McBride W.M. Technological change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945
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fore the Senate involving Secretary Daniels and the chief of naval opera-
tions, Admiral Benson, and whether Congress would want to hear from
him yet again on the separate aeronautics issue may have been doubtful.
104
David Taylor drew a parallel between this latest Simsian disturbance and
the 1908 Senate investigation and undoubtedly believed that Sims’s inter-
vention might be more of a hindrance than a help to naval aviation.
105
By the end of 1920, the naval hierarchy was largely in agreement that avi-
ation had an important future in the maintenance of naval power. The
chief of naval operation’s Planning Division even recommended that pri-
ority be given to aircraft carrier construction over that of battleships. The
Division recommended the construction of three types of “plane carriers”:
scout carriers with scout planes, battle fleet carriers carrying planes “pri-
marily for use in co-operation with surface ships in action,” that is, for gun-
fire spotting, and base carriers for the repair and overhaul of aircraft.
106
The
Planning Division advised allocating first priority within the navy’s build-
ing program to the construction of eight carriers—four scout carriers and
four battle fleet carriers—at an estimated cost of $10 million per ship. The
colliers Jupiter and Neptune would be converted to base carriers.
107
The Planning Division specified the construction of more smaller car-
riers rather than a few large ships. More ships could scout a greater area
(akin to Mahan’s concept of “flexibility” in his failed argument against
larger battleships) and would also allow the “development of the maximum
strength in the air” since “the rapidity with which a given number of planes
can take to the air is dependent upon the number of flying off decks.”
108
Smaller aircraft carriers also tended to underscore the auxiliary nature of
naval aviation.
The air complement on the proposed carriers included torpedo planes
and offered an entree for naval aviation as a counterweapon. Each scout
carrier would carry eighteen fighter planes and eighteen scouting planes;
the latter would double as torpedo planes to harass an enemy force until
American battleships arrived. Each battle fleet carrier would carry eighteen
planes to be used to spot friendly battleship gunfire. The remaining aircraft
on the battle fleet carrier would be either fifty-four fighters to be used to
achieve control of the air or a mixture of thirty-six fighters and eighteen
torpedo planes.
The inclusion of torpedo planes by the Planning Division provided an
offensive mission for naval aviation and extended the navy debate over the
relative merits of the torpedo and the battleship from submarines into the
Technological Change and the United States Navy
134
air. In an attempt to make torpedo planes more paradigmatically “normal,”
they were even characterized as “100 knot torpedo boats.”
109
The General
Board was told that a fleet protected by an adequate number of aircraft car-
riers with fighter planes would have “no cause at all for worry against attack
by bombing planes or torpedo planes.”
110
William Sims was one senior officer who did appreciate the aviation
threat to the battleship. As president of the Naval War College after the
World War, Sims ordered war game simulations at the College involving
aircraft, something that met with Fiske’s approval: “I think your idea of hav-
ing two fleets fight each other, which are exactly alike in all respects, ex-
cept that whereas one fleet has sixteen battleships the other fleet has six-
teen aeroplane and torpedo-plane carriers, is bully.”
111
Sims kept Fiske
apprised of the results of these games and regularly asked his advice on air-
craft tactics and capabilities.
In return, Fiske was not shy in giving Sims his own ideas concerning the
restructuring aviation would force upon the battleship navy: “I also believe
that the aeroplane carrier is a more powerful ship than the present battle-
ship,—or that it will be just as soon as we have worked out a few details in
the way of launching torpedoes, and landing on the decks of ships or in the
water. The torpedo plane carrier is a capital ship.”
112
When asked by Sims
if he would exchange the “airplane carrier of the future for the battleship
of the present,” Fiske replied, “Yes:—I think a 35-knot torpedo plane car-
rier (able to shoot 20 torpedoplanes 200 miles would be a ‘capital ship’:—
a more ‘capital ship’ than the [superdreadnought] New Mexico.”
113
Fiske’s use of a gun metaphor to describe aviation would be echoed by
other aviation enthusiasts over the next decade. Most notable among them
was Rear Admiral William Moffett, the first chief of the Bureau of Aero-
nautics, a former big battleship advocate who had received a Congressional
Medal of Honor as captain of a cruiser during the navy’s bombardment of
Vera Cruz in 1914.
Sims, former champion of the big battleship, was convinced of the cor-
rectness of Fiske’s appraisal of naval aviation. Sims railed against the stub-
born defense of the battleship by other officers: “I know, of course, some-
thing of the psychology of opinion, but this seems to go beyond the theories
of the psychological experts. Can it be that the Navy is reluctant to give up
the big ships to live in?”
