McBride W.M. Technological change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945

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Mahan attributed the Russian defeat to their beginning the action in a

ﬂeet formation in which the battleships “could not quickly develop the full

power of the broadside.”

In an interesting sailing metaphor, Mahan com-

pared the ships’ funnels with masts and sails. He analyzed the destruction

the secondary batteries of 6-inch and 8-inch guns wrought upon the ships’

funnels in both ﬂeets. Perforations in the funnel, Mahan claimed, reduced

a ship’s speed, forcing the battle line to slow to maintain ﬂeet integrity while

protecting the damaged ship. Besides slowing enemy ships, the smaller

guns also served a more important, antipersonnel mission which was often

the cause of defeat during the age of sail: “It has long been my own opin-

ion that the so-called secondary battery is really entitled to the name pri-

mary, because its effect is exerted mainly upon the personnel rather than

the material of the vessel.”

Curiously, Mahan ignored the effect that a 12-

inch shell, ﬁred from a big gun and delivered from long range, could have

on both materiel and personnel.

Mahan recognized the slippery slope of ever larger battleships and the

threat posed to the status quo by Dreadnought, but except for decrying “this

wilful premature antiquating of good vessels” as a “growing and wanton

evil,” could offer no solution:

Practically, the navies of the world have now committed themselves to solving

their problem by progressive increases in size, which affects national expendi-

ture in two principal ways: ﬁrst, increase of cost by bigger ships, and, second, by

prematurely relegating to the dump vessels good in themselves, but unable to

keep up with the last one built. To-day’s Dreadnought has no immunity from

the common lot of all battleships. In a ﬂeet, to-day, her speed will be that of her

slower sisters [pre-dreadnought battleships]; more Dreadnoughts must be built

to keep up with her; and upon them in turn, according to the prevalent law of

progress, she will be a drag, for her successors will excel her.

While urging retrenchment based on economy, Mahan was driven, as

was Porter, by a strong attachment to the thought style typical of ofﬁcers of

his generation. The dreadnought battleship threatened to make Mahan’s

old navy obsolete and invalidate the historical framework he had con-

structed in his interpretation of naval power. If a modern dreadnought

had a useful technical life of but a few years before being superseded, the

long-term identiﬁcation of the ofﬁcer corps with its artifacts, the very mor-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

tar of the naval profession, was in danger and perhaps, in some insensate

way, Mahan perceived a future technology-based presumptive anomaly

that would overthrow the strategic paradigm of battleship-based guerre

d’escadre.

Mahan’s opposition to the new dreadnought battleship was attacked by

Lieutenant Commander William S. Sims, appointed inspector of target

practice by President Roosevelt.

Taking care to treat the great Mahan re-

spectfully, Sims cited “recently available” information—a publication of

charts and chronology of the Battle in the Sea of Japan provided by a Rus-

sian ofﬁcer-observer.

For Sims, the efﬁcacy of the large-caliber gun had been proven in the

ﬁrst minutes of the battle when two Russian battleships were pounded out

of the line by Japanese long-range gunﬁre. The battleship Osliabia was

sunk and in Suvaroff, the Russian admiral was wounded. Despite their su-

periority in large guns, the Russians preferred a surprisingly short 1,800-yard

battle range. The superior speed of the Japanese ships allowed them to keep

the Russians at an unfamiliar distance. The Russian ships were also over-

loaded with coal and stores so that their waterline armor belt, located along

the side of the hull, was submerged and ineffective—a charge Sims would

soon level against the Board on Construction regarding U.S. battleship

designs.

The lesson of the Russo-Japanese War, according to Sims, was that all

things being equal, higher speed conferred tactical advantage. The com-

mander of a faster ﬂeet always had the ability to: “(1) Refuse or accept

battle. (2) Choose his own range. (3) Control the rate of change of range.

(4) Control the compass bearing, thus taking advantage of the weather con-

ditions that favor his own gun-ﬁre.”

If armor and guns were untouchable,

the higher speed advocated by Sims could only come from more powerful

propulsion plants, which would require much longer and larger battle-

ships.

