Campaigns were ultimately decided not only by fighting qualities but also by the effectiveness of pre-planning, the efficiency of supply and logistics, and the extent of support from indigenous population and allies.

The Principal Theatres of War, 1793–1815

Between 1793 and 1795 the British Cabinet launched attacks on two fronts. In northern Europe it attempted to establish footholds on the European mainland and in the West Indies it resolved to destroy France's financial stability by attacking the islands which provided the source of its wealth. The European expeditions launched in 1793, to Flanders, Dunkirk, Brittany and Holland, failed, as did subsequent expeditions to the Vendée in 1795, Ostend in 1798, den Helder in 1799 and Ferrol in 1800. Following these setbacks Henry Dundas, Secretary of State for War (1794–1801) admitted that he was ‘impressed with a deep conviction that we cannot take a direct part in the military operations on the Continent, we can only act indirectly and collaterally with our Continental allies’. After Ferrol there were no more attempts to land forces in northern Europe until 1805 when a force was despatched to Hanover in northern Germany; but this campaign was abandoned and the troops withdrew without engaging the enemy. However, in 1807, there were two successful campaigns against Heligoland and Copenhagen. An expedition in 1808 to the Baltic to support the Swedes was less so: it returned to England within two months. This was followed, in 1809, by the Scheldt (also known as Walcheren) expedition, which was to be the most monumental failure of the wars. This disaster was followed by partial success in Holland in 1813–14 and finally Anglo-Prussian success at Waterloo in June 1815.

Despite operational successes, the early expeditions to the West Indies were contentious: the excessive death rate, which accounted for 50 per cent of the army, was attributable to yellow fever, rather than conflict fatalities. More recently, the significance of the economic legacy of these expeditions has been exposed, rebalancing the negative perceptions.

Despite its inglorious performance earlier in the wars, by 1815 the prestige of the British army was high because of its successes in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. The irony was that the prestige of the navy was not high at the end of the war. Despite the glorious fleet victories in the Revolutionary war, and of course at Trafalgar, its role in the later years of the Napoleonic war, though absolutely vital, was less visible. Nevertheless it was the British navy's virtual command of the oceans that made military success attainable by facilitating reasonably unfettered shipment of the army and also of the trade that sustained Britain's financial and fiscal stability and fed the nation when harvests were poor. However, in the end Napoleon was defeated not by British military and naval capacity alone. The proud nation had finite capacities in manpower which were insufficient to defeat the French single-handed or even to materially influence the foreign policy of its allies. The French were only quelled when the interests of the coalition of states of Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria coalesced, significantly encouraged by heavy subsidies from Britain, which during the wars amounted to over £65 million. This demonstrates that British financial and fiscal stability, underpinned by naval hegemony, together with patient, often painful diplomacy were also important contributors to the defeat of Napoleon. To this mix, should be added industrial inventiveness and manufacturing capacity, and the diligence of the government administrative backroom civil servants.

Successful expeditions depended upon support from the local population and from allied armies. The repeated breakdown of coalitions tended to oblige the British government to be reactive to events. When it did react it tended to be over-ambitious, particularly in respect of attacks on the European mainland: den Helder in 1799, Hanover in 1805 and Walcheren in 1809 were organised relatively quickly on a scale that was too large for effective planning and co-ordination, but more importantly these expeditions failed because of the absence of effective support from local populations and the allies – from the Dutch (den Helder, 1799), from Prussia (Hanover, 1805) and from Austria (Walcheren, 1809). The West Indies expeditions of 1793–97 were also conducted on a large scale.

Although victory at sea alone could not win the war, the British navy played a very significant role in the ultimate defeat of Napoleon, principally by achieving and retaining hegemony at sea. This allowed the relatively unfettered movement of troops and military supplies by sea, much faster than the French were able to achieve by land. It also ensured the security of the vitally important British maritime trade whilst restricting the trading capacity of Britain's enemies.

During the Revolutionary war and in the early years of the Napoleonic war the naval strength of Britain and its enemies was finely balanced. The British navy concentrated on destroying or neutralising enemy naval forces through successful fleet actions and relentless concentration on blockading their principal naval bases. Naval domination was almost complete after the decisive Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. In comparison, the weaknesses in the army had been regularly exposed during the period. Though there were successes in the West Indies they came at a high cost of life. All the European expeditions ended in failure. Indeed, until Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby's campaign in Egypt in 1801 it was naval successes that sustained the morale of the British public and fuelled the political resolve to continue the war during this period.

