Air University Review, May-June 1979
Dr. Paolo E. Coletta
NAVAL thought is important to the modern Air Force officer for two reasons. First, the only American to gain world renown as a military theorist was a naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan. Although air power theorist Giulio Douhet admitted no debt to history or historians, the very title of his book, The Command of the Air, suggests an indebtedness to Mahan and calls to mind the main theorem of Mahan that the first objective must ever be to gain command of the medium (the sea, in his case) through the engagement and defeat of the enemy's main battle fleet. So too, Douhet argues that one must gain command of the air through the defeat of enemy air power at the very outset of any war, be that air power on the ground or aloft. The works of the two men can be compared in many other 'Nays, also.
A second significance of naval studies for Air Force readers is that they provide some disarmament case studies superior to most others available. The record of arms control before this century was dismal; since World War II, it has been so involved with current domestic and foreign politics that its academic value is limited in some ways, and the records are not yet unclassified. Thus, the naval arms control of the twenties and thirties provides about the only example of successful limitation that is far enough in the past to provide reliable data. The readers of Air University Review may, therefore, find it useful to maintain some acquaintance with the literature of naval affairs.
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n extremely terse prose, Roger Dingman has written a fine comparative history about naval relations among the United States, Great Britain, and Japan from 1914 to 1921.† Despite the word "Pacific" in the title, the book really deals with naval affairs on a global scale. Though he is strong on characterization, the nature of naval bureaucracies, and political matters, Dingman is less impressive in dealing with organizational matters and ideologies. Among other things, he makes Warren Harding appear more astute than he really was. Also, a broader view of Japan might have resulted had Dingman been able to use Asada Sadao's essay on "Japanese Admirals and the Politics of Naval Limitation in Gerald Jordan, editor, Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1945; Essays in Honour of Arthur Murder.†Roger Dingman, Power in the Pacific: The Origins of Naval Arms Limitation, 1914-1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976, $19.00), 318 pages.
Nonetheless, Dingman's work reflects tireless multiarchival research in three countries abetted by his knowledge of Japanese. He provides new vistas in the naval history and politics of national defense, particularly in the case of Japan. Since the author used many new materials on the Washington Conference, he gives a much fuller picture of the naval attitudes of the three nations than do the older works by Harold and Margaret Sprout, Mark Sullivan, Dudley Knox, and even the more recent study by Thomas Buckley.1
Dingman describes the attitude toward naval matters of the political, diplomatic, and economic leaders of all three countries from 1914 to 1922. His theme is that naval affairs were influenced less by admirals than by the more realistic civil leaders, the latter being moved much more by domestic constraints than by international events. This was particularly true in Japan, where military officers were little subject to civil ministers and had direct access to the emperor. There, the Diet found it difficult to control military expenditures.
In the first period, 1914-1915, although the naval arms race continued, the leaders of the three nations were conscious not only of differences in the reasons why they needed naval power for national security but also that they could upset domestic political equilibrium with exorbitant military spending demands. World War I heightened the importance of statesmen, lessened that of parliaments, stressed the efficiency of fleet actions rather than increases in fleet sizes, and temporarily repressed the opponents of arms expansion and war dissenters. In Great Britain, for example, largely because of embarrassments at Gallipoli, Jutland, and in the antisubmarine campaign, David Lloyd George (rather than John Fisher, Churchill, Jellicoe, Beatty, or Geddes) assumed strategic leadership. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson proved to be a better strategist than his naval secretary, Josephus Daniels, or even than his Chief of Naval Operations, William S. Benson.
The same war caused a different reaction in Japan. Only a limited fleet expansion could be funded, and it could not be allowed to provoke criticism from the other naval powers. Most important, military expansion in Japan was seen as a political stabilizer.
As the Great War ended, a new world order emerged, and a new order of seapower along with it. Dingman's lucid account explains the effect of British politics and the decision to disarm down to the level of parity with the United States. He also provides some new insights on the relationships between the Treaty of Versailles and domestic politics on the one hand and the Washington Naval Conference on the other. French intransigence prevented the controlling of submarines, and the Japanese premier was able to use the plea of the security of the western Pacific as an aid in establishing domestic political tranquillity. One of Dingman's major themes, then, was that domestic political pressures, rather than international political factors, again determined the fate of the negotiations at the Washington Naval Conference.
Until World War II, the Washington treaties provided about the only real example of arms control, and even here there was the lingering skepticism that the diplomacy was only the codification of the constraints that were put on the statesmen by the economic and political realities of the day. There were additional agreements in the years that followed which attempted to deal with arms that were not controlled at Washington--principally submarines and, especially, cruisers. The Geneva Conference of 1927 failed over the cruiser issue. The London Conference of 1930 resulted in a treaty that limited cruisers and extended the battleship-building holiday. Japan refused to participate in the second London Naval Conference in 1935, and only minor agreements between Great Britain and the United States were then possible. The world was already embarked on the road to war, and that is where James R. Leutze picks up the story. Leutze's Bargaining for Supremacy† provides details on the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill in what Joseph P. Lash calls "the partnership that saved the west."2 The study goes beyond diplomatic history to examine the political, economic, and strategic aspects of the alliance. Leutze concentrates on how the Americans and British sparred {or almost four
years before agreeing on an alliance in which the latter consented to "allow the U.S. Navy a major role in the Atlantic/European area with a concomitant increase in America's influence in directing the war." (p. 4) Since the Treaty of Versailles had done away with the Kaiser's navy, English and American interest had concentrated on naval problems in the western Pacific and Southeast Asia. The Fall of France in 1940 caused concern to redound to the Atlantic, where Hitler had suddenly become a very real threat. Churchill was convinced that he had to have U.S. logistical and military support against that threat, and the price he had to pay was American predominance in the partnership.
