Naval Warfare 1919-45

An Operational History of the Volatile War at Sea

Malcolm H. Murfett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415762069
• eBook ISBN: 9781134048120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Naval Warfare 1919–45 is a comprehensive history of the war at sea from the end of the Great War to the end of World War Two. Showing the bewildering nature and complexity of the war facing those charged with fighting it around the world, this book ranges far and wide: sweeping across all naval theatres and those powers performing major, as well as minor, roles within them.

Armed with the latest material from an extensive set of sources, Malcolm H. Murfett has written an absorbing as well as a comprehensive reference work. He demonstrates that superior equipment and the best intelligence, ominous power and systematic planning, vast finance and suitable training are often simply not enough in themselves to guarantee the successful outcome of a particular encounter at sea. Sometimes the narrow difference between victory and defeat hinges on those infinite variables: the individual's performance under acute pressure and sheer luck.

Naval Warfare 1919–45 is an analytical and interpretive study which is an accessible and fascinating read both for students and for interested members of the general public.

1 Neither one thing nor the other (1919–39)

Such was the grotesque nature and cost of the Great War in both human and economic terms that it soon became referred to as ‘the war to end all wars’.¹ Alas, it didn’t prove to be so. Whatever pious hopes may have been expressed for peace in the months after the armistice had been arranged in November 1918 they amounted to little more than well intentioned wishful thinking. As a utopian concept, the renunciation of war was to have a brief renaissance in Europe before faltering and being abandoned in the years of acute economic, political and social upheaval that followed the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression at the outset of the 1930s.² Thereafter the world began lurching from one international crisis to the next with alarming frequency. Before the end of the decade the ‘lamps’ of peace that had gone out once before in July 1914 were extinguished yet again in Europe as the continent was dragged into another tumultuous war by the forces of craven personal ambition and belligerent national expansionism.³

A little over twenty years before Hitler was to open his blitzkrieg (lightning war) offensive against Poland and usher in the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the major naval powers had emerged from the 1914–18 conflict in some disarray. So much had not gone according to plan. Some cherished notions had fallen well short of expectations.⁴ Instead of being the final arbiter of the war at sea, the capital ship had not exercised the decisive influence on these encounters that so many naval experts had confidently predicted beforehand it would have done.⁵ Controversy has stalked the issue ever since. Were the British capital ships let down by poor equipment or inferior tactics or by inadequate training and dangerous practices? While it is customary to blame problems in range-finding, gun-laying and fire control for undermining their gunnery potential especially over long distances, the jury remains defiantly out on whether the usual suspects – the Admiralty and its use of the Dreyer Tables in preference to Pollen’s Argo system – were really so inept.⁶ To add to the general frustration of those on board the capital ship, even when its gunnery problems were corrected and hits were made on enemy vessels, their shells would often malfunction and fail to explode on impact. Again, in defiance of confident predictions to the contrary, a final definitive set piece battle between the capital ship fleets of the various adversaries had not been waged amidst the dying embers of the war. Instead, contradictorily, the numerically weaker enemy combatants had preferred to retain their principal naval assets as a ‘fleet-in-being’ by keeping them in their bases as a latent threat rather than risking them in some final epic götterdämerung on the high seas that could well have totally eliminated them.⁷

While the battleship and battlecruiser had clearly failed to live up to their prewar hype, the submarine, on the other hand, had comfortably exceeded expectations. Coping with the menace of the U-boat and its withering attack on mercantile trade was to tax the British Admiralty to the hilt. What made its leaders so culpable was that they possessed the means of effectively tackling or neutralising the threat posed by the submersible if only they had adopted it sooner than they did. Convoy had a long history of success when operating under hostile conditions. It was designed for the practice of defending mercantile supplies and war matériel, but it was blatantly ignored by the Admiralty for specious reasons for far too long and at great cost to the Allied war effort. Instead of merely being a defensive tool, the convoy was far more proactive than it was given credit for. As destroyer escorts improved their anti-submarine warfare (ASW) methods so convoy losses fell to below 1% in 1918 while the toll on their would-be U-boat predators increased to over 7%.⁸

