num_pages: 741
description: American diplomatic history too often has been written without adequate consideration of economic, military, intellectual, and other motivating factors behind foreign policy, and the study of naval history too often has been limited to a narrow consideration of wars and campaigns without attention to the Navy's continuing influence on foreign and domestic affairs in time of peace.Continuing in his study of the interrelationship of naval and diplomatic policies, William Reynolds Braisted begins this volume immediately after the events that concluded his earlier work, The United State Navy in the Pacific, 1897-1909. In this study he has extended his research on the Navy in the Pacific from the inauguration of President Taft in 1909 through the Washington Arms Conference of 1921-1922.He is principally concerned with the efforts by American naval men to render secure the East Asian possessions of the United States against possible Japanese attack by assuring to the Navy the ultimate capacity to win and retain control of the western Pacific. While the American fleet outclassed the Japanese in heavy ships and guns, naval men in 1909 had yet to complete their first Orange Plan for war with Japan, still less to develop sources of shore support that would enable the United States to move to East Asia a fleet that until 1919 was habitually concentrated in the Atlantic. Until 1919 the Navy almost invariably assumed that the possible enemy in the Atlantic (Germany) was potentially far more dangerous than the possible enemy in the Pacific (Japan).Professor Braisted's concern for the Navy's relation to diplomacy has led him to examine the Navy's involvement in the Chinese Revolution, the Siberian Intervention, and a number of isthmian adventures in the Western Hemisphere. He discusses fully for the first time the extraordinary naval building contract between the Bethlehem Steel Company and China in 1911 in which the United States Navy was committed to training Chinese naval personnel. The Washington Conference, a high point in the integration of diplomacy and naval policy, is also shown to have been a triumph for traditional American attitudes toward East Asia over the more ambitious aspirations of American naval men.Professor Braisted's study is based on extensive research in American and Japanese public records as well as in the private papers of prominent Americans concerned.
language: English
title: The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-1922
publisher: University of Texas Press