The battleship Hyuga lies in Kure Harbor with her main deck awash, in considerably worse shape than any American vessel on the morning of December 8, 1941. Haruna's back has been broken; she is burned out fore and aft. Over Nagato flies the American flag. There are only three Japanese carriers, all in a severe state of disrepair, and it is unlikely that any of them will go to sea again. The Japanese Navy register as of the date of the surrender contained the name of only one seaworthy cruiser, and in fact no navy in history since galley days has ever been so nearly wiped out in action as that of our enemy in the Pacific.
During the naval conferences which began in the twenties it was again and again stated that Japan’s allotted figure of three major warships to five for each of the Anglo-Saxon powers gave her a practical immunity from naval attack in the waters of East Asia. No one even in Japan denied it; oriental attempts to change the ratio were placed on quite other dialectical grounds. On the morning of December 10, 1941, Japan possessed 12 battleships, at least 11 carriers, and 18 heavy cruisers, figures which were not sensibly altered till the Battle of Midway, she months later. As of the same December 10 England had 12 battleships, 6 carriers, and 14 heavy cruisers, of which force she lost 1 carrier and 3 heavy cruisers during the same sue months. The United States possessed 10 battleships, 7 carriers, and 18 heavy cruisers, and if in the six-month period we recovered two battleships that had been lost, we lost a carrier and a heavy cruiser to make up for it. Nearly all the British fleet and a great part of the American were in the Atlantic during most of the six months prior to Midway.
Even after that costly engagement the Japanese possessed, if not an absolute margin of superiority in the Pacific at least far more than the three:five ratio, which was supposed to give them immunity against attack. That the attack was first delivered in the South Seas does not particularly matter in this connection. The security factor that made the three:five ratio acceptable was the extent of the Allied lines of operation, and these were not notably shortened in making the voyage to the Solomons, nor were the Japanese lines unduly lengthened, while they could use the great bases and depots in the Carolines and New Britain.
Before the war and for some time during the conflict it was freely stated that the development of the airplane had rendered close blockade impossible. Yet no blockades were ever closer than those of Italy, the Philippines, and Okinawa at the time of the invasions, and both in the operations of the Third Fleet against Japan and during the invasion of Southern France, sea power was able to invade the land and throttle hostile shore-based aviation in its cradle.
What we have here is a series of results apparently unrelated but predictable by none of the widely held ideas of sea power and naval strategy as they stood at the beginning of the war. Indeed these results are so wholly at variance with theory as to suggest the need for an examination perhaps of the ideas of sea power in general, perhaps of their application in the conflict just closed. Such an examination will require years and volumes; but a few of the landmarks among which it must navigate arc already visible.
II
One of the points which attracts attention at once is the enormous change that has taken place within the frame of naval power itself. Before the war the navies of the world were qualitatively almost identical, whatever their quantitative difference. The United States had 15 battleships, 6 carriers, 18 heavy and 19 light cruisers, 215 destroyers, 90 submarines. The navy of France, a typical second-class sea power, had 9 battleships, 2 vessels that might be called carriers, 7 heavy and 12 light cruisers, 72 destroyers, 79 submarines. Turkey, a naval power of the third rate, could count 1 battleship, 2 light cruisers, 8 destroyers, 11 submarines. It is true that within these classes a degree of specialization had appeared between the two wars. For instance, American cruisers were built large to run the great distances of the oceans, and British carriers had armored decks in anticipation of attacks from planes based on the near-by shores of Europe. This is specialization to meet the requirements of the geographical regions in which the ships are expected to operate.
But World War II has introduced quite a different type of specialization, involving entire navies and fitting them not to conduct any type of naval operation in a particular ocean, but to conduct only one kind of operation in any ocean whatever. Specialization has extended from individual ships to entire navies. During the conflict only three nations —England, the United States, and Italy— built into all classes that would make up a rounded fleet. The Germans completed a few of the major ships they already had on the ways when the struggle began, but their new construction was exclusively in the submarine and destroyer classes. The Japanese built numerous destroyers, a few submarines, and still fewer cruisers, of a type so light that France and Italy denominated similar ' hips as destroyer leaders, but concentrated so heavily in the direction of carriers that they were forced to abandon all the gunnery ships laid down when the war began.
