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

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8 War and a Shifting Technological Paradigm: Fast

Task Forces and “Three-Plane” Warfare 182

9 Castles of Steel: Technological Change and

the Modern Navy 211

Notes 243

Note on Sources 319

Index 325

Contents

Acknowledgments

his study would not have been possible without the strong support, vision, and

continuing encouragement of Stuart W. Leslie, who introduced me to the his-

tory of technology at the Johns Hopkins University well over a decade ago. I am

indebted to Robert H. Kargon, Willis K. Shepherd Professor of the History of

Science, for shedding light on the institutional development of science and tech-

nology in the United States and for introducing me to the work of the philosopher

Ludwik Fleck. I would also like to thank Alex Roland, of Duke University, for his

continued endorsement of my investigation into the history of naval technology. I

am also grateful to Louis Galambos, editor of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers,

whose seminars in American political and business history at Johns Hopkins al-

lowed me to place American naval technology within an appropriate political con-

text. I am in debt to Paul M. Kennedy, Dilworth Professor of History at Yale Uni-

versity, for providing the opportunity to extend my research on American naval

policy into the post-1945 period as a John M. Olin Fellow in Military and Strategic

History in the International Security Program at Yale. I also appreciate the friend-

ship of a ﬁne colleague, James Sadkovich, who “internationalized” my perceptions

of naval power and strategy during our year in New Haven. I also owe debts to

Robert O’Connell and Jon Sumida for the insights their works have offered

regarding military technology and the battleship in particular.

I am grateful to Rameswar Bhattacharyya, Roger C. Compton, and Paul Van

Mater for their interest and pedagogical efforts during my undergraduate educa-

tion in naval architecture at the U.S. Naval Academy three decades ago. I also

beneﬁted a great deal from the two years I spent as a senior naval architect at

John J. McMullen and Associates in northern Virginia. I especially value my in-

teractions with Dr. Volf Asinovsky, whose years of design experience in Leningrad

provided me with a unique window into transcultural technological and engi-

neering practices.

This study has only been possible due to the ﬁnancial support I received from

various institutions. I would like to thank the Naval Historical Center of Washing-

ton, D.C., speciﬁcally Dean Allard and Ronald Spector, now of George Washing-

ton University, for selecting me as the inaugural Rear Admiral John D. Hayes Fel-

low in 1987. My research was also aided by the Hoover Presidential Library

Association, which designated me a 1988 Hoover Presidential Scholar and the

1988–89 U.S. Senator (Ret.) and Mrs. Roman L. Hruska Fellow. I am indebted to

the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute of Hyde Park, New York, for a grant

to conduct research at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, and to the Center for the

History of Business, Technology, and Society of the Hagley Museum and Library

of Wilmington, Delaware, for an additional grant to explore the Elmer A. Sperry

Papers.

Some later portions of this study were undertaken at James Madison University,

where I was blessed with a pleasant group of colleagues on the history faculty. I am

grateful to the head of the history department, Michael Galgano, for granting me

release from some of my teaching responsibilities over several semesters to devote

time to this book. I also appreciate the external ﬁnancial support for my research

that resulted from my selection as inaugural Edna T. Shaeffer Distinguished Hu-

manist at James Madison in 1993.

I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of History at the

United States Naval Academy for their support. I have beneﬁted a great deal from

conversations on naval history with Fred Harrod, Bob Love, Bill Roberts, and Craig

Symonds. I am especially indebted to Eric Reed for numerous thought-provoking

theoretical discussions, grounded ﬁrmly in naval realities. Many of my students

over the years have been exposed to my ideas, and I appreciate their responses. I

would like to thank Bill Roberts for his patient advice and Bob Love for the insight

he has provided into the personalities who populated the twentieth-century navy.

I also owe thanks to the military members of the history faculty whose questions as

new instructors have forced me to clarify and reﬁne many of my conceptualiza-

tions of American naval history. I also appreciate the readings of various sections of

this study by my colleagues, David Appleby, Mary DeCredico, Allison Fuss, and

Brian Van De Mark.

Any historical study dealing with the federal government requires the sifting of

extensive archival records. If not for the assistance I received from the staff mem-

bers at various archives, I would still be lost amid miles of manuscripts and records.

