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

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Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

The Simsian Uproar, Engineer Bashing,

and the All-Big-Gun Battleship

uch like late medieval astronomers arguing over the signiﬁcance of

a new comet to the Ptolemaic universe, U.S. naval ofﬁcers differed

over what conclusions should be drawn from the Russo-Japanese War. The

battleship paradigm, like the pre-Copernican Ptolemaic cosmogony, was

intact but contained certain puzzles that required reﬁnement, such as the

size and type of battleship which best exempliﬁed the paradigm.

The re-

sulting discussion yielded further ammunition for a continuing line-ofﬁcer

assault on the technical bureaus.

In their struggle with the technical bureaus over deﬁnition of the bat-

tleship, some line ofﬁcers, centered around William S. Sims, saw President

Theodore Roosevelt as a potential ally. Roosevelt viewed naval expansion

as an integral part of America’s transformation into a world power and the

navy as a positive instrument of national policy: “If we build and maintain

an adequate navy and let it be understood that . . . we are perfectly ready

and willing to ﬁght for our rights, then the chances of war will become in-

ﬁnitesimal.”

To Roosevelt, an “adequate” navy required warships that re-

ﬂected the “greatness of our people,” that is, modern battleships. The ships

of the Connecticut class, despite the controversy over their gun battery and

torpedo tubes, were on a par with the best foreign designs and mirrored the

international battleship technological paradigm. Yet the Simsian rebels

continued their attacks on the technical bureaus’ production of “inferior”

battleships and endangered the Roosevelt naval buildup.

chapter 3

Guns, Armor, and Speed

The shifting geostrategic realities of the early twentieth century placed

great stress on the U.S. Navy. The historical, singular rivalry with Britain

was replaced with concerns over the rise of Germany and the Anglo-

Japanese Alliance of 1902 and a potential two-ocean war. The Mahanian-

Jominian dictum of concentration of forces forbade splitting the battle ﬂeet

between the Atlantic and the Paciﬁc. The Panama Canal was one answer

in the works, but its width later would place design limits on U.S. battle-

ships.

The acquisition of the Philippines from Spain had extended greatly

the area of operations of the U.S. Navy and complicated strategic planning.

It was quite difﬁcult, as William Braisted observed, to “defend the interests

of the United States in two oceans with a one-ocean navy.”

Despite naval-

Just as the cannon had threatened the castle, torpedo boats such as Ericsson imper-

iled the battleship. As with the castle, defensive efforts focused on creating a “defense-

in-depth” using cruisers and torpedo boat destroyers to keep the threat away. (Naval

Historical Center, NH 63744)

Image not available.

ist efforts, appropriations for a two-ocean navy would have to wait until the

summer of 1940 and the fall of France.

Line ofﬁcers and engineers in the technical bureaus had grown up in a

service in which the geographic expanse of the Paciﬁc dominated opera-

tions and was one of the most basic design criteria for U.S. warships.

As in

Vice Admiral Porter’s day, steam-propelled ships required fueling bases and

ships that could carry sufﬁcient fuel to steam long distances without re-

plenishment. Acquisition of Guam from Spain helped, but the Philippines

drew an even stronger U.S. naval presence to the Far East. Complicating

the design problem was the ﬁnite volume and displacement of a ship’s hull

that had to be apportioned among guns, armor, propulsion machinery,

fuel, and provisions. Simply put, battleships for Paciﬁc operations had to

be much larger than the early “coastal” battleships of the 1890s.

In an article in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in 1900, the profes-

sional journal of the naval ofﬁcer corps, Captain Asa Walker called for the

construction of larger battleships to protect American imperial responsi-

bilities in the Far East.

To achieve a desirable level of “all-around efﬁ-

ciency,” Walker argued that armament and armor should take precedence

over speed. Walker wanted battleships with moderate speed (not to exceed

17 knots) and coal capacity to provide for 7,000 miles of steaming. His em-

phasis upon invulnerable armor designs and maximum gun power was in

line with the brown-water Civil War experience that emphasized armor

strength and gun power and harkened back to the same features in the 44-

gun Humphrey superfrigates of the 1790s. Far East operations, on the other

hand, required warships with the capability for long-range, economical

steaming, which could only be had at the expense of speed, reduced armor,

or fewer or smaller guns.

