The Development of British Naval Thinking

Essays in Memory of Bryan Ranft

Geoffrey Till

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135774141
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This new book brings together Britain's leading naval historians and analysts to present a comprehensive investigation of British naval thinking and what has made it so distinctive over the last three centuries, from the sailing ship era to the current day.

This new volume describes in depth the beginnings of formalized thought about the conduct of naval operations in the 18th Century, its transformation through the impact of industrialization in the 19th Century and its application in the two World Wars of the twentieth. This book concludes with a review of modern British naval thinking and the appearance of naval doctrine against the uncertainties of the loss of empire, the Cold War, nuclear weapons and the huge changes facing us as we move in to the new millennium. How perceptive and distinctive was British naval thinking? Where did British ideas come from? Did they determine or merely follow British experience? Do they explain British naval success ? The contributors to this volume tackle these key questions in a book that will be of considerable interest to the maritime community around the English-speaking world.

This book will be of great interest to all students and professionals with an interest in the history of the Royal Navy, contemporary British maritime operations and strategic studies.

This is a commemorative volume of the life and work of the distinguished Professor Bryan Ranft.

1
Introduction
British naval thinking:
a contradiction in terms?
Geoffrey Till

My strategy lectures are very uphill work. I had no idea when I undertook . . .
[the task] . . . , how difficult it was to present theory to the unused organs of naval officers.¹

This celebrated quotation from the correspondence of Sir Julian Corbett, the foremost British naval strategist whose work will be considered later, nicely encapsulates the notion that the British, and in particular the Royal Navy, do not ‘do’ strategy and, more insultingly still that ‘naval thinking’ is essentially a contradiction in terms. This fits in with a preference for practical, down-to-earth empiricism, rather than the theoretical philosophising which many think distinguishes the British from many of the other Europeans.

Reflecting on the problems of the Royal Navy of the eighteenth century in pinning down their habitual enemy, the French, into as many decisive engagements as it would have liked, John Clerk of Eldin pointed to the French, ‘. . . having acquired a superior knowledge, have adopted some new system of managing great fleets, not known, or not sufficiently attended to by us’. This all went to show, he thought, that

Though a superior degree of knowledge in naval affairs be evidently of the utmost consequence to the inhabitants of this island, yet the subject of naval tactics has long remained among us in a very rude and uncultivated state.²

Mahan likewise lamented the fact that not only were British naval officers not ‘instruit’ in the French sense, they did not want to be: ‘To meet difficulties as they arise, instead of by foresight, to learn by hard experience rather than by reflection or premeditation, are national traits’.³ The problem, many complained, was particularly acute in the late nineteenth century. According to one observer who went by the soubriquet T124, ‘it has to be confessed that in abstract thought concerning the problems of naval warfare’ the Navy’s ‘achievements had not been outstanding’.⁴

Such claimed deficiencies in British naval thinking might be thought especially surprising given the evident centrality of naval and maritime concerns to Britain’s security, prosperity, and even its identity and sense of itself. The Navy was well regarded by people and government. While the Army was perhaps a necessary evil, so far as Pitt was concerned the Navy was: ‘That great foundation of our strength, of our glory and of our characteristic superiority over the rest of the nations of Europe’.⁵

The Navy provided Britain’s fundamental security, it was associated with beneficial trade, economic, social and political liberalism and the restraint of arbitrary power at home and abroad. Thus the ringing tones of Robert, Earl Nugent, in a debate in the Lords, in September 1745:

Let us remember that we are superior to other nations, principally by our riches; that those riches are the gifts of commerce, and that commerce can subsist only while we maintain a naval force superior to that of other princes. A naval power, and an extended trade reciprocally produce each other; without trade we shall want sailors for our ships of war, and without ships of war we shall soon discover that the oppressive ambition of our neighbours will not suffer us to trade. . . . [If] our trade be lost, who can inform us how long we shall be suffered to enjoy our laws or our liberties, or our religion? Without trade, what wealth shall we possess? And without wealth, what alliances can be formed?⁶

