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

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power.

Fisher was fond of pointing out the need for such a high-speed ship

by citing a French minister of marine, who in a classic guerre de course ar-

gument ridiculed the ability of battleships alone to protect a nation’s sea-

borne trade: “The battle ﬂeet parades the seas in solemn pomp, but, inas-

much as it has insufﬁcient speed, it cannot protect the traders that ﬂy its

ﬂag from the depredations of an enemy’s corsairs and can only win victo-

ries on condition that its enemy is complaisant enough to ‘come and be

killed.’ ”

Fast British battlecruisers could go, catch, and kill commerce

raiders and lesser warships as they did to Admiral Graf von Spee’s force off

the Falkland Islands in December 1914.

Advocates of the battlecruiser also claimed a tactical advantage in guerre

d’escadre for a battle ﬂeet that included this new type of ship. Battlecruis-

ers could destroy lightly armed enemy scout cruisers before they could ﬁnd

the battle ﬂeet. With its scouts destroyed, the enemy ﬂeet would have no

intelligence on the battle ﬂeet’s location, strength, and disposition. Using

the intelligence gathered by its own battlecruisers, the ﬂeet could then ma-

neuver freely for tactical advantage against its blind enemy.

This argument typiﬁed the concept of intra-artifact combat that perme-

ates much of modern military thinking. It also ignored the dangers of evo-

lutionary technologies Mahan had decried. The advantages of having a

ﬂeet with battlecruisers was greatest if one’s enemy had none. This paral-

lels Guilio Douhet’s strategic bombing argument that lost some of its efﬁ-

cacy if one’s opponent also had a strategic air force. To prevail against an

enemy ﬂeet incorporating battlecruisers, one needed either technologi-

cally superior battlecruisers, leading to a broadened naval race, or, if battle-

cruiser technology was relatively equal, greater numbers. Either option

would be tremendously expensive. British pursuit of the battlecruiser

threatened to pull the U.S. Navy down a technological path that ran

counter to the American tradition.

In December 1914, almost a decade after the ﬁrst British battlecruiser

was laid down, the General Board recommended following Britain and

constructing battlecruisers as adjuncts to the battleship. Nevertheless, the

Board believed it prudent to complete the construction of a sufﬁcient num-

ber of dreadnoughts for the battle ﬂeet before allocating any construction

assets to battlecruisers.

The call for battlecruisers soon spread. In January 1915 former Secretary

of the Navy George von L. Meyer, in a speech at the New York Republi-

can Club, characterized the lack of battlecruisers as a fatal ﬂaw in the U.S.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

114

Navy: “We don’t own a battleship that could keep up with the armored

cruiser Bluecher [sic, Blücher], of the German Navy . . . and yet the

Bluecher was lost in the recent North Sea action because she was too slow.

Japan could wipe out our whole Paciﬁc commerce. Japan has battlecruis-

ers and we have none.”

The lack of fast capital ships to protect American trade was underscored

by a report in the Army and Navy Journal that the Japanese battlecruisers

of the Kongo class possessed 14-inch guns compared with the 12-inch guns

on U.S. battleships.

Reﬂecting a Mahanian focus on the guerre d’escadre

strategy, the Army and Navy Journal ignored the commerce raiding poten-

tial of the Japanese battlecruisers and focused on the 6-knot speed advan-

tage of the Kongos. Their high speed would allow them to maneuver and

destroy an American ﬂeet from beyond U.S. gun range.

The Journal’s concern about gun-bore disparity was based upon the

common misconception that larger-diameter gun bores translated directly

into longer ranges, that is, a 16-inch gun could shoot farther and penetrate

thicker armor than a 14-inch shell. All things being equal, this was true. In

fact, the shell weight, muzzle velocity, and armor-piercing capabilities of

the U.S. 12-inch/50-caliber, Mark 7 gun entering service in 1912 were com-

parable to the British-built 14-inch/45-caliber guns installed in the Kongo-

class battlecruisers.

