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

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statute. The ship carried 200 tons more coal than the 1890 battleships and

that allowed Iowa to operate beyond the 1,000-mile limit previously stipu-

lated by Congress.

A failing economy aided the Democrats in capturing majorities in both

houses of Congress and the White House in 1892. The Democrats’ plat-

form, under which Grover Cleveland was elected to his second presidency,

called for moderate tariffs and ﬁscal responsibility, which included re-

duced naval expenditures. Cleveland’s new secretary of the navy, Hilary A.

Herbert, supported curbs on naval spending. A former Confederate army

ofﬁcer, Herbert had served for sixteen years as a representative from Al-

abama and had spent four terms on the House Naval Affairs Committee,

one of these as chairman.

Despite his initial allegiance to the party platform, Herbert had a com-

plete change of heart shortly after taking ofﬁce. Crediting Alfred Thayer

Mahan for his conversion, Herbert supported the Naval War College and

its advocacy of the new battleship strategy, and opposed the administra-

tion’s cutbacks in naval construction. Herbert used Mahan’s histories to

support his call for appropriations for ﬁve battleships from Congress.

Secretary Herbert, like Tracy before him, became the point man for the

battleship and the strategy of guerre d’escadre. Herbert chose to ignore the

effectiveness of Confederate naval commerce raiders while remembering

the failure of lightly armed Confederate blockade runners and commerce

raiders when confronted with heavily armed Union ships.

He rejected

the policy of building unarmored warships and called for the construction

of at least one battleship in the next building program. His proposal em-

barrassed the Cleveland administration and came at a most inauspicious

time for the domestic economy. As Walter Herrick observed, such a pro-

gram contradicted the Democratic Party’s tradition, and President Cleve-

land cautioned Congress that large-scale naval construction must await the

return of prosperity.

Cleveland was able to shelve Herbert’s battleship plan, but his efforts to

stabilize the economy split his own party and led to a Republican majority

in the House of Representatives and Senate after the off-year election in

1894. Always friendly to the navy, the Republicans wanted to restart battle-

ship production.

In 1895 Herbert convinced Cleveland to work with congressional Re-

publicans, arguing that a naval construction bill would act as a catalyst on

the depressed economy. This was similar to the Gladstone government’s

Technological Change and the United States Navy

increase in the 1884 naval estimates to stimulate the depressed British econ-

omy.

Abroad, the emergence of Japan as a Paciﬁc power, and the

Venezuela-British Guiana border dispute, which threatened a showdown

with Britain over the Monroe Doctrine, reinforced the need for a stronger

American navy.

Domestically, the arguments of Alfred Thayer Mahan

The superposed gun turrets of the two 1895 Kearsarge-class battleships caused a se-

ries of design problems. When assigned to Kentucky in 1900, Lieutenant William

Sims sent a lengthy criticism to the Bureau of Construction & Repair and later re-

ferred to the ships as the “worst crime in naval construction ever perpetrated by the

white race.” (Courtesy of the Filson Club, Louisville, KY. Gift of Mrs. Alexander

M. Watson. Naval Historical Center, NH 92507)

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were well entrenched in American culture. Considering these factors,

Cleveland asked Congress for three, large (10,000-ton) battleships.

The Republican-controlled House readily agreed to an appropriation of

$12 million for three battleships. Populist opposition reduced the ﬁnal au-

thorization to two battleships of 11,520 tons, each carrying four 13-inch and

four 8-inch guns, an armament more powerful than that of the preceding

Iowa. Much the same formula was repeated in 1896, with Herbert asking

for two battleships, the House voting for four, the Senate voting for two; a

conference resulted in legislation approving the construction of three.

The election of 1896 brought the Republicans—with their strong naval

platform—the presidency and continued majorities in both the House of

Representatives and the Senate. Despite the pro-navy components of his

party’s platform, President William McKinley was personally opposed to a

further naval buildup. He appointed the former governor of Massachusetts,

John D. Long, as secretary of the navy, a man whom ﬁery Assistant Secre-

tary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt thought “lukewarm if not actually

hostile, to further expansion of the Navy.”

