Cover: Mock tanks constructed of cardboard were used during maneuvers on

9 September 1928, at Uckermark, the German training base. (Getty Images)
Wotan’s Workshop

Military Experiments

before World War II

by

Brian McCue
The views expressed in this book do not necessarily represent the opinions of the

U.S. Department of the Navy or the U.S. Marine Corps.

CNA Corporation

4825 Mark Center Drive

Alexandria, Virginia 22311

www.cna.org

Marine Corps University Press

3078 Upshur Avenue

Quantico, Virginia 22134

www.tecom.usmc.mil/mcupress

Wotan’s Workshop: Military Experiments before World War II

© 2013 by CNA Corporation. All rights reserved.

Published by Marine Corps University Press, Quantico, VA.

About the title: Wotan, the Norse god of wisdom and logic, was also latterly

associated with war and battle. His name survives in our word Wednesday.

Title page photo: A column of mock tanks—with wood and canvas armor

shapes mounted on light vehicles—participated in German military maneuvers

in 1928. (Imperial War Museum/Q71388)
Contents

Introduction..........................................................................1

Themes.................................................................................3

 The Structure of Experimentation

 Models, Modeling, and a Paradox

 Surrogates

 Artificialities

 Theory, Hypothesis, and Serendipity

 “All’s fair in love and war”—What about in

 Experimentation?

Three Idiosyncratic Nonservice Efforts..................................11

 G. F. Gause’s Bugs

 Hector Bywater’s Wind-Up Ship Models

 Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game

 Observations on the Idiosyncratic Efforts

The U.S. Prepares for World War II........................................19

 The Fleet Problems, 1923–40

 The Experiments of Billy Mitchell

 Major Pete Ellis and USMC Interwar Experimentation

 The Army’s Louisiana Maneuvers

 Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School

 Observations on the U.S. Experiments

Germany Prepares for World War II.......................................41

 The German Army’s Experiments with Blitzkrieg

 The German Navy’s Experiments with Wolf Packs

iii
 A Limited Technical Assessment

 Observations on the German Experiments

Overall Observations.............................................................53

 Recapitulating the Themes

 The Experiments’ Points of Similarity

 The Paradox of Modelling, Resolved

Notes ..................................................................................59

Bibliography........................................................................63

iv
Introduction

Over the last few years, military experimentation has attained

unprecedented salience. The secretary of defense, the chairman

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Congress all called for increased

efforts in military experimentation in the early 2000s.1 Because

this support is relatively new, military experimentation is in the

anomalous position of being popular, yet unfamiliar. The resulting

lack of understanding of the nature of military experimentation

has acted to the detriment of the various efforts now ongoing at

the service and joint levels. The outward resemblance of military

experiments to the more familiar exercises and field tests, and the

outward resemblance of the experiments’ technology surrogates

to prototypes, have only served to deepen the misunderstanding.

An attempt to better understand military experimentation by

detailed examination of some of today’s efforts would be hampered by the need for a considerable background in the technologies that the experiments address. There is also room for concern

that discussion of present-day efforts would be seen primarily as

praise or criticism of the particular efforts, and thereby rendered

useless as a vehicle for discussion of experimentation itself.

An alternative way to strive for a better understanding of military experiments is through a set of historical examples. Today’s

impetus for military experimentation has arisen largely because

we have experienced a large amount of technological change during a protracted period of peace. The period from the demise of

the Soviet Union to the present is longer than two decades, and

they have been two decades of dramatic technological progress

in sensors, materials, and communications—all areas of undoubted military potential—and above all in computation, whose

potential applicability to warfare remains a topic of heated discussion. For these reasons, the present period is often compared

to the 1918–39 interwar period, whose dramatic developments in

1
such areas as radio and aviation and considerable evolutionary

improvements in submarines and tanks led to great speculation

and argument as to the future of warfare and the applicability of

technology to it. Then as now, the military resorted to experimentation as a means of discovering the implications of the new technologies.

To increase understanding of the process of military experimentation, this work examines some of these experiments; today, the

technologies need no introduction, and the Second World War

provides hindsight through which the experiments and their findings can be viewed. The efforts described here have been chosen

as an instructive set, not an exhaustive one.

This being a work of analysis, rather than history, secondary

sources—as well as primary sources in the form of some participants’ memoirs—have been used freely. This paper was originally

part of CNA’s project on military experimentation.

2
Themes

Anumber of themes will run through the cases examined here.These themes are important in any consideration of military

experimentation, and in fact a major goal of this work is to illustrate

them through the use of the pre–World War II examples.

The Structure of Experimentation

As shown in figure 1, an experiment consists of:

• An event that can have multiple outcomes,

• A question that could have multiple answers, and

• A matching, usually prestated, between the outcomes of

the event and the answers to the question.

A familiar example is the use of litmus paper to test the pH

(acidity) of a sample. The event is that the litmus paper is dipped

into the sample and turns color. The multiple outcomes are that

it can turn either of two colors. The question is, “Is the sample

an acid or a base?” The prestated matching is that the color blue

indicates an acid whereas the color red indicates a base.

3

Figure 1: Schema of an experiment
Note that this account of experimentation does not require an

experiment to have a hypothesis, a control group, a statistically

valid number of trials, or any of the other trappings sometimes

associated with experiments. An experiment may have some or

all these things, but if it does, they are part of the definition of the

set of outcomes, and the matching of the outcomes to the answers.

Elsewhere I have referred to military experimentation as an

“art”—if it is so scientific, why is it an art?

The reason is that in military experimentation* a large number

of real-world influences act on the experiment, preventing the experimenter from doing exactly what he or she would like. Therefore the problem must be worked from both ends: the experiment

must be designed to fit the question, but the question may also

have to be adjusted so as to fit the experiment.

In this process, two important traits must be retained:

• There are multiple possible outcomes, not just a single outcome that is guaranteed to happen.

• The matching between event outcomes and answers

to the question is preassigned.

If there is only one outcome, or if there are multiple outcomes

but they are indistinguishable, the event is a demonstration, not

an experiment. If the meaning of the outcome is determined only

after the experiment is over, then it is an exploration, not an experiment. Demonstrations and explorations can be of value, but

they are not experiments.

Models, Modeling, and a Paradox

Today, models of warfare are automatically assumed to be computer models. Many people, especially those in uniform, additionally assume computer models of warfare to be of questionable

validity and tend to reject findings based on them. To them, field

4

*And, probably, in all other kinds as well, perhaps excluding only the most “scientific”

and well-funded.
experiments or fleet experiments are alternatives to modeling,

and perhaps attractive for that very reason.

However, it is important to realize that the activities undertaken

in the field, at sea, or in the air are themselves warfare models,

albeit not resident in a computer. Just like a computer model, this

model should be examined critically, and judged on factors other

than appearance.

Models are an apparent violation of the computer-age principle,

“Garbage in, garbage out.” A related aphorism holds that if you

add a tablespoon of fine wine to a barrel of garbage, the barrel

still contains garbage, but if you add a tablespoon of garbage to

a barrel of fine wine, a conversion does occur, and the barrel becomes a barrel of garbage. A model being, by definition, something other than that which is modeled and therefore imperfect

in some respect, this logic would suggest that in no case can the

results of a model be trusted—there is always the possibility that

some important feature of the problem has been omitted, and

thus that the model and its output are garbage. This line of reasoning would apply to military experiments in the field or at sea

just as much as it would apply to computer models, and it can

be a compelling counsel of despair.

Yet military experiments, including most of those described in this

paper, have a record of success. Each for his or her own reason, the

analyst and the military officer may well balk at the notion that the

whole can be more correct than the parts. To the analyst, very possibly trained in physical science, the idea seems to run counter to

the whole notion of reductionism that has powered science since the

Age of Enlightenment. To the military officer, the idea seems to run

counter to the hierarchical notion embodied in the military structure

itself, and more recently in such constructs as the Universal Military

Task List, that the way to get the whole job done correctly is to build

it up correctly from correctly done subtasks. One of the goals of this

paper, to which we shall return in the “Overall Observations” section

at the end, is to resolve this apparent paradox.

5
Surrogates2

In field or fleet experiments, as in exercises, technological surrogates often replace the genuine items of equipment that would

be used in battle. In some instances, the motivation for using a

surrogate is that the real thing would be expensive to use, or dangerous. A typical example would be the use of flour-filled bags

as hand grenades—they mark recipients as casualties without

causing injury. In other instances, a surrogate must be used because the real thing is not yet available. Examples would include

the use of automobiles as tanks, or the use of destroyers as submarines, in a country that does not yet have any tanks or submarines but is working on building some and would like to get a

head start on studying their employment.

Artificialities

Many considerations (such as cost, danger, the limits of the

physically possible, and shortcomings of any surrogates) will constrain a military experiment from being a complete faithful representation of the combat situation under study. The points of

difference are generally known as artificialities, and it is the responsibility of the experimenter to limit the degree to which these

cause the wrong conclusion to be drawn. This responsibility is

much greater than any to limit the artificialities themselves. Indeed, any amount of artificiality can, theoretically, be withstood

as long as there is a correct matching of outcomes (however artificial they may be) to answers. Some of the efforts considered

in this paper feature rather high levels of artificiality, but succeeded nonetheless.

How can one tell that one is successfully coping with artificiality? An initial impression, one way or the other, is not enough.

As we will see, Major General William “Billy” Mitchell’s famous

ship bombing experiment, realistic although it appeared through

its use of a real ship and real airplanes, may have suffered so

badly from just one or two artificialities that an incorrect conclu6
sion was drawn. Conversely, most people’s initial reaction to the

Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School’s tricycles—functioning as airplanes—was probably mirth, but the school was able to

handle its panoply of artificialities and become a source not

merely of training, but of new knowledge regarding the emerging

topic of fighter direction.

The answer lies in the possession and use of a theory.

Theory, Hypothesis, and Serendipity

The word theory has a variety of meanings. It is variously used:

• As if synonymous with hypothesis, or even speculation, as in, “I have a theory.”

• As the antonym of practice, as in, “That’s all very

well in theory, but it would never work in practice.”

• To mean “systematically organized knowledge applicable in a wide variety of circumstances, especially a

system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules

of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise

explain,”3 as in “music theory” or “game theory.”

Especially in the military, the widespread derogatory use of the

term in the first two senses has detracted not only from its use in

the third sense, but may even have deterred some people from

the activity described therein. In fact, much of what passes for

military theory is either platitudinous (“Inflict the maximum casualties on the enemy while suffering the least possible level of

casualties to one’s own force”), without empirical foundation (the

famous 3:1 ratio of offense to defense has surprisingly little),4 or

both.5

Yet, as Kurt Lewin* said, “There is nothing so practical as a

good theory.”

