The word ‘strategy’ is a relatively recent import into Western languages, first appearing in English in the early nineteenth century (though it was in use in French rather earlier) as a direct rendering of the Greek word meaning ‘generalship’. For much of that century it was usually applied to the battlefield, meaning something close to the modern ‘tactics’, and it was not often applied to war at sea. Julian Corbett at the end of the century was the first to publish on the strategy of naval warfare, and he deliberately avoided the term ‘naval strategy’ as being too limited and parochial. The proper strategy for a naval power, he maintained, was a ‘maritime strategy’, one embracing both services and all arms. Since Corbett's time, ‘strategy’ has come to be applied ever more widely. It has long been casually used to refer to almost any sort of systematic or wide-ranging planning, not necessarily having any connection with war. In universities today a ‘professor of strategy’ is more likely to be studying business or economics than warfare. Even within a military context, ‘strategy’ has long outgrown its original meaning. In its modern sense it is not so much the art of the general as the art of the General Staff. It covers the whole organisation and management of war.

John Hattendorf has long taught and studied strategy in the broadest of senses. His published work ranges as widely in time and space and treatment as any one scholar could go in a single lifetime (if not several), but the focus of his work has always been on the proper employment of armed forces, especially navies. As befits a Professor of History seated in that most intellectual of naval establishments the US Naval War College, he has taken a particular interest in the study and teaching of naval warfare, in the ways in which navies think, learn, and act on what they have learnt. Naturally and properly, his instrument and theirs has been history. The present slips constantly between our fingers; the future, which it would be so convenient to know, is regrettably inaccessible; only the past (recent or distant) yields a great bank of evidence with which to study navies and the conduct of war at sea.

For the British Navy of the eighteenth century, there was no aspect of naval warfare that caused as much difficulty and anguish as manning the fleet. Finding the necessary skilled seamen to man warships was the alpha and omega of the navy's problems. Over the course of the so-called ‘Second Hundred Years’ War’ between Britain and France, British fleets were forced to grow in order to gain and maintain seaborne superiority, in both home and distant waters. Larger and more numerous warships required increasing numbers of men. The English Navy of 1695 employed around 48,000 men, while the Royal Navy of 1810 employed over 145,000 men to face Napoleonic France. As each progressive conflict superseded its predecessor in size and scope, so too did the matter of manning British warships. Finding enough men, and in particular enough skilled men, to man the navy's ships was a strategic as well as a logistical problem for naval administrators. This chapter argues that successfully manning the fleet was the foundation of British naval strategy in the late eighteenth century. The Impress Service and the controversial system of impressment largely succeeded in providing skilled seamen for the navy and laid the foundation for the navy's remarkable performance in the two decades of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. However, contrary to most of the received historiography, impressment did not provide the majority of naval recruits.

The historiography of British naval manpower, and in particular the extensive literature on impressment, has suffered from a noticeable lack of statistical data. At the heart of this chapter is the first substantial and statistically significant study of naval manpower, which examines the recruitment of over 27,000 sailors during the French Revolutionary Wars. Its analysis suggests that most of the assumptions underpinning the current scholarship on impressment are inaccurate: most members of the lower deck were volunteers; impressment was comparatively rare and targeted a select group of experienced sailors. By examining the archival record – rather than relying, as too many historians have done, on Victorian polemics on the evils of impressment – this chapter revises the historiography of British naval manning policy and simultaneously demonstrates its significance for British naval strategy in the eighteenth century.

In 1943, Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, President of the Japanese Naval War College, told Professor Iwao Koyama of Kyoto University gravely that ‘Now Japan is at war with the maritime nations, the United States and the United Kingdom. There were many reasons to enter the war, but I believe one of the main reasons was that in educating officers of the Imperial Navy and Army, we put too much emphasis on the techniques and technologies of battle.’

Oikawa admits the failure of higher education in the Japanese Navy, which focused on battle rather than on war. The education was based on memorisation rather than on creativity and originality, and tended to suppress flexible thinking. But it is not fair to judge the officers of the Showa era (1925–89) in isolation; we have to consider how the Japanese Navy had evolved since the days of its creation in the 1860s. The failure of naval higher education was not simply an institutional or educational problem, but sprang from the lack of an ‘intellectual attitude’. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the root causes of this failure, from the foundation of the Imperial Japanese Navy, up to 1905 when it triumphed over the Russian Navy.