Political pressure forced McKinley to appoint the unpredictable Roo-

sevelt to his administration. McKinley’s apprehensions were soon justiﬁed

when Roosevelt began to lobby for naval expansion and the active em-

ployment of the ﬂeet in foreign policy.

Roosevelt allied himself with

Henry Cabot Lodge and moved to annex Hawaii to thwart potential Japa-

nese expansion. Later, with Secretary Long out of town, Roosevelt, prefer-

ring not to “drift into war butt end foremost, and go at it higgedly-piggedly

fashion,” readied the ﬂeet for war after the Maine blew up in Havana in

February 1898.

In the wake of the Maine disaster, Long expanded the navy, buying two

cruisers being built in Britain for Brazil, and purchasing or chartering mer-

chant ships for use as naval auxiliaries. The war proved a boon to the navy as

Congress authorized the construction of three new battleships within a fort-

night of the Spanish declaration of war on 23 April, an indication of how syn-

onymous the battleship had become with naval power in the United States.

The naval successes against Spain at Manila and Santiago de Cuba

demonstrated the usefulness of America’s new naval power. The potential

for future conﬂict with Japan, Germany, and Britain underscored the im-

portance of technological superiority, and strategic planning, to the appli-

cation and maintenance of naval power. The correlation between tech-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

nology and strategic and tactical superiority was obvious to most naval of-

ﬁcers. What was needed, according to some members of the line, was a new

institutional structure within the navy which reﬂected this. Many of these

line ofﬁcers viewed the creation of the General Board of the Navy in 1900

as a means to institutionalize the subordination of naval technology to the

line. Line ofﬁcers wanted to ensure that they—the strategists, tacticians,

and operators of this technology—determined design speciﬁcations and

approved warship plans, prerogatives previously reserved for the chiefs of

the technical bureaus who dominated the navy’s Board on Construction.

The ﬁrst conﬂict between the General Board and the technical bureaus in-

volved the design of the six Connecticut-class battleships Congress autho-

rized in July 1902.

The Opening Skirmish for Technology Control

The General Board provided the secretary of the navy with an advisory

body of seagoing line ofﬁcers outside the bureau system. The General

Board was to “insure efﬁcient preparation of the ﬂeet in case of war and for

the naval defense of the coast.”

The Board had two categories of mem-

bers: the full-time executive committee and ex ofﬁcio members, senior of-

ﬁcers holding speciﬁc posts, who attended monthly board meetings.

The

ﬁrst president of the General Board was Admiral of the Navy George

Dewey, who served until his death in 1917. Besides Dewey, the ex ofﬁcio

members of the Board included the president of the Naval War College,

the director of naval intelligence, and the chief of the Bureau of Naviga-

tion. Although a bureau head, the chief of the Bureau of Navigation was a

line ofﬁcer and was often at odds with the three main technical bureaus:

Construction & Repair, Steam Engineering, and Ordnance.

The General Board was a watered-down version of the naval general

staff proposed by a line ofﬁcer, Captain Henry C. Taylor, in February

1900.

Taylor denied any attempt to interfere with the bureau system,

claiming that his push for a general staff was motivated only by a desire to

improve American naval war planning. To smooth any rufﬂed feathers in

Congress and within the navy, Taylor sent a personal note to Colonel

William Church, editor of the Army and Navy Journal, stating the raison

d’être of the Board:

Competing for Control

The Board is to plan Naval Campaigns, to examine where our naval bases

should be created in different parts of the world, to develop our Coast Defense,

and stimulate the practical searching out of these and other facts which are

purely Naval, Military, and connected with War. The Board has nothing to do

with material, manufacture, or any details of equipment, armament and con-

structing [emphasis added].