Yet even with gun power relatively equal, the faster

Japanese ships could control when, where, and if a battle would occur, a

quality Bradley Fiske included in his “compromiseless” battleship in 1905.

Battlecruiser proponents, including both line and engineering ofﬁcers,

campaigned for the battlecruiser in the pages of the Proceedings of the

Naval Institute. Assistant Naval Constructor B. S. Bullard decried Amer-

ica’s singular stagnation in battlecruiser construction, calling for the im-

mediate adoption of this type of ship which had “proved its worth in actual

battle.”

Commander Yates Stirling maintained that the decision to build

only battleships was sound, if all the preliminary operations leading to the

ﬁnal battle between battleships were ignored.

The dreadnought battle-

ship, according to Stirling, had become little more than a defensive forti-

ﬁcation, and he proclaimed that “The battle-cruiser is the mistress of the

sea and he who commands the most powerful ﬂeet of battle-cruisers com-

mands the sea.”

Expounding upon its 1914 endorsement of the battlecruiser, the General

Board concluded by July 1915 that the battlecruiser “gap” represented a se-

rious weakness in American sea power. When Secretary of the Navy Jose-

Anomalous Technologies of the Great War

115

phus Daniels requested advice on the navy building program, the General

Board told him that by 1925 the navy “should be equal to the most power-

ful maintained by any other nation” and “gradually increased to this point

by such a rate of development year by year as may be permitted by the fa-

cilities of the country.” As part of this gradual buildup to naval supremacy,

the Board, in 1915, recommended the addition of “four battlecruisers, four

dreadnoughts, six scouts, 30 coast submarines, [and] seven ﬂeet sub-

marines.”

The General Board proposal for battlecruiser construction was endorsed

by the Bureau of Construction & Repair, which was compiling lessons to

be learned from the war in Europe. In attempting to assess “desirable types

of vessels,” the Bureau reported that the British felt that the battlecruiser

had “thoroughly established” its usefulness in the Dogger Bank action

(1915) and by destroying von Spee’s squadron off the Falklands.

The 1916 Naval Appropriations Act authorized six battlecruisers “of the

highest practicable speed” at a cost, excluding armor and armament, of un-

der $16.5 million each. The Act also authorized ten battleships “carrying

as heavy armor and as powerful armament as any vessels of their class” at a

cost, excluding armor and armament, not to exceed $11.5 million each.

At 31,000 tons, the battleships of the 1916 Program were very large ships,

underscoring the editorial opinion in Scientiﬁc American that “Size, thick

armor and the big gun, as combined in the modern dreadnought, consti-

tute the supreme controlling factor in naval warfare.”

The magazine’s ed-

itorial staff agreed with Poundstone’s philosophy that bigger was better,

claiming that there was “nothing of the freakish or phenomenal in the ex-

traordinary growth in size of the battleship and the gun it carried”; the large

dreadnought embodied engineering and economical “efﬁciency.”

The upward spiral in battleship size and expense, so long predicted,

caused concern even among stalwart navalists in Congress. Attempting to

set some ceiling on battleship size, Congress attached a rider to the 1916

Appropriations Act requiring Secretary Daniels to report on the “largest

battleship which can be undertaken in the United States.” In response,

Daniels informed Congress that “the technical and military advisers of the

department have prepared and considered a number of alternative designs”

before arriving at an 80,000-ton, 975-foot battleship, sporting ﬁfteen 18-inch

guns.

The navy thought it would require the construction of ﬁve such

ships at a cost of $50 million each. It appeared to some that Park Benjamin’s

satirical prediction concerning the “big ships” would come true.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

116

Within naval circles, the battleship emerged from the May 1916 Battle

of Jutland stronger than before, but the worth of the battlecruiser was in

doubt. Combat negated naval sentiment that the ﬁrst hits would mean vic-

tory. Both German and British battleships had taken tremendous punish-

ment from large-caliber naval guns at Jutland and endured. The battleship

Warspite, for example, with her steering gear disabled, survived ﬁre from

six German battleships.