There have been a few successful theories of warfare that fit

7

*Psychologist and inventor of the now-commonplace term “group dynamics.”
the third definition above. Frederick W. Lanchester’s theory of attrition warfare, expressible in a set of coupled differential equations, has probably seen at least as much misuse as use, but it

has some explanatory power and in any case is better than the

set of vacuous platitudes that Lanchester was trying to displace.

CNA’s predecessor organizations, the wartime ASWORG (AntiSubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group) and the postwar

OEG (Operations Evaluation Group), developed a theory of

“search and screening.”6

Such formal theories as these, or even rules of thumb such as

the “3:1 ratio of offense to defense,” allow formulation of an experiment in a way that takes artificialities into account and restricts the harm they can do. The instances of pre–World War II

experimentation shown in this paper will provide examples.

It is useful to distinguish between a theory, the intellectual

framework of understanding in which the inquiry takes place,

and a hypothesis, the proposition whose truth is to be tested by

the experiment. As mentioned previously, there are forms of experimentation other than hypothesis testing (measurement, for

example), but the test of a hypothesis is a particularly simple experimental design because there are only two answers—the hypothesis is either true or false. Therefore only two outcomes need

to be distinguished—outcomes proving the hypothesis, and outcomes disproving it.*

In some cases, the hypothesis being tested is really a statement

that the underlying theory is true. In that case, the experiment

may be called a crucial experiment.

Serendipity refers to unexpected, and welcome, discovery. Especially when entering a particularly new area of inquiry, an experiment may result in an unforeseen outcome. Being unforeseen,

this outcome is not matched to any answer to the experiment’s

8

*A philosopher of science would rightly interject at this point that one cannot arrive at

definitive proof of a hypothesis, so that really there are outcomes that disprove the hypothesis and outcomes that fail to do so.
question and therefore probably points to a defect in the theory

underlying the experiment. Several major discoveries of mainstream science (e.g., Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic

nucleus) have been made in this manner. Perhaps because of the

weakness of military theories, serendipitous discoveries often

emerge from military experiments. Yet it would be a mistake to

just go out and undertake some activity in the hope that a

serendipitous discovery would occur.

“All’s fair in love and war”7

—What about in Experimentation?

Like the exercises they resemble, military experiments are governed by various rules, as if in a game. The participants, possessed of desirable traits such as competitiveness and desire to

win, often bend or break these rules.

In exercises, a certain amount of leeway in regard to the rules—

sometimes summarized by the phrase, “If you ain’t cheating, you

ain’t trying”—is expected and allowed.8 There even exists a respectable rationale: exercises are so artificial and constrained that

cheating is the only opportunity for the kind of creative thinking

necessary for success in actual warfare, and some amount of

cheating ought therefore to be allowed.

However, this notion is not among the many points of similarity

between exercises and experiments. It is hard enough to construct

a valid experiment without having to allow for the possibility that

the participants might deliberately violate the rules. The response,

“Well, in warfare, there aren’t any rules,” is thoughtless. In warfare, there is no need to keep the other side safe (in fact, quite

the contrary), perhaps even a reduced need to avoid risk to one’s

own side, and no external constraints on the time or place of combat. In experiments, these considerations arise, and cannot be ignored or wished away.

Actual combat has even less in common with experiments than

do exercises. Sometimes, during the process of defining the experiment’s question and its answers, and how these will relate to

9
the experiment’s event and its possible outcomes, those involved

perceive that their experiment is really a test (e.g., of a piece of

hardware, or a doctrine), and they will object that the proposed

test is, one way or the other, unfair. Almost invariably, the desire

to make the experiment a fair test becomes conflated with a desire

to make the combat (in the experiment) a fair fight. The correct

rejection of the latter usually comes at the expense of losing the

former as well.

10
Three Idiosyncratic Nonservice Efforts

The three trials described in this section were undertaken byindividuals, not nations or military services. These individuals were civilians, and while G. F. Gause clearly saw some relationship between his work and war, he was not in any sense

trying to foresee the shape of the coming Second World War.

Yet these experiments make a good beginning for our survey.

One reason is to provide instances of wargaming, an important

aspect of simulation not addressed in the other sections. Another

reason is simply to stretch the reader’s imagination: the combat

models these experiments incorporate are neither the computer

models in widespread use today nor the exercise-like models used

in the experiments with which the balance of the paper is concerned.

G. F. Gause’s Bugs9

The naturalist Georgii Frantsevich Gause (not to be confused

with the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss) experimented with

colonies of beetles and bacteria that competed with one another

either indirectly, by drawing upon the same resources, or directly—by predation.

One of his goals, notable to us for being cast in starkly military

terms, was to “give a clear answer to Darwin’s question: why has

one species been victorious over another in the great battle of

life?”

Another goal was much more definite: to see if the animals’

populations followed the equations formulated earlier by Ronald

Ross, Alfred J. Lotka, and Vito Volterra. Mathematically, these are

quite similar to the equations independently formulated by Lanchester (and others) to describe force-on-force attrition warfare:10

R(t) = -b x B(t)

B(t) = -r x R(t)

where R(t) and B(t) are the sizes of the two forces Red and Blue,

11
and r and b are positive numbers indicative of the quality of the

fighters on each side. The naturalists’ version of the equations

differs somewhat because it lacks the element of mutual predation; rather, although it may include one-way direct predation as

above, it includes exponential growth by breeding, limited by the

two populations each acting to limit their joint size, by competing

over a finite food supply, which is itself a third population.

Given the presence of a physical refuge in which a population

of the prey could survive while the predator starves outside, these

equations predict oscillations in the populations’ size: the predator grows numerous, kills nearly all the prey, and then starves almost to extinction, whereupon the remnant population of the

prey (having survived in the refuge) multiplies almost unchecked

and becomes numerous, once again providing plenty of food for

the predator.

Gause performed the same experiment multiple times, starting

12

In an illustration from Gause’s book The Struggle for Existence, the smaller voracious

Didinium nasutum, which requires at least one paramecium every three hours, is depicted devouring a Paramecium caudatum. This graph depicts the basic interaction of

the predator-prey relationship between the two. It demonstrates the precipitous decline

of the prey (paramecium) immediately after the introduction of the predator (didinium).

It also shows the decline in the predator population with that of the prey.
with identical populations of the predator and prey, and experienced some serendipity when it turned out that starving predators

continue to reproduce at or near the usual rate, the starvation

manifesting itself in a reduction of each individual’s size, not in

a reduction of the population count. Switching over to measuring

population in terms of mass, not number of individuals, he observed the expected oscillations, but also noticed that eventually

one species or the other would die off completely.

Hector Bywater’s Wind-Up Ship Models

Published in 1925, Hector Bywater’s The Great Pacific War foretells World War II in the Pacific with quite a degree of accuracy: the

surprise attack by the Japanese, the invasions of Guam and the

Philippines, and the eventual victory of the United States based on

the island-hopping strategy. In the book, the Americans force the

Japanese to a decisive Battle of Yap Island in a way that is completely parallel to the way the Japanese planned to force the American fleet to a decisive battle in the real world’s later Battle of

Midway.

Bywater, a civilian, was a journalist and commentator on naval

affairs. His biographer, William Honan, makes the case that the resemblance between the war eventuated and the way Bywater presented it was neither coincidence nor prescience: it was that the

participants read Bywater’s book and liked the ideas in it better

than their own.

Bywater, in turn, discovered his ideas by experimentation. He

proceeded from tabletop wargaming (like that of Fletcher Pratt, described below) to experiments using self-propelled ship models on

a pond. Most builders of ship models rejoice in the painstaking reproduction of minute details, but Bywater eschewed these, holding

a multiplicity of ‘gadgets’ to be a nuisance in a

working model, . . . they should therefore be reduced to the minimum consistent with the character of the ship.11

13
Radio-controlled ship models did not yet exist, so Bywater and

his assistants had to program the maneuver and fire of the ships

when they launched them from the pond’s perimeter. Perhaps

this limitation actually offered a realism beyond that of the tabletop games, in which players are notoriously able to put ships

through intricate evolutions that would be beyond the command

and control capabilities of real ships. The firing was, in any case,

entirely cosmetic, leaving maneuver as the important variable.

The central problem of naval strategy at that time was, “How

can the superior fleet bring the inferior fleet to battle?” As at Jutland, a force that thought it might lose could readily flee in most

situations. Bywater, apparently through the maneuvering of the

mechanical ship models on the pond, came to an answer:

threaten to invade an island within the enemy’s defensive perimeter—ideally, one that he cannot afford to lose. In his resulting

book, The Great Pacific War, the Americans did this at Yap, in the

Caroline Islands.

This answer ran counter to the planning wisdom of the time,

both American and Japanese. Opposed landings were held to be

difficult or impossible, and U.S. planning centered on the “through

ticket” from Hawaii to the Philippines. Fifteen months after the

appearance of Bywater’s book, the United States’ War Plan Orange

changed from the “through ticket” to island hopping, via the Marshalls and Carolines. After the war began, the Japanese used the

island-invasion ploy at Midway, getting the major battle they had

sought, but losing it. As every teacher knows, the best way to detect copying is in the similarity of wrong answers, not correct

ones: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, like Bywater’s Americans, inexplicably positioned his carriers ahead of his battleships.

Thus far, this account has followed that of Bywater and his

work given by Honan.12 He, much less Bywater himself, gives no

description of how the operation of the ship models on the pond

produced the insights that it is said to have produced. One is left

to think that the models and their collective motions somehow

14
fertilized Bywater’s capacity

to imagine naval actions, and

thus led him to reach conclusions that could not have

been reached unaided. This

explanation is very possibly

correct, but there is an intriguing alternative: Bywater

and his helpers may have in

fact failed to make the windup ships behave in the desired fashion. Indeed, it is

difficult to imagine how they

could have made mechanical

ships stay in formation for

long, or execute turns with

any degree of simultaneity.

Precisely because clockwork

ships cannot be made to perform clockwork operations, they illustrate the point that a formation, and a fortiori a large operation, can stay in synchrony only

by constant adaptive adjustment. A Japanese weakness in the ensuing war was to create complicated plans that looked good on

paper, but were unduly difficult to execute—all the more so because of the Japanese weakness in communication technology.

The Americans were better served by their simpler plans and better communications technology.

Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game13

In the late 1930s, writer and polymath Fletcher Pratt perfected

a naval wargame similar in spirit to the games conducted on the

famous checkerboard deck of Sims Hall at the U.S. Naval War

College.14 Although he was professionally involved with naval

matters as a journalist, and some of those who played his game

15

Hansel Mieth/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Fletcher Pratt works at his home on a model

of a Chinese gunboat in preparation for the

next round of his war games.
were officers (naval and otherwise), his game was in large part a

social affair and the players were a co-ed group of writers, socialites, and artistes. If, as some have suggested,15 there is value

in having a diverse group of players, Pratt had it. Given the existence, and fame, of the War College game, the Pratt game is noteworthy because of the following reasons:

• Its modest level of effort. Pratt and his group of

New York City intellectuals played it for fun, in a

ballroom, with homemade ship models. The rulebook is slim and newcomers could learn to play in

15 minutes. The contrast with today’s computerbased simulations is astounding.

