The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  During World War I, torpedoes, submarines, and mines made the close blockade of the German coast envisioned by prewar British planners untenable, so the Admiralty opted for a distant blockade. The Grand Fleet kept watch on the northern approaches to the North Sea between the Orkneys and Norway while other units patrolled the English Channel. In November 1914, Britain declared the North Sea a war area. Three months later Germany adopted a strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Great Britain, where all French and British vessels were deemed fair game and neutral ships might also be attacked. Among the converts to this strategy was the apostle of the decisive fleet action himself, Tirpitz, who the month before wrote “In view of the extraordinary importance of trade disruption, namely in supplying the west of England with food, I can promise an unqualified success from a cruiser war.” The irony was twofold. The naval arms race that had poisoned relations among the great powers was an expensive and ineffective means of actually prosecuting a naval war, the burden for which fell increasingly on smaller, less glamorous vessels including converted merchantmen, trawlers (used as minelayers and minesweepers), and submarines. But in September 1914, Germany had only thirty-seven submarines, less than half as many as the Royal Navy.

  With the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Allied merchant ship losses doubled from a monthly average of sixty-one thousand tons between the first six months of the war and the middle of 1915. Neither Britain’s “war area” nor Germany’s “military area” was legal in terms of international law regarding blockade. The first two articles of the Declaration of London (1909) specified that “A blockade must not extend beyond the ports and coasts belonging to or occupied by the enemy”; and “In accordance with the Declaration of Paris of 1856, a blockade, in order to be binding, must be … maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the enemy coastline.” Yet the German strategy met with vigorous opposition because it depended on the use of submarines, which lacked the manpower to send prize crews aboard enemy ships; which stood little chance of surviving an engagement with an armed merchantman while surfaced; and whose commanders therefore had little recourse but to sink their prey and, increasingly, to do so without warning. The May 1915 sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania with the loss of 128 American citizens threatened to drag the United States into the war, and after considerable debate Germany suspended the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare in September.

  The end of the submarine campaign around the British Isles freed U-boats for service in the Mediterranean, where British, Australian, and New Zealand troops were pinned down at Gallipoli. While Turkey would likely have allied with Germany anyway, it became a certainty when the Royal Navy requisitioned two Ottoman battleships under construction in British yards; Turkey concluded a secret treaty with Germany the same day. Promoted by Winston Churchill, the Gallipoli campaign was intended to divert Turkish forces away from the oil fields of Mesopotamia and the Suez Canal, open a second front to alleviate pressure on Russia in the Caucasus, signal Allied support for Serbia, and prepare for an attack on Istanbul. Churchill initially believed the Dardanelles could be forced by the navy alone, but when three battleships were sunk and three heavily damaged in March 1915, it was decided to land troops on the west side of the Gallipoli Peninsula. This was accomplished with heavy losses, and after almost nine months more or less pinned down on the beaches, the troops were withdrawn. In the meantime, the expedition’s utter failure had forced Jackie Fisher’s resignation as first sea lord and Churchill’s ouster as first lord of the admiralty.

  By the end of 1916, many Germans believed that a resumption of unrestricted commerce warfare could force a British surrender by the fall of 1917. Included in this calculus was the likelihood that the United States would join the Allies, but that its contribution would come too late to make a difference. Unrestricted warfare resumed February 1, when there were 120 U-boats operational between the Mediterranean and Baltic. In the first three months, German submarines sank more than two million tons of shipping, nearly two-thirds of it British, for the loss of only nine U-boats. Part of the problem was the Royal Navy’s preference for hunting submarines over protecting merchantmen by implementing a convoy system. Although the British had more than three hundred destroyers, this was inadequate for an effective convoy system, and the only source of support was the United States. Assigned as liaison to London immediately after the United States declared war in April 1917, Rear Admiral William S. Sims was a forceful advocate for convoys. When a mere six destroyers arrived at Queenstown (Cobh, Ireland), he urged Washington “we can not send too soon or too many.” A week after the Americans reached Queenstown, the first British convoy sailed from Gibraltar and, according to a Royal Navy study after the war, was “an entire success, and from that moment it may be said that the submarine menace was conquered.” With a naval staff still rooted in Mahanian concepts of sea power, the U.S. Navy was initially as resistant to convoys as the British, but new capital ship construction was dropped in favor of antisubmarine vessels, and more than four hundred submarine chasers of all kinds were commissioned by war’s end. Together these provided adequate coverage for the transatlantic supply convoys vital to the British war effort.

