American military policy in the Far East had two challenges: The defense of the newly annexed Philippine Islands and support of the “Open Door” diplomacy designed to preserve the political and territorial integrity of China. In the face of European competition and the militancy of a modernizing Japan, the two concerns were linked. Although American policymakers viewed Russia, Great Britain, and Germany as diplomatic problems in Asia, they were most concerned with Japan, especially after the Japanese upset the balance of power by signing a mutual security treaty with Great Britain in 1902 and then defeated Russia in the war of 1904–1905. Adopting British and German military equipment and techniques but grafting these modern military capabilities upon modified samurai traditions, Japan defined its new international role as one of economic expansion in China and the liberation of Asia from European (and American) colonialism. The mistreatment of Japanese immigrants in the United States provided an additional irritant. The United States, on the other hand, viewed itself as the champion of an independent and reformed China. It also had no intention of surrendering the Philippines to another foreign power, Asian or not, particularly after making sizable financial, human, and emotional investments in governing the islands. American imperial impulses—a strange amalgam of humanitarianism and cultural arrogance—dictated that the future of China and the Philippines follow an American path.
The difficulty with backing the “Open Door” policy with military forces stationed in the Philippines and China was that the national stake in Asia did not seem worth the cost. At least, so it seemed to a substantial portion of Congress, the attentive public, and the officer corps of the Army and Navy. Since the United States could not find a suitable way to divest itself of the Philippines or to sever its missionary and economic ties with China, it faced an unsolvable strategic problem: How could it extend its limited military forces-in-being across six thousand miles of ocean to defend interests its citizens probably regarded as insufficient to fight for? The “Philippine problem” was to distress military planners for decades to come.
The Rise of American Military Strength 1899–1917
* * *
Department of the Navy
EXPENDITURES (IN MILLIONS)
STRENGTH NAVY
STRENGTH MARINE CORPS
MAJOR COMBATANT VESSELS*
1899
$64
16,354
3,142
36
1904
$102
32,158
7,584
29
1908
$118
42,322
9,236
62
1912
$135
51,357
9,696
64
1916
$153
60,376
10,601
77
War Department
EXPENDITURES (IN MILLIONS)**
STRENGTH U.S. ARMY
STRENGTH NATIONAL GUARD
1899
$299
80,670
100,000 est.
1904
$165
70,387
115,937
1908
$175
76,942
111,000
1912
$184
92,121
121,852
1916
$183
108,399
132,194
* * *
*Battleships and cruisers with 6-inch or larger main batteries. Monitors not included.
**Civil projects by the Corps of Engineers included in the budget.
The United States probably would have had to readjust its military policies without the war with Spain in 1898 and the territorial annexations that accompanied the war, but the nation’s imperial spasm dramatized both the utility of military force and the nation’s relative unpreparedness to face any state more formidable than Spain. The defense of the Philippines and the Caribbean (and the projected canal) demanded that military reform come quickly. Certainly, the new possessions complicated defense planning and forced the pace of naval expansion and the emphasis on ready land forces. The result was two decades of accelerated military change.
Building a Great Power Navy
Halfway through the nation’s two-decade drive toward “a Navy second to none,” President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907–1909 sent the American “Great White Fleet” on a dramatic, globe-circling cruise. Although the voyage had some bearing upon America’s disputes with Japan and the president’s request for more battleships, the cruise had greater symbolic purposes. Although TR’s sixteen battleships did not send up the appropriate signal flags, the message to the world could not have been clearer: The United States had come of age as a world naval power and viewed the battlefleet as the nation’s first line of defense and primary military instrument of great power diplomacy.
Like its potential adversaries, the United States Navy was a battleship navy. By the outbreak of World War I, the American battlefleet, which had undergone both modernization and expansion, was superior to all other naval forces except the Royal Navy and the German High Seas Fleet. From a force of eleven battleships in 1898, the battleline of the U.S. fleet had increased to thirty-six vessels by 1913. With fluctuations tied to congressional perceptions of the available money and the international situation, American battleship building held a relatively steady course for almost twenty years. During Roosevelt’s administration, Congress normally authorized at least two new battleships a year. It cut the program to one ship only once and often authorized as many as four (and once five) new vessels. During the presidencies of William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson the authorizations up to 1916 focused on replacing the older battleships at a rate of one or two a year, which stabilized battleship numbers but increased the fleet’s capability.