It was precisely this ‘blind spot’ mentality amongst a number of senior naval officers in the Admiralty that ensured that non-optimal use was made of the priceless signals intelligence that flooded into Room 40 during the war.⁹ It was also present in the attitude of those within the Senior Service who tended to denigrate the importance and potential of the submarine in the immediate postwar world. Despite its performance in the Great War, or perhaps because of it, the submarine had acquired a reputation for such unscrupulous and devious conduct that a school of opinion developed within Royal Navy circles that looked to ban these vessels in future. Other powers, most notably the French, found this curious British reluctance to embrace the submarine as a key vessel in any future naval struggle as being thoroughly unworldly and peculiarly shortsighted given the problems caused by the U-boats in the recent war.¹⁰

There was much, therefore, for the leading naval powers to absorb and reflect upon in the early days of peace. Would they heed the lessons of the First World War and be better prepared in future if the collective yearning for peace was once again replaced by a nation striving for war? What changes would be made to both strategic and tactical doctrine so as to position naval powers to their best advantage for future operations at sea? Would there be sufficient time to critically test these ideas and theories through rigorous war gaming and naval manoeuvres so as to ensure their viability in time of war?¹¹ What role, for instance, might be played by the aeroplane in any future conflict conducted at sea?¹² To what purposes might radio and radar be used on board ship?¹³ Would sufficient finance, research and training be devoted to improving a ship’s capacity to strike an enemy more often than not, regardless of weather, sea, and rapidly changing battle conditions? What of weapons technology and improvements in warship design and construction? Would sufficient investment be made in the field of cryptology to improve cipher security and, if so, would sufficient attention be also paid to cryptanalysis in a bid to penetrate the communication systems of foreign powers?¹⁴ While any naval staff worth its salt would be forced to consider these questions to improve their combat readiness, solving them would take an immense amount of money. Would governments be prepared to devote the sums necessary to improve their navies when there would be other military claimants seeking a larger share of the service estimates? Could the services expect to receive vast subventions when across Europe most of the continental powers desperately needed time for reconstruction and redevelopment work and required the financial resources to pay for them?¹⁵

Unfortunately, just when a period of calm retrospection and sober accountancy was urgently needed to tackle these momentous tasks, the world braced itself once more for the prospect of yet another naval race. Both the United States Navy (USN) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) seemed poised to embark on new warship construction programmes in the months after the armistice.¹⁶ They could both see a number of strategic and commercial advantages accruing to those who possessed substantial fleets and felt, not unreasonably, that they had the economic clout to afford them. Despite not being able to afford the necessary expenditure to match this construction effort, the leading European powers with naval positions to protect nonetheless felt this twin riposte could not go unanswered and they also began to plan ambitious programmes of their own. Fortunately the world was saved from this collective madness by the American decision to take the lead in active disarmament at the time of the Washington Conference in November 1921.¹⁷ Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes’ decision to take the initiative and lay down an audaciously comprehensive schedule of scrapping took all the naval powers by surprise. Not for the first time an enlightened decision was greeted with angst and much soul searching from those who felt that some nefarious design or sinister purpose lay behind this desire to cut the fleets of the various leading naval powers so appreciably. Weathering the predictable storm of protest, the Americans – who wished to remove possible sources of friction between the victorious Allied and Associated Powers – calmly and firmly insisted upon their plan of naval limitation and the rest of the invited delegates were left to ponder on what this unprecedented scale of disarmament meant for each of them.¹⁸

Of the three treaties to emerge from the Washington Conference, the Five Power Naval Limitation Agreement enshrined the principle of parity between the capital ship force levels of the Americans and the British and established a fixed ratio between their fleets and those of the Japanese, French and Italians on the basis of a 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 proportion. In other words, as the Americans and the British were to be awarded fifteen capital ships each, the IJN would be allowed to build up to nine and the French and Italians five each. Although the non-American delegates expressed harsh words over the final allocation, the principle of disarmament was grudgingly accepted by all concerned.¹⁹ While dealing an unprecedented quantitative blow to the Royal Navy, in particular – by surgically removing a vast amount of old naval clutter that had been accumulated by the Admiralty over the course of time – it proved to be a real qualitative stimulus for those signatory powers that now sought to build a set of modern and powerful capital ship units to replace those that were technically inferior to the new behemoths.²⁰ Complaints about the details of this agreement persisted, however, not least from leading figures in the USN who felt that the parity they had desired and regarded as their due for some time past was still compromised for years to come by the fact that the British had been allowed to retain a higher total tonnage figure for their capital ships than the Americans had been given. Anglophobia was never far from the surface of many of the leading USN personnel at this time and the suspicion that the British had used their wiles to get away with something at the expense of the USN rankled with many American naval officers.²¹