• Its encapsulation of the value of surface combatants via a single simple formula taking into account

tonnage, the thickness of armor, the size and number of guns, etc. This formula, and therefore the

game on which it was based, represented a theory

of naval combat.*

Pratt also conceived of an intriguing solution to a bothersome

problem. Previous wargaming systems had used dice-rolling to

determine which shots, if any, hit their targets. These games’ dicebased determination of hits and misses had difficulty capturing

many of the considerations that bear on whether or not naval

gunfire hits its mark, including the ability of the gun director to

correct on the basis of the splashes of shots that miss; the increased difficulty of hitting if the target is moving faster, or maneuvering; or if the shooting ship is doing so (and, conversely,

the increased ease of hitting when shooting at a calmly moving

target, or from a calmly moving ship); and the dependence of

probability-of-hit on target aspect—bow-on and stern-on ships

are easier to hit than broadside ships because the shooter’s error

16

*Allen notes (on page 119) that one of Pratt’s Army officer players was Trevor N. Dupuy,

who later created the “Quantified Judgment Model” of land combat, which features a formula that attempts to summarize all manner of force characteristics as a single number.
is greater in range than in track. Rather than create a complicated

mathematical model of this situation, Pratt simply obliged his

players to lie down on the floor (i.e., deck) of the ballroom and

direct their fire by aiming, as best they could, a pointer at the target and noting down their estimate of the range (in inches). An

umpire would then use a tape measure to find the point of aim

from this information, and hits were scored if the model target

ship (or another ship!) was at the point of aim.

Pratt can be considered to have been experimenting when, in

advance of the Battle of the River Plate, he set up a game pitting

the German “pocket battleship” Admiral Graf Spee against several

smaller ships. Military wisdom of the time—including that of

Pratt—held that the larger ship should win, but the game predicted a victory for the multiple small ships. Such of course, was

the outcome later, when the Graf Spee was defeated by the British

heavy cruiser Exeter and the light cruisers Ajax and Achilles.

Observations on the Idiosyncratic Efforts

Gause remarked, “Apparently every serious thought on the

process of competition obliges one to consider it as a whole, and

this leads inevitably to mathematics.”16 The same could certainly

be said with combat replacing competition. Gause recognized that

the mathematical theories might contain inadequacies and in fact

saw his experiments as exploring a split between observation and

theory: “these processes are extremely complicated and [their

trends] often do not harmonize with the predictions of the relatively simple mathematical theory.”17 In our terms, Gause’s work

was a crucial experiment because it was a test of the very theory

on which it was based. To an extent, it was therefore also a crucial

experiment regarding the related Lanchester equations. Gause’s

predation examples ended in some markedly different endstates,

and he missed an opportunity to make an observation that would

be extremely relevant to the Lanchester case as well: in a case

with predation, the endgame is an unstable process with too few

17
creatures for the law of large numbers to apply. It would be interesting to see how much of the observed variation in outcomes

(which species exterminates the other, and how many of the victors there are when this happens) is predicted by the equations

alone.

Gause’s work is also notable for being a test-tube version of

today’s computer-based experiments in which intelligent agents

battle one another.18

Bywater’s work is nearly at the opposite end of the spectrum

from that of Gause: he had no mathematical formulas to guide

him, or to be tested, and his work did not even produce any statistics regarding numbers of ships “surviving” or the like, because

he had no means of imputing damage to the ships. One interpretation of his work (and another will be presented in the section

entitled “Overall Observations,” at the end of this book) is that it

stands as an example of work that is objective, yet not at all quantitative, despite common usage that treats these terms as equivalent. Unfortunately, his work is also an example of work in

which the conclusions are documented, but the method of reaching those conclusions is not. As such, it is a warning to those

who would do likewise: we can’t tell whether his work was, to

use terms defined earlier on, an experiment or an exploration.

Pratt’s work lies in between. The contradiction, by Pratt’s own

game, of Pratt’s (and others’) views on the outcome of the Graf

Spee scenario, is especially notable for its disproof of such platitudes as “you can’t get anything out of a model that you didn’t

put into it,” “a model only embodies the prejudices of its designer,” and so on. This disproof could arise because of Pratt’s

intellectual honesty, aided by the formal structure of his game.

His belief in his facts regarding ships’s speeds, guns, and armor,

and in the way he had structured them into a game, suffice to

make him believe in the output of the game, even though he

would not have accepted it as a bare assertion.

18
The U.S. Prepares for World War II

This section looks at five sets of experiments undertaken inthe United States with a view toward an eventual (or, in

the later cases, imminent) Second World War. These cases are the

U.S. Navy’s Fleet Problems, at-sea exercises with a considerable

experimental component; the famous joint ship bombing experiment of General William “Billy” Mitchell; the amphibious invasion experiments inspired by Major Earl H. “Pete” Ellis of the

Marine Corps; the Army’s Louisiana Maneuvers, which were field

exercises with an experimental component; and the experiments

with fighter direction conducted as an aspect of training at the

Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School.

The Fleet Problems, 1923–40*

Apart from their doubtlessly considerable training value, the

U.S. Navy’s Fleet Problems I–XXI are generally considered to have

been pivotal in the development of U.S. carrier doctrine.19 Regrettably, some are less well documented than others, and historians

who have done archival research on the Fleet Problems have invariably expressed dismay at the large amount of information regarding them that seems to have been lost, or never written down

in the first place. This, in itself, is a lesson for present and future

military experimentation efforts.

Experiments I–IV, taking place in 1923–24, are therefore notable

for their lack of actual aircraft carriers: USS Langley (CV 1), had

been commissioned in 1922 (following conversion from its earlier

incarnation as a collier, Jupiter), but was not available for use in

the Fleet Problems. Instead, other types of ships were used as surrogates for carriers. In Fleet Problem I, for example, the attacking

Black fleet had as its carriers the battleships New York (BB 34) and

Oklahoma (BB 37), whose flight operations were represented by

19

*Since this section was originally written, an important new source on this topic has

been published: Albert Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy’s Fleet Problems,

1923–1940 (Newport, RI Naval War College, 2010).
their catapult-launched spotting planes. The scenario was a Black

attack on the Blue-defended Panama Canal, and a single Black airplane, dropping miniature bombs, was ruled to have destroyed the

Gatun spillway, which would lower the level of Lake Gatun, rendering the canal impassable to ships.

USS Langley at last participated in Fleet Problem V in 1925. In

this scenario, an attack on the Hawaiian Islands, the Black aggressor was again given the carrier, as well as two seaplane tenders and aviation-capable battleships and cruisers. The Blue

defenders had no carriers, and the airplanes on board their battleship, USS Wyoming (BB 32), could not be launched for want

of a catapult.

The Langley’s performance was sufficiently impressive as to re20

J.M.F. Haase Collection/San Diego Aero Space Museum via Tailhook

The USS Langley (CV 1) steams off the southern California coast with its aircraft during

one of the Fleet Problems of the mid-1920s.
sult in a recommendation that the Lexington (CV 2) and Saratoga

(CV 3) be completed quickly.

Fleet Problems VI (1926) and VII (1927) again addressed attacks on the Panama Canal. Before Fleet Problem VII, the fleet

participated in what was really a joint problem because the U.S.

Army was involved as well. In it, the Langley again appeared in

the aggressor’s fleet, and its aircraft were used to defend against

attacks from land-based Army aircraft, the first instance of what

would later be termed combat air patrol (CAP). Even with the

participation of the Langley, the attacks on the Miraflores Locks

(at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal) were executed by single

airplanes, acting as surrogates for larger forces. A commentator

noted,

In later problems when carriers were available from

which attacks in force could be launched and great

reality could be introduced into the maneuvers, the

vital necessity for air defense of the Canal was to

become even more apparent.20

In Fleet Problem VII, the Langley joined the Blue side and was

to protect a slow convoy crossing the Caribbean Sea. The carrier

again provided CAP, but had already recovered its planes when,

after the end of the exercise, Black land-based aircraft attacked

the convoy. This Fleet Problem was taken to indicate the need of

carriers for freedom of maneuver, and freedom of action in employing their aircraft.

Fleet Problem VIII (1928), in Hawaiian waters, suffered from

bad weather.

Fleet Problem IX (1929) marked a major advance—the introduction of the large, fast carriers Lexington and Saratoga. The

venue was again the Panama Canal, and the goal was to validate

with actual carriers and full-size air complements the conclusions

drawn earlier from the exercises conducted using surrogates.

The Blue defenders got the Lexington while the Black attackers

had the Saratoga and USS Aroostook (CM 3), a converted

21
minelayer seaplane tender that was to represent the Langley. The

Lexington ran into Black’s battleship division, and would surely

have been “sunk” by gunfire, but was ruled to be only “damaged”

for the sake of preserving the remainder of the problem. This

“damage” took the form of decreased speed.

Serendipity arose:

The climax of this exercise came when Saratoga left

the main force of battleships and, accompanied by

one light cruiser, made a high-speed run from the

west. . . . This strike, however, was not part of the

original plan for the exercise and seems to have

come about simply because the destroyer screen for

Saratoga’s battleship escort did not have the fuel to

stay with it. Nevertheless, after [Fleet Problem IX],

carriers “were accepted as fleet units.”21

The Blue light cruiser USS Detroit (CL 8) had sighted the

Saratoga and was able to track it on into the night, but the crippled

Lexington lacked the speed to give chase until the next morning,

when its “damage” was ruled to have been repaired. Saratoga

launched 70 airplanes from a position some 145 miles away from

the canal. In an incident parallel to that which had befallen the

Lexington, Saratoga then encountered the Blue battleship division,

as well as an enemy submarine. It was ruled to have been sunk

by each, despite which it managed to launch another 13 airplanes.

The Aroostook launched its one plane, representing Langley’s

aircraft, on a one-way mission to the Atlantic end of the canal, to

bomb the locks and spillway at Gatun, and the port of Coco Solo.

The Blue defenders, however, were unaware that this seaplane

represented the entire Langley complement, and took little notice

of it until it alighted at the Atlantic end of the canal and the pilot

“surrendered,” explaining what he was supposed to be considered to have done.

Saratoga was recovering its airplanes (which had successfully

attacked the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel Locks, as well as two

22
Army airfields, all at or near the Pacific end of the canal) when

an airstrike from the Lexington arrived and “sank” Saratoga for

the third time. A fourth “sinking” of the Saratoga was attempted

by Blue land-based naval aircraft the following day, but the two

sister ships were operating in proximity—so close, it was reported, as to have engaged each other with their 8-inch guns—

and they attacked the Lexington instead.