In the same period, the US Navy was also in the process of modernisation. Its higher education system was shaped by Commodore Stephen B. Luce, who ‘taught the Navy to think, to think about the Navy as a whole’. That is, he defined a system of naval professional thinking, and a method of teaching it. In this chapter, this intellectual system is referred to as ‘Naval Intellectualism’. Among Luce's many achievements, the establishment of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island to teach the art and science of war, was the key to a revolution in military higher education.

This chapter's key term is therefore ‘naval intellectualism’. To understand this concept, I first examine the evolution of the US Navy's intellectual posture in the late nineteenth century, which guided the rise of the US Navy in the twentieth century.

The battlecruiser, brainchild of colourful First Sea Lord Sir Jackie Fisher, has long been a matter of controversy. Contemporaries argued over the use and value of these warships; the loss by catastrophic magazine explosion of three of these vessels at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 further polarised this debate; and modern-day historians have, for various reasons, spilt a great deal of ink over their genesis and purpose. In the current historiography there are two rival explanations for their origins. On the one hand there are revisionist historians such as Jon Sumida, who argue that the battlecruiser was conceived as an imperial power-projection vessel, whose roots lay in the need to find an antidote to Franco-Russian plans to wage a guerre de courseagainst British shipping with a fleet of commerce-raiding armoured cruisers. On the other side of the debate are historians, such as the present author, who argue that the origins of the battlecruiser are grounded in the Anglo-German antagonism of the early twentieth century. In this formulation, this warship type was specifically devised as a counter to German plans to convert fast transatlantic liners into auxiliary cruisers and deploy them as raiders on the Atlantic trade routes. An exceptionally fast surface warship able to cut through the heavy Atlantic swells that could swallow smaller vessels and so overtake the fast German liners that ploughed this route with ease led first to subsidised British liners and then to the battlecruiser. This essay will contribute to this debate by demonstrating that the former argument is based upon an inaccurate depiction of relative naval strength and illustrate the limitations inherent on focusing purely upon the originsof the battlecruiser, without paying sufficient attention to how the craft were actually employed.

The first of these interpretations assumes that a global Franco-Russian armoured cruiser threat was foremost in the Admiralty's thinking when the battlecruiser was conceived. However, a careful examination of the available documentary evidence reveals this premise to be unsustainable. The first battlecruiser to be laid down was HMS Inflexible, the keel plate of which was placed in position on the slipway on 5 February 1906.

In ‘the noble city’ of Tournai in 1394, ‘In Honour of God and the King of France/ There was made in very fine ordinance’. In July and August fifty teams from across the Low Countries came together for a ‘feast and noble affair/ the handsome game of the crossbow’. They competed to ‘hit two targets’, the two large targets being set up at each end of the market place in the town centre. As the crossbowmen entered Tournai they passed through streets bedecked with cloth. ‘Everything was decorated very well/ by skilled workers/ and hung with cloths/ to show castles argent on a field of gules [i.e. the arms of Tournai].’ Other buildings were draped in the French royal colours – green and white – demonstrating Tournai's loyalty to the king and sense of civic pride. The crossbowmen processing past these buildings were no less elaborate. Those of Bruges carried gold and silver and all had been given funds by their town officials to pay for their journey to Tournai. Many other civic authorities had likewise given their guild-brothers money ‘for the honour of the town’. A nearcontemporary poem describing the events lists each of the fifty towns that had sent teams. They included great Flemish centres such as Ypres and Lille and small towns like Dixmuide and Sluis; guilds came from Brabant, Hainaut and Holland, from nearby places like Condé and from more distant French towns, including Laon and Paris. Numerous prizes of ‘silver, gold and finery’ were given for the best individual and group shooters, for those who had travelled the greatest distance and for the guild that performed the best play. The event was not a one off; rather, it was part of an elaborate series of archery and crossbow competitions staged in the Low Countries throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Where had these skilled crossbowmen competing for prizes learnt their skills? Who were they? Were they rich civic elites, or craftsmen from the middling ranks of urban society? Why did Tournai host such an elaborate event and allow such a potentially dangerous activity to take over civic space during much of the summer?

