The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Three months before, the Second Pacific Squadron (formerly the Baltic Fleet) had sailed for the Far East under Vice Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rozhestvensky. This was a motley flotilla of four new and three old battleships, six cruisers, an armored cruiser, four destroyers, and more than a dozen auxiliaries. Their eighteen-thousand-mile passage was complicated by poor intelligence, which led to the fleet’s firing on English fishing trawlers in the belief that they were Japanese destroyers; having to sail around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid detention by the British in the Suez Canal; and the reluctance of European powers to risk losing their neutral status by offering coaling facilities to the Russians. After seven months in transit (including surreptitious stays in French Madagascar and Indo-China), Rozhestvensky reached the Strait of Tsushima on May 27, 1905, where Togo’s fleet of four battleships, eight armored cruisers, twenty-one destroyers, and forty-four torpedo boats intercepted him. Operating in home waters with better speed, training, and morale, the Japanese sank, scuttled, captured, or interned thirty-four Russian ships, with nearly five thousand dead, and took six thousand prisoners. Japanese losses at the battle of Tsushima amounted to just over a hundred sailors dead and three torpedo boats. Under the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by the United States, Russia and Japan evacuated their forces from Manchuria, but Japan was allowed to lease the Liaodong Peninsula and it gained control of Korea, which it formally annexed in 1910. In the meantime Japan strengthened its 1902 alliance with Britain and recognized United States hegemony in the Philippines, which it had won in the Spanish-American War in 1898.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Spain’s overseas empire was in eclipse and unrest in Cuba and its other Caribbean colonies prompted American policy makers to plan for a possible war with Spain in the Caribbean and the Philippines. In January 1898, President William McKinley dispatched the battleship USS Maine to Havana out of concern for U.S. interests. Two weeks later, an explosion sank the ship and killed 252 of the crew. The ship’s captain cautioned his superiors that “public opinion should be suspended until further report,” but a naval court of inquiry determined that the explosion was the result of a mine, although it was “unable to obtain evidence fixing responsibility for the destruction of the Maine upon any person or persons.” A Spanish investigation suggested that an internal explosion destroyed the ship, a view supported by the chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Steam Engineering. Such findings were beside the point. Fired by a jingoist press in the full bloom of yellow journalism, Congress acceded to popular opinion and declared war on April 25. The Americans blockaded Cuba, and in July four Spanish cruisers and two torpedo boats were sunk attempting to reach Santiago.

  Despite Cuba’s proximity to the United States, the Pacific loomed larger in American strategic considerations and, as Mahan wrote to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, “we have much more likelihood of trouble on that side than the Atlantic”—that is, not from Spain, but from Japan, whose interest in Hawaii rivaled that of the United States. Six days after the declaration of war with Spain, Commodore George Dewey led four steel-hulled cruisers and two gunboats of the China-based Asiatic Fleet into Manila Bay. The poorly maintained Spanish squadron of wooden gunboats and a small cruiser was no match for the newer American fleet. The gunnery was appalling on both sides—less than 3 percent of the nearly six thousand shells fired by Dewey’s ships hit their targets—but after two hours, the Spanish fleet was destroyed. Dewey proceeded to blockade Manila, which fell in August. The outcome of the Spanish-American War made the United States a major Pacific power. Spain ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, and the United States annexed the kingdom of Hawaii. Such clear-cut success only increased apprehension about the navy’s ability to fight a two-ocean war. The two-month passage of the battleship USS Oregon from San Francisco to Florida via the Strait of Magellan highlighted this problem and spurred renewed interest in a canal across Central America, work on which began in 1904.