Most striking of all is the case of Canada. After five years of war she became a naval power of great importance with a fleet of over 200 vessels manned by a personnel at least as numerous as that of the Japanese Navy at a similar date. Yet this great sea force contained no ship even as large as a light cruiser, while for comparison one may note that the far smaller Australian Navy had 2 heavy cruisers, several light cruisers, and at least one carrier. The same violent variations of type are observed elsewhere among the minor Allied navies.
No doubt this can be explained by the strain thrown on world constructional facilities by the war itself—an extension on a world scale of the case of 1917, when the American fleet program had to be laid aside for the hurried construction of destroyers. But mingled with this influence, partly arising from it and partly in response to new concepts of international relations, there has been another development. It may be described as the specialization of fleets for function. The minor navies and perhaps some of the major ones are no longer comparable with each other in quantitative terms. They are composed of ships and planes with widely varying strategical and tactical characteristics. Another Washington Conference would have to work on the basis of those formulas with which mathematicians attempt to describe the relations of the incommensurable.
A war between Canada and Australia is not a practical possibility—but what would happen on a clash of two such fleets? The war has shown that an entire Navy can specialize, and unless the international organization functions better than anyone thinks it will, there arc bound to be more specialized fleets and the prospects of clash between them.
III
Or will there? To a certain extent the development was one forced upon the Allies by the nature of Axis sea operations. Those operations mark something new in the whole history of sea power. Lieutenant Commander Brodie has defined sea power as the ability to use the ocean at pleasure for the transmission of either goods or military force. The over-all strategy of the Axis was directed less toward obtaining sea power for themselves, which was the focal point of all past naval wars, than toward denying it to the Allies. (Even Napoleon’s Trafalgar campaign, where the effort was to avoid the British fleet, had at its end the achievement of the kind of local and limited sea power that would enable him to cross the Channel.)
Dr. Haushofer, the muddle-headed old gentleman who was chief of the Nazi geopolitical institute, has made the point as clearly as anybody. He maintained that in the long run war boiled down to a matter of movement—of troops, supplies, equipment. Sea power had been effective in the past because the ocean presented a more rapid and less vulnerable means of travel than the land routes. A map drawn to represent traveling time rather than distance in the days of sail would place Rome nearer to London than to Paris.
It was Haushofer’s contention (and that of the men who made Germany’s war) that this represented the strategy of a bygone age. The coming of steam power on the whole benefited land transport more than it did that by water. The latter remained the more efficient but the advantage of speed passed from the ship to the railroad. The arrival of the internal-combustion engine completed the process. It offered little improvement to sea transportation; but to movement by land, in its forms of airplane and motor car, it made accessible points beyond the reach of railroads.
Moreover and very important for war purposes, land transport was given the advantage of operating in vehicles of low unit value, so small and so capable of dispersion as hardly to constitute military objectives. Sea transportation remained at its most efficient when the unit was a large one. Land transport had thus become more efficient than transport by sea. To win her war Germany needed neither sea commerce nor sea power if she could achieve land connections with the necessary raw-material producing areas; and England would inevitably be defeated in a war of attrition against the continent because her sea communications were vulnerable while the land communications of the Nazis were not.
This was Haushofer, stating the thing in absolute and theoretical terms. As a practical matter there existed a German program for obtaining naval power and then sea power through the use of Britain’s building facilities after she had been defeated, but that is not the point here, nor are the defects that caused this besotted scheme to fail. What is important here is the effect on German naval strategy and through it upon Allied sea power. The Germans were fully conscious that in the last war part of Britain’s sea communications were maintained by neutrals. The new doctrine led them to a step new in naval history—an effort not to make the sea safe for themselves but to make it unsafe for everyone. They were quite content to let England distribute her warships wherever she chose as they had been in 1940 happy to let the French distribute their armies wherever they wished, the farther forward the better, since this made the lines of communication longer and more subject to attack.
The fact that neutrals would become involved did not matter since it was necessary to the German strategy to absorb the neutrals in the development of their land-power, land-communications policy. The typical weapon of this campaign to make the seas unsafe was the magnetic mine, sown broadcast and largely by airplanes. Until absolutely convincing evidence is produced to the contrary it will always seem that the first really heartbreaking German failure of the war was the inability of this secret weapon and such successors as the series switch mine to produce any more results than they did. Nobody in Germany expected the British to find any answer to it at all any more than they could find an answer to V-2.