Introduction

In 1918, Admiral William S. Sims, the newly appointed President of the United States Naval War College, wrote to Professor H. Spenser Wilkinson, the first Chichele Professor of Military History at the University of Oxford:

These men shared a correspondence over the next four years concerning ‘ideas on education for Officers for the Navy’ and ‘the principles of the art of warfare’. Their conclusions shaped the teaching of strategy and sea power at the Naval War College throughout the interwar period, creating an intellectual legacy still evident today in the courses and material taught.

Their short exchange of letters and meetings in London and Oxford created a mutual interest and an important exchange of ideas, particularly for the reforms Sims was about to make at the United States Naval War College. Towards the end of Sims's time as president, he told Wilkinson, ‘As you doubtless know, many of your books are in constant use at the Naval War College and are widely quoted in naval writings.’ Indeed, Sims requested an extra thirty copies of The Brain of the Navy(1895) from Wilkinson, because ‘[the College] consider[ed] this to be so suggestive and valuable to the beginners at the college that [it] wish[ed] to have these copies for their use’. As Sims wrote, ‘This little book will never be out of date as far as this college is concerned.’ Wilkinson secured one hundred copies for Sims. This transfer of ideas and influence poses a number of key questions about our understanding of the development of the Naval War College not only under Sims's presidency, but also throughout the years before the Second World War.

The 1940s and early 1950s were a stormy period for the Royal Navy's capital ships. They were the target of a great deal of criticism from sources at a high level in government, both political and military. These attacks were far more than the usual scrutiny of service programmes and amounted to fundamental questioning of whether the capital ship still had a role in naval strategy or in national strategy more broadly. Its role was debated during the war but was fought over even more intensely afterwards, when the evidence of the wartime years was deployed on both sides of a bitter and high-stakes debate over current and future policy.

This chapter explores the controversy over the role of the capital ship – defined simply as the most important unit of the fleet and specifically in this period meaning battleships, battlecruisers and, increasingly, aircraft carriers. It looks briefly at how the experience of the First World War foreshadowed the challenges that were to come, before examining the role of the capital ship during the Second World War, when the challenge truly manifested. Finally, it surveys the debate through the first post-war decade when the dispute not only intensified but also broadened to call into question the very need for naval power.

The battleship retained a central albeit evolving place in naval strategy during the war and afterwards until (as the Admiralty foresaw on the horizon) its role could be better performed by other means. As the battleship declined – a process far slower than its critics suggested – its role as capital ship was taken on by the carrier. The latter could perform the classic role of neutralising enemy capital ships but also offered other capabilities, countering new threats and adding a whole new dimension to power projection. However, the ambitions of the air enthusiasts, both uniformed and civilian, complicated this transition and ensured that for long after the period covered in this chapter, the place in British strategy of the new capital ship, and of the navy in general, would be anything but plain sailing.

Sailing vessels formed the vast majority of the ships in Spanish military service in medieval and early modern times. Nonetheless, Spain also used galley fleets in the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages, and later expanded their use wherever Spain had a presence in the world, including the coastal waters of the Americas and South-East Asia. Unlike the Republic of Venice in its heyday, Spain used galleys exclusively for military purposes. In the Mediterranean, they formed a crucial element of Spain's defensive and offensive strategy during the confrontation with the Ottoman Empire and its satellite states in North Africa in the sixteenth century.

Because Spanish galleys performed well at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, King Philip II sought to increase their numbers. However, the government had difficulty finding enough men to pull the oars and enough captains and other wage-earning officers with the necessary skills to organise and command multinational crews. There were a number of reasons for the difficulty, in part because mariners and naval officers had more attractive choices than the galleys. Spain's transatlantic fleets were approaching their peak in the late sixteenth century, with some two hundred vessels involved in the trade each year. Moreover, the military needs of the crown increased in the same period, spurred by English and French incursions into Spanish America in the late 1570s and Philip II's contested claim to the Portuguese throne after 1578. The naval build-up preceding the armada sent against England in 1588 also increased the demand for mariners at all ranks. The recruitment of captains for Spain's Mediterranean galleys required particular care. By the late sixteenth century, most of the galley oarsmen were slaves, prisoners of war or convicted criminals. Keeping order on board, as well as encouraging the best performance from all hands, required more than the usual skills of a competent naval officer. For noblemen, serving the king as a galley captain challenged not only their abilities as leaders, but also their sense of honour.