  The Naval Arms Race to World War I

  Even as the United States and Japan were announcing their arrival on the world stage, the established order of the Pax Britannica was being challenged in Europe. The passenger ship companies’ jockeying for position on the North Atlantic starting in the 1890s mirrored a more serious rivalry between Germany and Great Britain that developed in the wake of German unification in 1871. Shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh had propounded a policy by which Britain’s naval strength should be equal to that of the next two largest navies combined, and for the rest of the century no one nation had either the ambition or the wherewithal to unbalance this equation. The pace of British naval building declined markedly following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, though, in part because no one could decide which of the new technologies and designs on offer to adopt. As Prime Minister William Gladstone remarked, “The fashion in building ships of war is as fickle as that of ladies’ hats.” Indecision gave way to a robust rearmament with passage of the Naval Defence Act of 1889, which called for the construction over five years of ten battleships, thirty-four cruisers, and eighteen torpedo gunboats. Moreover, the bill institutionalized “a definite standard,” that the Royal Navy be equal in strength to “the fleets of two powers combined, one of which should be France.”

  The other was Russia, initially; but Germany soon emerged as a more potent threat. This manifested itself in the rapid increase of its international trade, and the concomitant quest for overseas colonies and a world-class fleet. The German naval shipbuilding program concentrated first on torpedo boats and gunboats. During an international naval review in 1887, Germany was represented by its torpedo boat squadron, commanded by Captain Alfred von Tirpitz. After a tour as chief of the Eastern Asiatic Cruiser Division, when he established the German naval base at Qingdao (Tsingtao), China, Tirpitz returned to Germany as secretary of state of the Imperial Navy Office. In 1898 he secured passage of a navy law with funds for nineteen battleships, eight coastal defense ships, forty-two large and small cruisers, and a host of other vessels. Capitalizing on the American victory over Spain and the possible repercussions for German interests in China, two years later he urged passage of a bill doubling the number of battleships. Although the official line was intended to relieve tensions with Britain, and Germany was leery of conflict with France and Russia, Tirpitz believed that “For Germany, the most dangerous enemy at the present time is England. It is also the enemy against which we most urgently require a certain measure of naval force as a political power factor.… Our fleet must be constructed so that it can unfold its greatest military potential between Helgoland and the Thames.… The military situation against England demands battleships in as great a number as possible.” Tirpitz did not believe that Germany could build a navy large enough to defeat the Royal Navy, but because much of the British fleet was dispersed around the world, Germany could build a “risk fleet”—that is, one large enough to challenge the British in their home waters. Overseas commitments like protection of the Suez Canal, which Italy and Austria-Hungary might threaten in a hypothetical Anglo-German conflict, would compel Britain to equivocate in her negotiations with Germany. The only alternative, which neither Tirpitz nor anyone else foresaw, was that the British would either forge unimaginable alliances or continue building to the two-power standard. They did both, reevaluating their suspicions of France and Russia, with whom they signed diplomatic accords in 1904 and 1907, respectively, and embarking on a massive shipbuilding campaign that led with a revolutionary new battleship.

  By the turn of the century, the world’s capital ships bristled with a variety of large-caliber guns. The King Edward VII–class battleships (1901) mounted four 12-inch (30.5 cm), four 9.2-inch (23.4 cm), and ten 6-inch (15.2 cm) guns, and the Lord Nelsons (1904) carried four 12-inch and ten 9.2-inch guns. At this point, naval architects began thinking in terms of an all-big-gun ship—powerfully armed, heavily armored, and fast. With such a ship, the captain could choose whe
n to fight and at what range, the gunnery officer could more easily judge the gunners’ accuracy (because all the shell splashes would be from guns of the same caliber), and the arsenal of shells carried would be more uniform. The Italian designer Vittorio Cuniberti published a plan for such a vessel in 1903, and the United States designed the USS Michigan and South Carolina, which mounted eight 12-inch guns in four centerline turrets. Yet the lead in actual development was taken by the Royal Navy under First Lord of the Admiralty Jackie Fisher, who oversaw plans for a ship mounting ten 12-inch guns in five turrets, driven by steam turbines, with watertight bulkheads and 11-inch (27.9 cm) belt armor for protection against torpedoes. The aptly named Dreadnought also mounted a light armament of eighteen 12-pounder guns specifically for use against torpedo boats. Fisher wanted fast, hard-hitting ships for his navy, and he led by example. The usual building time for a capital ship was thirty-three months, but HMS Dreadnought was laid down on October 2, 1905, launched on February 9, 1906, and went to sea on October 3, 1906.