114
Believing that the first impression regarding any
new technology was driven by conservative feelings that were always
wrong, Sims thought that the navy should have the courage to strike out on
Anomalous Technologies of the Great War
135
its own path, forsaking the traditional crowd mentality that governed naval
selection of new technologies: “If I had my way, I would arrest the build-
ing of great battleships and put money into the development of these new
devices [aircraft carriers] and not wait to see what other countries are
doing.”
115
The navy was successful in having legislation passed authorizing the Bu-
reau of Aeronautics in 1921. Yet even with its own air bureau, the navy was
under attack to establish a separate naval flying corps or to transfer its avi-
ators into an independent air force where they would join with former army
flyers. In 1922 the General Board held hearings on the question.
116
Moffett defended his bureau and was adamant that the navy maintain
its own air forces and that naval aviators be trained by the navy. He de-
scribed the air training facility at Pensacola as “a small organization simi-
lar to the Naval Academy.” Naval aviators, according to Moffett, had to be
drawn from the “officer class,” be mature, and be trained to obey. To en-
sure comprehension and conformance with both naval paradigms (tech-
nological and strategic), Moffett sent all aviators to sea for three years be-
fore they were trained to fly. This prevented “men eighteen and nineteen
years of age running into the air” who had no sense of discipline or appre-
ciation for the strategic mission of the navy.
117
Rear Admiral Charles B.
McVay, chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, echoed Moffett’s opinion, want-
ing only “sailor men” as aviators.
118
In light of General Billy Mitchell’s sensational claims that the battleship
was obsolete and the bombing trials conducted in 1921, the General Board
called for an analysis of the effect that aviation weapons had on battleships.
Captain Robert Stocker, of the Bureau of Construction & Repair, assured
the Board that aerial weapons posed no new threats to the battleship. Every-
thing done to the old battleships during the bombing tests in 1921 could be
done by battleship gunfire.
119
Stocker did warn the Board that subdivision
of battleship hulls had reached its limit. To defend the battleship from any
new form of attack (the aircraft not being considered as anything other than
a manned projectile) would require meeting the attack with a counterat-
tack, that is, destroying attacking bombers with fighter planes.
120
The naval hierarchy, as represented by the fleet commanders, members
of the General Board, and the bureau chiefs, saw aviation as a technology
necessary to naval power. Naval aviation had the potential to threaten the
technological status quo, but, if properly controlled, could be used to en-
Technological Change and the United States Navy
136
hance the battleship and to maintain the battleship-based strategic para-
digm.
121
The World War and Technological Diversity
Before 1914, the dreadnought battleship was the uncontested measure
of naval power. The initial success of the submarine forced the British to
readjust their naval strategy and tactics, vis-à-vis the North Sea. American
neutrality allowed the navy to observe and attempt to garner lessons from
the experience of the combatants. Initially, the war experience seemed to
endorse the decision, driven by British and Japanese policies, to embrace
the battlecruiser, a type of ship that violated traditional cultural and strate-
gic imperatives in American capital ship design philosophy. While the U.S.
Navy eventually rejected the battlecruiser, the episode emphasized the im-
portance that foreign design decisions had upon American technological
selections.
The submarine posed the greatest challenge to the supremacy of the
battleship. Yet the relative newness and “infernal” nature of the submarine
meant that there were no senior submarine officers to plead its case within
the navy hierarchy. In fact, Yates Stirling, who had championed the bat-
tlecruiser, was detailed to command the navy’s submarine force in 1914 al-
though he had no submarine experience.
122
Younger submarine officers
astutely perceived that the survival of their community, and its eventual
growth, could only come through the adoption of a mission for the sub-
marine force that conformed to the battleship strategy. Coastal submarines,
designed to sink enemy battleships, were forsaken, in favor of larger “fleet”
submarines that would travel with the battleships and scout for and harass
an enemy battle fleet.
The rise of aviation had commonalities with both the battlecruiser and
the submarine. Aviation scouts were seen as enhancing the capabilities of
the battleship, but interest in aviation may have been driven more by the
fear that uncontrolled naval competition would extend from the known
world of battleships, into the unknown world of aviation. This is a thread
that runs throughout the postwar General Board hearings on aviation.
As in the submarine force, there were no senior officers who were qual-
ified as naval aviators. As a result, the mission of aviation was defined by
Anomalous Technologies of the Great War
137
the naval hierarchy in terms of the battleship: frail, contemporary aircraft
were good for scouting for the battle line and for spotting the fall of shot
during a long-range battleship duel, but the advocacy of torpedo planes to
sink battleships was left to futurists like Bradley Fiske and to William Sims,
who were at odds with the conservative clique of admirals, “the Daniels
Cabinet,” appointed to lead the navy after the war.
