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

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land, Stirling predicted a general melee in which one air ﬂeet would be

completely victorious while the other would be cleared from the air. The

victorious side would then be free to use its airplanes for scouting and gun-

ﬁre spotting in support of the battleships. After the battleship action had

been concluded, “Bombing, gassing, and torpedoing of the enemy battle

line [by aircraft] will give the coup de grace.”

It was inconceivable to Stir-

ling and most of his colleagues that bombing, gassing, and torpedoing

alone might do the trick.

The Special Board and the Strategic Paradigm

The battleship reductions and building holidays of the Five-Power

Treaty provided aviation enthusiasts with a truly “stationary” target. Tech-

nical improvements to the surviving battleships were restricted severely,

while aviation technology developed at a quick rate. The Bureau of Aero-

nautics funded structural research at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadel-

phia and at the U.S. Bureau of Standards and NACA.

Wind tunnel ex-

periments were conducted at the navy’s Experimental Model Basin at the

Washington Navy Yard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At sea, aviators worked to improve the efﬁciency of aircraft carrier aviation

by “speeding up operations, including take-offs, landings, and faster

handling of planes both on deck and below. Brakes and tail wheels [were]

... now standard equipment for all carrier planes.”

However, Admiral

W. T. Mayo, commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet, stated the reality in 1919:

“The development of Naval Aviation must be governed by the develop-

ment of Naval Tactics and Strategy”—the thought style which supported

the battleship-based strategic paradigm.

According to Rear Admiral Moffett, the biggest drawback to aviation was

the failure to construct aircraft carriers, a byproduct of the limited funds for

naval construction during the New Era.

Yet even if the carriers allowed

by the Five-Power Treaty had been built, there is little to indicate that avi-

ation’s role would have been different early on. Its strategic and tactical

functions were delineated by ofﬁcers like Moffett, working in the intellec-

tual mainstream of the normal strategic and technological paradigm. The

lack of aircraft carriers did not strengthen the battleship’s position. The bat-

tleship remained preeminent because the Special Board Hearings painted

a future in which aviation technology remained weak vis-à-vis the battle-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

154

ship. The technological ceiling predicted by aviation experts relegated

naval aviation to scouting, gunﬁre spotting, and ﬁghting enemy aviation,

assignments that endured in naval doctrine through the 1930s.

Despite the dissolution of the 1924 aviation technological ceiling, naval

aviation remained more presumption than anomaly and the battleship

technological paradigm remained dominant. In February 1931 the chief of

naval operations, Admiral William V. Pratt, reported to the House Naval

Affairs Committee that the consensus of ofﬁcers attending Fleet Exercise

XII off western Central America was that air attacks were “of less value as

a means of defense against approaching ﬂeets” than previously believed.

The commander of the aviation units charged with defending the Panama

Canal from attack and invasion by the battle ﬂeet, Rear Admiral Joseph

Reeves, reported that aviation alone “cannot stop the advance of battle-

ships.”

The rapid improvement in aviation technology during the mid-1930s did

not translate into an immediate, viable presumptive anomaly. Carrier air-

craft development mirrored the often confusing co-evolution of the world’s

armored warships during the 1870–80s. A Bureau of Aeronautics’ report

that considered 47 percent of aircraft in service “obsolete, obsolescent, or

about to become obsolescent” was typical of a period of rapid technologi-

cal advancement.

The addition of the New Deal carriers Yorktown (com-

missioned 1937) and Enterprise (commissioned 1938) required a 40 percent

expansion of naval aviation.

A consensus existed among younger naval

aviators that their day was fast approaching.

To pose an effective presumptive anomaly, naval aviation required not

only more aircraft, but ﬁghters, torpedo bombers, and dive/scout bombers

that were state of the art. The acquisition of this technology began in 1936

when the navy ordered 114 all-metal torpedo bombers, the Douglas TBD-

1. The TBD-1 was the ﬁrst monoplane ordered for carrier use and marked

a turning point in carrier aircraft.

The TBD entered squadron service in

October 1937. Its time on the leading edge of carrier-based aviation tech-

nology was relatively brief. Unfortunately for its crews, the TBD’s 105-knot

cruising speed made it an easy target during the battles in the Coral Sea

(May 1942) and near Midway (June 1942).

The ﬁrst in the series of Doug-

las SBD dive bombers that would later play a key role in the early years of

the Paciﬁc war did not enter squadron service until December 1940.

