clear and

present danger, Wood notes, states have little more than domestic politics to

guide their preparations for war. As war becomes imminent, however, they must

face the international realities. It is at that point that comparative history becomes

particularly valuable.

Paul Halpem provides a case study of how one can break out of nationalistic

thinking. Having mastered the relevant languages, scripts, and archives, he

For one influential example, Samuel Huntington's seminal work on The Soldier and the State also marginalizes 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 North

Carolina Press, 1967).
1 54 Perspectives on Doing Naval History

demonstrates latitudinal comparisons in a single period, especially for evaluating

the question of which has primacy when: domestic or international politics?

Echoing Kennedy's remarks on the domestic agendas ofnavalists, Halpern offers

the quintessential case ofjean Darlan. In the late nineteenth-century Italian navy,

Halpern also finds a test for the understanding the role that finance and industry

play in shaping foreign policy and reflecting domestic policy. Berghahn's work

argues that navalism was highly important in determining the shape of the

modern German polity. My own book makes a similar argument for the United

States. Tirpitz and Mahan had contemporaries in Italy who also saw the manifold

ways in which a navy's technological, financial and industrial progress would

propel a nation to great power status. Halpern's contribution also suggests the need for more research on the role

offinance, along the lines suggested by Sumida and Rosenberg. As with the case of Britain's services during the Great War, the Austrian navy's greatest enemy

was frequently its sister service—the army. Rather than "jointness," Halpern

pointedly refers to the interdepartmental politics as "diplomacy."

If Halpern's comparisons ofcontemporaneous navies and armies can be called

latitudinal, William Thompson's approach is longitudinal. Examination of ten or more centuries of sea power gives his work a perspective remarkable for its breadth and its ability to transcend the historical moment. As such, it offers much

to students of navies, sea power, and international relations.

This rich set of data allows Thompson to compare the evolution of great sea powers, sometimes centuries apart. While the historian might balk at this

approach at first glance, he or she must keep in mind how few ofthe parameters

of sea power have fundamentally changed over the centuries. The physical

geography has remained the same for tens of thousands of years. Moreover,

twentieth-century battles almost invariably have taken place in the same locations as those of centuries prior. Also, the fundamental unit of political

interaction, the nation-state, has remained pre-eminent for at least three but

possibly as many as ten centuries. Even the building blocks ofsea power—ships

and fleets—retained many of their essential characteristics between Actium and

4 See Richard A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 1908-1915 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1975); Berghahn, Die Tirpitz-Plan (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971); Shulman, Navalism and the Emergettce 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 Warfarefrom the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder: Westview

Press, 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 (New

York: Free Press, 1991).

7 The primacy of the nation state is being challenged. See Roy Godson, "Transstate Security," in Godson, Richard Shultz, and George Quester, Security Studiesfor the Twenty-First Century (Washington:

Brassey's, forthcoming) for this thesis and a survey of the literature.
Shulman 155

Dogger Bank. As Thompson notes in his final proposition, "There are no trends

extant—technological, economic, political, or military—which suggest an imminent diminution in the strategic leverage of sea power. If the coming of the

railroad, internal combustion engine, and missile, nuclear, and space eras could

not demote the strategic value ofsea power significantly, it is difficult to see what

could emerge to do so over the next several decades."

This remarkable data base has allowed Thompson to derive dozens of

generally applicable axioms about the nature of sea power, hegemony, international relations, war and peace, and even polities and regimes. These fifty-two

"Thalassological Propositions" could easily generate hundreds ofspecific historical studies to test them. Thompson challenges the historians to move beyond

narrow studies and to examine general propositions. He challenges us to put

history to the test; what can it teach us?

Implicitly Thompson asks if we should be leaving the lessons of history to

practitioners ofall other disciplines besides history. Recently several of the very

best military and diplomatic historians have also attempted to nudge the

profession into taking up that gauntlet. Michael Howard's The Lessons ofHistory

does so in a gently gracious way, nonetheless reminding us of the costs of

misinterpretation. Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, with fewer apologies,

encourage the use ofthe past. Eliot Cohen andJohn Gooch sharply point to the

costs of failing to learn from history. And yet, naval historians have been among

those most hesitant to draw lessons from a rich and varied data set. Nicholas Rodger's work rivals Thompson's for its longitudinal span and

Halpern's for its latitudinal scope. His current project analyses the various British

navies over ten centuries as they interacted with dozens ofrivals and allies across the globe. And yet, he acknowledges great impediments to improving the field

of naval history. "There are real obstacles, both practical and psychological, to

mastering high technologies, especially more or less completely extinct technologies" such as weapons system long abandoned. The same must be said for

attempting to understand defunct bureaucracies, especially those in countries

that have suffered the ruination of war or accident. To this must be added the

burden of speaking and reading a Babel of tongues, for navies invariably link

peoples 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 recent exposition on the timelessness ofsea 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: Oxford

University Press, 1973); May and Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for

Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986); Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The

Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990). See also the varieties of reactions to Paul

Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987).
1 56 Perspectives on Doing Naval History

On the one hand, [are] those with an education as historians, more or less accustomed to taking a large view and to locating their findings in an historical

context. . . . Those who do understand, on the other hand, sometimes display a narrowly antiquarian pleasure in the amassing offacts, 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.