  The Interwar Treaties

  Under the terms of the armistice signed November 11, 1918, a majority of the German fleet was interned pending a permanent disposition to be worked out at Versailles. Ten days later, seventy ships, including nine dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers, sailed into the Grand Fleet’s Orkney Islands anchorage at Scapa Flow. Weighed down by the humiliation of this surrender, and loath to see the fleet dispersed to Germany’s erstwhile enemies, Admiral Ludwig von Reuter ordered his men to scuttle their ships on June 21, 1919. Fifty-two ships sank, including ten battleships and ten battlecruisers. But embarrassing to the Allies though the scuttling of the German fleet was, many greeted the action with relief, for at a stroke it removed the issue of whether and how the ships should be apportioned among the victors. The United States viewed any distribution of the Central Powers’ ships as inherently destabilizing, particularly because the Royal Navy already possessed forty-three capital ships, one more than the United States, Japan, France, and Italy combined. Moreover, President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a reduction in national armaments “to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety” became the basis for Article 8 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

  The United States failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, but it did convene the first of three naval arms limitation conferences intended to rein in the world’s leading naval powers. Many in the U.S. Navy still viewed Britain as a potential threat to American interests and world stability and the Americans sought to at least equal the British as the world’s premier navy, while the British remained suspicious of French determination to maintain its submarine and cruiser forces. The Americans and Japanese were mutually suspicious, as they had been since the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Even before World War I the Japanese had begun considering how to take on the American fleet, while the Americans developed War Plan Orange as a response to a hypothetical takeover of the Philippines, the route to which ran through the Marshalls, Micronesia, and the Carolines, where Japan now held formerly German islands as mandated territories. In a 1919 memorandum to President Wilson, Rear Admiral William S. Benson stated flatly “Japan has no rival in the Pacific except America. Every ship built or acquired by Japan can have in mind only opposition to American naval strength in the Pacific.”

  The battleship USS Arizona passing through the Panama Canal in the 1930s. Launched in 1918, four years after the opening of the canal, the Arizona was one of the “all-big-gun” battleships pioneered in 1905 by the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought. Impressive though these powerful battlewagons were, their heyday was short, coinciding as it did with the rise of the submarine and the aircraft carrier. Dispatched to the Pacific in 1939 as tensions with Japan were rising, in December 1941 the Ar
izona was sunk at its berth in the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor, where it remains as a war memorial. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 fixed the ratio of capital ship tonnage for Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy in the proportion of 5:5:3:1:1, with Britain and the United States each allowed 525,000 tons in capital ships. The United States and Japan each were entitled to convert two battlecruisers already under construction to aircraft carriers, and the treaty limited the size of new carriers. Inequities in the distribution of power excited nationalist indignation, especially in Japan, which had declared war on Germany in August 1914, nearly three years before the United States. The Americans also made repudiation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 a condition for their acceptance of the treaty, for as the author of the memorandum that guided American negotiators wrote, they wanted to place the “wise administration of sea power in the hands of an undivided Anglo-Saxon race.” Neither Germany nor Russia (then embroiled in a civil war) was represented at the conference.

  The London Naval Conference of 1930 confirmed the 5:5:3 ratio in battleship construction (Italy and France refused to sign) and came up with fixed definitions and tonnage limits for cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, which the Washington Treaty had ignored. Japan was limited to about two-thirds the cruiser and destroyer tonnage of either the United States or Britain. Only in submarines was there parity. Four years later, Japan repudiated the terms of the Washington and London treaties. As ominous, the London Naval Treaty (1935) between Britain and Germany allowed the latter to build a fleet, although the aggregate tonnage could not exceed 35 percent that of the naval forces of the British Commonwealth.

  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these negotiations and the formulation of naval strategy in the interwar period was the refusal to acknowledge the realities of World War I. In his memo to Wilson, Benson had recommended that German and Austrian submarines be scrapped:

  Not only should these submarines be destroyed, but all submarines in the world should be destroyed, and their future possession by any Power forbidden. They serve no useful purpose in time of peace. They are inferior to surface craft in time of war except in ability to treacherously attack merchant ships. In the present war, 99 per cent of submarine attacks were illegal attacks on merchant ships. Civilization demands that naval war be placed on a higher plane and confined to combatant vessels.

  This was wishful thinking of the worst kind, but it reflected not only revulsion from Germany’s unrestricted submarine campaign but also the abiding influence of Mahan, who had died in 1914. In The Influence of Sea Power, Mahan conceded that “steam navies have as yet made no history which can be quoted as decisive in its teaching,” but the obvious lessons of the submarine campaigns were lost on his acolytes. However unsettling the consequences, the Jeune Ecole’s assumption of an abrogation of international law in the case of total war had been correct. Yet as before the war, most navy officers worldwide considered capital ships the gold standard against which naval power should be measured and they tailored their strategies accordingly. American war gamers relegated submarines to the role of scouts for the U.S. fleet, and if submariners assigned to the “enemy” fleet actually dared to attack, they were chastised. Reflecting on the thinking of interwar strategists, submarine commander and naval historian Edward L. Beach later wrote, “The minds of the men in control were not attuned to the changes being wrought by advancing technology. Mahan’s nearly mystical pronouncements had taken the place of reality for men who truly did not understand but were comfortable in not understanding.”