With senior aviators sprouting from the battleship thought collective

and perceiving aviation as a gun, naval aviation was unable to escape the

Controlling Aviation after the World War

155

social, institutional, and technological momentum attending the battle-

ship technological paradigm. The authorization of fast aircraft carriers in

the late 1930s, to work with the post-treaty fast battleships, marked the be-

ginning of the fast task force concept. However, American naval aviation

had to wait until after Pearl Harbor for opportunities to demonstrate its abil-

ities in war at sea.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

156

Disarmament, Depression,

and Politics

Technological Momentum and the Unstable

Dynamics of the Hoover-Roosevelt Years

ost U.S. naval ofﬁcers during the New Era (1921–33) would have

agreed with Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris’s descrip-

tion of the period as one of “crisis and failure” and of the character of the

Republican administrations as “pervasively negative.”

The technological

basis of the naval profession—the battleship—was threatened by aviation,

international treaty, and the attempts of three Republican presidents (es-

pecially Herbert Hoover) to negotiate or budget it into extinction. Survival

of the battleship during the Republican New Era, and the Democrat New

Deal that followed, was part of the larger, often unstable, dynamics of dis-

parate presidential strategic visions, international disarmament, economic

depression, and domestic politics.

In almost every way, Franklin Roosevelt was the antithesis of Herbert

Hoover, and U.S. naval ofﬁcers welcomed the election of the former assis-

tant secretary of the navy in November 1932. Roosevelt actively directed the

technological aspects of the navy’s building program to a far greater extent

than had the nation’s previous archnavalist president, Theodore Roosevelt.

Between 1937 and 1940, Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the authorization of

seventeen new battleships to bolster the existing battleship-based strategic

paradigm. But such support had a price. Battleship construction became

ensnared in New Deal labor legislation and ship construction was the sub-

chapter 7

ject of heavy political lobbying. In addition, Roosevelt routinely meddled

in naval ship design.

In its New Deal legislation, Congress also abdicated its historical role in

the deﬁnition of naval technology to the president. This was of minimal

concern to naval ofﬁcers since Roosevelt thought as they did and deﬁned

naval power in terms of the battleship. But he did force the navy to con-

struct the anachronistic Alaska-class battlecruisers, which the admirals de-

commissioned soon after his death.

Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s differing attitudes toward the navy reﬂected dis-

parate strategic visions. Hoover favored a hemispheric defense while Roo-

sevelt was a globalist member of the navalist thought collective. According

to his admirers, Roosevelt’s naval policy fell within the framework of the

actions of “forward-looking men who saved the country from economic

chaos and later spared western civilization from the hands of fascist out-

laws.” This contrasted with Hoover’s “denial of global responsibility.” Re-

visionist and New Left historians, on the other hand, have emphasized

Hoover’s pursuit of naval disarmament, his noninterventionist foreign pol-

icy, and his “non-coercive military policy.”

Economic issues also buffeted the interwar navy. Hoover and Roosevelt

differed on the role of military expenditures in economic recovery, specif-

ically on the use of naval construction as employment relief. While Hoover

accepted ﬂeet maintenance as a valid expenditure to maintain shipyard

employment, he refused to accede to new warship construction. Initially,

Roosevelt announced a naval program more conservative than Hoover’s,

but within months had expanded this program dramatically.

Linking mil-

itary expenditures and public welfare—a policy favored in late-nineteenth-

century Britain, as noted by William McNeill, and followed in the United

States by Grover Cleveland in 1895—Roosevelt made warship construc-

tion part of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), an event es-

sentially ignored by the leading historians of the New Deal, but one which

stimulated naval expansion in Japan.

According to Frank Freidel, “In the

spring of 1933 Roosevelt would have liked to embark on a more vigorous

American leadership toward disarmament and a countering of the threat

from Hitler,” but was checked by “strong tempering inﬂuences in Con-

gress” and “backtracked” to save his New Deal legislation. But Roosevelt’s

signing of an executive order, on the same day that NIRA became law, for

thirty-two new warships paid for with $238 million in NIRA public works

money would seem to indicate otherwise.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

158

Naval ofﬁcers were pleased by the upturn in their fortunes during the

New Deal, and the largely Democratic populations of shipbuilding cities

welcomed and even lobbied for the employment resulting from Roosevelt’s

actions. But construction of the “Treaty Navy”—the lesser warships that

supported the battleships—stimulated international suspicions and un-

derscored Roosevelt’s repudiation of Hoover’s hemispheric defense policy.

When the major naval powers failed to agree on continued naval limita-

tions at London in 1935, the battleship technological paradigm was as

strong and pervasive as ever. Within its framework, President Roosevelt,

Congress, and the naval hierarchy authorized seventeen new battleships

between 1937 and 1940.