Sims pointed out that the new all-big-gun battleships like Dreadnought

were impervious to anything but ﬁre from the heaviest guns and had made

battleships like the Connecticut obsolete. In the new dreadnoughts, the tur-

rets were completely enclosed in 8-inch armor plate, making the gunners

invulnerable to ﬁre from the smaller guns of Mahan’s favored secondary

battery. Given the need to build battleships capable of meeting those of

other nations on equal terms, Sims thought it “unwise to equip our new

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

ships with a large number of small guns that are incapable of inﬂicting ma-

terial damage upon the all-big-gun, one-caliber ships of our enemies, or

upon the personnel manning their guns.”

Sims accused Mahan of con-

fusing “volume of ﬁre” with “volume of hitting,” or as Sims preferred, “ra-

pidity of hitting, which is the only true standard of efﬁciency for all kinds

of gun-ﬁre.”

Ignoring the issue of technological obsolescence, Sims argued that ten

20,000-ton, all-big-gun battleships would be more economical to acquire

and to maintain ($100 million) than twenty small battleships ($120 million

to $130 million). Sims surprisingly claimed that the larger ship would re-

quire half the ofﬁcers and men as its smaller, more labor-intensive coun-

terpart. Sims may have been thinking in terms of gun crews and charac-

teristically ignoring engineers as well as deck personnel required to

maintain the ship. The larger battleships would cost less yet would be

“greatly superior in tactical qualities, effective hitting capacity, speed, pro-

tection, and inherent ability, to concentrate its gun-ﬁre, and have a sufﬁ-

cient sum left over to build one 20,000-ton battleship each year.”

Sims’s argument presaged later U.S. Navy efforts to reduce crew size.

The 1970s Spruance-class destroyers were highly automated ships nomi-

nally incorporating the latest technology and providing a solution to the

navy’s postconscription manpower concerns. This approach, however, did

not prove to be a panacea. The smaller crew, on a larger ship, meant rou-

tine maintenance such as chipping rust and painting was hard to accom-

plish. The high percentage of trained technical specialists in the crews of

these ships were not pleased by the prospect of manual labor, exacerbat-

ing retention of these highly skilled personnel.

During the mid-1990s,

the so-called arsenal ship was touted for its minimal crew and reduced

crew size continues to be an issue in the twenty-ﬁrst-century navy. It is

likely that Sims’s ideas would have produced similar problems a century

ago.

In his biography of Sims, Elting Morison has portrayed his father-in-law

as only interested in constructing the most efﬁcient and powerful battle-

ship possible, and downplayed any inference that Sims was a big-navy ad-

vocate.

While Sims did not write with the same fervor as Gibbons and

Poundstone, he was not exactly a voice for moderation in battleship con-

struction. Perhaps Park Benjamin, a contemporary writer who graduated

from the Naval Academy in 1867, said it best:

Technological Change and the United States Navy

The ﬂeet of big overtopping ships which Lieutenant-Commander Sims treats,

and no doubt would like us to treat, with easy familiarity, will, on his own ar-

gument, be open to defeat, for precisely similar reasons, by half their number

of still larger ships; and these, in turn, by a still smaller number of vessels big-

ger yet; and ﬁnally, what is to prevent (pace the naval constructors) the reduc-

tion (ad absurdum if you like) of the last pair, like “two single gentlemen rolled

into one,” to an isolated and massive identity? Think of that! Perhaps but one

ship may be needed to scare off the effete navies of Europe from the Atlantic.

Sims’s all-big-gun battleship was in line with the “traditional desire” of

the American naval ofﬁcer to possess “long range guns,” elucidated by

Lieutenant Signor in 1902. Mahan’s arguments were rejected by his col-

leagues and overtaken by the all-big-gun design of the battleship Michigan,

produced by the technical bureaus and funded by Congress in 1905. Michi-

gan was soon followed by true dreadnought battleship designs for the U.S.

Navy featuring steam turbine propulsion.

Dreadnought battleships replaced the mixed-gun-bore pre-dread-

noughts and, like nuclear weapons today, became the quantiﬁable and

deﬁning measure of national power for maritime nations. Even Brazil and

Argentina ordered dreadnoughts, not for any valid defense reason, but

solely as a matter of national pride. By 1909, the cry in Britain was for dread-

noughts: “We want eight and we won’t wait!”

Still, as Mahan had pre-

dicted, the dreadnought battleship was but another step in a technological

arms race and, before the outbreak of World War I, the powerful dread-

nought was superseded by the larger superdreadnought with more effec-

tive guns.

