The Last Century of Sea Power, Volume 1: From Port Arthur to Chanak, 1894–1922

By H. P. Willmott

“In this first of three volumes on sea power, the author reviews the story of political, economic, and military oceanic control from the 1890s through WWI.” —Choice

The transition to modern war at sea began during the period of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Spanish-American War (1898) and was propelled forward rapidly by the advent of the dreadnought and the nearly continuous state of war that culminated in World War I. By 1922, most of the elements that would define sea power in the 20th century were in place.

Written by one of our foremost military historians, this volume acknowledges the complex nature of this transformation, focusing on imperialism, the growth of fleets, changes in shipbuilding and armament technology, and doctrines about the deployment and use of force at sea, among other factors. There is careful attention to the many battles fought at sea during this period and their impact on the future of sea power. The narrative is supplemented by a wide range of reference materials, including a detailed census of capital ships built during this period and a remarkable chronology of actions at sea during World War I.

“The author, dean of naval historians, provides a sweeping look at, and analysis of, the transformation of naval power . . . [His] dry wit and sense of irony add spice to the impressive array of facts and analysis of the greatest period of naval warfare. Wilmott is fearless in his judgments.” —Seapower

“This book, first of a series, contains a wealth of facts and opinions, the latter provided with Willmott’s unerring analytical eye and mordant wit.” —Bernard D. Cole, National War College

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9780253003560

Book preview

THE LAST CENTURY OF SEA POWER

THE LAST

CENTURY

OF SEA

POWER

Volume One: From Port Arthur

to Chanak, 1894–1922

H. P. Willmott

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

http://iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders   800-842-6796

Fax orders   812-855-7931

Orders by e-mail   [e-mail]

© 2009 by H. P. Willmott

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed

Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Willmott, H. P.

The last century of sea power : from Port Arthur to Chanak, 1894–1922 / H.P. Willmott.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35214-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Naval history, Modern—19th century. 2. Naval history, Modern—20th century. I. Title.

D362.W68 2008

359'.0309041—dc22

2008015018

1  2  3  4  5  14  13  12  11  10  09

Dedicated to FY1645

and

in Praise of

Toleration, Uncertainty, and Dissent

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Preface and Acknowledgments

Part 1. Definitions and Terms of Reference

Introduction

Part 2. From Port Arthur to Bucharest, 1898 to 1913

Introduction

Part 3. From Sarajevo to Constantinople, 1914 to 1922

Introduction

Part 4. Not So Much Finis as . . .

Conclusion

Appendix Conclu.1 The Battleships, Battlecruisers, Aircraft Carriers, and Cruisers with the British Navy, 1913 and 1935

Chronology of the First World War at Sea

Notes

Selected Bibliography

General Index

Index of Warships, Auxiliaries and Merchantmen, and Submarines

MAPS

MAP 1.1. The Japanese Perspective: The main theaters of operations in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, 1984–1895 and 1904–1905, respectively.

MAP 2.1. The Greco-Turkish War of 1897: The Thessaly and Epirus sectors.

MAP 3.1. The Battle of Manila Bay, 1 May 1898.

MAP 3.2. The naval battle off Santiago de Cuba, 3 July 1898.

MAP 5.1. The Russo-Japanese War: The initial Japanese operations.

MAP 5.2. The Russo-Japanese War: Second- and third-phase Japanese operations.

MAP 6.1. The journey of the 2nd Pacific Squadron from Europe to the Far East, October 1904–May 1905.

MAP 6.2. The action off Tsushima, 27–28 May 1905.

MAP 8.1. The Italian-Turkish and Balkan wars: The Balkan peninsula.

MAP 8.2. The Italian-Turkish and Balkan wars: The Aegean.

MAP 9.1. The North Sea: The perspective of the British Grand Fleet.

MAP 9.2. The Southwest Approaches, English Channel, and southwest North Sea.

MAP 10.1. The moment of the mine: The Dardanelles operation, 18 March 1915.

MAP 12.1. The Baltic theater of operations: The Russian perspective.

MAP 13.1. The Black Sea theater of operations: The Russian perspective.

MAP 13.2. The Mediterranean theater of operations.

MAP 13.3. The Adriatic theater of operations.

MAP 14.1. The dismemberment of Turkey under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

VERY RESPECTFULLY, AND in light of lengthening shadows of mortality, I would in these few lines set out two matters that together provide the raison d’être of The Last Century of Sea Power. The first matter, relating to one’s own rationale as a historian, is something that I had never committed in public, but it is provided here because it forms the basis of the approach to the subject that in its turn gave rise, per se, to The Last Century of Sea Power. This first matter, the shaping of one’s own philosophy and career, really has its basis in three episodes, only two of which will be presented here, both of which were only minutes in length.

The first of these episodes was really the first time I thought, and I was some 24 years of age and had just presented my first lecture. A matter of months before I had completed two years’ post-graduate study at university, and my thesis subject was the Liberal governments and the Navy Estimates/dreadnought building program, 1906–1910, and because I had worked on these subjects I understood navies and therefore I understood the U.S. Navy and therefore I understood the Pacific War, 1941–1945—or that was how logic (of a kind) ordained that I was the member of the department obliged to give this specific lecture. I gave the lecture and at its end my head of department came to me and told me that the lecture had been very good indeed and that he had much enjoyed it: he congratulated me and told me that the lecture had been very well organized and delivered. I went to my office, sat down at my desk, lit a cigarette—how things have changed!—and sat there a moment, and then the thought crossed my mind: I had described the Pacific War but had not explained any aspect of it. I realized, with a start, that my head of department really did not understand the difference between description and explanation, between narrative and analysis, and I resolved at that moment always to explain and never to describe.