Considerable documentation regarding galley service by Spanish noblemen exists in the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), the Archivo del Museo Naval (AMN) and the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), both in Madrid, and in other depositories.

In a book honouring a great naval educator it is only fitting that we reflect on the career of another. In the last decades of the nineteenth century navies grappled with the problem of preparing their officer corps for future wars, while the pace of technological change was accelerating, and there were few conflicts to inform the development of tactical and strategic doctrine. The United States Naval War College, established in 1884, addressed this issue as a vital preparatory stage for the creation of a new navy. In Great Britain the problem was compounded by the unique nature of the Imperial state, a global collection of colonies, dominions, informal economic zones and markets, linked by seaborne and submarine telegraph communications, and wholly dependent on sea control. Sir Julian Corbett developed classical strategic theory, hitherto dominated by continental military concerns to explain the strategic logic of British power. This chapter considers the origins and purpose of Corbett's Some Principles of Maritime Strategyof 1911. While Corbett's work has long been recognised as an outstanding intellectual contribution to strategic thought and defence education, it seems the case needs restatement.

A public intellectual, intimately engaged with naval and political circles at the highest levels, most of Corbett's contacts were on the Fisherite and Liberal Imperialist sides of the debate. They were the men in power. He worked for the Royal Navy because he loved the Service, found the work congenial, and retained the intellectual independence secured by private wealth, a global investment portfolio and London property.

Between 1902 and 1914 Corbett systematically analysed English/British strategy from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, suitably updated by examining the Spanish–American and Russo-Japanese Wars of 1898 and 1904–5, in a sophisticated attempt to establish a ‘British’ strategic model that was consistent with the classic texts of Clausewitz and Jomini, rather than naval thinkers like Mahan and Philip Colomb. He sought to explain the primacy of maritime over continental power to contemporary British statesmen and senior officers. He was not a ‘navalist’: he stressed army–navy cooperation, and dismissed naval strategy as a ‘minor’ or operational issue.

Formulating the raison d’être for the Dutch Navy in early modern times is not difficult. The Low Countries and later the Dutch Republic bordered the North Sea, and on the inland side the Zuyder Zee. Salt water offered possibilities for invasion or raids from overseas. The Dutch themselves used the sea for merchant shipping and fisheries. They were eager to open the whole world for their economic activities. Naval forces were the foremost safeguard against invasion. Protection of commercial shipping and fisheries required convoys. Overseas expansion required offensive sea power.

The Sixteenth Century

The Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands, Charles V and Philip II, started the organisation of regular naval forces. The city of Veere in Zeeland became the centre of all their naval activities. At some periods there were even some permanent warships. Differences of interests between the provinces hampered the introduction of fixed convoys on shipping routes to western and southern Europe and also for the fisheries, but some occasional state protection could nevertheless be provided. The incursions of the Protestant rebels called ‘Sea Beggars’ from 1566 to 1572 proved the vulnerability of the coastal areas along the North Sea and Zuyder Zee. Hereafter, nobody in the rebellious North and in the loyal South had to be convinced that a navy was an absolute necessity.

In the North it was impossible to establish one centralised naval organisation. Provincial and local interests, the accidents of war and simple power politics created five different admiralties, located in the three maritime provinces of Zeeland, Holland and Friesland, and specifically in the cities of Middelburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Hoorn or Enkhuizen, and Dokkum, later Harlingen. The newly born Republic badly needed naval forces in a war that would last for eighty years until 1648. Spain and the Southern Netherlands, and in particular the Dunkirk privateers, represented a constant threat, not only by numerous raids and invasions, but also by their efficient attacks on herring and other fishing boats, and of course on all kinds of merchantmen. The enemy endangered the Dutch economy, which was growing very fast in particular from the 1590s. The Dutch entered into the Mediterranean trades and crossed the equator.