Fleet Problems X and XI took place in 1930. In the former, Blue

got the Saratoga and Langley, while the enemy coalition Black

had the Lexington. The contest was nothing less than a struggle

for control of the Caribbean Sea. Neither side had a good idea of

where the other’s ships were, and bad weather lessened the

amount of air search that either could accomplish. After some

days, aircraft from the Lexington spotted the Saratoga, and successive strikes put it, and then the Langley, and finally a number

of Blue surface ships, out of action. These operations resembled,

in detail as well as in the large, later operations in the war with

Japan, and they showed the primacy of the offensive in carrier

warfare. Fleet Problem XI similarly pointed to the importance of

scouting, and the after-action report apparently offered a counsel

of perfection:

After the game, it was recommended that scouting

squadrons be increased to 18 planes and that a more

suitable scouting plane be developed. It was felt that

better flotation was needed for amphibians and that

a greatly increased range for carrier-based scouts,

as well as the ability to take off from a short run,

were necessary. Among desirable secondary characteristics were small size, folding wings, and high

speed, even at the cost of ceiling and armament.22

The willingness to sacrifice armament must be considered in

light of the observation, made after Fleet Problem X, deploring

the scouts’ inability to bomb carriers when they found them. The

report on Fleet Problem XI also recommended the creation of bat23
tlegroups as we know them today: cruisers and destroyers assigned to escort a carrier, all training together as a team.

Fleet Problem XII, conducted in 1931, included scouting and

at-sea refueling, but the major theme was combat between a battleship-intensive fleet and a carrier-intensive fleet. It was found

that the commander of the latter had best be located on the carrier itself, an arrangement that we take for granted today, but that

was novel at the time.

Fleet Problem XIII, held in 1932, dealt with air search for submarines, and it found that the submarines were clearly vulnerable

to airborne detection and attack. Despite a very different setup

from that which had faced the commanders in Fleet Problem X,

the commanders in Fleet Problem XIII made the same choice: a

24

USS Yorktown (CV 5), at Naval Air Station, North Island, San Diego, California, in June

1940: Three Torpedo Squadron Five (VT-5) Douglas TBD-1 Devastators at the after end

of the flight deck are painted in experimental camouflage schemes tested during Fleet

Problem XXI.

Official U.S. Navy photograph, U.S. National Archives
top-priority effort to find and defeat the enemy carrier. The commander of the Blue aircraft noted this and saw a corollary: the

side with more carriers would have a great advantage.

In 1933’s Fleet Problem XIV, the Blue force was to protect the

West Coast against Black raids. Black’s Lexington again stumbled

into contact with Blue battleships, getting caught between two

and ruled “sunk.” Saratoga conducted successful attacks on Long

Beach, Venice, and El Segundo, and then moved north to hit San

Francisco. While launching its strike there, it was attacked by aircraft from the Richmond (CL 9) and Langley. Aircraft from the

Saratoga and Langley proceeded to damage each other’s ships,

again underscoring the primacy of the offensive in carrier warfare,

and hence the need for high-quality attack airplanes and

weapons. This lesson was drawn again from the ensuing Fleet

Problem XV in 1934.

In 1935, USS Ranger (CV 4) joined the series for Fleet Problem

XVI, actually a disconnected set of joint problems conducted in

cooperation with the Army and the Coast Guard. Fleet Problem

XVII, in the following year, seems to have made only technical

contributions, such as the introduction of the automatic pilot.

Fleet Problem XVIII (1937) returned to the business of refining

carrier doctrine, this time addressing the question of whether carriers should operate with the main body of the fleet (defined, of

course, by the presence of battleships) or separately. No strong

conclusion seems to have been reached.

Fleet Problem XIX included a now-famous attack on Pearl Harbor, foreshadowing in 1938 the Japanese attack of 1941. The Lexington was eliminated early, by a long-range flight from San Diego,

but aircraft from the Saratoga flew attacks quite similar in detail

to those flown later by the Japanese. The defenders’ difficulties

were analyzed as stemming from the mobility of the fast carriers.

Fleet Problem XX (1939), in the Caribbean, featured the carriers

Yorktown and Enterprise (CV 5 and CV 6, respectively), but not

the Langley or Saratoga.

25
The last Fleet Problem, XXI, took place in 1940, in the Hawaii

area. It consisted of two exercises devoted to refining such points

of carrier warfare as coordination and planning of scouting and

screening.

The Experiments of Billy Mitchell

In 1921, the decommissioned ex-German battleship Ostfriesland was bombed by U.S. Navy and Army airplanes in an experiment made famous by its connection to then–Brigadier General

William “Billy” Mitchell. The ship sank, Mitchell declared battle26

Over 13–21 July 1921, the 49th and 96th Bombardment Squadrons assigned to Brigadier

General William “Billy” Mitchell’s 1st Provisional Air Brigade at Langley Field, Virginia,

conducted tests to determine the efficacy of aircraft against warships. The group’s Martin

MB-2 and Handley-Page HP 0/400 aircraft successfully bombed and sank three ex-German warships, including the formidable 22,437-ton battleship Ostfriesland, shown here,

off the coast of Virginia.

U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
ships to have been made obsolete by airpower, and the impression stuck.23

The experiment actually began with a search by the bombers

for the decommissioned battleship ex-Iowa (BB 4, not the later

BB 61), which was operating under radio control. It was moving

at six knots and the searchers knew only that it was offshore

somewhere between the mouth of the Delaware River and that

of Chesapeake Bay, a distance of about 100 miles. To conserve

airplanes, the search was conducted with dirigibles.24 These having found it, the ship was subjected to bombardment with sandfilled dummy bombs.25 “Seacraft are not only very easy to find,

but their type and character are also as easy to determine from

the air,” wrote Mitchell.26

In the first round of heavy bombing against the Ostfriesland,

Navy and Marine aircraft, making multiple passes, dropped 33

medium-sized (230 lb.) bombs (out of 36 carried), hitting with

nine—but only two exploded, and with low-order explosions at

that. The next wave of Army and Navy aircraft dropped 600-lb.

and 550-lb. bombs, respectively. Nineteen were dropped (out of

24 carried), resulting in five hits and a near miss. Of these, only

one hit and the near miss—both Army-dropped—detonated. Inspection showed that the duds, while doing some damage

through sheer kinetic energy, did not compromise the watertightness of the hull, but either the exploding hit or the water hammer

effect of the near miss had started several major leaks.27

The next day, the Army dropped five 1,000-lb. bombs (out of

12 carried by six airplanes), scoring three hits and two near

misses. In a pause, Navy inspectors boarded the target ship and

found that the hits had done great damage, but not to the watertightness of the ship. The Army then loaded 2,000-lb. bombs onto

its aircraft, dropping six and hitting (or just barely missing, and

applying the water hammer effect) with three. The ship sank

stern-first relatively promptly, with a final 2,000 pounder administered to the bow as it went under.28

27
Major Pete Ellis and USMC

Interwar Experimentation29

In the 1920s, after the disastrous experience of the Gallipoli landing in World War I,

conventional wisdom held

that opposed amphibious

landings—especially in daylight—were impossible operations. Yet the United States’

important Pacific possessions,

Guam and the Philippines, lay

on the far side of the vast

Japanese Mandate—the former German islands entrusted

to Japan in its capacity as one

of the victorious powers of the

First World War.

Major Earl H. “Pete” Ellis,

USMC, who took a great interest in these islands of the Pacific (and was to die among them), saw the need to prepare for

their conquest. He envisioned Marine Corps amphibious operations as the means by which the United States would retake the

islands, and higher-ups in the Corps (perhaps having interservice

politics in view) agreed. Ellis met his mysterious end in 1923, but

the Navy and Marine Corps conducted a series of landing exercises in the 1920s. Although these—like some coeval USMC (and

Army) refights of Civil War battles using 20th-century equipment—were actually exercises rather than experiments, they revealed deficiencies in almost every aspect of the operation,

including fires, logistics, and the vessels and vehicles needed to

accomplish the actual transition from sea to land.

The Corps was slow to react, but when it finally did—in the

28

U.S. Marine Corps History Division

Marine Major Earl H. “Pete” Ellis’s vision of

Marine Corps amphibious operations in the

Pacific islands precipitated a series of Navy

and Marine Corps landing exercises in the

1920s. These revealed deficiencies in almost

every aspect of the operation, which prepared the services for their actions two

decades later.
1930s—it did so decisively, establishing the Fleet Marine Force as

an entity with a charter to engage in expeditionary warfare, and

setting about the creation of a usable manual of landing operations.

Absent any authorities on the topic, the latter effort was accomplished by dint of what would, today, be termed brainstorming. Quantico’s schools for officers were devoted entirely to the

project, in which each Marine prepared a chronological account

of a landing operation. These lists were then subjected to a multistage winnowing process at the hands of more senior officers.

This process is remarkable for its bootstrap nature. One of the

Marines wrote that the group

approached its subject . . . about the same as every

other committee, with a lantern in one hand and a

candle in the other—but neither of these seemed to

throw much light on the subject, so we wound up

by hiding our lights under a bushel and using the

imagination that God gave us to use for this particular purpose.30

The result was the famous Tentative Manual for Landing Operations, published in 1934. As its title showed, it was the first

word on amphibious landings, not the last. Therefore, it needed

to be tested. Accordingly, the Fleet Marine Force participated in

seven annual fleet landing exercises, conducted in concert with

the Navy at the islands of Culebra, in the Caribbean, and San

Clemente, off San Diego. These exercises, despite numerous artificialities, helped to test the Tentative Manual—particularly with

regard to fires, close air support, and logistics—and also gave

some experience with new pieces of equipment. A final exercise

occurred in June 1941, at New River, North Carolina. Simultaneously, work of an academic nature, based upon history and attempting to advance theory, continued, as did limited technical

experiments with particular devices. The landing craft as we

know it did not emerge as a solution until the very end of this

29
process, with the first test of the Higgins boat—that eventually

became the landing craft, vehicle, personnel (LCVP)—occurring

in Fleet Landing Exercise Number 6, in 1940.

The Army’s Louisiana Maneuvers31

The U.S. Army’s 1941 experiments, usually known as the

Louisiana Maneuvers, were quite large in scope. They actually took

place in two separate venues, one on the Louisiana-Texas border

and one on the border separating the Carolinas, each encompassing

thousands of square miles. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers took

part in force-on-force battles adjudicated by thousands of umpires

on the basis of a rulebook.

30

During the Carolina phase of the maneuvers near Jefferson, South Carolina, on 26 November 1941, members of the 101st Coast Artillery attached to the IV Corps “Reds” used

a wooden beam to simulate a 37mm antitank gun. The gunners called it a “wood-ometer” and claimed it could fire 400 splinters and 15 drops of turpentine per minute.