These are two hands ofthe same beast: ignorance about the highly technical but

extremely influential roles that science, finance, and administration play in

society. Fortunately, he notes, good technical histories are now being written.

Currently, it appears that the Military Technical Revolution (or Revolution in

Military Affairs) of the 1990s may be accelerating this trend, driving research

into the roles technological change plays in shaping and reflecting the evolution

of strategy.

Military historian Dennis Showalter comments on other impediments to the

improvement of naval history as a field. He notes the Anglo-centricity of the

profession—a bias which leads one to find lessons from the British and American

experiences. These are critical but by no means the only histories worth

exploring. Showalter also notes the insularity of naval communities, at least as far as they relate to (or fail to) their home societies. He explains, "Navies are the

most self-referencing ofarmed forces, and can possess a correspondingly powerful dynamic." This particularization, Showalter suggests, is reflected in the

isolation of the discipline.

Each writer notes ways to improve "Doing Naval History." Each of their

valid and useful insights calls for a systematic response and leads me to make a modest proposal. It offers prescriptions in three crucial areas: the procurement

and use of resources for understanding history, the writing of history, and its teaching. Each ofthese calls for the establishment ofan American Naval Records

Society (ANRS).

Resources

Like its British counterpart, an American NRS could publish edited documents and it could also help to promote and to coordinate research, writing, and

teaching at every level. Much as the British society operates, an American NRS

would publish key source materials for its open membership, allowing scholars

10 For some interesting works, see John W. Bodnar, "The Military Technical Revolution: From

Hardware 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: Innovation

and the Modem Military (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Andrew F. Krepinevich, "Keeping Pace

with 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 have

either written on British history or have studied or taught at English universities.
Shulman 157

to identify and elucidate key sources for insights into naval history. In the past, the

Naval Institute Press in Annapolis and the Naval Historical Center in Washington

have performed these tasks, and they should be encouraged to continue them. But

an ANRS could provide a broader selection base of documents, exploring issues

and insights independent from market forces and service image.

Electronic data storage and retrieval systems open myriad possibilities for an

ANRS. These machines have vastly reduced the costs for preparing and

reproducing documentary collections in several areas. Furthermore, they offer

unparalleled access. Text can be stored in previously inconceivable quantities.

Furthermore, cross-indexing is far simpler, faster and more efficient, allowing

users to access any stored information almost instantaneously. The hardware for

such a storage system is not expensive, and the prices are moving down, rather

than up. In the early 1980s, $400-500 would buy a drive that supported a disk

capable ofstoring 250 pages. Today that much would purchase a 100-megabyte

hard 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 recently

available just to the wealthiest ofinstitutional buyers. Their storage and retrieval

capacities are measured in the gigabytes (billions of bytes). So great is their

capacity that they can store images as well as text. For instance, complete

facsimiles of The Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers are currently being stored on

CD-ROM. Their editor notes that twenty disks store the images that would

otherwise have required some 200 reels of microfilm. "Jukebox CD-ROM

players hold up to 64 discs at a time and make any of over 1.5 million images

available to a researcher in less than 5 seconds." The CD-ROM edition of the

Oxford English Dictionary "allows scholars to accomplish tasks almost impossible

in the printed volumes. . . . For example, one can . . . determine which words

English 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 a 57 million-word collection of 99 percent of all extant Greek writings from

Homer to 600 A.D. The American and French Research on the Treasury of

the French Language (ARTFL) is nearly three times that size. Anyone who

has ever used Lexis/Nexis will testify to the remarkable power and flexibility of

these systems. Furthermore, with the growth of the internet, such databases

could be filled in (either manually or with scanners) from an unlimited number

David Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions: The Promise and Problems of Technology," Documentary

Editing, 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 Facsimile

Edition on CD-ROM" Documentary Editing, 16 (December, 1994). pp. 100-107. Quotations are from

Benner, "Lincoln" 101 and Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions," p. 71.

14 Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions," p. 71.
1 58 Perspectives on Doing Naval History

of remote locations. Professors with teams of bursary students or scholars

working in libraries around the globe could input sources and documents. All

this appears to require an agency to house, coordinate, regulate and disseminate

these products. Printed volumes could simply extract from and refer to these

larger collections, providing more complete explanatory annotation. How else

will we ever hope to see the sources for naval or maritime history of impoverished or out of the way countries? How else will anyone be able to afford

to write truly multi-national history?

Next among the NRS's tasks would be promotion and coordination of the

field. The U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center already does some admirable

promoting, but more could surely be done and best by a non-service institution.