This seemingly vindicated the traditional view

elucidated by Chief Constructor Washington Capps in 1908 that the battle-

ship could absorb tremendous punishment from big guns.

The value of the battlecruiser, on the other hand, became suspect in

U.S. circles once more details of the destruction of the British battlecruis-

ers Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible (3,319 dead) became known

after America became a cobelligerent.

The thin armor and poor ﬂash

protection of Fisher’s fast battlecruisers could not keep out the German

shells or prevent ruinous secondary explosions, and the ships’ high speed

had provided no protection.

In a righteous defense of his battlecruiser de-

signs, Fisher angrily noted on Jellicoe’s letter to him after Jutland that

battlecruisers were “never meant to get in enemy’s range!”

Because of

Jutland, the British redesigned the new battlecruiser HMS Hood to include

more armor, but not enough to save her from a catastrophic explosion

(1,415 dead) during her May 1941 engagement with the battleship Bismarck

and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen.

Once enlightened about Jutland, the U.S. naval hierarchy began to re-

think its own commitment to the battlecruiser. For the U.S. Navy, guerre

de course remained marginal and the battlecruiser had no ability to

counter the submarine, the dominant commerce raider of the war. In 1918

William Sims, now the admiral commanding U.S. naval forces in Europe,

was asked to review the designs of the battlecruisers and battleships of the

1916 Program. Sims knew that the British had abandoned singular reliance

on Fisher’s “speed is armor” idea and were increasing the protection on

Hood. Sims’s London-based Planning Section recommended increased ar-

mor protection at the expense of high speed for the U.S. battlecruisers not

yet laid down. The General Board, perhaps acting out of a need to defend

its stated position, and also because of a certain lingering hostility toward

Sims, rejected any change in the battlecruiser design. Sims called on the

navy’s senior ofﬁcer, the chief of naval operations (CNO), Admiral William

S. Benson, to support the increased protection recommended by his Plan-

ning Section.

Anomalous Technologies of the Great War

117

The Sims–Benson battlecruiser dialog came in the wake of a serious rift

over wartime construction priorities. The anglophilic Sims advocated sus-

pension of the 1916 capital ships to build destroyers and merchant hulls to

save Britain from the German submarine offensive. Benson, distrustful of

the British and with an eye on the postwar naval balance, pushed to con-

tinue the 1916 Program.

Benson favored proceeding with the six weakly

armored 1916 battlecruisers if delays would be incurred by a redesign of

their armor protection.

Sims glibly estimated the maximum delay at six

months and argued that the redesign would provide conformity with the

new, more heavily armored second wave of battlecruisers currently being

proposed by the Department. With the total cost of the six battlecruisers

running around $150 million, Sims legitimately argued that “in view of the

enormous sums involved, it appears to me indefensible to actually start

construction of 12 capital ships of what we actually consider to be obsolete

types. . . . Everyone seems to be agreed that these enormous vessels, with

only ﬁve inches of armor, would be a grievous error.”

With Sims and the General Board at odds, and Benson wavering, Sec-

retary of the Navy Josephus Daniels suspended construction on the six

battlecruisers early in 1919, pending a visit by him and his three principal

technical advisers (the chiefs of the Bureau of Ordnance, Bureau of Con-

struction & Repair, and the Bureau of Steam Engineering) to the navy de-

partments of Britain, France, and Italy to discuss their conclusions drawn

from the war.

The American battlecruisers were never completed. The dispute over

the value of the battlecruiser was ultimately resolved by the Five-Power

Treaty, which limited the total number of capital ships the United States

could possess. The navy decided to retain its traditional heavily gunned,

long-range, slow ships, as they were more valuable for operations in the Pa-

ciﬁc. Two of the 1916 battlecruisers did enter service, but as the large air-

craft carriers Lexington and Saratoga allowed under the treaty as a result of

U.S. lobbying.