Nelson's victory at the Nile did not remove the French from Egypt; neither did Copenhagen nor Trafalgar affect the French strategic position in Europe. Complete victory over Napoleon's forces would only be achieved on land and then only with the support of allies. If it was to be achieved, the army and the navy needed to engage in conjunct operations. These were most successful when inter-service rivalries were suppressed. However, there are numerous well-documented illustrations of tensions in army–navy relations. During the Revolutionary war, inter-service relations were particularly strained. In 1795 an infantry officer serving aboard a warship as a marine was dismissed from his ship by a naval court martial for insubordination to the captain and the army backed the officer.

Writing in 1574, and looking back on the growth of unity in the Low Countries, the significance of archery and crossbow guilds, and their landjuwellen – their great competitions – was clear to the governor of Veere in Zeeland. Just as the Olympic Games had built unity between the city states of ancient Greece, so shooting competitions shared values and, in competing together in large shoots, the guilds demonstrated and strengthened their inter-urban networks. Networks were vital to the Low Countries; the towns of Flanders were powerful in their own right, but gained from regional networks and from the ideals of social peace.

Archery and crossbow competitions benefited from established networks, especially those of trade and interactions along rivers, but they also served to strengthen regional communities. Small networks grew out from large towns into their hinterlands, bringing economic and political benefit, but also the possibility of tensions. In looking at charters granted to shooting guilds in smaller towns and analysing the guilds’ festive interactions, it becomes clear that shooting guilds were part of small networks, used by the civic powers to demonstrate authority and to emphasise community with smaller neighbours. In considering regional networks, many recent works have shown not just the high level of urbanisation in Flanders, but also the strength of urban networks and desires for the ‘Common Good’. The shooting competitions present an exciting lens through which to analyse such networks in action. The location of and attendance at competitions reveal the significance of rivers, as well as the efforts that civic governors went to in order to build and maintain politically and economically powerful links through festive bonds.

John Hattendorf was born in Hinsdale, Illinois on 22 December 1941, a fortnight after the Imperial Japanese Navy had flung the United States abruptly into the Second World War. The next few years were to contribute a great deal of naval history to the United States and the world, but few would have searched for a future naval historian in the outer suburbs of Chicago, nor in Gambier, the small town amidst the peaceful Ohio cornfields where John studied as an undergraduate at Kenyon College. But Kenyon, though far from the sea, was not isolated from the wider world, and certainly not from the scholarly world. Charles Ritcheson, the noted historian of the American Revolution, was then a professor at Kenyon. His experience included wartime service in the US Navy, and a DPhil at Oxford, while his private interests ranged from the Paris Opera to the Beefsteak Club. John also had close contact with the distinguished German medievalist Richard G. Salomon, driven from his chair in Hamburg in 1934, who retired from Kenyon in 1962 aged seventy-eight but remained an active scholar. At one period when he was housebound after a fall, John fetched books for him from the library: a new parcel every week, a book for every day, each in a different language. Salomon introduced John to the scholarly tradition of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and aroused in him an enthusiasm for archives highly unusual in an undergraduate. Over two years’ voluntary work, John listed and organised the college archives, and he edited A Dusty Path, an anthology of documents and photographs drawn from them. Salomon almost lured him into medieval church history – but not quite.

Instead, on leaving Kenyon in 1964, John joined the US Navy, and the following day, as he remembers, ‘someone started a war in a place called Viet Nam’. In February 1965 he was commissioned as an ensign, and before the end of the year he was at sea off that coast as an officer of the destroyer USS O'Brien. In 1967 he was mentioned in despatches for his ‘skill and judgement’ under fire. From the O'Brienhe went to the Naval History Division in Washington, where he found himself in danger of a different sort.