  If proponents of the all-big-gun ship were optimistic to believe that the Dreadnought would give Britain an insuperable lead in naval construction and design, others were wrong to think that Britain could have avoided an arms race by not building an all-big-gun ship. Both groups ignored the general trend toward the development of such vessels. Germany responded to the British challenge with orders for four Nassau-class ships mounting twelve 11.3-inch (28.7 cm) guns, and in 1907 Italy laid down Cuniberti’s Dante Alighieri, the first ship to mount triple-gun turrets. Nor can the element of populist support be overlooked. A year after its founding in 1898 (with strong backing from the Reichsmarine), the German Navy League had 240,000 members, vastly more than its counterparts in other countries, who provided ample support for Tirpitz’s naval budgets. The Royal Navy had far deeper roots in Britain, but the public only became alarmed by the potential threat of German naval power with the publication of Erskine Childers’s espionage novel, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which posited a German amphibious invasion from the Frisian Islands and the realism of which was based on the author’s firsthand knowledge of sailing a small boat on the coast of Germany. Nor was Childers wide of the mark, for the German general staff had entertained plans for just such an invasion as early as 1897.

  Across the Atlantic, the U.S. Navy was preoccupied by the twin threats of Germany and Japan, and the difficulty of coordinating fleets in two oceans. The Germans had made no effort to disguise their interest in South America and the Caribbean, and a Naval War College study warned that when “Germany’s accelerated [shipbuilding] program is completed, she … will surpass us in naval strength. Germany will then be ready to take issue with us over the Monroe Doctrine” under which the United States opposed European influence in the Americas. One solution was to increase the United States’ presence in the Caribbean, to which end President Theodore Roosevelt supported a Panamanian revolt against Colombia, recognized Panamanian independence, and negotiated with the new government to build a canal from Colón to Panama. Ten years in the making, when it opened in August 1914 the eighty-kilometer-long Panama Canal cut the distance from San Francisco to New York from more than thirteen thousand to less than fifty-three hundred miles.

  While the American estimate of the German threat was based on projected fleet strengths, the Japanese posed a more immediate problem. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance had allowed the British to pull warships out of East Asia on the understanding that the Japanese would protect their interests. In their wars with China and Russia, Japan had demonstrated their naval capabilities in ways Americans never had, and Roosevelt hosted the Russo-Japanese treaty negotiations at Portsmouth partly to get a measure of the Japanese. His decision to send the Great White Fleet of sixteen battleships on a round-the-world cruise in 1907 was intended as a demonstration of American resolve and naval capability. Relations with Japan were also tainted by an undisguised racial animosity, and anti-Japanese riots in California led to the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, which limited Japanese immigration to the United States.

  While the naval arms race contributed to the climate of mistrust that led to the start of World War I in July 1914, naval operations took a far different turn than anyone expected. In creating a powerful battle fleet, Germany was able to force the British to concentrate their forces in their home waters, as planned, but Germany likewise had to recall its own Far East Squadron from Qingdao. After defeating a squadron of older British ships off Coronel, Chile, this force was all but annihilated in the battle of the Falklands. If Germany’s High Seas Fleet was too powerful for the Royal Navy to ignore, it was too weak for the German high command to risk in battle. Apart from a few “tip-and-run” raids against British North Sea ports in 1914 and 1915, the only major fleet action, involving about 150 British and 100 German ships, was the battle of Jutland, fought on May 31, 1916, the conduct and results of which have been debated ever since the smoke cleared. Although the British lost six battlecruisers and armored cruisers to only two German, the British maintained their numerical advantage, and apart from a few minor sorties, the High Seas Fleet remained confined to port for the duration of the war.