The General Board was the line’s best hope to break the power of the

bureau system and to wrest control of the basis of the technological para-

digm from the “engineer-sociologists” in the Washington bureaus. The

Board was to develop war and campaign plans, to provide advice regarding

logistics, to work with the War College on tactics, and to “consider the

number and types of ships proper to constitute the ﬂeet.”

Despite Taylor’s

declaration, the General Board was headed for conﬂict with the technical

bureaus. Even had Taylor and Dewey wanted to focus exclusively on

“War,” the interrelationship of technology, strategy, and tactics precluded

such a narrow focus by the General Board.

Secretary Tracy had established the Board on Construction in 1889 to

coordinate the bureaus’ efforts to produce optimal warship designs. In 1901

the Board consisted of the chiefs of the Bureaus of Construction & Repair,

Steam Engineering, Ordnance, and Equipment, as well as the navy’s chief

intelligence ofﬁcer.

Although the Board on Construction had a rotating

presidency, the chief constructor, who headed the Bureau of Construction

& Repair, served as the de facto chairman of the board, placing the deﬁn-

ition of warship technology ﬁrmly under naval engineering control.

On 6 March 1901, Secretary Long directed the Board on Construction

to consider the designs for the Connecticut-class battleships to be submit-

ted to Congress in December. After reviewing eight preliminary designs,

the Board on Construction split over which to recommend. The chiefs of

Ordnance, Construction & Repair, and Steam Engineering sided against

the chief intelligence ofﬁcer and the chief of the Bureau of Equipment.

The majority report called for a main battery of four 12-inch guns in two

turrets with 10-inch armor; the minority favored the same turret arrange-

ment but with less armor. A more serious difference involved the secondary

gun battery: the majority favored installing new, rapid-ﬁre, 7-inch guns in

casements along the beam while the minority called for 6-inch and 8-inch

guns in six turrets, two of which would be superposed on the 12-inch gun

turrets.

Such a superposed arrangement (one turret directly on top of the

Technological Change and the United States Navy

other and training in tandem) had been employed in the two battleships of

the Kearsarge class, authorized in 1895.

The superposed turrets of Kearsarge and Kentucky had been the subject

of controversy within the navy and sparked resentment by ﬂeet ofﬁcers.

Lieutenant William S. Sims had gone straight from attaché duty in France

to the newly completed Kentucky in 1900. Familiar with contemporary Eu-

ropean battleships, Sims was horriﬁed when he saw his new ship, remark-

ing, “Kentucky is not a battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval con-

struction ever perpetrated by the white race.” He later commented, “It is

almost incredible that white men who have reached the present stage of

civilization could have built a ship like that.”

The heavy 13-inch guns installed in Kearsarge and Kentucky had affected

the overall design adversely. The weight of the guns required a redesigned

recoil system that forced the guns to be mounted 14 inches back from the

gun ports in the turret. This created an opening that exposed the guns’ pow-

der to premature ignition from an enemy shell or shrapnel, a problem Sims

summed up as follows: “You could stand on the quarter deck and look into

that turret, and you could spit right down into that powder magazine. Now

that is a fact. You could stand in the bottom of the powder magazine, or

rather, in the chamber out of the powder magazine, and looking up see a

man smoking a cigarette right up on the bridge.”

Besides insufﬁcient armor protection of powder rooms and magazines,

the superposed turrets had a cascading, negative effect upon the overall de-

sign of Kearsarge and Kentucky. The Bureau of Ordnance was delighted

with the superposed turrets since the main barbette armor for the 13-inch

guns simultaneously protected the ammunition hoists for the 8-inch guns,

simplifying their design. The Bureau of Construction & Repair had op-

posed the superposed turrets because they raised the center of gravity of the

ship and reduced the ship’s stability. Construction & Repair had wanted

superﬁring turrets, that is, separate 8-inch turrets mounted behind and

above the 13-inch turrets. Ordnance thought such an arrangement would

result in blast damage to the 13-inch turrets from the 8-inch guns. The 8-

inch turrets, needed for defense against torpedo boats, could not be sacri-

ﬁced and the Bureau of Ordnance stood ﬁrm for the superposed turret

design. To offset the resulting higher center of gravity for the ship, Con-

struction & Repair was forced to lower the height of the main deck, mak-

ing Kearsarge and Kentucky “wet” in moderate seas and “criminal” designs

to many seagoing ofﬁcers, such as Sims.