I would like to claim that I kept this promise to myself but, of course, for all my best intentions I have confused the two repeatedly and on all too many occasions have failed to provide explanation. With the passing of time I have realized that single explanation really does present intellectual difficulty and indeed dangers, but while I would plead that I have consciously attempted to provide explanation, I would admit that the second episode has probably been more important and a greater single influence than this 1970 intention. The second episode came nearly three years later, in late 1972, as I watched the eleventh program of Jacob Bronowski’s television series The Ascent of Man. This remarkable enterprise—the explanation of the relationship between the physical sciences, political philosophy, and politics—had as its eleventh subject of examination the certainty of knowledge and dealt with Einstein, Szilard, and Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty (1927). The one piece in this program, the eleventh hour of the eleventh, that I always will remember was the scene in which, crouched over a little stream, Bronowski made the statement that the basis of democracy is tolerance and the basis of tolerance is uncertainty, and that when men behave with the certainty of knowledge that has no test in reality, then one finishes in a place like this. The camera stepped backward and one recognized that Bronowski was in Auschwitz. He then stated that this was where so many members of his family were murdered and where their ashes were washed away, and that this is what happens when men aspire to the certainty of knowledge that has no test in reality, that this is what happens when men aspire to the knowledge of gods. I realized, at that one moment, that, whatever explanation I sought to provide, more important than knowledge and explanation were tolerance and uncertainty. From this one moment, before the screen, there stemmed over a period of time a desire to place before the reader choice that would encourage independent thought, to provoke questions rather than provide answers, and indeed in time came another thought that arose when attending a lecture and hearing myself quoted as an authority on the subject: a determination to write the counter-view lest the original idea and writings commanded acceptance and endorsement.

The second matter deals with the immediate origins of The Last Century of Sea Power, and one would admit that this book does have a rather unusual pedigree. Some four years ago I was considering various options, most obviously with reference to war and warfare at the present time, and was specifically intrigued by one thought—that the United States at the present time has the same capacity that European powers had with respect, or disrespect, to east Asia between about 1840 and 1890 and over most of Africa in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Both the European powers more than a hundred years ago and the United States at the present time had acquired the capacity to destroy what may be termed Third World polities, and they were able to wage total war without having to mobilize the economic, social, and military forces as was necessary in their conduct of the two world wars of the twentieth century.

I therefore determined to produce a three-volume enterprise, From Total War to Total War, the first volume from 1815 to 1864 and from the defeat of the Old Guard at Waterloo to the Union defeat at Cold Harbor, the second from the defeat of the French cavalry at Sedan in 1870 to Okinawa and a case of from kamikaze to kamikaze, and the third from Tokyo to Baghdad. But in putting together chapters for these three volumes a totally unforeseen problem emerged. I was working on the wars of national liberation of the mid-nineteenth century, and specifically on the war of 1866, when I was confronted by the realization of the manner in which the detail of this war has been combed from historical accounts over the last hundred years. What was an important series of events after the battle of Königgrätz that had been recorded in pre-1914 history books was largely lost after 1919, being of small account, and by the time I was working my way through university in the sixties what had been but little known had followed Austria into oblivion. My own interests took me in other directions, and four decades were to elapse before I appreciated the manner in which historical bookkeeping had all but ceased to provide proper account of these proceedings. It was only when I acquired books published in the 1880s and 1890s that I was able to acquire some knowledge and understanding of events after Königgrätz, but by the time that I did so another matter had intruded upon my deliberations: if events on land were subject to such treatment, then where stood matters naval?

In seeking answers to this question, I was beset by certain considerations. I have long entertained certain reservations on naval historiography, specifically with reference to three matters. In the two world wars, but specifically and more seriously the second, the defeat of the submarine campaign against shipping has been told primarily in terms of U-boat losses. Any detached consideration of events would seem to suggest that U-boat losses were extremely important in terms of German defeat, but the peak of U-boat numbers at sea in the Second World War was in April 1945, and therefore German submarine losses cannot tell a very full story in terms of overall defeat. Any attempt to explain that defeat must address other matters such as new Allied construction, control of shipping space, and the volume of cargoes safely arriving in port and their composition and relative importance in the maximum effective use of available shipping.

The second matter relates to what has been my main area of study, Japan and the war in the Pacific. My study of this war extends over more than four decades, more than eleven times the length of the war, which, I admit, does leave me a rather sad and pathetic case not least because my adding of knowledge has gone hand-in-hand with a lessening of understanding. There are so many questions about this war that defy understanding, and while this is not the place to parade some of the more obvious ones, just three may be cited for purposes of immediate illustration: the obvious question of when Japan reached the point of defeat, the extent of Japanese losses between the outbreak of war in December 1941 and the start of the American drive across the central Pacific in November 1943, and the scale of American losses between November 1943 and October 1944 in the course of the offensives that took the tide of war from eastern New Guinea and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands to the Philippines. The first of these questions defies easy or simple answer, though I would stand by my view that in conducting the strike against the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its Pearl Harbor base Japan passed the point of defeat. The second and third questions are more straightforward because both are concerned with numbers and the answers are perhaps surprising. Between 7–8 December 1941 and 19 November 1943 the Imperial Japanese Navy lost four fleet and two light carriers, two seaplane carriers, three battleships, four heavy and four light cruisers, forty-seven destroyers, and forty submarines, and such losses prompt an obvious question of whether Japan was assured of defeat on the basis of such losses. Intimation to that effect is patently absurd, and herein the obvious problem of comprehension arises: it is difficult to understand how the sum of the series of defeats incurred by Japanese forces between May 1942 and November 1943 represents national defeat. But what really does confound understanding is the fact that between 24 November 1943, when the escort carrier Liscome Bay was torpedoed off the Gilberts by the submarine I-175, and 24 October 1944, when the Princeton was lost off the northern Philippines as a result of attack by a land-based aircraft, Japanese shells, torpedoes, and bombs failed to account for a single U.S. Navy fleet unit other than the Fletcher-class destroyer Brownson, which was lost on 26 December 1943 off Cape Gloucester, New Britain, to air attack. In other words, the whole of the American effort that resulted in the breaking of the outer perimeter defense in the central Pacific, the carrier rampages into the western Pacific that resulted in the shipping massacres at Truk (17–18 February) and Koror (30–31 March), the landings at Hollandia and Aitape, which took the tide of war from one end of New Guinea to the other in two months, and which finally led to overwhelming victory in the Philippine Sea (19–20 June), cost the United States just one destroyer, plus the destroyer escort Shelton, which was sunk by the submarine Ro. 41 off Morotai on 3 October.