IV
The consistency with which the Germans overestimated the military effects of their inventions is very striking, but hardly less so than the fact that specialization of an entire navy for a single strategic purpose began with them. It is in some respects analogous to the guerre de course in the later days of Louis XIV, when the ships of the French Royal Navy were rented out to contractors for privateering. As Mahan has noted, the British Navy was then able to disperse and hunt down the privateers. But the differences in the two cases are at least as significant as the resemblances. The Germans deliberately abandoned any effort to control the ocean; did not care whether the British dispersed or not; expected to lose numbers of their raiders, and adopted the wolf-pack tactics in anticipation of these losses.
They perceived the whole problem as one in military economics, basing on the fact that a mass-produced submarine is a relatively small and cheap vessel, a target (including cargo) a large and expensive one. If one ship could be sunk for every submarine lost the Germans would be gainers in the long run, for the destruction of a ship in the English trade included a reduction of Britain’s capacity to replace that ship, while their own replacement capacity, backed by land transport, was (by their calculation) invulnerable.
They brought the element of a geographical region’s total productive capacity into naval war. They made use of the fact that, with the progress of science, the technique of war grows continually more complex, so that it is no longer possible to speak of naval or land or even air strategy without a modifying phrase. The form as well as the total content of naval power must be considered in every calculation. In pure theory a carrier can either handle or get away from the opposition of any other class of ship, and in pure theory a destroyer ought always to be able to handle submarines. But of! the coast of Norway the Scharnhorst sank the Glorious; the same German battleship was eventually lost fundamentally because she lacked accompanying vessels to hold quite minor surface craft at arm’s length. American submarines making radar approaches sank no less than 42 Jap destroyers.
In their system of strategy the Germans made some errors, but in at least one important case the mistake was in underestimating their own accomplishments. During the high days of the U-boat war in 1942 they were getting four or five ships for every submarine lost, instead of the one or two their theory required. Their campaign failed ultimately; but it seems to have been a failure in tactical execution rather than in theory.
The proof of this is the American submarine campaign against Japan. Naval war in several other dimensions was going on at the same time, but this should not be allowed to conceal the fact that with relation to the Japanese Empire we occupied the same strategic position the Germans thought they occupied with relation to England, and that we conducted the same general type of campaign as they. Our arms-producing areas had efficient and invulnerable land transportation from the sources of the raw materials; their supplies had to be brought in from overseas. Our submarines attacked their lines of communication without reference to the control of the surface in the affected area by Japanese warships. The fact that none but Japanese ships moved in those waters doubtless simplified the task of our submarines, but it does not alter the other fact that, as with the Nazis against England, the fundamental effort of the American submarine campaign was to make those waters unsafe for every sort of traffic. It is unnecessary to dilate on the achievements of the American submarines in that campaign except to remark that our submarines perfectly justified the German theory that it is possible to cripple the industrial potential of a nation that depends upon sea transport, without actually obtaining control of the sea.
How far the increased effectiveness of our mine warfare contributed to this result is uncertain as yet, but it seems likely that it supplemented the work of the submarines to a very great extent indeed, just as the Germans expected their mines to render the approaches to all British ports unsafe. Technical answers to the “unsweepable” mines with which the German North Sea ports were closed in the last days of the war and the Japanese fleet held in the Inland Sea for the attentions of Halsey’s planes may be discovered. Such answers usually are. The new thing in mine war; the factor that makes it more dangerous than ever before is the effectiveness of the airplane as a means of laying. There is really very little defense against single airplanes slipping in under cover of darkness to plant mines in shallow waters, and though the Germans realized this in the early days of the war they never really used the information.
The Nazi failure, then, was tactical and technical. They placed quantity before quality in the production of their submarines, and this is always a mistake with a military weapon. They were so interested in getting a large number of raiders to sea that they wrongly assumed raiding craft can be operated on the principles of fleet tactics, that one able commodore to a squadron, with the rest of the captains capable of no more than following the flag, can accomplish as much as a dozen ships individually well led. This may be true for a battle fleet; Suffren and Tegetthof would appear to demonstrate it. But it is certainly not true for raiders, and John Paul Jones’ experience stands in proof of it.