A whole variety of assumptions underlay Earl Nugent’s position. Some of them had to do with the cultural and social dimensions of maritime power. Perhaps, ultimately, the most important of Nugent’s claims was a strong sense that a maritime priority chimed in well with what Britain’s leaders and opinion-formers thought were ‘British values’ and their sense of the kind of country they wished Britain to be. As Mackinder remarked: ‘. . . liberty is the natural privilege of an island people’.⁷ The historic association of seapower with open trade on the one hand and with conceptions of freedom and liberal democracy on the other has been much discussed recently.⁸

There is a geophysical strand to this as well – namely the sense that the British are ‘an island race’, insulated from the sordid affairs of the continent of Europe by the English Channel. This common perception has in fact been challenged by those who point out that national identity is based on interaction with others and that Britishness is partly a consequence of cross-channel links and partly of the ‘. . . extended network of communication, diaspora and culture created by the eighteenth century British Empire’. But whether the emphasis is put on the islander aspect of the British, or on the fact that they were at the heart of a major sea-based empire, both would help justify the assertion that ‘salt water runs in the veins of every true-born Englishman’.⁹

Secondly, every now and again, the international context moved in directions that were less benign than usual. The year 1745, when Nugent made his speech was, after all, the year of the very dangerous Jacobite rebellion, a real reminder of how vulnerable Britain could be. As one speaker remarked in a particularly interesting debate in 1743, such dangers required a standing Army to guard against invasions and raids, which the Navy would not always be able to prevent:

Yet considering the great Number of disaffected persons we still have amongst us, even the landing of a small Number of foreign Troops might very well disturb our domestic Tranquillity, if we had not a sufficient Number of regular Troops to send against them at their first landing.¹⁰

Such threats also caused much concern in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Maritime power could indeed be a great source of national strength, but it was a source of vulnerability too, especially given Britain’s dependence on the security of its merchant shipping. In 1929, the then prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, put it like this:

In our case, our navy is the very life of our nation. We are a small island. For good or for ill, the lines of our Empire have been thrown all over the face of the earth. We have to import our food. A month’s blockade, effectively carried out, would starve us all in the event of any conflict. Britain’s navy is Britain itself and the sea is our security and our safety.¹¹

Thirdly, in this period ‘Britain’ was actually not just a collection of mist-shrouded islands off the European mainland, it was a worldwide empire, held together by a network of shipping routes. The British Empire may have begun in a ‘maelstrom of seaborne violence and theft’ but it was transformed into the world’s most powerful polity through a process of ‘globalization with gunboats’.¹² As Jeremy Black has recently reminded us, its maritime character was and is still not always fully appreciated.

Partly this was because the nature of the empire itself underwent significant change. At first this ‘empire of the sea’ was limited to trading outposts, maritime colonies and old-fashioned mercantilism, but increasingly it spread inland and became ‘territorialised’, the province of soldiers and colonial administrators:

Nineteenth century empire is generally seen in terms of power and expansion on land. The dominant image is of a line or square of redcoats confronting charging natives. The geographical focus is on India and, towards the close of the century, Africa. Ideas associated with David Livingstone or Rudyard Kipling are those of the interior: the dark forests of Africa for the former, distant hill-stations and mountain valleys for the latter. All of these were indeed important, but they draw

attention from the naval power on which the British position rested, and that provided a consistent existent goal throughout the period, linking the years immediately after Waterloo to the late Victorian era. Expansion on land relied on Pax Britannica at sea, naval hegemony providing the secure background to force projection. This hegemony combined with industrial growth and a liberal entrepreneurial ethos to encourage and sustain the commitment to free trade and a liberal international order that was to be a defining feature of nineteenth-century British imperialism. This commitment to free trade was also to be of great importance for economic growth across the world, although the ‘globalisation’, or, at least, openness to markets, it fostered also caused major problems of adjustment, and the benefits it brought were spread very unequally. Trade, rather than costly expansion on land was the source of Britain’s status as the world’s wealthiest nation, and thus of her power, more particularly the resources that were to underwrite government revenues, while maritime strength was also crucial to the image of British power.¹³