The “Gun Club” chief executive. President Franklin Roosevelt reviewing the Fleet in

1934. Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson is at left; former Secretary of the Navy

Josephus Daniels, under whom Roosevelt served as assistant secretary during the Wil-

son administration, is at the right. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

Image not available.

The Navy and the Post-Harding New Era

After Harding’s death in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge rejected the

global strategic responsibilities (and attendant force structure) peddled by

navalists and set out in the General Board’s “Basic Naval Policy of the U.S.”

Among other things, the “Basic Naval Policy” stated that “The Navy of the

United States should be maintained in sufﬁcient strength to support its

policies and its commerce, and to guard its continental and overseas pos-

sessions.” The ofﬁcers of the General Board justiﬁed their strategic focus

on Japan because of the threat Japan posed to American Far Eastern trade.

Yet only 10 percent of U.S. trade was with Asia and the majority of that with

Japan itself.

Coolidge was sensitive to the technological devolution of the naval arms

race from the battleship to the cruiser and spoke out against cruiser con-

struction to “catch up” with the British and the Japanese. Coolidge con-

sidered American naval power sufﬁcient to defend the United States and

refused to give in to those who advocated “nibbling the limitation treaty to

pieces.” He continued the Republican policy of minimal defense expendi-

tures and reminded the public that the Five-Power Treaty had been moti-

vated by a desire to make “aggressive war” impossible. In 1926, Coolidge

deleted funding for three of eight new 10,000-ton cruisers authorized by

Congress in 1924, maintaining that construction of these ships would in-

ﬂame naval competition.

The failure of the 1927 Geneva Conference led to renewed navalist ef-

forts to build the navy up to treaty limits. Legislation passed the House of

Representatives for the construction of seventy-one new ships, including

ﬁve aircraft carriers, twenty-ﬁve new cruisers, and thirty-two submarines, at

a cost of $740 million over nine years. The proposal stalled in the Senate

until after the 1928 presidential election. Coolidge, frustrated by British in-

transigence at Geneva, reversed his position and endorsed limited cruiser

construction on Armistice Day 1928 and again in his ﬁnal State of the

Union address in January 1929. This led the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot to

opine, “Happily for international peace, the law of presidential succession

will spare the world his friendly thoughts on the Fourth of July.”

In 1931, the Five-Power Treaty’s ten-year moratorium on battleship con-

struction would end. A resumption of capital ship competition, along with

a cruiser race, threatened to end the New Era’s pursuit of strategic arms

reductions. It fell to Herbert Hoover to ﬁnd a solution.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

160

Hoover and the Navy

Herbert Hoover believed that there were limits to American power and

deﬁned the U.S. military’s strategic mission as defense of the Western

Hemisphere, not the projection of American naval power throughout the

Paciﬁc basin.

During the 1931 Manchurian crisis, Hoover told his cabi-

net that Japanese actions “do not imperil the freedom of the American

people, the economic or moral future of our people. I do not propose ever

to sacriﬁce American life for anything short of this.” As president-elect,

Hoover toured Latin America to improve relations. He laid the basis for the

Good Neighbor Policy, removed the marines from Nicaragua, and re-

frained from the practice of gunboat diplomacy.

Hoover also continued to pursue arms limitations in the name of ﬁscal

responsibility. As secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge, and

especially as president, Hoover earned the enmity of the majority of the

naval ofﬁcer corps because of his support for capital ship reductions and

naval limitations.

Like Coolidge, Hoover took issue with the General

Board’s “Basic Naval Policy.” When he entered the White House in March

1929, Hoover was determined to extend the capital ship limitations of the

Five-Power Treaty to “auxiliary” warships, such as cruisers and submarines,

which comprised 70 percent of the navy and whose growth was unregu-

lated by any international accord.

Hoover’s engineering background inﬂuenced his approach to naval

arms limitation. He realized that arms reductions based upon tonnage

alone did not take into account qualitative differences caused by techno-

logical variations in gun size, armor design, speed, and age—factors that

contributed to the overall efﬁciency of warships. Elmer Sperry, represent-

ing the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, had conveyed much

the same opinion to Hoover during the Washington Naval Conference in

1921.

In the month following his inauguration, Hoover directed Ambas-

sador Hugh Gibson to propose a “technical yardstick” to the League of Na-

tion’s preparatory commission at Geneva to break the deadlock over the

number of cruisers. Hoover’s yardstick promised a way to measure naval

power based upon technical quality, rather than by the simplistic, and mis-

leading, standard of tonnage.