For example, when the Smithsonian Institution abolishes its last curatorship in

naval history should the NHC protest? I think not. But a consortium of

concerned historians might be able to lobby for its maintenance. The same would

go for the chairs at Stanford and Harvard universities—both of which 'were

donated for naval and maritime history and neither of which is filled by a naval or maritime historian. When the American Historical Association fails to include

any panels on naval history for years running, should the navy intercede? No,

but the NRS could coordinate a couple ofpanels—panels integrated within the

regular program instead of marginalized in a special sub-meeting. They could

be even further integrated, with non-naval historians or even non-historians as commentators—thus providing different and useful perspectives. They could

also mix senior and junior practitioners to provide the professional encouragement younger people need in these tough times.

Writing

This present volume—along with its predecessor, John Hattendorfs Ubi

Sutnus? (with its extraordinary breadth of coverage)—bring out the varieties of

strengths and weaknesses in the writing of naval and maritime history across the

globe. In terms of this broad scope, one is drawn immediately to the United

States Navy (USN), because of its great importance. Despite numerous contributions to American naval history, writers on this subject have rarely shown

the conceptual and methodological innovation one would expect, given the

current importance of their topic. While the writing of the history of the USN

has 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 of

which would be far more useful if stored in digjtalized and manipulable form. The US Naval Academy

Archives and Museum has collected its pictures on one such laser disk that might provide a model for

this type of collection.

16 See Kenneth J. Hagan and Shulman, "Mahan Plus One Hundred: The Status ofUS Naval History,"

and David A. Rosenberg, "Beyond Toddlerhood: Thoughts on the Future ofAmerican Naval History"
Shulman 159

that it needs to embrace methodologies ofnewer and brighter fields in the study

ofthe history ofculture, society, technology, finance, and administration.

17 The

mere fact ofan ANRS with newsletters, publications, and meetings might breath

new life into the field.

In particular, the ANRS could also coordinate research, most crucially at the

international level. Presaging the comments in this volume ofProfessors Halpern

and Rodger, Ronald Spector has pointed out that the languages one would need

to write a histoire totale of the Pacific War would include not only English and

Japanese, and Russian, French and Dutch, but also the various Polynesian,

Micronesian, Melanesian, and Chinese tongues. Only a group of historians (and

probably anthropologists as well) could begin this effort. Working through the

already established International Commission on Military History and its American branch (USCMH), the ANRS could bring together a panel ofscholars

on this topics, as well as for such studies ofmore regionalized topics as a strategic

history ofthe North Sea, or a social history of sailors in the Far East—including

the multi-ethnic communities that fed them in Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong,

San Francisco, Honolulu, and New York. Because the sea does indeed connect

all things, its human history should provide the bulk of any truly international

history. And yet, no man or woman can attempt it alone.

Teaching

An American NRS could also coordinate teaching—the third major area in

need ofchange. Although each teacher's courses are highly personal, few would

fail to benefit from a support network providing suggested syllabi with readings,

themes, goals and even possible lecture topics. Currently, young professors start from scratch. There does not even exist a syllabus bank, let alone a central

audio-visual collection from which he or she can order slides or movies—virtually required media for teaching the MTV generation. While this video1 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 War

College Press, 1994).

17 See this author's "Why Men Fight" in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, (Autumn

1995) ofthe following remarkable books which approach army or marine combat units from innovative

perspectives 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 Conduct

of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and

Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During

World War I (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).

The mid-west consortium has arrangements to institutionalize this cooperation by covering the

expenses ofone professor each term to visit a sister institution for teaching and advising and also arranges

for 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 summer

institute and the second through shared advisors. A biennial summer institute

on naval history would allow graduate students from programs around the

country to gather for one intensive course ofstudy in the history, historiography

and methodology ofnaval history. Team-taught to cover more fields, this course would provide the well-spring for growth that the profession needs. The second

stage would be a consortium through which Ph.D. students would be able to

contact appropriate advisors as they commence their dissertation research. Using

telephones, facsimile machines, modems and even the US postal service, a graduate student ought to be able to seek and find knowledgeable advisors for

his or her research and writing.

Conclusion

Thucydides set the highest standards in his multi-disciplinary examination of

policy, society, logistics, command, andjoint operations at the start ofhis History

of the Peloponnesian War. "My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize

composition which is heard and forgotten." Hard-working, resourceful and

intelligent, today's naval historians should aim to do no less. An independent

ANRS could foster breadth of research, creativity and coordination in writing

and effectiveness in teaching. It could do so in an inexpensive, non-ideological

forum. While it would not solve our problems, it could offer a venue for critical

improvements in research, writing and teaching.

19 At very least, there ought be a syllabus bank—which would cost only reproduction and mailing and

could be billed at a fee for service rate. Alternatively, the service could be available through electronic

mail at no cost. Later a further service could be added of a week-long seminar on "Teaching Naval

History;" this would be more expensive (c. $1500 per student, plus professors). Similar courses are already offered to ROTC and NROTC instructors but are not generally open to academic faculty.