In a March 1902 article, Lieutenant Matt Signor proposed a battleship

with more emphasis upon a heavy main battery, in keeping with the “tra-

ditional desire” of the American naval ofﬁcer to possess “long range guns.”

However, the most unabashed call for large American battleships came

from Lieutenant Homer Poundstone in January 1903.

Poundstone be-

lieved that the battleship was “one of the cases where ‘The biggest is the

best’ and . . . ‘The best is the cheapest.’ ” Larger ships were necessary to op-

timize the major technological subsystems of the battleship: guns, armor,

and the propulsion machinery. To Poundstone, cost was incidental. What

was important was the expansion of the navy and the construction of large

numbers of invulnerable battleships: “if we should build and maintain a

Technological Change and the United States Navy

ﬂeet of even as many as 50 Connecticuts, the expenditure involved would

not constitute an extravagant insurance on the material wealth and for the

continued peace of our country.”

Echoing President Roosevelt’s desire

for the United States to “take the position to which it is entitled among the

nations of the earth,” Poundstone’s writings epitomized the navalism ﬁrmly

rooted in the battleship-based strategic paradigm.

Naval ofﬁcers established the Naval Institute in 1876 to promote the free

exchange of ideas. The U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings provided the en-

vironment for an honest discussion of naval issues. The Institute’s editorial

policies deemphasized, as much as possible, an author’s naval rank or po-

sition. The articles written by Poundstone and his colleagues were serious

proposals and considered as such by Naval Institute members.

The psychology underlying battleship design, and the tactical employ-

ment of battleships, reﬂected a fortress mentality. Battleships truly had be-

come castles of steel.

Their survival lay in their armor. Battleship design

was a continuing competition between improved naval guns, with armor-

piercing shells, and steel armor dependent upon metallurgical and manu-

facturing processes as well as the geometry of armor installations.

The effect of naval ordnance on ironclad warship design after the Civil

War was analogous to the introduction of bronze cannon and iron cannon

balls to medieval fortiﬁcations. Naval constructors became modern ver-

sions of the ﬁfteenth-century Siennese military engineer Francesco di

Giorgio Martini

in their experimentation with new armor designs to

counter the effect of improved naval guns. Armor systems thought to be im-

pervious to penetration by an enemy’s shells could foster a sense of invul-

nerability and lead to an aggressive course of action in battle. However, in

most cases, battleship commanders had to deal with an enemy whose

strengths and weaknesses were unknown.

This could, and often did, lead

to unpleasant surprises as with British battlecruisers at Jutland in 1916 and

the battlecruiser Hood in 1941.

In a battleship engagement, the armor

protection either worked or failed and naval ofﬁcers, quite understandably,

wanted to sail in the best design possible. Poundstone’s advocacy of the

biggest and best battleship was understandable in the all-or-nothing envi-

ronment of battleship combat. For some line ofﬁcers, the fact that naval

constructors and other bureau engineers rarely rode ships in combat

underscored the engineers’ more “academic” interest in the battleship.

Poundstone’s call for ﬁfty battleships of the Connecticut class might

seem excessive, but it was in line with the General Board’s own call for the

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

construction of forty-eight battleships—critics claimed one for each

state.

Yet underneath the numbers, Poundstone was arguing for the con-

struction of fewer, large battleships rather than many smaller ones built at

the same cost. In an argument similar to that later used by Admiral Jackie

Fisher in Britain, Poundstone claimed that a larger number of small

battleships could not defeat one large battleship.

Poundstone’s article stimulated the antibureau faction within the line.

Manifesto-writing Lieutenant Commander John Gibbons lamented that

the eloquent Poundstone had not been on hand to defend the large battle-

ship, supported by navalists in the Senate, against attack by the House of

Representatives and their friends in the Board on Construction.