Battleship construction in the same period reflected the quickening pace of technological progress, especially in the strength of armor plating, the fabrication of heavy naval guns, the destructiveness of explosives, and the power of marine engines. Battleships became larger, more lethal, and more expensive. In size American battleships began the century in the 10,000- to 15,000-ton range but reached 31,000 tons in 1914; their cost soared from $5 million to $15–20 million each. With larger bunker capacity (first for coal, then oil), their ranges became transoceanic. Their main batteries increased in numbers and caliber until the standard battleship mounted ten or twelve guns of 12 or 14 inches in diameter; the larger guns both increased the weight of a broadside and improved ranges from 6,000 to 20,000 yards. Since the technological improvements of the era were shared by all the naval powers, the American building program also shared the universal insecurity about obsolescence and relative effectiveness. This insecurity was fed in 1906 when Great Britain launched the first true all-big-gun capital ship, HMS Dreadnought. Demonstrating dramatic improvements in speed, firepower, and armoring, Dreadnought accelerated the naval arms race. Naval analysts divided the world’s battlefleets into pre-Dreadnought and post-Dreadnought categories. The United States, which was already shifting to the all-big-gun ship in 1906, more than kept pace. In 1914 the American fleet boasted fourteen post -Dreadnought battleships.
The growth of the American battlefleet also demonstrated significant changes in the political and strategic foundations of American naval policy. The political coalition that supported the “new Navy” of the 1890s broadened and deepened in the federal government and the public. At the point of political attack strode Roosevelt (and, more reluctantly, Taft and Wilson), a coalition of internationalist Republican and Democratic senators and congressmen, industrialists with an economic stake in navalism, Navy officers, and several public interest groups, especially the Navy League, formed in 1903.
Of particular significance within the Navy Department was the institutionalization of professional advice from line officers, who were enthusiastic naval builders but also critics of many aspec
ts of fleet modernization. Before 1898 and to some degree thereafter, such long-range planning as occurred came from officers assigned to the Naval War College, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Bureau of Navigation. In 1900 Secretary of the Navy John D. Long created a General Board of senior officers to consolidate professional advice, and the General Board became the central agency for coordinating war-planning and building programs. The General Board consistently requested more vessels than its civilian superiors would approve; between 1900 and 1914 it asked for 340 vessels but received only 181. In 1910–1913 it caused a public stir by setting American modern battleship strength at forty-eight, more ships than the government thought it needed or could afford. Presided over by Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, the board emerged as a force for fleet modernization and expansion.
To some Navy officers, collectively labeled the “Young Turks,” the General Board did not provide sufficient line influence over Navy policy, and the period of naval expansion was accompanied by bitter arguments over Navy Department organization. On some issues there was consensus. The naval reformers, for example, agreed that sea power meant a battle-fleet-in-being, ready for a decisive ocean duel with its enemy. By 1907, the Navy had abandoned its traditional far-flung squadron deployments and concentrated most of its battleships in Atlantic waters. The only units deployed outside the hemisphere had old battleships, a few cruisers, and smaller vessels.
The Young Turks, led by such aggressive officers as Henry C. Taylor, A. O. Key, William S. Sims, William F. Fullam, Bradley Fiske, Ridley McLean, and Washington I. Chambers, lobbied for line-reformer influence. By 1915 the organizational reformers had made some limited progress in the face of civilian skepticism and Navy conservatism. In 1909 they scored a minor victory when Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer created a group of “naval aids,” staffed with Young Turks, to give advice, spur the General Board, and evaluate fleet readiness. Meyer’s Democratic successor, Josephus Daniels, reluctantly approved the creation of the post of chief of naval operations to replace the aids in 1915, but he filled the job with a traditionalist admiral, William S. Benson. Nevertheless, the CNO’s immediate staff continued to be a focal point for improved fleet efficiency and replaced a system of personal influence with bureaucratized policy advising.
The reformers’ demand that the line officers who would command the fleet in war receive more power reflected concern about real problems. For all its dramatic appearance, the Great White Fleet was not as effective as it might have to be. The battleships themselves showed distressing technical deficiencies. Their armor was often placed too low on the hull, and turrets received too little protection. The vessels had too little freeboard, which meant that heavy seas made manning the lower turrets and aiming guns difficult. The turrets did not have effective baffles to keep burning debris from reaching the powder magazines below; catastrophic explosions in 1904 and 1906 on American battleships caused a clamor for naval reform and temporarily threatened TR’s building program. Line officers were equally aware that the fleet lacked adequate numbers of sailors to man the new vessels. Despite a dramatic increase in the size of the Navy from 16,354 (1899) to 60,376 (1916), each ship normally lacked about 10 percent of its complement. The shortages were especially acute among petty officers and the skilled technicians needed to operate the new machinery. The recruiting service did not have enough manpower, money, or authority; the efforts of Secretary Daniels to sell the Navy as a great vocational education school and laboratory for social uplift did make recruiting somewhat easier. Naval planners also worried that the Navy did not have a “balanced” fleet for wartime operations. Although Congress would buy battleships, it would not fund adequate numbers of smaller vessels. By 1916 the General Board calculated the fleet was short 125 cruisers, destroyers, and auxiliary vessels.