But if these matters represented the raising of real and genuine problems of understanding with reference to naval history, the third matter represented the problem of understanding of the present. If one looks, for example, at Stephen Roskill’s definition of sea power, then one can see that certain of what he identified as the key ingredients of sea power—overseas bases, building and repair facilities, a merchant marine and fisheries with their supply of manpower—would seem to be, at best, under sentence. Any casual consideration of the present time would suggest a major, indeed in certain countries a fatal, contraction of shipbuilding capacity, the lack of large numbers of men used to and trained in the ways of the sea, and, perhaps most significant of all, the apparent absence of any real blue-water enemy for the major western powers. My own view is that in 1945 the most important of the services in the United States was the navy because it was by sea that army and army air force formations and units were moved overseas and supplied: the reach of the United States across two oceans was primarily naval and maritime. In a very real sense, in 1945 the U.S. Navy was primus inter pares, and it had its own army and it had its own air force; by 2003 the U.S. Marine Corps had its own navy.

These were perhaps the main ideas that went into the concept of The Last Century of Sea Power, but in seeking to put together a book on this subject everything seemed to go wrong from the start. The various dimensions of sea power—not naval power—seemed to add layer upon layer of material as they were brought to the pages where they would be subjected to analysis, and this left aside one simple fact, namely that in presenting The Last Century of Sea Power one deliberately set aside full and proper consideration of those aspects of wars at sea that have been afforded full, one is tempted to suggest over-full, consideration in most histories. I deliberately sought to bring the little known aspects of war at sea to center stage at the expense of these better-known, and indeed more important, aspects whether these be campaigns, battles, formations and units, and other like matters. But what had been intended to be a single volume became two as the first ran to its prescribed length around the end of the First World War, but in line with a general sense of perversity this volume was ended with Chanak and 1922 in order to allow the second volume to begin in Washington in 1921. . . .

Such were the terms of reference of The Last Century of Sea Power, and in the preparation of this first volume acknowledgement must be made to those who, over many years and whether in the form of general conversation, correspondence, lectures, or conferences, have provided me with the basis of knowledge and critical facility that made this work possible. To attempt to list these people is impossible, but they have the satisfaction of knowing that without them and their guidance this book could never have been written and also that they are not responsible for the various errors, the sins of omission and commission, that litter its pages.

Nonetheless, specific acknowledgement needs be made to certain individuals who have spent many hours helping me try to settle a host of difficulties that presented themselves in the course of this book’s writing. I would specifically acknowledge and offer my sincere and unreserved gratitude for all the help and advice I received from Ersan Bas, Anthony Clayton, Kobayashi Go, Sally Paine, Geoffrey Miller, John Norton, Sarandis Papadopoulos, Tohmatsu Haruo, and Stephen Weingartner. And to these I would add those persons who were always at my side that went beyond the call of friendship, namely Michael and Sara Barrett, Bernard Cole, Michael Coles, Gerard Roncolato, William Spencer and Andrea Johnson and family, John Andreas and Tine Olsen, Jack and Gisela Sweetman, and Spencer C. and Beverly Tucker. To all of these people I would simply state my thanks and appreciation for help and camaraderie that are beyond my poor powers to acknowledge properly.

I would also acknowledge the support and encouragement provided by various colleagues and friends in a period of very considerable personal and professional misfortune and without whose quiet companionship what was bad might well have been nigh impossible. Among those I would acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Tim Bean, Patrick Birks, Nigel and Martine de Lee, Christopher Duffy, Paul Harris, Jack and Suzanne Hurley, Cliff Krieger, Jim Mattis, Lars Neilsen, George Raach, Kyle Sinisi, Frederick Snow, Patrick and Jennifer Speelman, David Vance, John Votaw, and David White, and with this acknowledgement I would state my hope that this book is some small token of my appreciation and esteem.

I also wish to acknowledge my debt to those without whose patience, tact, and literary ability this book would probably have gone the way of many of the ships cited in these pages. Specifically I would wish to acknowledge my debts to Robert Sloan and Brian Herrmann of Indiana University Press, to copy editor Sarah Brown, to Keith Chaffer for his professionalism and imaginative work upon the maps, and to the library personnel who professionally and personally have helped me at every stage of proceedings, Gareth Bellis, Edwin Finney, Ken Franklin, Iain Mackenzie, John Montgomery, Andrew Orgill, and John Pearce: I trust they will accept this poor acknowledgement of their support and efforts.

There remains one group that always appears in my acknowledgements section and for one reason: they have been the means of ensuring continuing sanity. I would acknowledge my debt to and love for my beloved woofers. Would that Everton, Sherry, Kondor, Jamie, Suki, and Lancaster be at peace and together, and in terms of my present debt and love for Mishka and Cassie, for Mishka and Cassie, and for Junior and Yanya, I would merely express my hope that much time will pass before they join their predecessors and chase together across the celestial fields.