Charles Gorry/Associated Press
Surrogates represented unavailable equipment, including especially the antitank guns whose abundant deployment was one of

the topics of experimentation.

Although the maneuvers were seen primarily as a tool for training

(at all levels), the Louisiana portion contained elements of serendipity and outright experimentation. The former was exemplified by

the “Battle of Shreveport,” which showed “the decisive influence of

destroyed bridges,” a lesson that would of course be confirmed in

later Allied operations in Europe during the Second World War, and

by various discoveries pertaining to the importance of close air support on the one hand, and to its difficulty on the other.

The explicit experimentation took the form of hypothesis-testing:

• The first phase of the Louisiana portion pitted a

large, traditional force against a smaller, but more

mobile one, to test what we would now call the maneuver warfare hypothesis that a small, agile force

can prevail against a larger, but clumsier, one. The

action was a meeting engagement, in which each side

had orders to attack.

• The second phase of the Louisiana portion was

even less symmetric, testing the hypothesis that the

smaller and more mobile force could successfully defend against the larger force. It was in this phase that

the destroyed bridges figured so prominently.

In the first phase, the antitank weapons of the traditional force

blunted the armored attacks of the mobile force, and ultimately the

traditional force prevailed. Arguably, the adjudication procedures of

the experiment—the rules of the game—portrayed antitank weapons

as unrealistically effective, and unrealistically invulnerable, and thus

skewed the outcome.* Time ran out before the second phase reached

a conclusion.

31

*More fundamentally, some weapons—such as the .50-caliber machine gun—were portrayed as being antitank weapons, despite the fact that tank armor had progressed to

the point of invulnerability against these weapons.
The Carolina phases were planned after the Louisiana phases

had ended. The maneuvers’ organizer, Lieutenant General Lesley

J. McNair, was a strong believer in antitank weapons, and no

steps were taken to correct the rules’ possible bias against tanks.

On the contrary, hand grenades, represented by small bags of

flour, were ruled capable of destroying tanks, notwithstanding an

existing rule that tanks’ very presence would neutralize any infantry within 100 yards.

Then-Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower related an amusing incident regarding surrogates—and cheating.

An umpire decided that a bridge had been destroyed by an enemy attack and flagged it accordingly. From then on, it was not to be used by men

or vehicles. Shortly, a Corporal brought his squad

up to the bridge, looked at the flag, and hesitated

for a moment; then resolutely marched his men

across it. The umpire yelled at him:

“Hey, don’t you see that that bridge is destroyed?”

The Corporal answered, “Of course I see that it’s

destroyed. Can’t you see we’re swimming?”32

It is easy to see how this cavalier approach to the rules, if widespread, could have undercut what turned out to be a key finding—

mentioned above—of the maneuvers, the importance of bridges.

The first Carolina event was a more extreme version of the first

Louisiana event, with even greater disparities in size and mobility

between the large traditional force on the one hand and the small

armored force on the other. The traditional force prevailed, despite

some spectacular local successes on the part of the mobile force,

in part because of some cheating such as starting early, deploying

out of area, and using the local commercial telephone system, in

part because of the bias in the rules regarding antitank weapons,

but also in part because of some extremely aggressive and creative

play on the part of the traditional force, and a tendency on the

part of the armored force to dissipate itself in piecemeal attacks.

32
The second Carolina event resembled the second Louisiana

event, in which a small armored force attempted a mobile defense

against a larger traditional force. Like the second Louisiana event,

the second Carolina event was ended by the calendar, before a

conclusion had been reached. Considerable serendipitous learning had taken place on the armor-heavy side, including the lesson

that tanks cannot function without infantry support.

By comparison to other experiments with land forces, the Army’s

maneuvers in 1941 are remarkable on several counts, notably:

• There was no bias in favor of innovation; on the

contrary, the deck was very arguably stacked in

favor of the traditional force and against the armored force (e.g., by the toleration of considerable

cheating on the part of the former, and by the

skewedness, noted previously, of rules involving

antitank weapons).

• Although the traditional force was dubbed “Blue”

and the untraditional armored force “Red,” there

was not a clear identification of one side or the

other as “The Americans.”

• Contrary to the visions of British and European

tank theorists, the experience in the Spanish Civil

War, and the experience in the Third Reich’s

blitzkrieg conquests (all of which had taken place

by the end of the Army’s experiments), the 1941

maneuvers highlighted the mobile defense as a potential mission for the armored forces. Looked at

differently, they highlighted attacks against armor

by traditional forces.

• From the maneuvers, the Army very clearly drew

the lesson that tanks need to be mixed with infantry and used in a combined-arms manner.33 All

participants in the Second World War, with the possible exception of the Russians, eventually reached

33
this conclusion. The discovery of a successful combined-arms doctrine is rendered all the more difficult by its similarity to a doctrine emphasizing the

use of tanks in support of infantry. The latter, taken

to its conclusion, leads to the development of “infantry tanks,” designed to accompany infantry and

accordingly capable of moving no faster than the

infantry can walk. Experience in France and North

Africa was to reveal great weaknesses in this form

of tank and tank warfare.

• The organizers did not flinch from the idea that

commanders might err during the maneuvers. “My

God, Senator, that’s the reason I do it,” responded

General George C. Marshall in response to a senator’s

question on this point. “I want the mistake [made]

down in Louisiana, not over in Europe, and the only

way to do this thing is to try it out, and if it doesn’t

work, find out what we need to make it work.”34

To the degree that these salient features form any kind of coherent picture—and it might be a mistake to read too much into

them—it is a picture of an experiment whose not-so-hidden

agenda is to debunk the claims of the innovators and show the

continuing supremacy of a force organized along traditional infantry lines, immunized against tanks by some extra antitank

weapons and an aggressive approach to their use.

Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School35

British experience gained in the Battle of Britain showed that

in an air battle, the defending aircraft needed the central control

of fighter directors if they were to defend against bombers. This

experience reached the U.S. Navy, via the Royal Canadian Air

Force Radio School, prior to Pearl Harbor, and was immediately

deemed applicable to the defense of carrier task forces against

the massed attacks of Japanese dive- and torpedo-bombers. Radio

34
would allow the fighter directors to communicate with their fighters, and radar would allow them to perceive the enemy attackers,

but to succeed, they would also need tactical proficiency. The Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School was created to teach

them how to fight the battle.

The commander of the school, Lieutenant Commander John

“Jack” Hook Griffin, had been assigned to Royal Air Force and

Royal Navy fighter squadrons, for whom the war had already

started. To teach his freshly-minted ensigns how to be fighter director officers (FDOs), Griffin amassed a collection of Navy publications and manuals, but he also undertook to create a

laboratory for the simulation of fighter battles. Having been given

an aircraft hangar in which to conduct his school, he set about

recreating the air battle on the deck of the hangar.

The result must have been quite a sight. One foot on the deck

35

Navigating and Direction Officers’ Association

Similar to the Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School, the British Fighter Direction

Training Centre also used surrogates in their training. The well-known (in Great Britain)

Wall’s ice cream tricycles were used as both enemy aircraft and friendly fighters at Speckington Hall, less than two miles from the Yeovilton Naval Air Station.
represented a nautical mile on the sea surface. Tricycles, modified

to accommodate a grown-up, geared down to move more slowly,

and provided with hoods so that the “pilots” could only see for a

few feet in any direction, were the fighters. Telephones, with long

wires to each tricycle, represented the radios—later, these telephones were replaced with actual radios so as to eliminate the

trailing wires. The tricycles also had compasses and clocks, and

were equipped with a table informing the driver of how fast to

pedal to simulate various airspeeds. Trainees on a catwalk thus

had a view of the deck that simulated a view of a radar screen:

viewing it from high above, the trainees saw the tricycles as blips,

with a painted circle at the center of the hangar representing the

task force itself and concentric circles surrounding it, as on a

plan-position indicator radar screen. These trainees then, as

would real-life radar operators, communicated their observations

by telephone to a separate plotting room.

This set-up allowed the trainees to plan and test defensive tactics, and to learn, apply, and validate points of British fighter doctrine, such as a teaching that every group of incoming bombers

should meet at least token opposition. However, the trainees also

found some useful contraventions of British doctrine regarding,

for example, how far out a raid ought to be met, and the utility

of holding fighters in reserve, to contend with enemy breakthroughs. These discoveries reflect the use of the FDO school setup for experimentation, as distinct from training.

The school also acted as the first step in what became a larger

Navy experiment, the attempt to determine what kind of man

would make a good FDO. This experiment came to include the

assessment of performance in actual fleet duty, not just in the

hangar at the school, and the result was surprising. High potential

as an FDO did not correlate with flying experience, or a background in science or engineering; it correlated with prewar income level. Former teachers were the only outlier—they tended

to do well as FDOs, despite their lack of income.

36
Observations on the U.S. Experiments

The early Fleet Problems are notable for their intensive use of

surrogates—battleships standing in for carriers, Langley standing

in for larger carriers, Aroostook standing in for Langley, and single

planes standing in for formations of a squadron or more—to conduct experiments in carrier warfare while using few, if any, actual

carriers. These formulations show great imagination and clearsightedness and should be noted by experimenters of today, despite occasional mix-ups such as the failure to inform the

defenders at Gatun that a seaplane from Aroostook would replace

Langley’s aircraft, and lapses such as the apparent nonrecognition

that a one-plane surrogate attack favors the attacker, because of

the reduced probability that the attack will be detected.

In the Fleet Problems, the “Blue” side was clearly identifiable

as the U.S. side, if only because of its missions. In the Louisiana

Maneuvers, as noted above, the identification was less clear, but

surely a considerable hint of Americanness inhered to the Blue

side. In neither case, however, was the Blue side endowed with

the modern (or even futuristic, especially in the early Fleet Problems) equipment—tanks or carriers. This set-up, quite different

from today’s, may have had the advantage that the controllers’

natural bias in favor of the American side and any bias they may

have harbored in favor of new technology (including any tendency to overestimate the effectiveness of coming “wonder

weapons”) would work in opposite directions.

Mitchell’s results, of course, stand at odds with the later experience of World War II, in which aircraft certainly did attack ships

successfully, but not by doing what his aircraft did to the Ostfriesland—pass over in level flight and drop heavy bombs. Closer

consideration of the German battleship experiment suggests various reasons that level bombing was so successful in the 1921

trial.36 For example, the ship was dead in the water and thus presumptively easier to hit than a moving target would be, and since

it was unmanned, there was no damage control. The latter point

37
was probably quite important inasmuch as the bombing took

place over two days, and leaks started on the first day admitted

water unchecked all through the night, leaving the target quite

low in the water as of the beginning of the second day.