The whole question of battlefleet support—especially the issue of bases—demonstrated the political limits to naval planning. In sum, the Navy had too many bases in the United States and too few bases abroad, measured by the projected war plans. Traditionally, a major naval base had the necessary dry docks, machinery, and workshops needed to overhaul a battleship completely. By such criteria, the United States had ten major continental bases before World War I, while the much larger Royal Navy had only six. Navy planners knew that American facilities were excessive, but Congress regarded base building and manning as attractive patronage. New bases at Charleston and Bremerton, Washington, supplemented by smaller facilities at San Pedro and San Diego, California, gave the Navy more than enough shore support by 1916. The continental base structure was dramatically enhanced in 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, since the canal cut transit time from coast to coast by two-thirds.
The Navy’s search for bases abroad was frustrated by the State Department, which thought base building bad diplomacy, and Congress, which thought base building bad spending. Although the Navy sought a base in China, the diplomats ruled that this policy did not conform to the Open Door and stopped the movement. Interservice disputes stopped plans to build a major base in the Philippines. The Navy chose Subic Bay on the west coast of Luzon as its preferred site. The Army reported that it could not defend the base from a land attack; Subic Bay would be another Port Arthur, the “impregnable” Russian port in Manchuria that had fallen to the Japanese army in 1905. The Navy rejected the Army’s choice, Cavite peninsula in Manila Bay, since the old Spanish base had neither adequate base facilities nor anchorages for the fleet. Although the Navy eventually maintained facilities at both Subic and Cavite, it agreed in 1909 to build its major Pacific base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. This decision did not immediately loosen congressional purse strings, and it further limited the Navy’s enthusiasm for defending the Philippines.
Since the Caribbean was close enough to the Navy’s Atlantic coast yards to make major bases unnecessary, the Navy sought instead a system of operating bases and stations there that would support wartime operations against either Britain or Germany. It was only partially successful in enacting its plans. Although the United States had the rights to two bases in Cuba, it built only one at isolated Guantanamo Bay, since the diplomats vetoed as too provocative plans for another at Havana. Diplomatic considerations also stopped plans for a base in Haiti or Santo Domingo. The annexation of Puerto Rico in 1899 and the Virgin Islands in 1915 gave the United States uncontested access to base sites in the eastern Caribbean, but the harbor at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands’ coves were not suitable for major fleet use.
Unable to secure forward bases in either the Pacific or the Caribbean, the Navy considered an alternative tactic, establishing temporary, or “advanced,” bases in the early stages of a naval campaign. Although the Navy was not satisfied with the numbers or sizes of its auxiliaries (colliers and oilers, ammunition ships, supply vessels, transports, and floating tenders and machine shops), it thought it might find such vessels in wartime in the American merchant fleet. It could not, however, completely extemporize a force to defend a forward operating base. In 1900 the General Board turned to the Navy’s sister service, the Marine Corps, and asked that the Corps reorganize and train for advanced base operations. Despite some modest experiments in emplacing harbor defenses, the Corps did not establish an Advanced Base Force until 1910, and it did not conduct major exercises until 1912. Marine traditionalism and the manpower and financial demands of garrisoning the increased number of naval stations abroad dampened Corps interest. The limited exercises and theoretical studies done by Navy and Marine officers, however, demonstrated the need for such a force. In theory, the Advanced Base Force would occupy an undefended harbor and then defend it from sea attack with stationary heavy guns and mines. Its mobile infantry and artillery would stop a land attack. The Navy would provide monitors, torpedo boats, and a few cruisers to assist the sea defenses. Convinced that the advanced base concept offered the Corps an important wartime role, a cadre of Marine officers became articulate spokesmen for improving the Navy’s a
bility to establish forward operating bases, but the actual forces for such operations did not develop rapidly.
Elsewhere in the Navy, other officers and civilian innovators examined the potential of new technology to reshape naval operations. Two novel developments—the submarine and the airplane—suggested that future naval warfare might occur above and beneath the seas, not just between rival battlefleets dueling upon the ocean’s surface. Although the first submarines appeared in experimental form in the late eighteenth century and the first successful submarine attack on a warship occurred in 1864 during the American Civil War, the Navy did not commission its first submarine until 1900. Naval conservatism in this case did not rest on a lack of mission, since the submarine (more properly, the “submersible”) was an attractive weapon for close-to-shore coast defense. The difficulties were largely technological, primarily the development of adequate powerplants and torpedoes. The difficulty was that technological progress depended upon government funding, since submarines had no special commercial attractions. In the United States the submarine champion, the aging eccentric John R. Holland, took some twenty years and six models to prove that he had an answer to the propulsion problem. Essentially, Holland coupled the internal-combustion engine for surface cruising with battery-powered electric engines for submerged attacks. Attendant problems in designing pressure hulls and ventilation systems slowed adoption of the submarine; early crews seemed to have little choice between carbon monoxide and chlorine gas asphyxiation. Submariners were constantly in fear of a break in their hull, which could submerge their vessel permanently. Nevertheless, the submarine remained a relatively cheap coastal defense weapon, and the Navy had thirty-four boats by 1914, twelve of them modern diesel-powered vessels of 500 to 700 tons, or five times larger than Holland’s experimental boats. At the time, the United States was the world’s fourth-strongest submarine power.
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