The ofﬁcers of the General Board disliked Hoover’s proposal and

thought that deviation from a strict tonnage measurement, for any category

of warship, was impossible: “It is highly improbable that accurate determi-

Disarmament, Depression, and Politics

161

nation of the ﬁghting or combatant value of any unit can be made. Any at-

tempt to establish such a value necessarily must be based upon highly tech-

nical assumptions and complex computations upon which general agree-

ment is most improbable if not impossible.” This was an interesting

position since the war games fought at the Naval War College since the

1890s were based on the “combatant value” of different types of ships.

The General Board believed that the United States had been “cheated”

by the British at Washington in 1921. The Board’s consensus was that the

adoption of any type of formula would result in Britain’s “inevitably” pos-

sessing a greater tonnage of cruisers than the United States. Hoover dis-

missed the Board’s objections and directed it to develop an appropriate

arms limitation formula with “coefﬁcients” that reﬂected American de-

fense needs. Reluctantly, the Board submitted a proposal to the secretary

of the navy at the beginning of August 1929.

Hoover’s novel approach to measuring naval power interested the

British enough to agree to a naval conference in London in January 1930.

The new Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, like Hoover, was

extremely anxious to reduce naval expenditures and traveled to the United

States in September 1929 for a meeting with Hoover at his Rapidan retreat.

In addition to discussions on cruiser parity, MacDonald proposed a reduc-

tion in the maximum size for battleships from 35,000 to 25,000 tons, a

reduction in gun size from 16-inch to 12-inch bore, and an extension of

battleship service life from twenty to twenty-six years (before replacement

was allowed). Hoover allegedly went even further than MacDonald and

broached the subject of scrapping all battleships.

Both men also dis-

cussed the possibility of reducing the total aircraft carrier tonnage allowed

under the Five-Power Treaty from 135,000 tons to 120,000 tons.

The London Naval Conference opened in January 1930 with three main

agenda items. First, negotiators would consider battleship reductions by de-

laying or eliminating replacement of older ships. Second, Britain and the

United States had decided in principle upon parity in “auxiliary” classes of

warships to be achieved by 1936. Third, both nations also agreed to push

for the abolition of the submarine. The Japanese delegation traveled to

Britain via the United States in order to lobby Hoover and the State De-

partment for a change in the naval ratios from 5:5:3 to 10:10:7 in cruiser ton-

nage, a ratio critical to Japanese defensive plans vis-à-vis the United States.

The British Admiralty vigorously opposed this change as did the General

Board.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

162

In choosing the members of the American delegation, Hoover made

sure that the failure of the 1927 Geneva talks would not be repeated. Sen-

sitive to naval ofﬁcers’ strong attachments to their vessels, Hoover excluded

them from the American negotiating team.

The delegation was led by

Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Charles F.

Adams. The naval ofﬁcers sent to Geneva were limited to an advisory role

and included Rear Admiral Hilary P. Jones, a hard-liner at the failed

Geneva talks; Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William V. Pratt, an

open-minded veteran of the Washington Conference; and four rear admi-

rals, including William Moffett, the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

The British government proposed an indeﬁnite extension of the capital

ship building holiday that expired in 1931 so capital ships would fade away

with age.

The U.S. delegation, at the urging of its naval advisers, de-

manded the right to build one new battleship to offset the supposed qual-

itative superiority of the new British battleships, Rodney and Nelson, de-

signed in 1922 and completed in 1927. In the face of British opposition, the

American proposal was withdrawn and, as a compromise, all the powers

agreed to extend the battleship building holiday until 1936.

The limitation on battleship construction was joined by a limitation on

submarines and an agreement on cruiser strength. The three major pow-

ers (Britain, the United States, and Japan) agreed to parity in submarine

tonnage (52,000 each). This was a victory for the Japanese, who considered

submarines critical in opposing an attacking U.S. battle ﬂeet as it crossed

the Paciﬁc. The maximum size of each submarine was set at a displace-

ment of 2,000 tons, the smallest judged by the Americans capable of oper-

ating with the battle ﬂeet in the western Paciﬁc against Japan.

The administration pulled out the stops in selling the London Naval

Treaty to the American public. Before the signing ceremony in London,

Hoover claimed the treaty provided for a savings of $1 billion compared to

the expenditures that would have been authorized under the naval agree-

ment of the aborted 1927 Geneva conference. While the London Treaty

had widespread support among peace groups and in the Midwest, South,

and West, it also faced signiﬁcant opposition. Opponents in the Senate

managed to prolong the debate until the end of the session on 3 July 1930.

Hoover called the Senate back into special session to consider the treaty,

writing: “The only alternative to this treaty is the competitive building of

navies with all its ﬂow of suspicion, hate, ill will, and ultimate disaster.”

Limiting U.S. strategic defense requirements to support of the Monroe

Disarmament, Depression, and Politics

163