These reasons are good examples of artificialities. It would

have been difficult to make the ship a moving target (though not

impossible; Iowa had been operated under radio control earlier

in the trials), and, of course, safety considerations would preclude

the presence of a damage control party during the bombing. The

amplification of the first day’s hits by the lack of damage control

can be seen as pointing, unnoticed, to a lesson learned only after

war broke out—the great importance of active damage control

once a hit has been taken.

The search for the Iowa also illustrates the difference between

a fair test and a fair fight. For a fair fight (i.e., a contest that could

equally well be won by either side), the region in which Iowa

might be found would have to be (as it seemingly was) rather

limited. For a fair test, on the other hand, the region in which

Iowa might be found would have to be as large as might be the

case if Iowa were a hostile warship in a real-world operation. The

two are entirely different.

More puzzling is the disjunction between the great difficulty

encountered by scout aircraft in the Fleet Problems, and the ease

with which Mitchell’s dirigibles found the Iowa in the search

phase of his experiment. Later wartime experience confirms the

exercise result. Very possibly, the area in which the Iowa was

known to steam was not so great as Mitchell makes it sound—

100 miles may seem sizeable when considered as the length of

the Maryland coastline, but it is not a great distance by maritime

standards and, moreover, Mitchell does not say how far out to

sea the search region extended.

Partial or total damage to ships figured strongly in several of

the Fleet Problems (e.g., in the crippling of Lexington, or the various “sinkings” of Saratoga). Yet—especially considering that

38
Mitchell’s experiment may have been “rigged” and that the reaction of the Navy witnesses to Ostfriesland’s sinking may have

been exaggerated or misinterpreted in some accounts37—nobody

at the time really knew very much about how bombs damage

ships. In this light, the relative success of the Fleet Problems

seems paradoxical: absent an understanding of the effects of

bombs on ships, how is it that the problems did such a good job

of highlighting the major issues of carrier warfare? A similar question could be asked regarding the adjudication of combats in the

Louisiana Maneuvers—these were handled by on-scene umpires

using rules of thumb embodied in a slim manual, and the results

can be considered to be an approximation, at best.

The story of interwar Marine Corps experimentation with amphibious operations, summarized above, is often told. In its command briefing and otherwise, the present-day Marine Corps

Warfighting Laboratory, for example, makes frequent reference to

it. These references typically point to the success of the effort, to

the fact that much of the learning came from aspects of the exercises that the participants would have considered to be instances

of failure, and in some cases to the fact that the principal product

of the experimentation was knowledge, not the Higgins Boat

(which was produced elsewhere, and brought in), or any other

piece of gear. These are all important points. But the following

seldom-noted points are important, too:

• The incorporation of academic effort, at the

Quantico schools;

• The “bootstrap” nature of the knowledge-gaining

process; and

• The lengthy timescale on which the events took

place.

The process by which the Marine Corps students at Quantico

developed the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations is a more

extreme version of the same phenomenon. A group of people,

seemingly drawing only on common sense and a knowledge of

39
what had not worked at Gallipoli, were able to create a successful

set of instructions for doing something that nobody had previously known how to do. However, it is important to notice the

next step—experimentation to test the contents of the manual.

That final point deserves some emphasis. Major Ellis directed

the Corps’ attention to the Pacific Islands before the First World

War was even over; the Commandant approved his plan in 1921;

a landing exercise was held at Culebra in 1922, and again in

Panama in 1924; the Fleet Marine Force was formed in 1933; the

Tentative Manual came out in 1934; experimentation began in

1935 and continued until just after America’s entry into the Second World War. From the standpoint of today, the story moves

right along and these events seem to occur in rapid succession.

But they span more than 20 years. Today’s efforts at experimentation come under heavy bureaucratic fire if they do not produce

something in two years.

Commander Griffin’s FDO school work, although experimental

only in part, deserves attention because of his careful creation of

a qualitatively and quantitatively well-designed surrogate that had

no physical elements in common with the real thing. Doubtless

many found it risible on their initial exposure, if not on a continuing basis. But its treatment of speeds and distances had been

thought through logically and resulted in realistic engagements

and a realistic flow of events over time, because of the correctness

of the relationship between the distances on the hangar’s deck

and the speeds at which the tricycles were moving. In this way,

the FDO school could in some respects represent an airstrike more

accurately than had the Fleet Problems, even though the former

used a tricycle and the latter used Aroostook’s seaplane.

40
Germany Prepares for World War II

This section examines two prewar German efforts in militaryexperimentation—the one that produced the tanks-and-planes

blitzkrieg, and the one that yielded the U-boats’ wolf packs.

The attempt to draw lessons from the German experience is

sometimes critiqued on the grounds that the Germans lost. Yet

while the United States eventually realized that it might be drawn

into a second world war, Germany was planning on starting one,

and accordingly set about preparations carefully. Nor can the

blitzkrieg or the wolf packs be considered ineffective in themselves. Therefore, these preparations, if not others, merit some

study.

The German Army’s Experiments with Blitzkrieg

Tanks were introduced by Allied armies in the First World War

41

In its early between-the-wars experiments with combined infantry and armor operations,

the German Army used simulated tanks—armor shapes over conventional road cars.

Associated Press
in an attempt to break the stalemated trench warfare. The German

side captured some tanks and later made a few of their own. The

war ended before large-scale armored warfare could occur, but

not before it could be envisioned by officers on both sides.

During the period between the world wars, the German Army

reinvented itself along the lines envisioned by General Hans von

Seeckt, who believed in the creation of a small, elite army operating on precepts that became known as blitzkrieg, and are

known in the present day as maneuver warfare—quite a change

from the trench warfare of the First World War. These ideas, formulated by von Seeckt even before World War I had ended, dovetailed with circumstance when the Treaty of Versailles limited the

size of the German Army to 100,000 men and mandated a long

period of service (to prevent the training of a large population by

cycling them through). Although von Seeckt was not among interwar Germany’s many proponents of armored warfare, he

agreed with them that the tank would have a part in the mobile

force he envisioned, and he had tank surrogates produced for participation in maneuvers. These surrogates, made of wood and

canvas and mounted on cars or even on bicycles, were used in

force-on-force maneuvers that tested the new concepts of mobile

warfare.38 When the surrogate tanks’ movement bogged down because of the poor crosscountry mobility of the automobiles and

bicycles on which they were based, the reaction was not to conclude that tanks wouldn’t work in mobile warfare, but instead

that the surrogates needed to be made more realistic.39

Communications with the tanks proved to be especially important, both because of the fluid and fast-moving nature of the

tank battle, and because one of their intended roles was for reconnaissance. In 1928, a communications exercise was held, with

all Reichswehr divisions and groups participating.40

In 1931, the German Army conducted six exercises combining

infantry and dummy tanks, notably at the Grafenwöhr training

area, which is still used for that purpose today. Although their

42
primary purpose was training, they had an experimental aspect

as well, because they were used to help create requirements for

the real tanks, then being designed.41

By 1 July 1934 the experimental work had attained

such dimensions that it became necessary to set up

a special Command of the Tank Forces. . . . The task

of the new command was to continue the experiments with the mechanized forces and explore and

test the tactical structures that might put these formations to the most effective use. In the autumn of

1935 the various cogitations and practical exercises

culminated in large experimental maneuvers at

Münsterlager, of which the most important result

was the decision to establish three panzer (armored) divisions.42

This passage is especially notable for its explicit reference to “cogitations.”

Blitzkrieg being a combined ground-air doctrine, the air arm

needed to be developed along with the tank arm. In the 1920s,

“simulated air attacks and aerial observation were developed by

the military air staff as a normal part of command exercises and

divisional maneuvers,”43 sometimes using small balloons as surrogates for airplanes.44 A more detailed surrogate was also sometimes used, as the American military attaché related after observing

maneuvers in 1924:

An officer, specially marked and often an ex-aviator,

was permitted to ride on a motorcycle unmolested

through and around the opponent’s line. Returning,

he reported in writing to the umpire designated, the

result of his supposed aerial flight—the umpire permitting so much or all of the report as would be in

keeping with an actual aerial flight to be transmitted to the commander sending out the aviator.45

In teaching air-to-air combat, the Germans used gun cameras

43
to record the aim of the

“shot” for evaluation.46

Interestingly, Heinz Guderian’s invention of the Panzer

division, Germany’s embodiment of the winning combinedarms doctrine of employing

tanks, came after the era of experimentation, during which

attention focused on avoiding

the doomed “infantry tank”

idea, and the related spreading

of the tank force too thin.47

For better or worse, the

German Army’s experiments,

more than any others under

study here, resembled some

efforts of today in that they

came closest to integrating

tactical experimentation with

ongoing hardware development, although even in this case, the

two efforts belonged to separate organizations within the army.

The German Navy’s Experiments with Wolf Packs

In the 1930s, Germany’s Admiral Karl Dönitz conducted some

at-sea experimentation to validate his concept of “wolf pack” tactics for U-boats, that is, German submarines.

His idea was—and had been for some time48—that the submarines of the day were not so much undersea ships as submersible ships, and that earlier doctrine’s view of them as

individual raiders had failed to take into account not only their

near-total lack of mobility and vision when submerged, but the

possibility that the other side would form its ships into convoys.

Dönitz seems to have appreciated that even without escorts,

44

U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

In the 1930s, Germany’s Admiral Karl Dönitz

used readily available S-boats to conduct atsea experiments to validate his concept of

wolf pack tactics for U-boats.
the convoy is a countermeasure to the individual submarine because the close grouping of the merchant vessels reduces the size

of the region from which any are spotted. Because the submarine

is limited in its ability to attack, the convoying side is more than

willing to trade a large chance that one vessel will be sighted for

a slim chance that many vessels will be sighted all at once. Escorts, if present, provide the added advantage of repulsing the attack of a single submarine, or at the very least preventing a

45

In the winter of 1938–39, Dönitz undertook a chart-based war game—this is an example—to explore actions on a scale too large to portray in his at-sea experiments.

Padfield. Dönitz: The Last Führer, 172
reattack. Dönitz also noted an underutilized asset of submarines,

their respectable surface speed, and that surface operation actually represented a countermeasure to the antisubmarine sonars

of the day. 

Based on this inventory of submarines’ strengths and weaknesses, and anticipation of the adoption of convoy as a countermeasure, he conceived of wolf pack tactics: a dozen or more

submarines would form a long line at right angles to the expected

track of the convoy, spread out as far as possible without creating

a gap through which the convoy might pass. When a submarine

saw the convoy, it would send a signal to higher headquarters,

which would mastermind the convergence of the submarines, at

a point farther along on the convoy’s route, where they would

submerge and lie in wait, and attack the large number of ships

with a large number of submarines. Any escorts would be overwhelmed by the submarines’ tactic of attacking all at once—on

the surface, and at night, if possible.49

Dönitz had several questions about his idea. He later elaborated

on them in the following way:

a) The exercise of control. How far is it possible to

exercise command over a number of U-boats? Is it

possible during the actual attack, or only as far as

to ensure coordinated action before the attack?