  Emphatically more lethal was the war against Allied shipping by German submarines and surface raiders. Five German navy cruisers and a handful of armed merchant cruisers—passenger liners and freighters fitted with guns and carrying false papers—collectively captured or sank 620,000 tons of Allied shipping while diverting Allied naval assets from other assignments. Seventy-five ships were involved in the hunt for the German cruiser Emden before she was sunk in November 1914, and in the spring of 1917, fifty-four vessels were assigned to search for the freighter Wolf, which nonetheless managed to reach Germany after a fifteen-month cruise. Yet even in Allied countries commanders of the German surface raiders were often regarded as gallant. After the war, Felix Graf von Luckner became an international celebrity for his exploits as commander of the three-masted ship Seeadler—the only sailing ship so employed—in which he captured sixteen ships without loss of life on either side.

  The Development of the Submarine

  The gravest threat to Great Britain was unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping bound for England. The idea for an underwater vessel had been around for hundreds of years—Leonardo da Vinci drew a rough sketch of one in 1500. A primitive submarine called the Turtle had been deployed in New York Harbor during the American Revolution, though to little effect; in 1801 Robert Fulton built one that he tried to sell to the French and British governments; and during the American Civil War, the H. L. Hunley sank the screw sloop USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor. Driven by a hand-cranked screw propeller, the Hunley’s weapon was a spar torpedo, an explosive charge carried on the end of a long spar and detonated when placed against a ship’s hull. That the Hunley and other submersibles had to make physical contact with their target in order to place their torpedoes (what are now called mines) limited their utility. The success of submersible boats had to await the invention of both a more practical and reliable submarine and a self-propelled torpedo.

  The latter was achieved first, by Robert Whitehead, a British engineer living in Trieste whose “locomotive torpedo” of 1866 had a range of 185 meters at a speed of seven knots. The potential of torpedoes as an inexpensive means of sinking even ironclad battleships was obvious, and most of the world’s navies purchased the right to manufacture them from Whitehead. The torpedo quickly gave rise to the torpedo boat and the torpedo boat destroyer. The former were smaller and faster than the battleships and cruisers that were their preferred prey, and difficult to hit with guns designed for use against big surface ships. Torpedo boat destroyers were designed to protect the larger ships against the new threat. In time, ships of all sizes would be armed with torpedoes, and in the twentieth century destroyers would be the primary defense against the ultimate torpedo boat, the submarine.

  In the nineteenth century, most work on practical submarines was carried out by a handful of private i
nventors, notably the Irish-American schoolteacher John P. Holland, and in England the Reverend George Garrett, who later collaborated with Swedish weapons maker Thorsten Nordenfelt. The French navy demonstrated official if limited interest in submarines and ordered the experimental Plongeur in 1863. Two decades later, Dupuy de Lôme noted that “we are going to recommence the study of the submarine and we will end the conflict of the torpedo boats and the battleships by suppressing both of them.” The French launched several more submarines before 1900, the most promising of which used batteries for underwater propulsion and a steam engine when surfaced, the same configuration hit on by Holland for his eponymous sixth and last creation.

  “The forerunner of all modern submarines,” in the opinion of British submariner and historian Richard Compton-Hall, the Holland was designed “entirely along the lines of submarines today [the 1980s] with frames, plating and general arrangements which … would not be out of place in any submarine drawing-office today.” Her primary armament consisted of three 18-inch (45.7 cm) torpedoes fired from a single torpedo tube in the bow. As assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt urged that the navy purchase the vessel, and in 1900 she was commissioned as USS Holland. The navy ordered six more submarines on the same model and in 1905 President Roosevelt joined the crew of the USS Plunger for a dive in Long Island Sound. “I went down in it,” he wrote, “chiefly because I did not like to have the officers and enlisted men think I wanted them to try things I was reluctant to try myself. I believe a good deal can be done with these submarines, although there is always the danger of people getting carried away with the idea and thinking that they can be of more use than they possibly could be.” Dupuy de Lôme’s view proved more prescient, but Roosevelt’s was more influential.