  In addition to their counterparts in other navies and submariners in their own, the “gun club” had to contend with an even newer and less understood phenomenon, naval aviation. In 1910, only seven years after the Wright brothers’ demonstration of manned flight, a pilot flew a plane off the deck of the anchored cruiser USS Birmingham. In August 1917 a pilot landed a plane on the deck of the battlecruiser–cum–aircraft carrier HMS Furious while that ship was under way, and the next year Furious launched seven planes in a successful raid on a German Zeppelin base. The Japanese commissioned the world’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier, the Hosho, in 1921, and by 1930 there were eleven aircraft carriers in commission worldwide. As with submarines, strategists initially thought of aircraft carriers as support vessels. Their potential came to be realized with improvements to radio communications and as the operational radius and payload capacity of carrier aircraft increased.

  World War II

  When World War II began in 1939, flag officers worldwide shared a common anxiety: the number of battleships available to them was inadequate. The lack of ships was real, but the war would require fleets of a completely different composition than strategists envisioned even as late as 1941. Going into the war, battleships dominated doctrine, but the outcome of World War II depended on aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, convoy escorts, cargo ships, and landing craft, all in far greater numbers than were available or than anyone imagined could be built. The fate of the world’s biggest battleships, the Yamato and Musashi, offers one example of the vast gulf between expectation and experience. Advocates of carrier aviation greeted these ships with skepticism in the late 1930s, and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto told one of the ships’ designers, “I’m afraid you’ll be out of work before long. From now on, aircraft are going to be the most important thing in the navy; big ships and big guns will become obsolete.” As they prepared for her last mission in April 1945, the Yamato’s junior officers are said to have gibed that “the world’s three great follies, prize examples of uselessness are the Great Wall of China, the pyramids and the Yamato.” The battleship saw little action before the battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, but changes in her armament reflected the shifting balance of power in naval warfare. Commissioned with 24 antiaircraft guns, by 1945 she carried 152 of them, and her 46-centimeter (18.1-inch) main guns, the largest ever mounted in a ship, fired antiaircraft “incendiary shotgun” projectiles. Even these were not enough to save her. While en route to Okinawa on April 7, she was attacked by nearly three hundred carrier planes and sunk with the loss of 2,500 lives.

  The promise of carrier aviation in offensive operations against capital ships was first revealed in the November 1940 British attack on Taranto, when British carrier planes from HMS Furious permanently disabled one Italian battleship and put two others out of service for nearly six months. Close study of the Taranto action may have convinced Yamamoto to attempt a preemptive Japanese strike on the American base in Hawaii. Even before Taranto demonstrated the feasibility of such an attack in wartime, a U.S. fleet exercise had yielded the same conclusion in 1938, and a report of the following year warned that the Japanese would likely “damage Major Fleet Units without warning, or possibly … block the Fleet in Pearl Harbor.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt made this the home port of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet in 1940, in a modest effort to counter Japanese aggression in the Pacific. Relations reached the breaking point when the United States banned oil exports to Japan the following summer. Yet despite official warnings, the experience of war games, worsening diplomatic relations, and the knowledge that Japan had begun the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese Wars with surprise attacks, preparations at Hawaii for a preemptive strike were inexcusably lax.

  The Carrier War

  On December 7, 1941, a Japanese fleet of thirty ships under Admiral Chuichi Nagumo launched two strikes of high-level bombers, dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and fighter planes from a point about 220 miles north of Oahu. The primary target was Pearl Harbor’s “Battleship Row,” where two of seven battleships were permanently destroyed. As luck would have it, none of the U.S. Navy’s carriers was in Pearl Harbor at the time. The USS Enterprise and Lexington were delivering planes to Wake Island, twenty-three hundred miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, and Midway Island at the end of the Hawaiian chain thirteen hundred miles to the northwest. The attack on Pearl Har
bor was carried out in conjunction with surprise attacks on American bases in the Philippines, as well as British Hong Kong and Singapore, and on December 10 bombers and torpedo planes based in Indo-China sank the Royal Navy’s capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the Malay Peninsula.

  Although Japanese and American admirals alike often used battleships as their flagships, carrier task groups were at the heart of the most important naval operations of the Pacific War. At the battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, for instance, Task Force 58 was made up of four carrier groups about fifteen miles apart. Each comprised three or four carriers surrounded by between three and five cruisers and between twelve and fourteen destroyers that provided early warning of and protection against enemy submarines and aircraft. Carrier aircraft were designed for distinct missions. Fighter aircraft were intended to fight other aircraft and were the core of the combat air patrols launched against incoming planes. Dive-bombers attacked ships from a high altitude by diving at a ship and releasing their bombs at as low an altitude as possible before leveling out. Before the development of effective bombsights, this was the most accurate means of delivering a bomb to a relatively small target like a ship. Ships’ decks tended to be unarmored and bombs could easily penetrate them, although sinking a ship in this way was difficult. Most lethal to ships was the torpedo bomber, which flew directly toward its target before releasing the torpedo at an altitude of less than thirty meters. But this angle of attack left planes vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and combat air patrols.