H. P. WILLMOTT

Englefield Green

Surrey

United Kingdom

4 October 2008

THE LAST CENTURY OF SEA POWER

PART 1

DEFINITIONS

AND TERMS OF

REFERENCE

INTRODUCTION

THE COMING OF THE NEW millennium invited any number of histories, real and alleged, constructed on the basis of noughts. It is one of the curses of history that, depending on the prejudices of the writer, either a decade or a century is an age, its counterpart an era, and that in neighboring periods there are elements of contrast that so determine character. In reality, history concerns itself with elements of constancy and change, and very seldom affords consideration to simplistic, single-cause representation and for very obvious reason: for every complicated human problem there is a simple explanation, which is neat, plausible, and invariably wrong.

Within two decades of the end of the Second World War the British historian Stephen Wentworth Roskill (1903–1982), writing in The Strategy of Sea Power, set out definitions of sea power and its constituent elements.¹ One would provide one’s own definition of the historical role of naval power, which is that

The purpose of sea power is to ensure in times of war those rights automatically commanded in times of peace, specifically the security of homeland and overseas possessions against raid and invasion and of sea-borne trade, while denying those same rights to an enemy in terms of the conduct of amphibious operations and attacks on shipping.²

The crucial point herein is that while in a general war the offensive use of sea power in terms of assault or landing on enemy territory cannot necessarily be undertaken before and until a measure of defensive primacy has been secured, the line of demarcation between the offense and defense at sea is very different from that ashore, and battle itself is very different. The battle at sea does not possess those elements such as rivers, mountains, lines of communication, and settlement that ashore spell out the difference between offense and defense: the battle at sea has terms of reference supplied by latitude and longitude, daylight hours, and factors of time and distance that necessarily ally themselves with coastline and off-shore hazard. The battle at sea has to be fought repeatedly over the same reaches of sea and ocean in a way that the battle on land does not, and lest the point be doubted reference may be made to just one war and campaign. In the course of the Second World War the German offensive against shipping was defeated in May 1945. Various commentators—one hesitates to use the word historians—have tended to focus upon the month of May 1943 as the time when the German campaign againstAllied shipping was defeated, and it cannot be denied that in this month the German U-boat offensive suffered a defeat singular in significance. In this single month the German Navy lost no fewer than forty-one U-boats from all causes, and this total stands in very sharp contrast to the totals of nine, twenty-four, thirty-five, and eighty-seven U-boats lost to all causes in (3 September–31 December) 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942, respectively. But the point was that the victory that was won by Allied forces in May 1943 had to be repeated until the very end of the European war, and Allied shipping had to be provided with escort and nonetheless took losses virtually to the very last day of the German war. The victory that was won in May 1943 was indeed repeated, most obviously in July–August and again in October–November 1943, and the victories that were recorded in these subsequent months were every bit as important as the victory won in May for the very simple reason that these subsequent losses were sustained by a U-boat service that had been re-organized, re-equipped, and committed afresh to the campaign in the North Atlantic. Losses in July and August 1943 were thirty-seven and twenty-five, respectively, and in October and November twenty-six and nineteen, respectively,³ and in terms of the war at sea and the proper recounting of history the crucial point is to see these subsequent Allied successes in terms of complementary victories, not episodes complete in their own right. The victories that were won between May and November 1943 undoubtedly served to ensure that the initiative at sea passed finally and irreversibly into Allied hands, but the basic reality—that the defensive commitment remained until the end of the war and that the victories of 1943 had to be fought for and won every week, every month, of what remained of the war—cannot be gainsaid.