Competing for Control

Defending the casement broadside guns in the Connecticut, the tech-

nical-bureau majority within the Board on Construction claimed that re-

ports from line ofﬁcers serving in the war with Spain favored the casement

arrangement over that of stand-alone or superposed turrets for the auxiliary

battery. The technical bureau chiefs belittled the worth of the 8-inch gun

by pointing to its miserable record in 1898. At the Battle of Manila Bay,

Dewey’s ﬂagship, Olympia, with 8-inch guns in turrets, ﬁred only one-third

the number of shells of the nonturreted 8-inch battery in USS Boston.

During the engagement at Santiago de Cuba, 319 8-inch shells were ﬁred,

with only 13 hits achieved (4.07 percent). At Manila Bay the hitting per-

centage of the 8-inch guns was 6.38 percent.

The new, quick-ﬁring,

longer-range 7-inch gun was viewed as superior (i.e., faster ﬁring, but not

necessarily more accurate) than the older 8-inch design. Also the use of 7-

inch guns exclusively, as opposed to the mixed-caliber arrangement fa-

vored by the minority, had the added advantage of standardizing the sec-

ondary battery ammunition.

The deadlocked Board on Construction requested guidance from the

secretary of the navy. With his technical advisers at a stalemate, Secretary

Long referred the question to Dewey and the General Board, providing the

Board an entree into technological matters.

Dewey was opposed to su-

perposed turrets. He knew nothing of the new 7-inch guns, but because of

a sense of tradition and his own position as admiral of the navy, felt inclined

to defend the majority position.

Dewey proposed a compromise design

with an auxiliary battery of 8-inch guns with improved armor for the broad-

side gun casements.

Dewey opposed turrets since their multiple guns

were pointed by a single individual and “the element of personnel error of

one man, whether due to lack of skill, nervousness or temporary physical

condition” could reduce the effectiveness of the battery in combat.

With Dewey and the General Board invading its bailiwick, the Board

on Construction conducted its own survey of over “eighty naval ofﬁcers of

prominence on the subject.” The result was a compromise design featur-

ing a mixed auxiliary battery of four 8-inch gun turrets mounted on each

corner of the main deck and the newer 7-inch broadside guns in case-

ments.

Secretary Long approved the Board on Construction report and

Congress authorized construction in July 1902.

Line ofﬁcers, through the General Board, had their ﬁrst high-level in-

volvement in the deﬁnition of battleship technology. But the General

Board’s recommendations counted for little when the Board on Construc-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

tion presented a revised design which was accepted unanimously. Al-

though the bureaus had agreed, a precedent had been set for General

Board involvement in controlling the trajectory of the battleship techno-

logical paradigm. Among the eighty commentaries received regarding the

Connecticut gun arrangement was one that called for a total reorganization

of the process of battleship design—under line ofﬁcers.

Sims and the French Model of Warship Design

Lieutenant William S. Sims, who had criticized the design of the

battleship Kentucky so vehemently, warned the chief of the Bureau of Con-

struction & Repair, Rear Admiral Francis T. Bowles, against design by an

opinion poll of the line. Many were ignorant of developments in foreign

naval technology: “[their opinions] are likely to be of little value and even

dangerous (if given equal weight), through a lack of sufﬁcient acquaintance

with the progress made abroad. It is a singular and apparently unaccount-

able fact that the apathy of the great bulk of our ofﬁcers regarding these

matters is extreme, and that consequently they are largely unacquainted

with even the main lines of the progress in naval construction abroad.”