All these assumptions were exemplified in the maritime agenda of Tory opposition to the Walpole administration in the mid-eighteenth century. Its defiant Britishness was illustrated by constant references to the danger that the ‘. . . whole strength of the British Empire was to be steer’d by the Hannoverian rudder’.¹⁴ Patriotic Britons should not permit the ‘. . . sacrifice of the wealth and interest of Great Britain to the narrow views and petty concerns of a German Electorate . . . We ought as far as possible to enjoy the Advantage Nature has bestowed on us of being an island, and consequently to keep as free as we can from all quarrels of the continent’.

The British should defend their interests not other peoples’. It was ‘[u]n pardonable to neglect a necessary maritime war for the security of our Trade and Navigation for an unnecessary land war’ since this would leave ‘. . . our commerce a prey to a piratical enemy, our losses unrecompensed, our injuries unavenged and our Honour unretrieved’. It made sense to concentrate resources on the Navy and the Marines, rather than on an Army operating on the mainland of Europe:

We ought to disband a great part of the troops we have now on foot, in order to be able to increase our naval Force, because it is upon that alone, after the balance of Power upon the Continent is destroyed, that we must depend for the continuance of our future Independency.

Naval forces, moreover, would be much cheaper for the mercantile sea trading British to provide because Britain had twice as many hulls, ports and seamen as anyone else. The Navy would also offer sufficient and cost-effective defence against the risk of invasion: ‘You can be in no danger from any Invasion that can be made upon you, as long as you have a superior Force at Sea’. Moreover, a standing Army was a permanent, unnecessary and unnatural threat to civil liberties.

It was all summed up by one speaker in the debate like this:

If they should attack before their having such a Fleet ready, and we should confine ourselves to our own Element, without wasting our Strength in romantic Expeditions upon the Continent and maintaining numerous land Armies, we should be gainers by the War, by destroying their plantations and putting an entire Stop to their Trade, and thereby ridding ourselves of our greatest Rival in Manufactures and Commerce; so that I do not know, but it would be one of the greatest Favours the French could do us to provoke us to a Sea War, and one of the greatest Injuries we can do ourselves, is to engage without Necessity in an expensive land one . . .

Clearly, in these debates, the opposition’s vision of Britain was of a country that was strong, that should be invulnerable to external attack and proof against insurrection at home, free from the threat of tyranny and aloof from the petty quarrels of Europe. Above all, it was prosperous, mercantile and profoundly maritime.

Of course, there was more than a dash of political hyperbole in all this.
The Walpole administration and its successors were equally aware of Britain’s maritime imperatives, but were apt to make the point that things were not as simple as the opposition claimed, especially when there was no power balance on the continent of Europe for Britain to manipulate to its benefit as cost effectively as the opposition claimed it could. Instead the British would need physically and substantially to intervene on the mainland in order to avert the grisly prospect of a malign imbalance of power the other side of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction: British Naval Thinking: A Contradiction In Terms?
• 2: The Idea of Naval Strategy In Britain In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 3: The Development of Education In the Royal Navy: 1854–1914
• 4: Corbett and the Emergence of a British School?
• 5: 1914–18: The Proof of the Pudding
• 6: Richmond and the Faith Reaffirmed: British Naval Thinking Between the Wars
• 7: All Sorts of Wars: British Naval Thinking and Technology In the Second World War
• 8: British Naval Thinking In the Nuclear Age
• 9: The Discovery of Doctrine: British Naval Thinking At the Close of the Twentieth Century
• Epilogue: Professor Bryan McLaren Ranft
• Bibliography