This Festschrift, made up of papers given at a conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, in April 2014 to mark Professor John B. Hattendorf 's impending retirement from the Naval War College, is meant to reflect the respect and affection in which he is held by a great number of scholars and naval officers from all over the world. It is also meant to reflect the nature and breadth of his studies, which present a challenge to the editors as we attempt to draw out some common themes. It is tempting to side-step the topic and declare ‘Strategy and the Sea’ to be nothing more than a sufficiently generic label for Professor Hattendorf 's career. But as Lawrence Freedman identifies in his recent survey of all things strategic, ‘[S]trategy remains the best word we have for expressing attempts to think about actions in advance, in the light of our goals and our capacities.’ The difficulty in defining and discussing strategy is not, therefore, a hurdle to be overcome but rather a characteristic to be embraced. The contributions to this volume encompass all three elements of Freedman's definition: how to think about actions in advance, how to define goals and how to understand capabilities.

Often the most straightforward decision, at least in the abstract, for leaders on the eve of war is to determine whether their navy's actions will be primarily defensive or offensive. Roger Knight and Agustín Guimerá both question the perceptions of the eighteenth-century British and Spanish navies as being primarily offensive and defensive strategic tools, respectively. When considered together, Knight and Guimerá demonstrate the significance of a strong defensive perimeter as a prerequisite for effective offensive operations. Paul Kennedy picks up on the same theme in discussing naval strategy in terms of contested space. The statesmen responsible for the grand strategy in each of the three wars he discusses defined their goals this way. How could Britain make inroads into Napoleon's continental space? What was the use of a battle fleet in the First World War when faced with new asymmetrical technologies that limited its ability to patrol the enemy's coast? How could the Allies realise the goals of the Casablanca Conference and take control of the vital contested space of the North Atlantic?

The relationship of naval historians with the contemporary navy is a discussion we need to have. Arguably, it is part of a wider question as to the relationship which naval historians should have to allthe services. Past conversations about the interactions between the military and historians have too often been conducted within a context that relates much more to the concerns of the army than the navy, and for that reason the dialogue has been limited and incomplete. Indeed, much of the paradigm of what is described as ‘Professional Military Education’ (PME) is that of a combat arm officer of the army. Naval historians may not always have been sufficiently active in making military (that is, land warfare) historians aware of the wider dimensions of the PME problem – although John Hattendorf 's quiet voice has been one of the most effective in attempting to restore the balance. It is also true, however, that naval officers have not been particularly successful in making their voices heard within what passes for inter-service discourse on PME matters.

There is more to do. There is much within the PME debate that is relevant to the navy, but also much that is left out. Far too much of PME and the role of history within it is about the management and direction of conflict on land and the relationships between policy makers and military leaders, rather than the wider problems associated with the management and direction of organisations and of technology in peace as well as war. There is something here of C.P. Snow's ‘Two Cultures’ because it may be partly driven by an aversion, however unconscious, to the complexities of technology in favour of the emotional satisfactions of human relationships. But if you are going to understand navies, you have to cover both – and more.

There are other contemporary problems with the naval profession with which historians may be able to help. They relate not only to naval form, but naval function. In many ways, they are the same problems being faced by other complex organisations in the contemporary world, but the nature of navies and the difficulty, to use modern management terms, of assessing their outputs makes their challenges even greater.

‘From the standpoint of military advantage,’ Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote in 1902, ‘a Russian naval division in the Persian Gulf, although unquestionably a menace to the trade route from Suez to the East, would be most ex-centrically placed as regards all Russia's greatest interests. It is for these reasons … that the good of Russia presents no motive for Great Britain to concede a position so extremely injurious to herself and her dependencies.’ Comparable reasoning continued to suffuse thinking in Whitehall seventy years later, as the British liquidated the remnants of their empire east of Suez. Britain's residual interests in the Indian Ocean remained considerable, particularly on the economic side. Declaring the waters between Suez and Singapore a ‘Zone of Peace’ was popular throughout the Commonwealth, and held substantial political attraction. But, as in Mahan's time, geography, or rather geopolitics, continued to hold primacy of place in the shaping of strategy. The persistent asymmetry between the continental position of the Soviet Union, on one side, and Britain's maritime posture, on the other, left ‘no scope for an arms control solution to Indian Ocean security’. By the mid-1970s, American authorities had come around to a similar view: ‘as a major maritime nation, we have more to lose in an exchange of naval concessions than does the USSR, which is still primarily a land power’.