123
The officer-operators of submarine and aviation technology found, as
had the private sector with the electric drive, that their successful market-
ing of themselves depended upon their consonance with the prevailing
strategy and battleship technological paradigm. The establishment of a
Bureau of Aeronautics preserved naval aviation as an entity, but one that
supported the status quo.
The most serious threat to the battleship, and to the naval status quo,
came from the repudiation of superior naval power by the Republican ad-
ministrations of the New Era. This, coupled with the agitation of aviation
enthusiasts, the postwar sentiments for disarmament, and the call for more
“efficient” military technologies, meant stormy seas for the battleship.
Technological Change and the United States Navy
138
Controlling Aviation
after the World War
The 1924 Special Board and the Technological
Ceiling for Aviation
A
fter the World War, the battleship’s primacy was challenged on a broad
front. In Britain, the battleship was attacked vigorously for having
failed to prevent, and quickly win, the war. The Royal Navy actively cam-
paigned for a new postwar building program to maintain British capital
ship superiority in the face of American construction. This was an unpop-
ular, and expensive, proposition in the wake of the “war to end all wars.”
Even the creator of the dreadnought battleship, Lord Fisher, publicly
lashed out at the deficit spending of the British postwar plans: “It is in-
credible—it is uncalled for—it is a ruinous waste that the cost of the Fleet
is now 140 millions a year! (In 1904 it was 34 millions!) So the whole na-
tional expenditure before the war was only a third more than the present
Navy Estimates. Then a huge anti-German Fleet had to be ready to strike!
Now that German Fleet is at the bottom of the sea!”
1
In the United States, there was much less popular and professional
doubt in the efficacy of the battleship. In 1920 Rear Admiral David Taylor,
chief of the Bureau of Construction & Repair and a key member of the Na-
tional Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, denied that any new lessons
had come out of the fifty-one months of the World War. For the battleship
to become obsolescent, “either in the near or distant future, it will be as a
result of engineering progress and the invention and perfection of new
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weapons and not as a result of [technologies developed during] the World
War.”
2
According to Taylor, technical improvements in the design of Amer-
ican battleships had solved the challenge posed by the torpedo “so far as
the torpedo has been developed to date.”
3
Ignoring aviation’s potential
to concentrate torpedo power, the one commonly feared counter to the
battleship, Taylor pointed out that a “torpedo from a ship in the air is no
more deadly than from a submarine under the surface.”
4
Taylor believed
that a battleship fleet, protected by an adequate number of aircraft carriers
with fighter planes, would have “no cause at all for worry against attack by
bombing or torpedo planes.”
5
Taylor was a key designer of naval aircraft,
and his views may have comforted the technically oriented naval officers
who read his comments in the Journal of the American Society of Naval En-
gineers.
Warren G. Harding’s inauguration in 1921 began the Republican New
Era which continued through the Coolidge and Hoover administrations.
The Republicans pursued international arms control (meaning primarily
control of naval armaments) to eliminate the “wastefulness” of military ex-
penditures. Between 1922 and 1930, construction was begun on only ten of
the thirty-one warships authorized—a manifestation of the Republicans’
1920 campaign for a “return to normalcy” with significant reductions in fed-
eral spending.
6
According to Roger Dingman, Harding seized upon the issue of naval
arms reductions as a means to regain the political initiative from an in-
creasingly unruly Congress and to block renewal of the Anglo-Japanese al-
liance. At the time Harding invited the naval powers to Washington, the
United States was challenging British naval supremacy in the same way
Germany had in 1914. With the German fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow, the
German threat, as far as the Royal Navy was concerned, had been replaced
by an American one. By 1923–24, the United States would be close to
Britain in numbers of capital ships in service or building (Britain 43,
United States 35).
7
The technical superiority of the newer American
superdreadnoughts reduced the quantitative difference to relative insignif-
icance.
Harding’s efforts resulted in the Washington Naval Conference and its
resulting Five-Power Treaty, ratified in February 1922. The treaty measured
naval power in capital ship tonnage, giving the United States parity with
Britain while granting Japan a secondary status according to a 5:5:3 tonnage
ratio. Battleships were limited to 35,000 tons’ displacement, and a ten-year
Technological Change and the United States Navy
140
building holiday for battleships and battlecruisers went into effect. Britain
was allowed to build two new battleships after the conference and the
United States was allowed to retain three superdreadnoughts of the 1916
Program. Aircraft carriers were also limited by a ceiling on total tonnage,
with each ship to displace no more than 27,000 tons. This was later waived
to 33,000 tons as a result of U.S. pressure. Auxiliary warships—ships with
gun bore not greater than 8 inches and displacement less than 10,000 tons
(cruisers, destroyers, and submarines)—were not limited in any way.