The battlecruiser had caused a slight rift among battleship ofﬁcers. Ag-

gressive battlecruiser advocates, such as Stirling, may have seen the battle-

cruiser replacing the dreadnought and eventually acting as a true fast

battleship as Fisher had in Britain. Yet for most, there was never any doubt

that the battlecruiser would only serve as an adjunct within the battleship

technological paradigm.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

118

The submarine, on the other hand, had the potential to challenge the

battleship’s preeminence. Yet by the end of the war, the submarine would

be incorporated into the normal practice of the battleship paradigm.

The Submarine

The sinking of the three British cruisers, Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, by

the German submarine U-9 at the outset of the war brought the submarine

instant credibility.

The demonstrated efﬁcacy of the submarine forced

British battleships into a peripatetic life until ﬂeet anchorages were secured

by antisubmarine nets and other defenses.

On the open seas, battleships

had to travel at high speed. They also had to follow zigzag courses which

reduced their speed of advance and increased fuel consumption by as

much as 30 percent.

Technological countermeasures directed at the submarine foreshad-

owed postwar antiaviation arguments in which the battleship was presented

as an adaptable, superior technology. The U.S. Navy, like foreign navies,

initially relied upon steel antitorpedo nets, suspended from booms swung

outboard on each side of the ships, to protect battleships at anchor. In

October 1914 the navy ordered torpedo nets manufactured by the John A.

Roebling’s Sons Company for the new superdreadnoughts Nevada and Ok-

lahoma just as the Newport Torpedo Station proved that a torpedo could

penetrate such nets.

It is unclear if the unwelcome Torpedo Station re-

port was taken seriously for long, if at all.

In Britain, the German submarine success meant that capital ship sor-

ties into the North Sea had to contend with the submarine as never before.

During the Dogger Bank engagement in 1915, Vice Admiral David Beatty

broke off his pursuit of the outnumbered German ships because he be-

lieved German submarines were in the area. Fisher, the ﬁrst sea lord,

warned Beatty that “to go out in daylight with a lot of large ships and the

German submarines so ably handled is a very serious risk.”

In a rush to learn lessons from the European War, the House Naval Af-

fairs Committee, in December 1914, looked into whether the battleship

could be eliminated since its effectiveness appeared to have been impaired

by the war in Europe. In his testimony before the committee, Rear Admi-

ral Frank F. Fletcher, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, minimized the

Anomalous Technologies of the Great War

119

“submarine with its torpedoes” as “a weapon of opportunity” that is “for-

midable and destructive.” However, according to Fletcher “a skillful en-

emy need not permit the opportunity to occur.”

For Fletcher the torpedo was a passing threat that could be countered

by improving battleship design. A new weapon, according to Fletcher, al-

ways “appeals to our imagination, and we are apt to say that it changes the

history of warfare.”

In a classic military dismissal of a counterweapon,

Fletcher stated that the torpedo, and weapons of its kind, can only “delay

or obstruct the movements of the main force of battleships” until “the ﬁ-

nal clash is decided when the battleships come together.”

The battleship

remained supreme since “the development of any offensive weapon is nat-

urally followed by the development of the defense, which does not appear

until later. The submarine is the latest weapon and the defense against it

is not yet fully developed, but in the natural progress of all such develop-

ment the submarine [will become an] auxiliary weapon. . . . It will be able

to delay, obstruct, and hamper the movements of the main force, but it will

not win battles.”

Fletcher claimed that the navy could keep submarines one hundred

miles from its battleships using cruisers and destroyers, and perhaps, even

dirigibles. The submarine’s slow speed restricted its ability to attack fast bat-

tleship formations, but Fletcher severely underestimated the modern sub-

marine’s capabilities. When pressed, Fletcher was unsure how submerged

submarines could be prevented from closing with battleships. With devel-

opment of acoustic detection devices still in the future, submerged sub-

marines could only be found visually. As to ﬁghting submarines, Fletcher

admitted that the methods so far proposed—using torpedoes, grappling

hooks, or rapid-ﬁre guns—had not proven “absolutely positive as yet.”