Big battleship advocates, such as Sims, sincerely believed that large

dreadnoughts were economical, and therefore in a progressive sense, more

efﬁcient alternatives to their smaller predecessors.

It was a happy time for

navalists and naval ofﬁcers since the future, under Theodore Roosevelt,

promised more and ever-larger battleships. Unfortunately for Sims and his

colleagues, control of battleship technology still rested with the technical

bureaus. Having quashed criticism of the all-big-gun ship, and having de-

feated the great Mahan, Sims set his sights on the hated technical bureaus

and the engineer-dominated Board on Construction. Sims publicly criti-

cized American dreadnought design in one more attempt to achieve con-

trol over the technological basis of the profession.

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

Mutiny in the Line: The Senate Investigation

of 1907–1908

William Sims had never been bashful in presenting his views on the

shortcomings of the service to the Navy Department. Besides calling for

the subordination of the technical bureaus to the line in 1901, Sims had

successfully appealed to President Roosevelt to force a change in naval

gunnery technique in 1902.

Ordered to Washington to serve as the in-

spector of target practice, Sims observed the ﬁght over the Connecticut at

ﬁrst hand. He was intolerant of the naval bureaucracy and sought the

“blood” of those guilty of “indirection and shiftiness . . . in high places.”

Caring more for “the vital interests of our great service” than “saving face,”

Sims did not share Dewey’s fear of a public ﬁght for control of the profes-

sion.

In 1907 Sims indicted American battleship designs in an article in

McClure’s Weekly, penned by Henry Reuterdahl, a civilian writer on naval

affairs. The article savaged the design of American battleships, placing the

blame squarely upon the technical bureaus and the Board on Construc-

tion.

Sims hoped to create enough controversy to force a congressional

hearing, during which the malfeasance of the technical bureaus would be

exposed. Sims’s ultimate goals were the reorganization of the Navy De-

partment under a line-ofﬁcer general staff, establishment of a system of

promotion based upon ability, and an end to bureau control over battle-

ship technology.

The Reuterdahl article was published one month after President Roo-

sevelt proposed a greatly expanded battleship construction program to

counter HMS Dreadnought. The McClure’s article created just the effect

Admiral Dewey had feared in 1904—useful ammunition for congressional

opponents of naval expenditures. Coming hard on the heels of the eco-

nomic panic of 1907, the article placed Roosevelt’s dreadnought navy in

jeopardy.

Recognizing Sims’s handiwork in the McClure’s article, the powers

within the Navy Department lost no time in accusing Sims, now serving as

presidential naval aide, and Lieutenant Commander Frank Hill, who had

challenged the Board on Construction over battleship torpedo tubes, of

complicity with Reuterdahl.

Hill proclaimed his innocence, but did ac-

knowledge his long-standing opposition to the method of placement of the

waterline armor belt on American battleships, a key criticism in the Reu-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

terdahl article.

To protect his naval program, Roosevelt ordered a tem-

porary halt in the Navy Department inquiry directed at Sims.

Although

Roosevelt had succeeded in keeping his naval aide under wraps, the tech-

nical bureaus appealed to Senator Eugene Hale, chairman of the Naval

Affairs Committee, for vindication.

Hale, a Republican from Maine, opposed larger “imperialist” battle-

ships, and had little tolerance for their advocates.

Previously a pro-navy

congressman, Hale allowed his support for naval expansion to erode in line

with his strong opposition to the war with Spain. Elting Morison attributed

Hale’s aversion to large battleships to the claim, undoubtedly voiced by

Sims, that the shipyards in Hale’s home state could not accommodate large

battleships and were losing choice construction and repair contracts—a

charge belied by the construction of the large (14,900-ton) battleship Geor-

gia at Bath Iron Works in 1903. According to Robert Albion, Roosevelt was

often forced to bypass Hale and utilize Senator Albert Belveridge to push

many of the naval appropriations bills through the Senate.