One is very conscious that in setting out such an argument one comes close to infringing upon a related matter, the impermanence of victory, which comes associated with its complementary point, namely that great powers are not powers that win wars but powers that lose wars but keep going: defeat and failure, and the reaction to failure and defeat, are the measure of a great power, not victory—the weakness of this particular argument being that it would suggest that perhaps the greatest of all powers was Austria-Hungary. That final point aside, the nature of sea power and its related parts demand definition. With reference to the latter Roskill set out naval power in terms of fleets and warships, industrial infrastructure and bases, merchant and fishing fleets, and trained manpower, and with reference to the merchant and fishing fleets and trained manpower there was the obvious link in terms of the former in part providing navies in times of war with manpower trained in the ways of the sea. The element of impermanence to which reference was made presents itself herein because one can seriously question, on the basis of Roskill’s definition, what presently provides the foundation of sea power for such countries as the United States and Britain. These two countries were, at the end of the Second World War, possessed of naval strengths that rendered them impervious to challenge at sea, yet at the present time, in the first decade of the new millennium, Britain most certainly does not possess the industrial basis of Roskillian naval power and obvious question marks must be set against the United States in this same dimension: in 1990 the U.S. Navy had to go to suppliers in no fewer than eight countries in order to ready itself for war in the Middle East, a state of affairs that in industrial terms would have been unthinkable even twenty years previously, during the Vietnam War. No less obviously, the lack of shipping lines and trained manpower reserves were barely finessed by the U.S. Navy in 1990 when septuagenarians had to man the engine rooms of supply transports from the reserve that should have been scrapped and replaced at least one, perhaps two, decades earlier. The simple fact is that changed patterns of production, and certainly for European navies the lack of bases beyond Europe, necessarily have involved new definition of the role of naval power, and in ways that would never have been given real consideration even as late as the 1960s and 1970s. And to these matters there is a codicil. The Japanese dimension of the Second World War was unusual in the sense that this was a war decided by sea power, and it was very unusual in the sense that it was decided by sea power directed across an ocean, and it was a war that was won primarily by naval power. Certainly the American effort was necessarily joint in a way seldom properly defined, but the basic pattern was that land-based air power neutralized objectives, naval power isolated the latter, and amphibious assault then secured islands and airfields from which the process began anew. But the basis of this effort was naval: it was the sea that carried supplies for both the air and military endeavors. It was the U.S. Navy that was the main agency of American national power in the war in the Pacific, and at war’s end the U.S. Navy had its own air force—the air groups of the fleet and escort carriers—and its own military, the U.S. Marine Corps. By 2003, and say it sotto voce, the U.S. Marine Corps had its own navy. The basic point herein is that in times of peace navies always fare badly: their costs are high and invariably they, historically, took second place to armies. The period immediately after the Second World War conformed to historical precedence, but in the 1950s and 1960s the navies of the great powers were to be strengthened institutionally by the vesting of the main elements of strategic deterrence in submarines, while carriers recovered if not their numbers then their relevance in the aftermath of the Korean War. With the end of the Cold War, however, navies have come under pressure on four counts: the strategic nuclear deterrence role may still be in place but it is of dubious relevance; the demands of peace-enforcement and peace-keeping necessarily are directed primarily to armies, not navies; navies, and particularly the U.S. Navy, have been overtaken by air forces and now are third in the defense pecking order; and the sheer cost of units in terms of money and manpower places obvious question marks against future role and capability. It may very well be that navies, no longer facing blue-water enemies and with very limited capacity to engage targets ashore, are in a decline that will mark the end of their role as defined by fleets in two world wars and summarized by Roskill, and that in the future their role will be with those secondary aspects of sea power, such as suppression of smuggling, piracy, and slavery, that previously have been dismissed as unbecoming. It is perhaps worth noting that by 2007 the British Navy had reached a point of decline, specifically in the number of warships in commission, that really pointed to a decline of status that corresponds to that of the nineteenth-century Dutch Navy.

But in setting out these matters, and these are presented as the basis of discussion and not definitive, one must note the obvious, namely that so many accounts of proceedings set out sea power and naval power as the same, whereas in reality sea power embraces very distinct naval and maritime parts. The story of sea power is not simply concerned with naval formations and units and with the nature and conduct of war, and operations, at sea: matters relating to merchant shipping, the volume and nature of sea-borne trade, and the relationship between (on the one side) power, industry, and commerce and (on the other) the sea need be defined because the various elements herein are complementary. This point is so obvious that it is very seldom addressed. For example, very few accounts of the campaigns against shipping in the two world wars of the twentieth century provide proper analysis of the merchant fleets, cargo capacity, and the ship-building and maintenance facilities of the major combatant states, and most certainly such matters relating to neutrals are even less well documented even though in the First World War the importance of neutral shipping to British survival and Allied victory is not to be under-estimated: in the Second World War such nations as Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, and Greece contributed significantly to eventual Allied victory by virtue of their shipping despite defeat and occupation by German forces. Likewise, while accounts of the defeat of the German campaigns against shipping concentrate primarily upon such matters as the gradual extension and increased effectiveness of convoy, the resultant reduction of shipping losses to manageable proportions, and U-boat losses, such matters as the volume of imports arriving in ports, the state provision of objectives and rationing priorities, and details of ship requisitioning are seldom afforded much in the way of attention and consideration in naval histories. The fact is, however, that between August 1914 and October 1918 the British Transport Department provided tonnage sufficient to ensure no fewer than 23,700,000 individual passages—the equivalent of one for every two people in the British Isles—while transports dispatched almost 50,000,000 tons of military stores and supplies, 500,000 guns and motor vehicles, and 2,200,000 animals from British ports to various theaters of operation. The total of military stores and supplies dispatched as part of the national capacity to wage war represented the equivalent of a year’s total imports prior to the outbreak of war, yet in most naval histories these are matters that are seldom afforded even as much as historical footnotes.⁴

Sea power, in its historical context, has been concerned with naval power and the use of the sea, and in seeking to set out the story of sea power and the twentieth century the two parts necessarily need to be considered together in setting out the definition of the twentieth century. How one defines the twentieth century is a matter of personal persuasion and prejudice, but leaving aside the dictates of chronological exactness and thereby discarding the 1901–2000 option, one would suggest that there are three possible naval matters that might provide a suitable start line: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. One would suggest that in many ways the claims of the second, the Spanish-American War, really do provide a suitable point of departure, and on two counts: it was primarily a naval war and one that involved the defeat of a European imperial power—albeit one long past its peak—by a non-European state, and it was a war in which one battle, fought on 1 May 1898 in Manila Bay, may be regarded as the last battle of the Age of Sail. It was an action fought on the one side by five American cruisers and two gunboats and on the other by four Spanish cruisers, three gunboats, and three other vessels. The Spanish warships, inferior in gun power and of dubious seaworthiness, were anchored under the cover of guns in the fortified base of Cavite. Why this action should be considered the last battle of the Age of Sail is on account of the nature of the action. It was fought without reference to mines, torpedoes, and submarines, and it was fought without reference to central gunnery control systems, radio, airships, and aircraft, all of which were to figure so prominently in war at sea in the twentieth century. It was a battle fought in line ahead with broadsides at ranges that were reduced to 250 yards/230 m, at which distance, and with no means of aiming other than the eye, thirty-nine rounds in every forty still managed to miss their intended target. It was an action that should immediately invoke thoughts of Quiberon Bay (20 November 1759), the Nile (1 August 1798). and, particularly, first and second Copenhagen (2 April 1801 and 2–7 September 1807) in terms of pedigree. Despite the fact that the warships in Manila Bay in May 1898 were steam-powered, the battle that they fought properly belonged to a previous age.