Fletcher agreed with both the General Board and Navy Department po-

sition that called for the abandonment of the smaller “coastal defense” type

of submarine, designed to destroy attacking battleship ﬂeets, in favor of a

new “ﬂeet” type, designed to operate with the battleships and scout for, and

harass, an enemy ﬂeet.

In a perfect example of the battleship thought

style and its rejection of the pre-1890 continentalist naval thought style,

Fletcher responded to previous testimony advocating one hundred anti-

battleship coastal defense submarines. For the same money ($50 million),

Fletcher said he would rather have four dreadnoughts.

Fletcher’s defense of the battleship technological paradigm was echoed

by Rear Admiral Charles Badger of the General Board, who reafﬁrmed to

Technological Change and the United States Navy

120

the committee that “nothing has occurred to supplant the battleship with

any other ship of war or impair the usefulness of the battleship.”

In Sep-

tember 1912 the General Board had called for the construction of one hun-

dred “ﬂeet” submarines to “insure the strategic freedom of the main ﬂeet

in a theater of war.”

The General Board retained this prewar view of the

submarine as an auxiliary weapon.

The General Board position conﬂicted with that of the Bureau of Con-

struction & Repair. In its study of the ﬁrst year of the war, the Bureau

crossed into the traditional strategic domain of the line. Bureau ofﬁcers

resurrected a heretical, continentalist, antibattleship strategy by calling for

“submarines, as fast as possible, and of as great a radius [of action] as pos-

sible, and therefore of considerable displacement, and in as great a num-

ber as may be obtained.” These submarines would serve as a “weapon of

defense against a power of superior sea-strength [emphasis added].” The

naval constructors stopped short of championing the submarine at the

expense of the battleship, cautioning that the submarine’s “importance

should not be unduly emphasized.”

The Bureau’s clarion call for submarines, and the inherent, defensive

continental strategy based in such a counterweapon, challenged the dom-

inant goal in the naval ofﬁcer corps to achieve paramount status in a battle-

ship-deﬁned naval world. It would be easy to attribute the Bureau position

to engineers out of touch with the reality of the high seas (as someone like

Sims would). But the massive 1916 capital ship program was a year away in

a murky political future, and in 1915 the Wilson administration was es-

chewing naval expenditures and wistfully placing its naval preparedness in

the hands of Thomas Edison and the Naval Consulting Board.

In such

an environment, submarines were an economically attractive counter to

an attacking battleship ﬂeet. Yet as Robert O’Connell has observed, coun-

terweapons have never been popular due to the uncertainty they bring to

the established order.

Nor was there any reason for the leading philoso-

phers of the battleship thought collective to pursue anything but an in-

crease in parallel weapons development, that is, more dreadnoughts.

The submarine’s anomalous counterbattleship mission crossed into the

mainstream of the naval profession in a daring article in the U.S. Naval

Institute Proceedings in January 1915. Ensign Valentine N. Bieg made a

valiant attempt at career suicide by outlining an antibattleship mission for

new American “ﬂeet” submarines, whose 5,000-mile radius allowed them

to interfere with “the safe navigation of hostile battleships.” Deterrence of

Anomalous Technologies of the Great War

121

war, Bieg argued, no longer rested upon the dreadnought but upon the sub-

marine.

Publication of Bieg’s article typiﬁed the remarkable permissiveness of

naval ofﬁcers, as opposed to their counterparts in the army, to tolerate in-

ternal debate on key policy and operational issues, especially in a semi-

ofﬁcial journal. Bieg’s courage in submitting such an idealistic article was

in accord with an old Naval Academy dictum: “when principle is involved

be deaf to expediency.” However, a better guideline for the young subma-

rine force was “go along to get along.” Submariners had to expand their

branch of the service without presenting the submarine as an anomalous

technological challenge to the battleship. It was easy to see that the argu-

ment for the use of U.S. submarines against an attacking battleship ﬂeet

could be easily turned around. If such issues were pursued in Congress, the

navy’s battleship building programs could come in for rough weather.