Over the course of the next few years there would be many more sources of disagreement that would conspire to bedevil Anglo-American relations. Almost all would stem from the reluctance of the British Admiralty to embrace anything that was seen as undermining the Royal Navy’s once privileged position on the high seas. In British eyes, Hughes’ startling coup at Washington over the numbers and ratio of capital ships and aircraft carriers must not be repeated in future by accepting similarly punitive agreements over the future of their fleet of cruisers. Setting their faces against such an eventuality on the basis that the United Kingdom was the only island nation to have a worldwide empire and that cruisers were the most appropriate vessels to defend the maritime trade routes between the colonies and the mother country, the British resolutely defended their position in various international forums for the rest of the decade and frustrated those who saw no validity in their special pleading.²²

Notwithstanding what was offered to the British at Washington to win their approval for this agreement, the Japanese gained by far the most important concession. As part of a package deal that would not only place a cap on future Japanese building programmes but also see the forced abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Americans were prepared to provide a level of security for the Japanese in the Western Pacific that was as dramatic as it was ill-conceived. In essence, the Japanese were to be given a decisive measure of monopoly control in the waters of the region by an agreement to prohibit the construction and/or maintenance of any first class naval base closer to Japanese shores than Singapore for the British and Pearl Harbor for the Americans.²³ By offering such an undertaking, the Americans revealed the intensity of their dislike for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and their intention to scrap this nineteen-year-old diplomatic arrangement by any means at their disposal. Whatever the Americans thought about the alliance, cancelling it was a bitter pill for both the British and the Japanese governments to swallow and the more so because it had been administered by the Americans on grounds that were far from convincing. If the US authorities could be believed, the existence of the alliance was deemed to be fundamentally against the Harding administration’s trading interests in the Far East and particularly in China. Since the US saw the entire Pacific as lying within its own sphere of influence, the prospect of an Anglo-Japanese axis contending for power and penetration in the region was unwelcome. Whereas US officials felt thoroughly justified in being cautious and were wont to cite the alliance as a potential threat to peace, neither the British nor the Japanese thought this reason was anything more than a spurious attempt by the Americans to kill a diplomatic accord that didn’t include them.²⁴ Even so the fact that the British succumbed to American pressure and forced the unwilling Japanese to abrogate their strategic alliance was not taken kindly in Tokyo and the reverberations of this momentous decision were to be felt for many years to come both at home and abroad. Apart from anything else, it certainly did nothing to strengthen the hands of the Japanese government or assist those seeking a democratic future in the country. Moreover, it may also be seen as one of those major turning points in the United Kingdom’s fortunes after the war, not least because it managed to convert an admittedly difficult ally into a potential enemy with a disturbing agenda that it would reveal incrementally and ominously to the non-Japanese world over the course of the following two decades.²⁵ That neither the Four Power nor Nine Power Treaties, which rounded out the Washington system, proved to be anything other than calamitous for those of the signatory powers with interests in the Pacific Ocean should surprise few people. Both diplomatic arrangements had been devised with one thing in mind – the elimination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. That they replaced it with a much less effective system of supposedly interlocking relationships was one of the least satisfactory aspects of American diplomacy in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Abbreviations
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Neither One Thing nor the other (1919–39)
• 2. The Opening Gambit (1939)
• 3. Much more than a Phoney War (1940)
• 4. Uncompromising Hostilities (January–November 1941)
• 5. From Pearl Harbor to Madagascar (December 1941–May 1942)
• 6. Stalling the Juggernaut in the Early Summer of 1942
• 7. From Defence to Attack in the Autumn of 1942
• 8. A Change in Momentum (January–August 1943)
• 9. Striking Back (September–December 1943)
• 10. Seizing the Initiative (January–August 1944)
• 11. Tightening the Grip (September–December 1944)
• 12. Stranglehold (1945)
• Conclusion: Rising to the Challenge of Fighting the War at Sea
• Maps
• Appendix I: Allied Convoy Statistics (1939–45)
• Appendix II: Units of Measurement – Conversion Equivalents
• Glossary
• Select Bibliography