I would like to thank Dwight Miller, senior archivist at the Hoover Presidential Li-

Acknowledgments

xii

brary, West Branch, Iowa, for his generous assistance during my review of the

Hoover Papers pertaining to the U.S. Navy and disarmament questions. I would

also like to thank the very professional and helpful staff at the Manuscript Division

of the Library of Congress, who cheerfully dragged out innumerable dusty ﬁle

boxes from the Naval Manuscript Collection for my review. The staff of the

Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, was also most cooperative

in ﬁnding material about the navy during the New Deal. Dr. Michael Nash, of the

Hagley Museum and Library, kindly provided me the pertinent papers of Elmer

A. Sperry, and of the Sperry Gyroscope Company, for my investigation of one facet

of U.S. naval-industrial relations. Dr. Evelyn Cherpak, director of the Naval His-

torical Collection, U.S. Naval War College, was most helpful in directing me to

pertinent archival holdings. I would be remiss if I did not also thank the staff of the

Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy, including the staff of the Special Col-

lections Division, for their assistance in locating the appropriate Naval Academy

records in their vast holdings. The staff of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library

at Princeton University was most helpful in guiding me through material related

to my study. Finally, I acknowledge the assistance from the staff of the Military Ref-

erence Branch of the National Archives in Washington.

Preparing books for publication is a lengthy process and I appreciate the efforts

of the staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press, especially those of my editor,

Robert J. Brugger, and my copy editor, Maria E. denBoer.

This project has spawned several articles which have received peer recognition,

encouraging me when my energy was ebbing. I am grateful for the Society for the

History of Technology’s I.E.E.E. Life Members’ Prize, the Society of Historians of

the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s Inaugural Biennial Prize, the Society for Mil-

itary History’s Moncado Prize for Excellence, and the Naval Historical Center and

Naval Historical Foundation’s joint Ernest M. Eller Prize, Honorable Mention.

Most important, I treasure the selﬂessness of my wife, who eschewed a post-

doctoral fellowship at Yale Medical School for a ﬁve-year sojourn in a section of

Virginia where Bobby Lee still lives and Stonewall Jackson look-a-likes lurk behind

almost every tree. I also appreciate her tolerance of my periodic discourses on tech-

nology and history.

Many individuals and organizations contributed to this study. The interpreta-

tions and conclusions herein, and any shortcomings that may exist, are mine alone.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Technological Change and the

United States Navy,

1865–1945

Introduction

little over a quarter-century ago I was a naval ofﬁcer newly assigned to

a Paciﬁc Fleet destroyer. During my warfare qualiﬁcation I was intro-

duced to a piece of electronic gear designated ULQ-6. One of its features

was the ability to increase the radar reﬂection of our ship. In this “blip-

enhance mode” the ULQ-6 theoretically would trick radar-guided missiles

into mistaking our tiny destroyer for a huge aircraft carrier. When I ex-

pressed surprise at such a suicidal device, I was told not to worry because

the blip-enhance mode was “always broken.” The notion of hierarchical

sacriﬁce the ULQ-6 entailed was not new to me. The Naval Academy’s

“Sea Power” course had acquainted me with the sacriﬁce of destroyers and

destroyer escorts, and the deaths of 526 of their crews, off Samar in 1944 to

protect aircraft carriers.

What bothered me was my expendable status

thirty years later in what many nonaviators considered a futile sacriﬁce to

protect a vulnerable capital ship.

What intrigued me as I later took up the study of the history of technol-

ogy was how the naval profession developed the intellectual and institu-

tional framework necessary for the conceptualization, design, testing, and

deployment of such a device. In retrospect, I am amazed at the ULQ-6 de-

signers’ optimism that sailors would use it and its apparent easy circum-

vention by personnel unwilling to play capital ship during an attack. I

never found out if the account of constant disablement of the ULQ-6 was

apocryphal. I spent the next thirty-three months far below the air-condi-

tioned domain of the ULQ-6, in a world dominated by boilers and steam

turbines and populated by colorful characters drawn from Georgius Agri-

cola’s 1556 treatise, De Re Metallica.

My introduction to the ULQ-6 occurred within the context of the “hol-

low force” navy of the late Vietnam era. Aviators dominated the service, and

the navy contained large numbers of aging World War II ships such as

mine. In general, the navy measured its health in the numbers of attack

carriers able to project power ashore and, theoretically, able to control the

seas in the tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan. While my shipmates and I

were busy serving as lesser cogs within the technological framework that

supported the aircraft carrier, I perceived some weakness in the claims of

its dominance of war at sea.