Sims sent Bowles a ﬁfty-nine-page paper on the Board on Construction

and the American method of designing battleships. In it, Sims attacked the

engineers who dominated the Board on Construction and argued that the

ofﬁcers who determined the technical characteristics of new ships should

possess “nautical, tactical, and military experience to apply it without vio-

lation of the immutable military principles involved. It follows, therefore,

that these ofﬁcers should be selected from the purely military corps.”

While naval constructors were “indispensable in arranging, perfecting, and

completing the details of construction,” they were unqualiﬁed to decide

the general arrangements of equipment and weapons, as this required a

“knowledge of matters not included in their profession.”

Warship designs

should be left to line ofﬁcers who have “handled the ammunition, drilled

the crews at the guns, and exercised them at target practice; maneuvered

the vessel in ﬂeet formation; cruised in foreign waters, and enjoyed fre-

quent opportunities of comparing the details of our vessels with foreign na-

tions.”

Sims was describing himself.

As the American naval attaché to France, he had become familiar with

contemporary European warship design and was embarrassed by the best

Competing for Control

technical artifact his navy could produce in 1901—Kearsarge and Ken-

tucky—with their superposed turrets, wet decks, and unsatisfactory armor

protection.

Naval power was measured in qualitative, technological terms and Sims

found American battleships lacking. This was quite a statement from a 42-

year-old lieutenant with no appreciable engineering training. Sims con-

sidered line ofﬁcers as idea men and the battleship as a concept to be gen-

erated by line ofﬁcers with the design details left to naval engineers. Sims

justiﬁed this by the fact that the line had to command and ﬁght the ships

“for whose success they must bear the sole responsibility.”

Sims’s duty in Paris led him to recommend the adoption of the French

system, in which naval constructors and engineers designed warships ac-

cording to the dicta of the line hierarchy. Sims provided Bowles with an ex-

ample of his nouveau regime, recounting his conversation with Emile

Bertin, chief constructor of the French Navy. When Sims asked Bertin why

the forward turret of Henri IV had been placed two decks, instead of one

deck, higher than the after turret, Bertin had told him, “For certain tacti-

cal reasons; it was so recommended by the Superior Council, and the ship

was therefore designed to carry the turret in that position.”

French naval

constructors obeyed the orders of seagoing ofﬁcers, a situation Sims

thought the U.S. Navy should emulate.

Sims’s desire was clear: to remove any important aspects of battleship

design from the technical bureaus. He denied that there was “any logical

ground for giving the votes of a constructor and an engineer equal weight

with those of experienced admirals in deciding questions that are purely

nautical and military.”

Sims overlooked the fact that contemporary ad-

mirals of the line typically had less comprehension of the important nu-

ances of technology than younger line ofﬁcers raised in the post-1883 “mod-

ern” period. Sims also ignored the ease with which a simple military

decision—superposed turrets—had affected adversely the complex tech-

nological system of the Kearsarge-class battleships. The superposed turret

of his hated Kentucky was popular among senior line ofﬁcers as well as with

the technical specialists in the Bureau of Ordnance who had created it. Its

adoption had been largely a military decision that harmed the overall de-

sign of Kentucky and Kearsarge by requiring a lower main deck to reduce

the excessive topside weight. This had resulted in a ship with less reserve

buoyancy, poor sea keeping capabilities, and reduced ﬁghting abilities in

rough weather.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

Sims’s attack on naval engineers brought him fame among line ofﬁcers. In Septem-

ber 1904 the wardroom ofﬁcers in the battleship Missouri made Sims their guest of

honor, praising him in verse: “Unconquered see me! While beneath my feet the empty

skull of many a swivel chair that once deﬁed me, in that home of sin, the Bureau of

Construction and Repair!” (Collection of Adm. W.S. Sims, USN. Naval Historical

Center, NH 89489-KN)

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