V
In another very important respect the doctrines of sea power need re-examination. The fact that the Japs did control the surface of the sea within their empire, the fact that the Germans controlled the Baltic down to the very end of the war, and that for a time the Italians were in almost complete control of the Mediterranean, marks a change in the classic concept of sea power, a change adumbrated by Mahan himself and more clearly expressed by the Sprouts (Toward a New Order of Sea Power). It may be expressed as the localization of sea power, coming about as an effect of the mechanical warship.
One of the points upon which Mahan was most insistent was the ubiquity of sea power. In the sailing ship days on which he based most of his calculations, the ocean behaved as an almost perfect conductor of military force. A British battle fleet in the Downs could exert its strength undiminished against an enemy off Rochefort or Toulon or in the West Indies after an interval of time small in comparison with those required for other types of military movement. The only limiting condition was a very moderate amount of base facilities.
It seemed to Mahan that steam had greatly increased the importance of bases, though he was some distance from the Sprouts’ remark that British sea power in Far Eastern waters hardly existed at all as of World War I, partly because of English responsibilities elsewhere, partly because the complexity of fuel and supply necessities bind a modern fleet not merely to a base, but to a base closely supported by an industrial area. This concept of localized sea power, of a navy able to challenge any other within an area of operation not limited by the proximity of its coast line, but taking in an entire ocean area, was inherent in all the documents resulting from the Washington Naval Conference and was directly stated in some of those documents. It controlled most naval thinking of the current war down to 1943.
But it has now been attacked from at least three directions and so successfully that regionalized sea power was apparently a purely temporary phenomenon. The submarine, which can enter any region from any distance because of its extremely long cruising range, offers one challenge. It is a challenge that may be overcome as the Western Allies overcame the German submarines, but the failure of the Japanese to beat off our submarine attack suggests that the problem must be worked out in each individual case, that there is no inherent solution.
A far more serious challenge has been offered by the efficiency of American logistic organizations. During the Okinawa campaign Admiral Spruance was able to maintain his fleet for weeks at a distance of over 1,500 miles from the nearest base, and that base a forward one which produced nothing of its own. Some ships both of his fleet and of Halsey’s during the latter’s attacks on the Japanese home islands returned to base for such urgent matters as battle damage and burned-out boiler tubes which cannot be made good without bringing the ship to a stop in a sheltered anchorage. The margin of superiority possessed by the two leaders over their enemy during these campaigns was so great that the detachment did not seriously affect their strength. But the important point is not how many ships there were on our side during the long months of 1945 or how much pressure they brought to bear. The point is that any ships at all could thus remain at a distance of 1,500 miles from the nearest advanced base over a period of months, most of the time steaming at high speeds and putting out hundreds of tons of ammunition daily.
When any fleet can do that it is obvious that with the aid of its auxiliaries it can maintain itself in any part of the world. This is to say that thanks to American methods of improving the efficiency of the train, sea power has again become ubiquitous. A battle fleet assembled at San Francisco can come to a campaign off Ceylon or Kamchatka with practically undiminished strength and can remain as long as its lines of communication hold up. The limitations are no more severe than those on sailing ships. And let us not deceive ourselves; the efficiency of the American fleet train is no exclusive possession. Others will be able to study and to employ our methods just as the Germans after the last war were able to set up assembly lines in imitation of those we used in 1917.
VI
The third and perhaps the most serious attack on the localization of sea power has come from the air. The general expectation of intelligent military opinion—and not of the Seversky-type enthusiasts alone—before the war was that the airplane would increase the phenomenon of localization. Air control of waters out to fighter plane range from the shore could be provided from fields, and enemy surface ships could enter such a region only at extreme peril and for the briefest of raids. Most of the waters in which the European fighting was done fell into this category, and in the early part of the war the theory certainly seemed to be borne out, the only exceptions being the immediate region of the British Isles, where cover was given by aerial counterconcentrations, also from land bases. The closing of the Mediterranean so that relief for Malta had to run all the way around Africa was a case in point.
If this were true, then sea power was limited in its operation to regions more than 250 miles from enemy airfields; and in areas where islands provided numerous opportunities for such fields (as in the Aegean), the interdiction against sea power became absolute. Before the United States was forced into the war nobody thought of questioning this doctrine, in support of which it was urged that carrier planes must be technically inferior to land-based types.