Conversely, the Russo-Japanese War presents itself as a possible start point on account of the fact that this war did see the employment of twentieth-century means absent from Manila Bay, airships and aircraft excepted.⁵ But perhaps the most convenient start point for an examination of sea power in the twentieth century is provided by the Sino-Japanese War and on three counts. First, it is a war in which Japan emerged as the greatest indigenous power in eastern Asia and, in effect, as a great power, though recognition of that fact was not forthcoming until 30 January 1902 in the form of the alliance with Britain.⁶ Second, it was a war in which naval power provided the basis of Japanese victory. Third, this war came at a time when a number of changes relating to navies, merchant fleets, and trade at sea were in hand, and these were to prove crucial in the unfolding of subsequent events. And, of course, there was the small matter of the events that followed the Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895) and that set the scene for the Russo-Japanese conflict.⁷

Historical attention necessarily has focused upon the Triple Intervention, whereby France, Germany, and Russia combined to relieve Japan of the most important of the gains that it had registered at Chinese expense at Shimonoseki, and thereafter acquired various concessions for themselves. This sequence of events, along with the Sino-Japanese War itself, represents a convenient start line in an examination of sea power and the twentieth century for one immediate reason: such intervention on the part of European powers arguably would have been impossible, or at least intervention on the part of France, Germany, and Russia would have been impossible, before the last decade of the nineteenth century; it most certainly would have been impossible after that time.⁸ The first part of this argument is one that needs be exercised with care because it could be asserted that in the period between 1840 and 1870 perhaps Britain alone (but more likely Britain and France together) had an unprecedented capacity to destroy east Asian states and to do so without undue effort: in effect, Britain (or Britain and France) had the ability to wage total war without having to mobilize their populations and industrial and economic resources in order to do so, a Western capability that was lost until the United States entered into such an inheritance in the 1990s. But even if this ability on the part of European powers really did exist, as opposed to being alleged in these lines to have existed, the real point is that the ability reflected developments that came together at this time.

The most important of these changes concerned Britain and the position of industrial, financial, and naval pre-eminence in the world that it had established for itself in the course of the nineteenth century. The last decade of that century saw first the United States and then Germany overtake Britain in gross national product and industrial output. With such differences in population and natural resources among these nations, such a situation, at least in retrospect, would seem to have been inevitable, a question of when, not if. Yet despite being relegated to third place in the industrial league table in the course of the 1890s, Britain retained its position as world leader in finance, shipping, and trade. This decade, however, marked the apogee of British shipping and trade, not in terms of size but in terms of relative position. The decade really marked the end of the sailing ship on major routes; though various kinds of sailing vessels continued to work coastal routes and even major international routes with bulk items such as wheat, barley, jute, nitrates, timber, and (ironically) coal, the 1890s saw the last of the major passenger sailing vessels on the Antipodes routes. The passing of the sailing ship from center stage was primarily the result of the development of high-pressure boilers after 1878 and of compound engines, specifically the triple expansion engine after 1881, which made possible the operating of ships of 15,000 tons and more on a profitable basis. These developments made possible the development of electricity in merchantmen, and this was to mean, with the first refrigeration ships, that produce of the outside world could be brought to European tables: the first refrigerated cargo from the United States to arrive in Britain did so in 1879, from Australia in 1880, from New Zealand in 1882, and from Argentina in 1884.⁹

The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the various restrictive measures effected by different states assume significance for a British merchant marine that represented perhaps half the world’s tonnage capacity but which had been involved in carrying three-fifths, perhaps as much as two-thirds, of all sea-borne trade. Such measures as state subsidies, mail packaging, and the preventing of foreign vessels working designated coastal routes—which in the case of the United States meant that trade between New York and Honolulu was designated coastal—meant that the merchant navies of a number of major states had secured a viable base on which to expand by the 1890s, and this had to be at the expense of their British counterpart. Over the previous two decades the increase in the size of shipping world-wide had been accompanied by major falls in freight charges,¹⁰ but if in 1890 British steamships totaled 5,414,000 tons and the steamships of the rest of the world mustered 2,293,000 tons, the fact was that the subsequent expansion in carrying trade was to be shared: between 1890 and 1910 world-wide shipping tonnage all but doubled, with Britain, for the first time, falling below the magical 50 percent figure, though in terms of the building of merchantmen Britain still accounted for almost three-fifths of world production even as late as 1914.¹¹ As it was British building primacy was accompanied by innovation unmatched by any other nation in this same period. In 1894 a British yard produced, with the cargo ship Inchmona, five-cylinder four-stage expansion propulsion, and in that same year another yard constructed the famous Turbinia, which achieved an unprecedented speed of 34.5 knots. After 1902 steam turbines were generally adopted for passenger ships; the hybrid turbine and reciprocating engine were combined for the first time in 1906 and geared turbines made their first appearance in 1911, but it was in 1902 that a British yard built the first ship larger than Brunel’s famous Great Eastern,¹² which, at 18,914 tons, had been launched on 31 January 1858 and was scrapped in 1889. The Celtic, however, at 20,904 gross registered tons (GRT) was very quickly surpassed in size: within a decade liners larger than 40,000 GRT were working the oceans; by 1914 two German liners exceeded 50,000 tons.¹³ By this time the largest cargo ships were about 7,760 GRT—about the same size as the American-built Liberty ships of the Second World War—and were capable of carrying about 10,400 tons of cargo at a top speed of 13 knots.¹⁴