De-

fending the technical bureaus, Assistant Naval Constructor T. G. Roberts

challenged Poundstone’s bigger-is-better logic, asking, “If the largest is best,

why not make it [the next battleship] 25,000 tons?” Roberts would only have

to wait seven years for the Arkansas and Wyoming in 1910.

Naval Con-

structor Horatio G. Gillmor sought to educate line ofﬁcer critics on the del-

icate interrelationship among speed, horsepower requirements, weapons,

and armor: “by a reduction of two knots from the speed requirements, there

can be produced a very powerful battleship upon a moderate displacement,

presenting a correspondingly smaller target to an enemy.”

To Gibbons,

Poundstone, and other big-battleship advocates, the nattering details of de-

sign trade-offs were unimportant. The smaller battleships described by

Gillmor did not interest them.

The growing agitation for large battleships by naval ofﬁcers sparked a

condemnation from Representative James Tawney, chairman of the House

Appropriations Committee, who bemoaned the fact that “like children

competing for the most expensive and glittering toys, we must compete

with the nations of the world in the construction of the largest and most ex-

pensive battleships in order to satisfy our national pride and vanity.”

While Tawney had reason to complain, the push for larger battleships in-

volved more than vanity. The rapid evolution of various technologies pro-

moted quick obsolescence in warships.

In 1904, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, there was a general recog-

nition of the need for larger guns and battleships capable of long-range op-

erations. The technical bureau ofﬁcers demonstrated support for the big-

gun battleship with the design of Michigan and South Carolina that same

year. The geography of the Paciﬁc Basin, and the growing threat from

Japan, had resulted in an American battleship design that was in many ways

Technological Change and the United States Navy

quite comparable to Fisher’s Dreadnought. However, to many senior ofﬁ-

cers, including the publicly acclaimed creator of the battleship strategy, Al-

fred Thayer Mahan, such a ship was an aberration and violated the lessons

of the Russo-Japanese War.

The Events of 1904–1905

In August 1904 the ﬁrst engagement involving modern battleships took

place between the Tsarist and Imperial Japanese navies in Pechili Gulf.

This battle, and the more important battleship engagement at Tsushima

in 1905, were analyzed and discussed by the admirals and naval construc-

tors of every major naval power. The large-bore naval gun, mixed-bore guns

for close-in ﬁghting, the torpedo, and the mine each found champions.

On the other side of the world from Japan, Admiral Jackie Fisher was

appointed ﬁrst sea lord and launched his “Scheme” for revitalizing the

British navy. Besides the elimination of obsolete ships and the moderniza-

tion of the shore establishment, Fisher convinced the Board of the Admi-

ralty to restructure the Royal Navy to include just ﬁve types of ﬁghting

ships: battleships, armored cruisers, oceangoing destroyers, coastal-service

destroyers, and submarines.

Fisher sought to maintain Royal Navy dominance by redeﬁning the

technological basis of naval power and basing it on an all-large-caliber ar-

mament. According to Fisher’s Committee on Designs, “Both theory and

the actual experience of [the Russo-Japanese] war dictate a uniform arma-

ment of the largest gun, combined with speed exceeding that of the enemy,

so as to be able to force an action.”

The Committee cited the Battle

of Pechili Gulf as proving the uselessness of the smaller-caliber guns—

the secondary armament that had split the Board on Construction on the

Connecticut design.

No longer would naval battles be fought at close ranges. The Japanese

battleship Mikasa had been struck by a Russian 12-inch shell at a range of

13,000 meters (more than 7 nautical miles).

Fisher’s push for a battleship

sporting an all-large-caliber gun battery was bolstered by secret intelligence

that the war had convinced both the Russians and the Japanese to build

their future battleships as all-big-gun designs.