The Japanese, in fact, based their whole bid for empire on the theory that sea power could be restrained, limited, localized by aerial operations. They also made the unjustifiable assumption that the morale as well as the equipment of the American Navy could be broken at Pearl Harbor, but they were leaving nothing to chance. All they asked was time to complete the mechanical arrangement begun as long ago as the middle twenties—to set up throughout that enormous flowing triangle from the Kuriles to Sumatra and the Solomons the chain of their island airbases.
There is less difference between the fundamental strategy of their war and that of the Germans than appears at first glance. No more than their European allies did our oriental enemies conceive of sea power in the classic sense as something to be gained and then used for whatever purpose they desired. No commander who held that classic doctrine could have steamed away from Pearl Harbor on the night of December 7. This was an act in perfect accord with the old French doctrine of crippling the enemy and then using one’s own fleet to achieve “ulterior objectives” against which Mahan so often inveighed. It is the action of leaders who are not trying to attain sea power but to prevent the enemy from having it.
In this fundamentally false approach to the problem may be found the reason why the Japanese never made use of the naval superiority they had in the Pacific during the first six months of the war. They used ships; in fact no warships were ever much busier than the Japanese during this period. But they were employed as transports, as escort craft, and to provide floating fire support for amphibian operations. These are proper naval functions, but they are functions of a fleet which is beyond question superior to its opponents. Why the Japanese made this error is a question of considerable interest involving a number of concepts that have little bearing on the general topic of sea power. But it is germane to point out that this false strategy was at least partly the effect of the doctrine of localized sea power.
The concept of the Japanese was that sea power can be localized by the airplane. The first care of the Japanese wherever they landed was to seize the airfields, or where they did not exist, to set them up, and during the early part of the war their propaganda made enormous play with Hitler’s phrase about unsinkable carriers. They were correctly apprehensive about the industrial resources of America, but they conceived that by skimping in other directions, they might overmatch us in the single item of airplanes, given the fact that we would have to build ships as well as planes in vast quantities before laying siege to their flowing triangle of empire.
It was possible even to calculate within limits adequate for strategic purposes just how long it would take this effete democracy to muster sufficient strength for the counterattack. In the last war American ship and plane production was just getting to the effective point at the armistice, approximately a year and a half after the war started. The direct calculation from our industrial resources would work out to about the same point. In 18 months the Japanese expected to have their empire so firmly established that it would be immune to attack.
It is worth noting that these calculations were accurate to a degree. It was precisely the late summer of 1943 when the new carriers Essex, Independence, and Princeton appeared in the South Pacific, the first major ships of the war program. The Japanese misconception went beneath this. Its detail was that the outer rim of islands could be woven into a network of air bases, from each of which planes could support the nearest and to each of which planes from a wide area would rally in case of an attack—planes so numerous that an approaching fleet could be put out of action as readily as the Repulse and Prince of Wales off Malaya or Admiral Hart’s striking force in the Java Sea. Japanese gunnery ships could be put in to complete the rout, as they had been against Admiral Doorman’s little squadron. But the land-based planes would carry the load.
Now this amounted to maintaining that land-based planes could negate sea power, not merely locally and for a short period of time, but throughout a wide area and permanently. Like the U-boat campaign, it was essentially a claim that modern technology had produced conditions under which the classic doctrines of sea power were no longer valid. Like the Germans, the Japanese apparently had a program for gaining and using sea power themselves after they had achieved their initial victory, nor does either of the Axis partners seem to have seen any inconsistency in such a program. But the essential feature under technical methods of approach widely different was the statement that classic sea power could be discounted in the modern world.
The error was the old one of looking at practices instead of principles. The Japs were so fascinated by the technical mobility of the airplane that they never seem to have thought of its inferior strategic mobility. They drew an analogy between plane and ship, whereas the true one is between plane and shell; and in due time they discovered that those unsinkable carriers were also immovable and were in fact elements of a passive defense in its least effective form, a thinly held cordon. When enlightenment came to them after the American capture of the Marshalls, they made an effort to check navy with navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. By that time the airplane had already revealed its true role in the complex of modern sea power. The effect of the plane is not to localize sea power but to overcome what localization previously existed; not to extend the influence of the land arm for 300 miles out to sea, but to enable naval power to reach 300 miles inland and almost completely to neutralize the value of fortified bases. The individual superiority of the land plane, about which so much talking was done early in the war, has proved of little consequence beside the fact that the enormous strategic mobility of the ship enables this quality to be conferred upon the planes it carries and permits a concentration of so many seaborne aircraft at the point of attack that the defense is overwhelmed.