What is the ideal balance between the exercise of

overall command and giving the U-boat its independence of action? Must command be exercised

by a person actually at sea? In a U-boat? Or in a surface vessel? Is it, anyway, possible to exercise command from a U-boat? Can command be exercised

wholly or partially from land? . . . 

b) Communications. How can a U-boat be contacted when it is surfaced, when it is at periscope

depth, when it is completely submerged, from another U-boat, from a surface ship, and from a land

46
station? . . . The whole question of transmitting, receiving, and reporting beacon signals. . . .

c) Tactical. How should the U-boats, operating together, act? . . .50

To answer these and other questions, he resorted to experimentation.

Sources disagree as to when this experimentation began. Some

date it as early as the first part of the 1920s, when Germany had

not yet violated the Versailles Treaty ban on submarines, arguing

that torpedo boat exercises in tactical development, undertaken

in that period, were in fact exercises in submarine tactical development, with the torpedo boats being used as surrogates.51 This

is certainly possible. The above-cited questions all refer to the

part of the plan during which the submarines would be on the

surface. Dönitz was in a torpedo boat flotilla at the time.

In 1935, Dönitz was given command of the Third Reich’s first

U-boat flotilla, and immediately began work on wolf-pack tactics.

Whether or not the torpedo boat evolutions had been intended

as submarine experiments, they were used as a source of insight

into future U-boat operations. One of Dönitz’s subordinates

wrote:

The end of 1935, then, saw the birth of those wolfpack tactics which were later to be perfected in so

masterly a manner. But between anticipation and

perfection there were many stages. For reconnaissance and screening duties we adopted the old torpedo-boat tactics as our god-parent.52

Later, in 1937, Dönitz began to experiment with actual submarines: a wolf pack of some 20 submarines located and successfully “attacked” a convoy of armed transports sailing from East

Prussia to Swinemunde, in the Baltic Sea, with Dönitz exercising

command by radio from a surface ship at Kiel. Subsequent experiments in the Baltic and elsewhere were supplemented by realworld experience in the Spanish Civil War.53

47
Dönitz then shifted his attention to the high seas, undertaking

a chart-based war game to explore actions on a scale too large to

portray in his at-sea experiments. Such games tend to be cumbersome, and this one seems to have taken quite a while.

In the winter of 1938–39 I held a war game to examine, with special reference to operations in the

open Atlantic, the whole question of group tactics—

command and organization, location of enemy convoys, and the massing of further U-boats for the

final attack. No restrictions were placed on either

side and the officer in charge of convoys had the

whole Atlantic at his disposal and was at liberty to

select the courses followed by his various convoys.

The points that emerged from this war game can be summarized as follows:

1. If, as I presumed, the enemy organized his merchantmen in escorted convoys, we should require at

least 300 operational U-boats in order to successfully

wage war against his shipping. . . .

2. Complete control of the U-boats in the theatre of

operations and the conduct of their joint operations

by the Officer Commanding U-boats from his command post ashore did not seem feasible. Furthermore, I felt that his “on-the-spot” knowledge

particularly as regards the degree of enemy resistance

and the wind and weather conditions prevailing

would be altogether too meagre. I accordingly came

to the conclusion that the broad operational and tactical organization of the U-boats in their search for

convoys should be directed by the Officer Commanding U-boats, but that the command of the actual operation should be delegated to a subordinate

commander in a U-boat situated at some distance

from the enemy and remaining as far as possible on

48
the surface. I therefore insisted that a certain number

of U-boats under construction should be equipped

with particularly efficient means of communication

which would enable them to be used as command

boats.

3. [The programmed force of U-boats would be inadequate.]54

Dönitz recounts that his belief that his adversaries would use

convoys “was not generally held.”55

In May 1939, Dönitz performed a wolf pack versus convoy experiment in the Atlantic, based on a scenario of war with Great

Britain, even though his superiors insisted that such a war could

not possibly occur. In this experiment, the convoy had escorts.

In July, Dönitz’s submarines practiced against the German surface

fleet and its supply vessels as they made a training cruise, despite

the protestations of his commanding officer that a war with Great

Britain could not occur under any circumstances.56

A Limited Technical Assessment

Kahn describes57 a test of a German antiaircraft weapon, perhaps the famous 88mm Flieger abwehr kanone (FLaK) gun. In

today’s terminology of military experimentation, this test would

be a limited technical assessment (LTA). Theory had predicted

that each shot from the gun would have a 25-percent chance of

hitting an airplane, and a proving-ground test showed the same

result. Of course, wartime experience would demonstrate that the

true probability of hitting an airplane with a given shot was about

a thousand times less than this.

• The gun and its concept of operation made great

demands on the crew, both physically and mentally.

The LTA used “select crews, [who] might well have

been described as athletes with Ph.D.’s in physics.”

• Only one target aircraft was presented at a time,

49
but “the battery was a complicated affair requiring

the split-second coordination of six people. One man

found the height of the plane, another man found its

speed, a third man estimated the range, . . . as soon

as there are two planes in the sky simultaneously

one man will find the height of one plane while the

second man is finding the speed of the other.”

• The test used timing fuzes, a critical component,

that were specially made and of quality greater than

could be mass produced.

• The targets always flew at an altitude at which

the gun worked well. Kahn observes that during the

war, Allied aircraft flew twice as high to disadvantage the antiaircraft guns. One might add that by

always presenting aircraft at the same altitude, the

test greatly simplified the important and difficult

task of estimating the aircraft’s altitude.

Perhaps there is room in a development program for a test such

as that described by Kahn; the Germans’ mistake lay in considering the results of the test to be the last word, rather than the first.*

Observations on the German Experiments

It is interesting to note that the World War II ideas of the

blitzkrieg and the wolf pack were both initially conceived even

before the First World War had ended. Moreover, those involved

in the interwar experimentation—and in the subsequent Second

World War application of the experiments’ results—had personal

combat experience in World War I.

The Germans seem to have benefited from a systematic and serious approach, especially with regard to surrogates. From an experiment in which the surrogate tanks bogged down, some

experimenters might have concluded that tanks can only advance

50

*Or second, counting the theoretical calculation.
in favorable terrain. In contrast, the Germans kept in mind that

their tanks were only surrogates, and that one experiments with

surrogates rather than on them. They retained the concept of the

tank as an all-terrain vehicle, and worked on improving the surrogates. The seriousness with which experimentation was taken at

all levels can be seen in the story of the aerial observer on his surrogate airplane, a motorcycle. In a less serious effort, the troops

among whom he was moving would likely have taken him prisoner

or at least obstructed his progress, and—on the other side of the

coin—he would have been allowed to report all he saw and heard,

not just what could have been observed had he been airborne.

Dönitz’s clear-sightedness is remarkable. Not only did he correctly anticipate a war with Great Britain and turn to the radically

new wolf pack, he also perceived that the correct countermeasure

to the massed U-boats would be the escorted convoy* and therefore tested his tactics against convoys, and eventually against convoys with escorts. In the torpedo boat, he saw enough parallels

to U-boats to base submarine tactics on those of the surface boats,

and perhaps even use the torpedo boat as a surrogate U-boat in

experiments, despite its lack of the submarine’s most obvious

trait—the ability to submerge.

At the end, he was somehow able to articulate a force level requirement, 300 submarines.58 This is not the place for a thoroughgoing reanalysis of the U-boat war, but it is worthwhile to note

that Dönitz had separately estimated that in a war with Britain,

his submarines would have to sink two-thirds of a million tons

of shipping per month. Germany started the Atlantic phase of the

war in 1939 with slightly fewer than 60 oceangoing submarines,

some not yet operational, and sank an average of about one-sixth

of a million tons of shipping per month through the end of 1941,

when the United States entered the war and everything changed.

Only at the very end of this period did new construction (and the

51

*Note that Dönitz saw the value of convoying before the war, whereas Allied navies

were skeptical even after the war had begun.
training pipeline) provide more operational boats than were being

lost. Thus a very rough calculation suggests that one U-boat

would sink a long-run average of (1/6 million)/60, or about 3,000

tons per month (including the substantial fraction of its time

spent in port), and so to sink two-thirds of a million tons of shipping per month, 240 submarines would be needed:

(2/3 x 106

)/[(1/6 x 106)/60] = 240

Which is not at all far off from Dönitz’s estimate of 300.* Thus

Dönitz’s experience, perspicacity, and experimentation led him

to a substantially correct appreciation of submarine operations in

the war to come.

52

*This calculation addresses only Dönitz’s ability to predict, based in part upon experimentation, the force level he would need in order to inflict the level of shipping losses

that he sought. Whether or not that level of shipping loss would have led to the defeat

of Great Britain is a separate issue.
Overall Observations

The accounts of particular instances of military experimentation have concluded with some commentary on the individual case at hand. This section makes observations that apply

more broadly.

Recapitulating the Themes

We began by defining an experiment in terms of a question,

with a set of possible answers; an event, with a set of possible

outcomes; and a prestated matching between the outcomes and

the answers. Several themes were then stated regarding models

and modeling (and a paradox about them), surrogates, artificialities, theory, hypothesis, serendipity, cheating, and the difference

between a fair experiment and a fair fight.

The idiosyncratic efforts of civilians included Gause, whose biological experimentation was crucial in that its outcome would

either validate or falsify the very theory on which it was being

conducted. Bywater’s methods are obscure, but he clearly derived

some benefit—not wholly serendipitous, because he set out to

find a doctrine for naval victory and he found one—from watching the movements of his wind-up surrogates that it could not derive merely from the workings of his formidable imagination. Of

all the efforts examined here, Pratt’s work comes the closest of

all to the creation of a combat model as the term is normally understood. As such, his game’s artificialities and surrogates (if not

susceptability to cheating!) were doubtless closely examined, and

because his games were largely social events, his is the only case

in which the fair fight was an acceptable goal.

The U.S. services’ experiments made wide use of surrogates—

the Fleet Problems’ various stand-ins for carriers and the

Louisiana Maneuvers’ dummy tanks and guns—but do not seem

to have always benefited from a clear understanding of the artificialities these introduced. The effectiveness of the one-plane

airstrikes and the various oversold antitank weapons were exag53
gerated, and perhaps it is no accident that if these efforts had

agendas, they were to further carrier aviation on the one hand,

and to dampen enthusiasm for tanks on the other. In the latter

regard, it is interesting to note that the Louisiana exercises seem

to stand as the only example of experimentation undertaken with

a mindset of debunking innovation rather than fostering it. The

anecdote of the squad “swimming” across the bridge is a veritable

parable of military experimentation, illustrating at once the ease

with which cheating can be rationalized, and the way in which

it creates artificialities that can short-circuit the entire benefit of

the experiment.