The early submarine force was commanded by ofﬁcers who were not

submariners, such as Commander Yates Stirling. Stirling, along with

William Sims, was one of four ofﬁcers in the ﬁrst, eighteen-month “long”

course at the Naval War College in 1911. In 1914 Captain Sims commanded

the destroyers and submarines of the Atlantic Fleet. Sims asked Stirling,

then executive ofﬁcer in the battleship Rhode Island, to command the

soon-to-be-independent submarine ﬂotilla. Stirling recalled he went into

submarines expecting “a lot of hard work and disappointment.” The small

U.S. submarine force was in poor material condition because they had not

“won naval recognition of their usefulness.” Stirling’s ﬂagship as comman-

der of the Atlantic Submarine Flotilla was the coastal defense monitor

Ozark, another reﬂection of the status and defensive nature of the subma-

rine. Ofﬁcers and sailors were assigned to submarines without regard to pre-

vious training. According to Stirling, “like the air service the submarine

personnel was said to be temperamental, unreasonable, and at times almost

mutinous in its attitude toward control by surface ofﬁcers. The opinion of the

Bureau [of Navigation] of the Navy Department seemed to be expressed in

the saying: ‘The best way to exterminate vipers is in their nests.’”

The incorporation of submarines into the battleship technological par-

adigm began with a 1914 ﬂeet exercise. Admiral Fletcher directed Stirling

to form his submarines in a line through which the “enemy” battleship

force would pass. The submarines were handicapped by Fletcher’s order

to attack submerged but with decks awash, making them visible to the

battleships. Stirling reported only one submarine safe to submerge due to

Technological Change and the United States Navy

122

deﬁciencies in training and material. This “failure” of the Submarine

Flotilla to “hide” itself led to a letter of reprimand for Stirling and an ap-

pearance before the House Naval Affairs Committee.

The apparent lack

of readiness of the Submarine Flotilla became the focus of a Republican

attack on the Wilson administration. Neither party seemed too clear about

what submarines did but were aware that submarines were doing something

in the war in Europe.

In November 1915 Admiral Benson, recently installed in the new posi-

tion of chief of naval operations, privately expressed his belief to Sims that

a reduction in battleship size was warranted because of the threat posed by

the torpedo: “I am opposed to the tremendously large ship, particularly due

to the great development in the torpedo, and will say to you that it is my in-

tention to advocate a policy of going backward in the size of ships rather

than forward; that is to say, ships at the very most of not more than 30,000

tons, and preferably, 20,000 to 25,000 tons displacement.”

Just why Ben-

son believed that a reduction in tonnage would make a battleship im-

pervious to a torpedo is unclear. He did not appreciate that a battleship’s

resistance to torpedo hits could be improved only by increases in displace-

ment caused by the addition of reserve buoyancy (larger hulls) or through

the adoption of antitorpedo blisters and wing tanks that also required larger

hulls.

Benson’s inclination toward regression was challenged by Sims:

As to the question of large ships, I think we must always be governed in that mat-

ter very largely by the military qualities that our probable enemies put in their

ships. Undoubtedly one of the military qualities must necessarily be resistance

to torpedo attack. This quality must involve larger compartmentation outboard

of the real body of the ship. The last batch of notes from O.N.I. [Ofﬁce of Naval

Intelligence] gives a sketch of a particular form of hull proposed in England,

and perhaps actually under construction. If this proves effective, it follows that

a certain sum of money expended for ships of this kind would be more efﬁcient

than battleships of the ordinary type. It would therefore seem that we would

have to build larger rather than smaller ships, because these results cannot be

achieved without an increase of displacement.

In January 1916 Lieutenant Commander Harry E. Yarnell argued that

the rival of the gun was no longer armor, but the torpedo, since torpedoes

could now strike at ranges of 12,000 yards (6 nautical miles). Yarnell be-

Anomalous Technologies of the Great War

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