Nuclear-powered submarines posed a serious challenge. During peri-

odic exercises, submarines routinely and successfully attacked us and the

aircraft carriers we escorted. Most times they did so undetected, even by

newer antisubmarine ships. Since the Soviet navy had over three hundred

submarines, I wondered about the aircraft carrier’s ability to survive even a

limited conventional conﬂict. I was not alone and recall one illustration in

the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that featured an aviator admiral scan-

ning the heavens while centered in the crosshairs of a submarine periscope.

Two years after my introduction to the ULQ-6, another occurrence

caused me to question the navy’s apparent singular focus on air warfare and

became the nascent catalyst for this study. My old World War II–era de-

stroyer sank the nuclear-powered supercarrier Enterprise in two of three

phases of a ﬂeet exercise. Despite local umpire agreement with the success

of our attacks, we were informed that the ﬁnal exercise report did not men-

tion them. I assume the admiral who approved the report had a broader

view of the exercise and had valid reasons to discount our success. Or per-

haps he was just partial to aircraft carriers and knew that a nuclear-powered

supercarrier like Enterprise was only vulnerable to an airborne assailant.

The incident paralleled a successful British submarine attack on a battle-

ship during a pre-1914 exercise. The battleship admiral’s signal to the sub-

marine captain was dismissive: “You be damned!”

The whole Enterprise

issue seemed to repeat the stereotyped myopia of pre–Pearl Harbor battle-

ship admirals.

I can think of no other modern weapon that, in the popular view, so em-

bodies obsolescence as the battleship. The 1965 Random House American

College Dictionary on my bookshelf even used the battleship as an exam-

ple in its deﬁnition of “obsolete.”

This view originated with postwar per-

ceptions that the battleship had failed to fulﬁll its pre-1914 billing as a de-

cisive weapon. Images of the 1921 battleship bombing trials lingered in the

public and political consciousness and contributed to questions about the

Technological Change and the United States Navy

battleship’s relevance. During the 1920s, air power advocates such as Billy

Mitchell portrayed the battleship as passé and aviation as a technology and

weapon of the future. Popular literature, including science ﬁction, rein-

forced this and was part of what H. Bruce Franklin characterized as the

American fascination with “wonder weapons.”

The images of burning and

sinking battleships at Pearl Harbor went the rest of the way to discredit the

battleship and its champions. “Battleship admiral” became a pejorative

term, connoting a reactionary stubbornly clinging to tradition like the gen-

erals who blundered through World War I.

In lumping carrier admirals and battleship admirals together after the

Enterprise affair, I naively had accepted an aviation-biased history that for-

ward-thinking aviators had been oppressed by reactionary battleship admi-

rals before Pearl Harbor. This facile, but common, view has obscured the

realities of the battleship era. Intrinsic to this view was the idea that the pre-

war conservatism of the naval profession was so pervasive that only Japan-

ese use of aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor brought about a new, vigorous

U.S. Navy run by aviator visionaries. Quite simply, the aircraft carrier, used

by an enemy not constrained by barnacle-encrusted conservatism, pro-

vided the catalyst for a change in the navy’s technological, social, and cul-

tural hierarchies as well as a fundamental change in the way the U.S. Navy

would organize itself and ﬁght.

What bothered me as I delved into military history, and naval history

speciﬁcally, was the pervasive, simplistic technological determinism that

new technologies were “better” and the cause of new ways of war. The re-

lationship between military technology and strategic doctrine was por-

trayed as cause and effect. Military historians, like their colleagues in busi-

ness history, had succumbed too frequently to technological determinism,

making technology an exogenous factor—a “black box”—that has guided

the evolution of the military arts. A good example is Martin van Creveld’s

Technology and War (1989), which reads like a biblical account in which

the sword begat the musket, the musket the cannon, and so on, down

to nuclear weapons.

Such interpretations ignore any cultural or social

framework for technological innovation, development, cultivation, or re-

jection.

Over a decade ago, Merritt Roe Smith observed that military historians

have ignored technological enterprise in their attempts to “weave” military

history “more tightly into the fabric of American history.”

Not a great deal

has changed. In addition to more emphasis on technology, military history

Introduction