VII
Before considering the implications of this development it is perhaps worthwhile to note the inhibiting effect of false strategy upon Japanese operations during the period when they still had the superiority which the treachery at Pearl Harbor gave them. A painstaking search of the records fails to reveal a single case in which they undertook naval operations as such. Every contact between their fleet and our own down to the Battle of the Philippine Sea came about as the direct result of some operation against a land mass. At least from Midway on the constant effort of every Jap commander was to withdraw from action as soon as our fighting ships were discovered.
During the long struggle for the Solomons this unwillingness to carry matters to a conclusion several times saved our forces from defeat (had the Japs pressed on to the last gun at Savo Island, for instance!), and when the test came at the Philippine Sea it was a system of tactics founded on this cheeseparing economy that gave us a decisive victory. The matter may be summed up by saying that they deprived their own leaders of the spirit of the offensive.
What (for us) fortunate chance caused this confusion to descend on the councils of the Navy that in the war with Russia had acted so truly on the offensive we may some day find out. We do not know now, but there is something more than an outside possibility that it was the false view of air power as a competitor with sea power rather than as a form of sea power itself. It is not altogether surprising that the Japanese should have reached such a conclusion on the data available to them before the war. Air-sea power was in sharp competition with the other forms of sea power for the limited services of Japan’s industrial plant, and the conclusion that the two forms of military force were in competition with each other was reached by some good military thinkers in countries where the competition for industrial support did not exist.
Actually, of course, sea power has also become land power to a far greater extent than ever before. It is not impossible, for instance, for an entire division of troops to be launched unexpectedly into a land battle from carrier decks. One of the most striking technical developments of the war has been the appearance of quite new types of ships, all of them making the link between sea and land operations—attack transports, attack cargo carriers, special types of landing craft that mount rockets for the support of beachhead operations.
It is not surprising for new types of ships to appear during a war, and in view of the amount of beachhead work in the conflict just closed the development of special craft for this purpose was inevitable. But note that the classes mentioned above are not merely new types of ships; they are also functionally new, occupying places in the general economy of fleets that were never filled at all before. All of them are to a certain extent at once goods-carriers and warships. The responsibility of the captain of such a vessel does not cease with the safe delivery of this cargo, it extends inland to whatever distance his guns can reach.
It is true that the new types are fighting ships only for special purposes and in a limited area—the twilight zone along the beaches where the functions formerly sharply separated between navy and army are now combined. But already some of the new types are expected to furnish a good deal of their own gunnery protection against aircraft on the high seas, which is an invasion of quite another combat zone. Strategic principles remain unaltered though many changes in the technical character of weapons and the effect of modern war on design is important only as evidence. But the evidence in this case points to greatly widened responsibilities being conferred on sea power by the plane, which, so far from driving navies from the seas, promises to draw them into a closer relation with armies in a single complex of winged amphibian warfare whose very principles remain to be studied.
In this complex all weapons, all techniques play a part, influencing each other as never before. The struggle of England and France during the Napoleonic period has been described as the contest of the elephant and the whale, each unable to enter the other’s element. But in 1941 the Germans seized the naval base in Crete from the British by air; in 1944 the Japanese broke up an American air campaign by seizing bases in China through the movement of infantry soldiers; down to the very fall of Germany the Nazis rendered the right wing of the Russian land campaign impotent through naval control of the Baltic; and Admiral Halsey conducted what amounted to a very effective land campaign on Honshu by means of the sea-air combination. New weapons, new techniques do not simplify war nor does any one of them dominate it. They add eternally to its complication, and the master strategist is increasingly called upon to be the master co-ordinator.
But any scheme of naval activity rests upon bases, as do all military operations. Bases are the indispensable foundation upon which the superstructure of offense is raised. Important naval stations, therefore, should be secured against attack by land as well as by sea.—Mahan, Strategy.