TABLE 1. THE WORLD’S LEADING MERCHANT MARINES, 1870–1910

By 1914 three countries, hitherto not really in the lists, had emerged with major mercantile fleets. The most important of these was Germany, which in 1880 had been second tier, alongside France, Norway, and the United States, but which in the 1880s and then again in the first decade of the twentieth century possessed a merchant fleet that doubled in size. If it remained small in comparison to Britain by 1910 it was roughly double the size of the next largest merchant fleet. That fleet was Japanese. Even as late as 1880 there was no Japanese merchant fleet, and the massive growth of the Japanese merchant marine between 1890 and 1910 should be noted alongside two related matters. The ruggedness of the home islands placed a premium on coastal shipping, specifically small wooden ships. Such was the cost of steel in Japan—it was not until the First World War that Japan could produce steel that was cheaper than pre-war British and German imports—that in this period much of the better shipping that Japan acquired was built abroad, chiefly in Britain. In the period 1884–1903, 87.6 percent of all Japanese warships by tonnage were built abroad. The third country was Norway, which, of course, was not independent but was joined with Sweden until 1905. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, as a union Sweden and Norway more or less matched Germany until about 1900, and their combined merchant fleets were second only to Britain. By 1910 the merchant marine of Norway alone ranked fourth in the world.¹⁵

The contrast between these countries and the United States was most marked by the latter’s inability to compete in the price of steel, ship-building, and labor. Only on the Great Lakes, where there was no competition worthy of the name, could American ships make money, and the fact was that whereas in 1830 nine-tenths of American sea-borne trade was handled by American ships, by 1890 this was at one-tenth of its 1830 level. Alone among the leading powers, the United States possessed a merchant marine that declined in size between 1870 and 1890—in part the legacy of the losses incurred during the Civil War (1861–1865)—and it was not until the turn of the century that her merchant fleet began to reach the size that it had possessed some thirty years before.

What was happening to trade and shipping in the last decade of the nineteenth century was the opening of the extra-European world, and this was so in two senses: there was the opening of a world beyond Europe that was either settled or dominated by Europeans—the nineteenth century in South America was known as the British century, when British industry and capital in effect replaced direct Spanish and Portuguese rule—and there was the opening of world markets by direct annexation or the acquisition of spheres of influence. Perhaps the most important single development in this process was the European division of Africa in the wake of the Berlin conference, 1884–1885.¹⁶ In 1880 European presence in Africa was primarily coastal; the only areas where there was a general European presence and control were Algeria and southern Africa. By 1914 the only parts of Africa that were not under direct European control were Ethiopia and Liberia.

The European pre-eminence in Asia had been established primarily in the first half of the nineteenth century, what were perhaps the twin apogees of western power being the Anglo-French razing of the Summer Palace in Peking in October 1860 and the various bombardments, in June–August 1863 and September 1864, of Japanese fortresses by western navies, especially the attack on Shimonoseki, 5–8 September 1864, involving American, British, Dutch, and French warships. The latter bombardment formed part of the prelude to the civil war within Japan that resulted in the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji restoration of January 1869. In the event Japan, made acutely conscious of its weakness relative to western powers, was able to escape occidental domination primarily because the main focus of western attention was China. Japan was those extra miles and days beyond the markets of coastal and riverine China, and in that distance and time was the measure of protection that China lacked. In fact, the opening of Japan to western influence is a matter in which the United States has always claimed specific importance and relevance, the basis of this claim being Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s mission, with its four black ships,¹⁷ in 1853 and the resultant Treaty of Kanagawa (31 March 1854), under the terms of which the shogunate undertook to open normal trade relations with the United States and to return shipwrecked sailors.¹⁸ This indeed was the first casting aside of the cloak of self-exclusion with which Japan had been clad for more than two centuries.

Seldom afforded any consideration of these events is that American intention resulted in a Russian squadron sailing from the Baltic at the same time as Perry’s initial mission, and its ships stayed in Japanese waters after Perry returned to the United States. It was on the basis of this presence that Russia was able to secure the northern Kurile Islands in the Treaty of Shimoda of 7 February 1855.¹⁹ This was but the prelude to gains that were to render Russia the main beneficiary of the occidental penetration of the Far East, albeit it was a process that was primarily military and land-based and not naval. The Treaty of Aigun²⁰ (28 May 1858) and the Convention of Peking (18 October 1860), respectively, provided for the Russian acquisition of the Amur region and the Maritime Province, the irony being that Russia, which had reached the Pacific coast in 1649 and (as part of the preliminaries to the October treaty) had established a military outpost on what was to become the city and naval base of Vladivostok on 2 July 1860, established Vladivostok before it had secured such old cities as Tashkent (June 1865) and Samarkand (May 1868) in central Asia and much nearer to home.²¹ In fact, the Russian gains in the Far East predated the end of the campaigns in the Caucasus while the main Russian effort in central Asia unfolded after 1868. The process of conquest and assimilation within the Russian empire was more or less completed by February 1884, though it was not until the Akbal-Khorasan boundary treaty of 21 December 1881, along with the protocols of 30 January and 6 March 1886, that the border between Persia and Russia was designated, and it was not until 1897 that Russia and Afghanistan concluded a treaty that marked out, finally, the border that joined and separated the two countries.