U.S. naval officers generally believed that the United States had been
outnegotiated by the British since Britain was allowed to maintain 580,450
tons of capital ships against 500,360 tons for the United States. Four 1916
Program battlecruisers were canceled and the remaining two were con-
verted into the large aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga, which did not
enter service for another five years.
8
Reduced Republican naval spending,
The navy was hard pressed to counter images such as this spectacular, but ineffective,
explosion of a white phosphorus bomb over the old battleship Alabama during the
1921 bombing trials. (Naval Historical Center, NH 57483)
Image not available.
compared to the massive outlay of Wilson’s 1916 Program, promised to keep
the navy well below the maximum size allowed under the treaty.
With the battleship’s evolution limited by treaty, the navy came under
vigorous attacks from aviation advocates, who claimed that a $10,000 air-
plane could sink a $10 million battleship.
9
The sensational aerial bom-
bardments against captured German and obsolete American battleships
conducted in 1921 provided aviation supporters with ammunition for their
fight. The bombing trials yielded dramatic photographs of phosphorus and
high-explosive bombs detonating on the huge battleships as fragile, biplane
bombers flew overhead. However, the battleships that were bombed were
anchored, unmanned, unarmed, and, by virtue of their age, markedly less
resistant to aerial bombing than later designs.
10
The German battleship
Ostfriesland, sunk in the tests off Cape Henry, Virginia, in July 1921, had
been subjected to repeated attacks over a two-day period. During the first
day, sixteen of sixty-nine bombs ranging in size from 230 to 2,000 pounds
scored hits. On the second day, three out of eleven 1,000-pound bombs hit
the ship, while three of the six 2,000-pound bombs exploded in the water
close aboard. With most of her watertight fittings not fully repaired after
her battle damage at Jutland and no damage control teams on board to fight
the flooding, Ostfriesland sank.
11
The trials did not provide conclusive
proof of the battleship’s obsolescence, but a significant segment of the pub-
lic believed it was vulnerable to air attack.
12
Faced with this public relations fait accompli, the naval hierarchy
worked hard to restore a common sense of the battleship’s invulnerability.
The navy argued that a fully manned battleship with antiaircraft guns,
steaming at full speed, could thwart an attack from the air. Even if a bomb
should hit, the navy claimed that the resulting damage would hardly prove
fatal in light of the “superiority” of U.S. armor designs over those installed
on British and German ships which had survived numerous large-caliber
shell hits at Jutland.
In testimony before the House of Representatives’ Joint Military and
Naval Affairs Committee, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of the
Bureau of Aeronautics, maintained that the nation’s “first line of defense
is the main fleet . . . the second line of defense would be auxiliary vessels
of the fleet [cruisers, destroyers, and submarines] and the third line of de-
fense is our coast fortifications, augmented by the Army Air Service.”
13
In
a pejorative aside, Moffett doubted the ability of army flyers to defend
Technological Change and the United States Navy
142
against a seaborne attack since they have “never been to sea except as pas-
sengers.”
14
The Special Policy Board Hearings of 1924
Despite the creation of the Bureau of Aeronautics, critics persisted in
their claims that the navy was suppressing aviation. Amid this continuing
controversy, Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur was embroiled in a dis-
pute with the director of the budget over what level of naval appropriations
the executive branch should request from Congress.
15
Wilbur directed the
General Board of the navy to consult “experienced officers from both the
Army and the Navy” and to make recommendations as to “development
and upkeep of the Navy in its various branches, i.e., submarines, surface
ships, and aircraft” in preparation for the naval appropriations bill to be
submitted to Congress early in 1925.
16
Although a Naval Academy alum-
nus, Wilbur wanted professional advice on the most efficient expenditure
of whatever funds were allocated to the navy.
17
As a part of its study, the
General Board, keeper of the battleship technological paradigm, would
rule on battleship obsolescence.
During the fall of 1924 the Special Policy Board of the navy’s General
Board heard the testimony of seventy-six witnesses that included the chiefs
of the navy bureaus, fleet commanders, junior officers from the Bureau of
Aeronautics, civilian engineering representatives of the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), aviation industrialists, and army offi-
cers, including General Billy Mitchell.
18
In its 1925 special report, the Gen-
eral Board reaffirmed the supremacy of the battleship-based strategy and
the battleship technological paradigm. Since the conclusions drawn by the
General Board supported the status quo, it is tempting to categorize the
Special Board hearings as a show trial. But with the hearings held in exec-
utive session and the minutes unpublished, the testimony was confidential
and quite frank.
The General Board defined the navy’s technological needs in terms of
its two strategic missions: first, to gain control of disputed sea areas and sea
communications; and second, to maintain control of these areas and the
lines of sea communication.
19
The first strategic mission involved “fight-
ing the battle fleet of the enemy.” This required a fleet composed of “all
Controlling Aviation after the World War
143