In addition to an all-big-gun battery, Fisher speciﬁed high speed as a

requisite feature in his new type of battleship. Fisher’s design was to steam

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

at 20 knots at a time when the new American battleships of the Mississippi

class, authorized in 1903, were barely reaching 17 knots, the top speed of

Isherwood’s Wampanoag in 1869. Fisher’s reasoning was reﬂected in the

Committee on Design’s statement on battleship speed and its importance

within the expanded naval battleﬁeld:

There is no question that the ﬁrst desideratum in every type of ﬁghting vessel is

a greater speed than that possessed by a similar class of the enemy’s ships. It is

the “weather gauge” of the olden days. Strategy demands it, so as to get the de-

ciding factor (the battle ﬂeet) to any desired spot as quickly as possible. Tactics

demand it to afford choice of range at which the action is to be fought. This will

naturally be a long range, so that gunnery skill can be used to the best advan-

tage. Apart from the size of the ship’s turning circle, and the dread of the

torpedo, close ranges level individuality of marksmanship, and therefore are to

the advantage of the least trained guns’ crews.

To achieve higher speeds, Fisher convinced the Admiralty to reject tradi-

tional steam reciprocating engines and to install Parsons marine steam tur-

bines in the Dreadnought-type battleships.

The gun arrangement of Fisher’s Dreadnought reﬂected the primary

British tactical environment—the stormy North Sea. Unlike the American

Kearsarge-class battleships, whose smaller-caliber broadside guns were of-

ten unusable in moderate seas due to the low main deck, Dreadnought’s

main gun battery was on the upper deck, so that “the guns can be fought

in all times and in all weathers.”

Fisher’s dreadnought battleships were also designed to counter the ef-

fects of the torpedo and the submerged mine. Both the Russian battleship

Petropavlosk and the Japanese battleship Hatsuse had sunk in less than two

minutes after hitting submerged mines. “Inviolate” watertight bulkheads in

Dreadnought would prevent progressive ﬂooding after damage. The am-

munition magazines were moved to the ship’s centerline and elevated to

place them as far as possible from the effects of a mine or torpedo detona-

tion. For additional protection, Fisher pushed, unsuccessfully, to armor-

plate the hull sides and bottom, an impractical addition to the ship’s

displacement.

Through his emphasis upon accurate, long-range gunﬁre and high

speed, Fisher was attempting to expand the naval battleﬁeld and make ex-

isting battleships, especially those of Germany, obsolete. As Jon Sumida has

Technological Change and the United States Navy

demonstrated, Dreadnought was an interim step toward Fisher’s ideal “ar-

moured vessels” that would be a “fusion” of the battleship and armored

cruiser.

Fisher was planning for battleship actions at a range of 15,000

yards shortly after Admiral Dewey and the General Board were demand-

ing battleship torpedoes and deﬁning the maximum effective range of

battleship gunﬁre at 3,000 yards.

In fairness, Dewey’s pronouncement

had come on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War. American naval ofﬁcers,

perhaps more than their British counterparts, differed on just what con-

clusions to draw from the war. They also differed about what to make of

Fisher’s Dreadnought.

Debating the Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War

In the Naval Institute’s prize essay for 1905, Commander Bradley Fiske

endorsed the construction of very large, high-speed battleships, similar to

those of Homer Poundstone.

Fiske was attacked for his advocacy of in-

creased size and greater speed.

In his rebuttal, Fiske claimed that a truly

“compromiseless” battleship, and one consonant with American strategic

commitments in the Paciﬁc, could be had at a displacement of 20,000

tons.

Fiske reported consulting with naval constructors who told him that

such a large ship was possible from an engineering standpoint.

Fiske was calling for a ship much different than Fisher’s Dreadnought.

Despite the success of the long-range guns in the battleship actions

between the Russians and Japanese, Fiske was still thinking of battleship

duels at close range. Larger than Fisher’s Dreadnought, Fiske’s proposed

compromiseless battleship had a top speed of 18 knots with torpedoes to

keep an enemy 4,000 yards away, and carry such armor as to be “invulner-

able, beyond torpedo range, to any guns built, or building [original em-

phasis].”