The Russian conquest of central Asia was provided political, moral, and intellectual justification under the terms of the Prince Gorchakov memorandum, which was circulated throughout the capitals of Europe in December 1864. Annexation was justified in terms of contact with half-savage nomadic populations . . . whose turbulent and unsettled character make them undesirable neighbours and the need to exercise a certain ascendancy over such peoples. In such a situation, Russia was obliged to choose between bringing civilisation to those suffering under barbarian rule and abandoning its frontiers to anarchy and bloodshed, and in such a situation Russia, irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this forward march, necessarily was committed to a forward policy as has been the fate of every country which has found itself in a similar position.²² Herein was the basis of what all the countries involved in the scramble for empire in the second half of the nineteenth century embraced, mutatis mutandis, and which, by century’s end, was over-laid by two basic points of self-justification: Christian duty and the concept of racial superiority. In these matters, as one has noted elsewhere, the nineteenth century was about the cultivation of hatred, the twentieth century about the reaping,²³ but the basic point was that the elements of racial contempt and hatred were in place in the last decade of the nineteenth century in terms of European treatment of east Asians and provided the rationale as the last extra-European territories, in the Pacific, became the object of imperialist aspirations on the part of various powers.

Within the Pacific by the last decade of the nineteenth century the capacity to establish empire had largely passed. The French secured Tahiti and the Marquesas in the 1840s, by which time the British had established undisputed ownership of the whole of Australia and New Zealand and had secured Singapore and Malacca. Hongkong was secured as a result of victory in the First Opium War (1839–1842). Labuan was secured in 1846, but another four decades were to elapse before the British position of domination of northern Borneo manifested itself with the acquisition of Northern Borneo (1881) and Sarawak (1888). With Britain acquiring the Fiji Islands in 1874, the various island groups of the southwest Pacific were then secured: the Ellice Islands in 1886, the Gilbert Islands in 1892, and the middle and lower Solomons in 1893. With the Dutch in general control of the Indies—though Bali was not finally pacified until April 1908, more than three hundred years after the Dutch first arrived in the Indies—the only major territory not properly designated was New Guinea, the northeast part of which became German and Kaiser Wilhelmsland in 1884. Papua was acquired at this time by Britain and passed to Australia in 1906. But with the United States by this time having established itself in the Hawaiian Islands and having taken possession of the Midway Islands in 1867, Pago Pago in 1878, and the Pearl Harbor station in 1887, by the 1890s there were no areas for peaceful expansion, no indigenous territories into which major powers—whether old, established empires or newcomers—could move, at least not move and acquire without serious war.

The last decade of the nineteenth century saw development of naval power that ran in parallel with what had happened to merchant fleets and ships. The most obvious similarity was that this decade marked the apogee of British naval primacy, though a certain care needs be exercised in this matter because the losses incurred by the Japanese and Russians in the war of 1904–1905 and the effect of the Dreadnought allowed Britain a few years of grace. Even more conspicuous was the change of the profile of warship construction, which in this decade resulted in the development of types and silhouettes that are naturally part of the twentieth-century seascape.

The most important of these latter developments concerned battleships built of high-quality steel and equipped with quick-firing guns. The Royal Sovereign class, the first of which were laid down in 1889, were the first British battleships to have all-steel armor protection and they were the first British battleships to be given a secondary armament that consisted of quick-firing guns, initially 4.7-in./1-120-mm but later 6-in./152-mm guns. This combination of steel construction and the development of quick-firing guns was to transform the battleship with a restoration of freeboard as battleships began to assume one characteristic that was to become the standard feature of dreadnoughts. The members of the Royal Sovereign class, the first battleships to have steel armor and displace more than 12,000 tons, carried all their armament on the weather deck and all their secondary armament in casements; with their high freeboard they presented a balanced, symmetrical profile that contrasted very sharply with that of two decades of sullen and misshapen misfits.²⁴

In a very real sense the Royal Sovereign class represented two markers, two elements of constancy, at a time of very real change. The seven members of the class were laid down between July 1889 and February 1891 and were completed between May 1892 and June 1894 at an average cost of £944,140. The class represented a settled design that successive classes followed. The Barfleur, Centurion, and the Renown, the Majestic class battleships of the Spencer program of December 1893, and the Canopus class battleships of 1896–1897 represented a search for smaller, and less costly, battleships before the Formidable class of 1897, the London class of 1898 and 1900, and the Duncan class of 1898 and 1899 represented a return to the dimensions of the Majestic class at a seven-figure cost. Only the Implacable from the Formidable class and the Bulwark from the London class cost less than £1,000,000, while average cost of the six units of the Duncan class was almost £1,100,000 and the Prince of Wales, from the London class, cost almost £1,200,000. Settled design and profile, therefore, came at a very considerable increase of cost, and with the new century the size and cost of battleships climbed even more quickly: the eight battleships of the King Edward VII class, laid down between March 1902 and February 1904, displaced between 15,610 and 15,885 tons and cost £1,344,804 on average, while the Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, built between 1905 and 1908, displaced some 16,000 tons and cost £1,541,443 exclusive of armament. In a little less than a decade, therefore, the cost of individual ships rose by four-fifths (i.e., the average cost of a Lord Nelson class battleship compared to the Albion of the Canopus class), and in just six years rose by more than half (i.e., the average cost of a Lord Nelson class battleship compared to the Formidable).

The second element of constancy that the Royal Sovereign class represented was Britain’s determination to maintain itself as the world’s foremost naval power. The Royal Sovereign class was the first built under the provisions of the Naval Defence Act of March 1889, which authorized the construction of seventy warships between 1889 and 1894 at a cost of £21,500,000. So expensive a program had been foreshadowed by the report in the previous month, February 1889, which stated that Britain would be pressed to conduct a naval war against a single enemy—altogether inadequate to take the offensive in a war with only one Great Power—and would be out-numbered by a combination of two powers. Of course a great deal depended on the identity of these two powers, and the fact was that there were only two powers that could combine to leave the British inferior to themselves—France and Russia. It was the combination of these two powers that resulted in the emergence of the two-power standard on which Britain based her