Mitchell’s bombing of the Ostfriesland was well thought out in

terms of its question (can bombs sink battleships?), its event

(bombing a battleship), and the possible outcomes (it sinks or

not), but the answer was clouded by artificialities (notably the

lack of damage control) that verged on unfair experimentation (if

not cheating), as well as by interservice friction that Mitchell

seems to have made no effort to reduce, so his results were not

fully accepted at the time. Nor did wartime events bear him out;

of the experiments considered here, his are the only ones (counting the ship-finding and ship-bombing as two separate experiments) whose results do not hold up under the weight of

subsequent World War II experience. The FDO school’s simulation of carrier air battles is probably the best thought-out physical

surrogate considered here, in that the tricycles’ speeds and fields

of view were derived mathematically so as to result in engagement timelines congruent to those arising in actual air attacks on

carriers. The Fleet Problems, on the other hand, are notable for

being structured so that—in an instance of the “modeling paradox”—the general lack of mathematical correctness did not adversely influence that of the conclusions. The Marine Corps’

experimentation constituted a relatively straightforward test of

the validity of the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations, made

the least use of surrogates, and was therefore the least at risk from

debilitating artificialities.

54
The German experiments, too, used surrogates, and were exemplary with regard to controlling the considerable artificialities arising, or threatening to arise, from their surrogates. The torpedo boat

was (either in experimentation, or simply as an aid to Dönitz’s

thinking, whichever the case may have been) a brilliant choice of

surrogate for the wolf-pack experiments, in that its major artificiality (the inability to submerge) was moot in the context of the

operational concept under test. Other U-boat concepts of operation

could not have been tested with torpedo boats, but Dönitz’s could

be—and may have been. The experiments of the German Army

suffered from numerous artificialities, but it was conscious of them

and appears to have dealt with them well. Certainly the troops and

umpires in the field seem to have followed the rules. It would be

interesting to try to trace the major failing of Reichswehr experimentation (its nondiscovery of the effectiveness of combined

arms, without which it can be said to have only partially developed the blitzkrieg) to faults in experimental technique, but it is

also possible that the discovery of combined arms is an advanced

finding toward which the experiments had to work their way

through a sequence of more basic findings that consumed the time

available.

Although almost all the efforts benefited from serendipity, all

those examined here started out trying to prove or disprove a theory, or to test a proposed course of action or piece of equipment.

Nobody made progress by just going out and trying something to

see what would happen; the U.S. Marine Corps’ mock battles

staged on Civil War battlefields were instances of this, separate

from the effort to learn about amphibious warfare, and they don’t

seem to have contributed to knowledge at all, although of course

they were probably good training for the troops.

The Experiments’ Points of Similarity

An important point held in common by almost all of the efforts

is that they were trying to assess the effect of major changes, or—

55
more generally—they were addressing big questions. The various

inadequacies of their experimental methods did not matter because they were trying to address large issues, not details. The

exceptions are Fletcher Pratt and General Billy Mitchell, who

asked, respectively, if a pocket battleship could be defeated by

three cruisers, or if a true battleship could be defeated by

bombers. Pratt’s wargame, informal though it was, was based on

a huge body of empirical knowledge of the interaction of naval

guns and armor. The game integrated that knowledge and served

as a method for exploring its consequences. Mitchell’s experiment

was not conceptual at all, and thus completely dependent upon

success in getting the details correct.

It is interesting that so many of the experiments address issues

of command and control: C2 (later C3, and still later C3I, etc.) is

often considered to be a Cold War or even post–Cold War preoccupation, but it figures as prominently in the experiments of

Dönitz and the Pacific Fleet Fighter Direction Officer School as it

does in the experiments of the present-day Marine Corps

Warfighting Laboratory, and it was an important secondary aspect

of most of the other experiments.

The Paradox of Modelling, Resolved

We have seen that several efforts at experimentation have gotten useful and correct answers to big questions, without the benefit of a solid basis in fact. For example:

• The Fleet Problems discovered, and solved, many

problems in carrier warfare despite the lack of a

good understanding of the effects of bombs on large

ships, and despite the defect that their one-plane

“squadrons” were unduly hard for the defenders to

detect.

• Bywater conceptualized a successful philosophy

of naval operations by playing with wind-up boats

on a pond.

56
• Marine Corps junior officers drew the Tentative

Manual for Landing Operations out of thin air,

thickened only by an iterative review process.

As articulated earlier in the “Themes” section, by-the-bootstraps efforts to acquire knowledge (of which all the experiments

described here are examples, some to a lesser degree than the

three cited above) seem to be a violation of the precept, “Garbage

in, garbage out.”

The resolution of this paradox is that although the experimental

set-up may have been wrong about particulars, the questions

under study would have the same answers regardless of the

choice of particulars. Continuing with the Fleet Problems as an

example, the lessons learned in them (e.g., the need for carriers

to operate independently of battleships, the utility of combat air

patrol, and above all the primacy of the offensive in carrier warfare) would hold under a very wide range of technological implementations.

This line of reasoning should, in fact, not be alien to either the

analyst or the military officer. The military officer is likely to have

been taught that one can learn military art from the study of history, despite the fact that the weapons of the historical people

worked differently from the weapons of today. The analyst’s background in physical science should include the observation that

the content of most major subfields (e.g., fluid dynamics) is based

on premises that are really only working fictions. As Francis

Bacon, often cited as the inventor of the “scientific method,” said,

“Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.” It is

for this reason that cheating is destructive of experiments; it replaces the rules, simplistic though they may be, with confusion.

The process of modeling has been compared to the art of cartooning, on the basis that the skill lies in knowing what to leave out. A

more radical simile would be impressionist painting. The whole picture evokes the whole subject, even though—when viewed closely—

no part of the picture resembles any part of the subject.

57
In some cases, the paradox does not really exist:

• Sometimes the purpose of the experiment was to

demonstrate an “existence theorem” (i.e., a statement that something could possibly exist). Fleet

Problem XIII’s successful air attacks on submarines

may have suffered from a variety of aspects of unrealism, but they at least showed that it could possibly

be the case that aircraft could threaten submarines,

a proposition that Dönitz, so prescient in other areas,

had famously denied: “The aircraft can no more

eliminate the submarine than the crow can fight a

mole.”59

• Sometimes the fact that the experiment may have

given the wrong answer is not important, because

the goal was to find questions, not answers.

The most radical version of this view would see experimentation as an extension of the Socratic Method: the participants can

realize the truth for themselves if only they can be stimulated to

think about it correctly, and the experiment exists to provide the

stimulus.60 Bywater’s activity with the wind-up boats is a perfect

example of this approach. As a template for experimentation (vice

training), however, this view requires that the participants, after

the revelations afforded them by the experiment, record the truth

as they have learned it, or at least make it known to somebody

who can record it. A mere account of what happened will certainly not suffice, because the actual events were shaped by all

the artificialities and shortcomings of the experiment, and very

possibly also by the prerevelation mistakes of the participants.

58
Notes

1. See Donald Rumsfeld, Quadrennial Defense Review, chapter V; Henry Shelton, Joint Vision 2020; William S. Cohen, Annual Report, chapter 11. Congress

recently mandated the gigantic Millennium Challenge 2002 experiment.

2. See also Karppi and McCue.

3. Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary, 1200.

4. Dupuy, 1987.

5. This point is forcefully made by Davis and Blumenthal in their RAND report,

The Base of Sand Problem.

6. B. O. Koopman, Search and Screening.

7. Various sources are given for this quote, which seems to have originated

with the little-known Francis Edward Smedley.

8. Typical applications of this phrase appear on pages 35 and 40 in The Voyage

of the Devilfish, the novel by DiMercurio.

9. See Gause, Epstein, and McCue.

10. See Lanchester.

11. Bywater, quoted by Honan, 116.

12. See Honan.

13. See Pratt, and also Allen, 116–19.

14. See Vlahos.

15. Wilson, 75ff.

16. Gause, 7.

17. Gause, vii.

18. EINSTein Project: An Artificial-Life “Laboratory” for Exploring Self-Organized Emergence in Combat, documenation and program available at EINSTein

web site, http://www.cna.org/isaac.

19. Except as otherwise noted, material in this section is based on MacDonald.

20. James M. Grimes, quoted in MacDonald.

21. Watts and Murray, 402n. Quote within the quote is from Friedman, Hone,

and Mandeles, “The Introduction of Carrier Aviation into the U.S. Navy and

the Royal Navy.”

22. MacDonald, 35.

23. Layman.

24. Mitchell, 64.

25. Zimmerman.

59
26. Mitchell, 64.

27. Zimmerman.

28. Zimmerman.

29. This section drawn from Isely and Crowl.

30. Isely and Crowl, 36.

31. See Gabel.

32. Eisenhower, quoted in Gabel, 47–48.

33. Gable.

34. Gabel, 64.

35. Boslaugh, 35ff.

36. See Zimmerman.

37. Layman.

38. These vehicles are also mentioned by Guderian himself, in a section entitled, “The Era of the Dummy Tanks,” 160ff.

39. Corum, 186.

40. Corum, 187.

41. Guderian, 162.

42. Guderian, 162–63.

43. Corum, 149.

44. Corum, photograph, 162.

45. Quoted in Corum, 165–66.

46. Corum, 164.

47. Corum, 202ff.

48. See Dönitz, chapter 3 (“Wolf-Pack Tactics”), which makes it clear that the

use of U-boats in groups had been thought of by the Germans during World

War I, but never put into practice.

49. These ideas are discussed by Kuenne, Gardner, and McCue (2005). Their

attribution to Dönitz is more problematic; several sources (e.g., Frank, Keegan,

and many others) describe Dönitz as thinking these thoughts, often in the context of his loss, in the First World War, of the submarine U-68, but do not provide solid references. Keegan (224) provides a reference, but it dates from 1939.

He mentions (223) and even quotes pack-oriented doctrine statements applied

to destroyers, but Dönitz seems to have been largely a recipient of this doctrine

rather than a source. 

50. Dönitz, 20.

51. Padfield says there is “even the possbility that some of the exercises were

actually designed to study the problem of U-boat surfaced attack. No direct

60
evidence to support this has appeared, but . . .” and then goes on to list quite

a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence (101).

52. Dönitz, 19.

53. This paragraph drawn from Frank, 23, and Dönitz, 21.

54. Dönitz, 33.

55 Dönitz, 34.

56. This paragraph drawn from Frank, 25. See also Dönitz, 21, and Keegan,

224. The latter gives the incorrect impression that the May 1939 experiment

was the first test of U-boat wolf-pack tactics.

57. Kahn.

58. Frank, 25; Dönitz, 33.

59. Dönitz so wrote in his war diary in August 1942. Cited by Price, 87.

60. This view is close to that of Schrage.

61

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65
Cover: Mock tanks constructed of cardboard were used during maneuvers on

9 September 1928, at Uckermark, the German training base. (Getty Images)