Fiske’s proposed battleship was merely an enlarged Connecti-

cut, not an all-big-gun battleship like Dreadnought or the U.S. version, USS

Michigan, whose design work started in 1904. Fiske believed that the ma-

jority of line ofﬁcers desired such large ships and that “Congress will give

us some, provided we all agree, and keep stroke in advocating them. . . . But

a very formidable antagonist in the way of our getting such ships exists—

one whose opinion has tremendous weight in Congress, probably more

weight than all the rest of the navy combined—Captain Mahan [original

emphasis].”

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

Mahan threw his weight around in an article in Collier’s Weekly in June

1905. Mahan interpreted the sea battles of the Russo-Japanese War as en-

dorsing the small battleship since “Japanese success [at Tsushima] has

been the triumph of greater numbers, skillfully combined, over superior

individual ship power, too concentrated for ﬂexibility of movement.”

Fiske accused the “preceptor in Naval Strategy” of “fallacious” reason-

ing. Fiske acknowledged that ﬂexibility, the property of a ﬂeet consisting of

many, small battleships, had been of great use to the Japanese, and allowed

them to surround and prevent the Russians from escaping, but only “after

the Russians had been whipped [original emphasis]” by long-range gun-

ﬁre.

Although still visualizing battleship ﬁghting at close range, Fiske be-

lieved that war experience dictated the requirement for larger guns, which

in turn required larger battleships. According to Fiske, America’s future as

a major naval power depended upon it. Flexibility, so important to Mahan,

could only be gained “by sacriﬁcing power of concentration”—another

Mahanian dictum. According to Fiske, when “great resistance” in the form

of an enemy battleship ﬂeet “is to be overcome concentration is required.”

However, when confronting a “feeble” enemy force, the “principal effort

is to keep an enemy from escaping [and] ﬂexibility [many small ships]”

would be necessary. The issue was whether to be a ﬁrst-rate power, build-

ing “our ﬂeet so that it shall be able to overcome the resistance of a pow-

erful enemy, or build it so we shall be able to prevent a weak enemy from

escaping.”

Fiske acknowledged that large ships would not provide strategic or tac-

tical ﬂexibility if so large as to allow the construction of only one or two.

However, Fiske was not interested in a ﬂeet of one or two, but envisioned

a ﬂeet of at least eight “compromiseless” battleships as ﬂexible, and easier

to manage, than a large ﬂeet of smaller ships. The 20,000-ton battleship was

what Fiske wanted, and according to him, what America needed to achieve

true naval power.

In June 1906 Mahan responded with his own analysis of the “Battle of

the Japan Sea” in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

He criticized

Fiske’s emphasis on speed, since a ﬂeet was limited to the speed of its slow-

est battleship and the construction of faster battleships was pointless unless

enough were constructed to retire all the older ships. Mahan was prescient

in describing the destabilizing effect of technological innovation on mod-

ern arms races: “the standards of size and consequent speed depend upon

the ship your neighbor is laying down. We are at the beginning of a series

Technological Change and the United States Navy

to which there is no logical end, except the power of naval architects to in-

crease size.”

Mahan, quite correctly, was unable to fathom why Fiske be-

lieved that the size of future battleships would stop at 20,000 tons.

Mahan defended the mixed-bore gun batteries of the pre-dreadnought

battleships of the Russian and Japanese ﬂeets (and Connecticut) and at-

tacked Fisher’s all-big-gun Dreadnought and its supporters in the United

States. Mahan maintained that the Russian defeat was due to the Japanese

numerical superiority in smaller-bore broadside guns since the Russian

ﬂeet had almost double the number of large-bore guns than the Japanese.

This should have given the Russians the long-range advantage, as Dread-

nought’s supporters claimed, yet the Russians reported being “blinded” by

the volume of shells from the Japanese secondary battery.”

William Sims’s failed attack on the Bureau of Construction & Repair during 1907–

8 focused on the placement of the horizontal armor belt on U.S. battleships. This

1898 view of the launching of Kentucky shows the lighter band of teak planking over

which the armor belt will be installed. (Courtesy of the Filson Club, Louisville, KY.

Gift of Salem H. Ford. Naval Historical Center, NH 92506)

Image not available.