†James R. Leutze, Bargaining for Supremacy: Anglo-American Naval Cooperation, 1937-1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977, $17.95), 266 pages.
In developing his ideas, Leutze made extensive use of American and British archives. He read widely in government primary and secondary sources. He had the further advantage of being able to interview a number of the men who made the bargain possible. His story is a compound of the ways in which the U.S. developed a consensus within her own ranks and then contrived understandings with British counterparts at both the diplomatic and naval levels.
It is all too easy for Americans to assume that their military and logistical prowess made the alliance with Britain pretty much a one-way street. Faced with the uncertainties of the day, however, the decision-makers could not have felt that way at all--the British did have very considerable bargaining chips. They enjoyed trading advantages in their technological superiority in many areas, especially in underwater sound detection, radar, and nuclear physics. Furthermore, in 1940, when the Fall of France called forth visions of a similar collapse in England, the naval-conscious Roosevelt and many other Americans were mightily concerned about the fate of the British fleet. Were it to fall into Hitler's hands, they thought, Mahan's struggle for the essential "command of the sea" would be no pushover for the U.S. The English were well aware of these attitudes and used them to advantage in the negotiations. In the last analysis, however, the British had to recognize reality and give the U.S. the lead in planning for the war, even in their own backyard against Hitler. The whole experience was a rare example of successful coalition warfare, and it is so effectively presented by Leutze that it should serve as a model for succeeding generations of strategists and diplomats. It is a sound book that bears serious study by any officer engaged in combined or joint planning.
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ahan compensated a bit for his country's sparsity of military theorists with the remarkable breadth, depth, and durability of his ideas. In his own day, he was lionized in England, and his work had a profound impact on the German and Japanese navies--to name only two. A book of essays by Herbert Rosinski, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, spans the periods of both the works already discussed.†† He gives us some insight as to the ways in which Mahan's thought was used and modified in the decades after his death in 1914. Though B. Mitchell Simpson's editing does not rescue Rosinski from his own writing ineptitude, the ideas of the work may nevertheless be worth the struggle.††B. Mitchell Simpson III, editor, The Development of Naval Thought: Essays by Herbert Rosinski (Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College Press, 1977, $2.75), 139 pages.
These essays first appeared during the 1940s in various issues of Brassey's Naval Annual. Rosinski fully agreed with Mahan in the thought that command of the sea was essential and a prerequisite for all other operations. However, he criticized the great man for not fully expounding the implications of that theorem. Mahan, Rosinski says, did not sufficiently articulate the importance of a decisive and obvious superiority of naval arms in achieving command of the sea. In addition, he made more of the importance of naval force to the merchant marine than was necessary.
One of Mahan's principal articles of faith was that a war against commerce without command of the sea was a hopeless proposition. He was criticized time and again for failing to foresee the importance of the airplane and especially of the submarine. During the interwar period, many of the theorists of the weaker naval powers argued that the failure of the German submarine campaign did not prove Mahan right but that the flaw had been with the execution rather than the idea. As Rosinski explains, these men felt that earlier massive exploitation of the submarine against commerce might indeed have turned the tide. In any event, he seems to favor Mahan's view, and the topic remains as relevant as ever--especially in view of the growing importance of the sea lanes running into and out of the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. Beyond his turgid prose, Rosinski's chief defect appears to be that he, much more than Mahan himself, should have had a greater appreciation of air power and carrier warfare.
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ew Air Force officers will want to pursue these three works as a part of a general professional reading program. Each presupposes an understanding of Mahan, but that is better obtained from his The Influence of Seapower on History or from Robert Seager's fine biography, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters. However, Roger Dingman's Power in the Pacific would be useful to those with a special interest in naval affairs, diplomatic history, or arms control. Leutze's Bargaining for Supremacy provides good background reading for specialists in joint and combined planning or for historians of coalition warfare. Rosinski's essays probably have little appeal for the lay reader, but they may be interesting to specialists in military theory and doctrine.United States Naval Academy
Notes
1. Harold and Margaret Sprout. Toward a New Order of Sea Power American Naval Policy and the World Scene. 1918-1922 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1940); Mark Sullivan, The Great Adventure at Washington (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1922); Dudley Wright Knox, A History of the United States Navy (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1948); Thomas H. Buckley, The United States and the Washington Conference, 1921-1922 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970)
2. Joseph Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill. 1939-1941: The Partnership That Saved the West (New York: Norton, 1976).
Contributor
Paolo E. Coletta, Captain, USN (Ret)
, (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D., University of Missouri) is Professor of History, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. After serving three years in the Navy during World War II, he completed 30 years in 1973. He has written eight books and numerous articles for historical and military journals. Dr. Coletta is a previous contributor to the Review.Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.