In 1970, one was more likely to hear such a formulation in Whitehall than in the White House. In 1968, the Labour government led by Harold Wilson announced that Britain would withdraw its last major forces still on station east of Suez by the end of 1971. On assuming office in 1970, the Conservative government led by Edward Heath ordered a detailed review of that decision. In the end, British authorities determined that the process had progressed too far to abort and would thus proceed apace. They looked instead to American sea power as the future basis of security in the Indian Ocean, favouring this so-called ‘defence approach’ over either regional organisation or naval limitations. The diffuse politics of the Indian Ocean's littoral nations rendered regional organisation impractical, while naval limitations appeared incompatible with enduring requirements for sea control and power projection across the Indian Ocean.

The Expansion and Contraction of the Colbertian Fleet

Between the late 1660s and early 1690s, the French Navy underwent an unprecedented operational and administrative expansion, the latter of which was reflected in the extensive 1689 Ordonnance pour les armées navales. Naval minister and contrôleur généralJean-Baptiste Colbert (1663–83) and later his son, the Marquis de Seignelay (1683–90), had presided over a series of naval reforms in an effort to create a strong battle fleet that competed with the English and Dutch fleets by incorporating the latest tactical and technological refinements. Rebuilding the navy had been a comprehensive effort that required not only the acquisition or construction of ships, but also the management of a complex logistical network, extensive investments in ports and arsenals at Toulon, Brest and Rochefort, the formation of a conscription system to supply the navy with approximately 50,000 sailors, and the oversight of an administrative system of maritime intendantsand commissaireswith a broad array of responsibilities. While the Colbertian navy was built on a network of ‘fisco-financiers’ where administrative and subcontracting roles were often conflated, the growth of La Royaleechoed, it would seem, a wider determination by Louis XIV to reassert monarchical sovereignty and establish firm royal control over the armed forces.

With impressive speed, the navy increased in size and sophistication over the course of three decades, expanding from 18 ships in 1661 to 132 rated warships by January 1692. By 1676, when it gained an important victory over a combined Spanish–Dutch fleet at Palermo during the Franco-Dutch Wars (1672–78), the navy had demonstrated its importance as an instrument of war by enabling the French monarchy to project its military power and influence beyond its immediate reach. The offshore bombardments of Algiers (1682–83), Genoa (1684) and Tripoli (1685) underscored not only the strategic value of a standing fleet, but also the devastating effect with which it could be deployed. On the surface, the results of the Colbertian naval reconstruction programme were decisive, leading to the creation of a fleet capable of challenging the Anglo-Dutch navies for superiority, in warship tonnage terms, and for relative strategic dominance of the Mediterranean between 1676 and 1693.

This chapter is based on John Hattendorf 's observation that British sea power was undermined in the 1930s by the strategic need to prioritise first the air force and then the army. The rise of the Luftwaffe posed a direct threat to London, and ministers were more willing to increase expenditure on the Royal Air Force (RAF) than on the other services. A change in the European balance of power after the Munich conference, and the consequent need to support France on land, forced a reluctant Chamberlain government to expand the army in 1939. Professor Hattendorf 's point can be illustrated graphically by measuring the navy's declining share of defence expenditure after Britain began to rearm in the mid-1930s (Figure 12.1).

The navy's leading share down to 1937 reflected its role in protecting trade routes and a worldwide empire. The army was engaged primarily in imperial defence, and would require heavy expenditure on munitions if it were committed to fight on the European continent. In the absence of a credible air threat before Hitler came to power the RAF had had the smallest share of defence expenditure, but in 1934 Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative party, gave a pledge that the National Government would ‘see to it that in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be in a position inferior to any country within striking distance of our shores’. The Air Staff claimed that fighter, army cooperation and coastal reconnaissance squadrons had no place in measurement of relative air strength, and that what mattered was parity in bombers, which it wished to order in large numbers. The Admiralty was well aware that it was in competition with the army and RAF for funding. It therefore sought to influence grand strategy in ways that would minimise the other services’ demands. In particular, it questioned both the necessity for the army to be ready to fight in Europe and the effectiveness of the RAF's Bomber Command.

Since the 1920s Admiralty planning had been on the basis that, if Japan threatened British interests, the main fleet would be sent to Singapore.