Hale had

waged a stiff ﬁght with the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1903 over the

three 16,000-ton Connecticut-class battleships voted by the House. He

forced a compromise in which the three Connecticuts were joined by two

smaller 12,000-ton battleships of the Mississippi class. Hale thought

[the smaller battleship] does not ﬁt the fancy of a naval ofﬁcer. She has not the

room on her for staterooms and for comforts and for conveniences and for all

the intricate machinery that a 16,000 ton ship has. But she has the same num-

ber of 12-inch guns and the same number of turrets and the same efﬁcient force,

so far as the great guns go. She is smaller, more efﬁciently handled, and when

she goes to the bottom, as any battleship will from the effect of a torpedo . . .

instead of seven or eight million dollars going to the bottom, it is only

$5,000,000.

In preparation for the Senate hearings, Hale garnered statements from

Rear Admiral Washington Capps, chief of the Bureau of Construction &

Repair, and Rear Admiral George Converse, a retired line ofﬁcer serving

as president of the Board on Construction.

Assured by Capps and Con-

verse that the charges against American battleship designs were groundless,

Hale optimistically opened the hearings designed to vindicate the techni-

cal bureaus and expose the big battleship insurgents as irresponsible spend-

thrifts.

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

Capps had recently assumed the duties of chief of the Bureau of Con-

struction & Repair and was defending his predecessor’s design for the

Delaware-class dreadnoughts currently under construction. Capps had

graduated from the Naval Academy in 1884, four years after Sims, but was

entitled to the temporary rank of rear admiral as chief of a bureau.

News-

papers supporting Sims sneered at “Rear Admiral” Capps, but his lengthy

experience as a naval architect qualiﬁed him to head his bureau.

In his statement to the committee, Capps refuted the charges made by

Sims and his compatriots.

Capps presented comprehensive data on con-

temporary warship design practices that supported the bureaus’ contention

that American warship design philosophy was comparable to foreign prac-

tice. In contrast to the claim made in the Reuterdahl article, the data also

indicated that American armor belt design was consonant with the design

practices of the British and Japanese navies.

Capps reported that the

Japanese Aki-class battleship “indicates clearly that the Japanese, with all

their experience derived from the battle of the Sea of Japan, have con-

ﬁrmed in 1906, so far as concerns freeboard, water-line armor protection,

height of guns, etc., the American design of two years previous, that is the

Connecticut-Vermont class.”

Capps pointed out that Sims’s ideal battleship, HMS Dreadnought, had

only one-third of her coal on board when the design waterline was calcu-

lated. When fully loaded, Dreadnought was almost 2 feet deeper in the

water than when designed, submerging her armor belt even farther than

the worst American ship. When Sims suggested that Capps’s data was in

error and that a little legwork by Capps could “dig out” the correct infor-

mation, Capps’s reply was peremptory: “It is not a case of digging it out; it

is simply a case where those who have to deal with these things and are re-

sponsible know, and those who carelessly criticize do not know.”

Technically, Sims was correct in accusing the Bureau of Construction

& Repair of arbitrarily establishing the waterline at which the armor belt

was installed, but it was a decision designed to foster strategic consonance

of the battleship force. In 1896, the Walker Board had recommended ﬁx-

ing the design waterline based upon a two-thirds load of coal, stores, and

the like.

But given the strategic and tactical necessity for battle ﬂeet in-

tegrity, an important Mahanian concept, the Board on Construction had

decided that the varying rates of fuel consumption of different classes of

battleships had to be taken into account. The “normal” load (upon which

the design waterline was based) should include enough coal to provide a

Technological Change and the United States Navy

common radius of steaming, allowing the ﬂeet to operate together. As a re-

sult, some ships had their belt armor location based upon a coal load of 67

percent while others might have only 45 percent of their coal allowance on

board. In any case, the actual draft variance was small between ships. In no

case did any American ship ever exceed the design waterline draft by more

than 11 inches. That occurred with one ship. The next highest overdraft at

full load was 7 inches.

Arguing that it was better to have the belt too high rather than sub-

merged, Sims, as “a practical naval ofﬁcer in contradiction to a scientiﬁc

one,”

scoffed at the need for underwater protection from gunﬁre as a

naval shell “always ricochets with extreme suddenness off the water. It

never goes down. . . . The water is entirely impenetrable.”

Sims, the gun-

nery expert, was scientiﬁcally naive and out of touch. Capps informed the

committee that army experiments, done in cooperation with the navy, had

demonstrated that it was possible for a shell to penetrate the water and strike

a ship’s side.

Sims was ill-suited to counter Capps’s technical evidence and expertise

and fared poorly before the Senate Committee. Sims shifted his attack to

his claim that line ofﬁcers were excluded from the battleship design

process. But Sims’s dislike of the technical bureaus blinded him to the in-

creasing cooperation between seagoing ofﬁcers and engineering specialists

that had produced the Michigan design in 1904.

The designs for the North Dakota-class dreadnoughts, which Sims con-

demned, had been subjected to extensive review within the navy. In 1907

the secretary of the navy’s General Order No. 49 solicited comments on

the proposed battleship design from all ofﬁcers of the navy. The North

Dakota design was selected after the consideration of twenty preliminary

plans, including designs prepared by naval architects from the private sec-

tor.

The Board on Construction selected the best plans and forwarded

them to a special board for review. This board consisted of the assistant sec-

retary of the navy, Truman Newberry; three line ofﬁcers from the General

Board, Rear Admiral Merrell and Captains Wainwright and Rodgers; the

chief of the Bureau of Construction & Repair; the chief of the Bureau of

Ordnance; and the chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering. The ﬁnal

plans for the two North Dakota-class battleships were approved by this line-

engineer special board, forwarded to Secretary of the Navy Charles Bona-

parte, and approved by Congress in the naval appropriation bill of 2 March

1907.

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

Sims had forwarded a response to General Order 49 in which he

charged that the armor belt on the North Dakota design was 30 inches too

low.

Sims’s complaint was referred to the Board on Construction, which

rejected his assertion and recommended no change in the design. Sims

ﬁled a rebuttal, and in an extraordinary expression of tolerance, the secre-

tary referred the matter to two line ofﬁcers, Rear Admiral Willard Brown-

son, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, and Rear Admiral Robley D. “Fight-

ing Bob” Evans, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, a former battleship

commander and popular hero from the Battle of Santiago de Cuba. Brown-

son supported the Board on Construction. Evans, who admitted that he

had believed American armor belts were too low, changed his mind, stat-

ing that he had been “misinformed” as to the facts.

Secretary Metcalf then went one step further and submitted the armor

design of the North Dakota class to other line ofﬁcers. With one exception,

they informed the secretary that “these ships, namely, the Delaware and

North Dakota, were amply protected; in fact, better protected than the

ships of any other service.”

With Sims’s complaint rejected by a large

number of seagoing ofﬁcers, Metcalf testiﬁed that

[the Navy Department’s] highly trained and legally appointed ofﬁcial advisers

[Board on Construction and General Board] should have the dominating inﬂu-

ence in all matters connected with the design of naval vessels, it appears to me

that in this question of the location of the water-line armor belt, the Department

has gone out of its way to obtain opinions from the highest possible authorities

among the seagoing branch of the Navy, and that there is really no ground for

further contention with respect to the matter of the water-line belt armor on the

Delaware and North Dakota or on the South Carolina and Michigan, whose

armor belts are very similar in location and character.

When the armor belt issue surfaced in the McClure’s article, Secretary

Metcalf had forwarded a report to Senator Hale written by Rear Admiral

Robley Evans during the cruise of the Great White Fleet:

it would appear that better protection might have been afforded had these belts

been originally placed between 6 inches and 1 foot higher; this on the theory

that the Commanding Ofﬁcer would admit sufﬁcient water before an action to

sink the belt to within 18 inches above the waterline; but even this is open to

Technological Change and the United States Navy

question, for it has been noted that even when heavy laden and in the smooth

to moderate seas which have thus far characterized this cruise, the ships fre-

quently expose their entire belt and the bottom plating beneath it. It must be

remembered that even a 5 or 6-inch shell (of which there would be a great num-

ber), could inﬂict a severe and dangerous injury if it struck below the belt, while

otherwise the waterline, even with the belt entirely submerged, is, on account

of the casemate, armor and coal, immune to all except the heaviest projec-

tiles.

Secretary Metcalf informed Senator Hale that Captain Roy Ingersoll, late

chief of staff to Admiral Evans, had informed Metcalf that “the undoubted

The alleged deﬁciencies in the dreadnought North Dakota led to the Sims faction’s

failed attempt at Newport to increase the guns mounted in Utah (seen here) and

Delaware. Commander Albert Key criticized the placement of turret three, immedi-

ately behind the second stack. (Naval Historical Center, NH 44256)

Image not available.