Naval Blockades and Seapower

Strategies and Counter-Strategies, 1805-2005

Bruce Allen Elleman, Sarah C.M. Paine, Bruce A. Elleman, S.C.M. Paine, Bruce Allen Elleman, Sarah C.M. Paine, Bruce A. Elleman, S.C.M. Paine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415354660
• eBook ISBN: 9781134257287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This new collection of scholarly, readable, and up-to-date essays covers the most significant naval blockades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Here the reader can find Napoleon's Continental Blockade of England, the Anglo-American War of 1812, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the first Sino-Japanese War 1894-95, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the second Sino-Japanese War 1937-45, the Second World War in Europe and Asia, the Nationalist attempt to blockade the PRC, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the British blockade of Rhodesia, the Falklands War, the Persian Gulf interdiction program, the PRC "missile" blockade of Taiwan in 1996, and finally Australia's recent "reverse" blockade to keep illegal aliens out of the country.

The authors of each chapter address the causes of the blockade in question, its long and short-term repercussions, and the course of the blockade itself. More generally, they address the state of the literature, taking advantage of new research and new methodologies to provide something of value to both the specialist and non-specialist reader. Taken as a whole, this volume presents fresh insights into issues such as what a blockade is, why countries might choose them, which navies can and cannot make use of them, what responses lead to satisfactory or unsatisfactory conclusions, and how far-reaching their consequences tend to be.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of strategic studies, military history and maritime studies in particular.

PART I

Blockades and Seapower

1 Introduction

Bruce A. Elleman and S.C.M. Paine^*

Naval blockades have historically been associated with the “starvation blockade” of World War I, and more recently with the danger surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Contrary to these highly publicized blockades, many naval blockades have been conducted with little fanfare, and relatively little public awareness. This does not mean that they have been ineffective, however, and as a military tactic naval blockades have time after time shown themselves to be one of the most efficient ways to exert pressure on an opponent. While some blockades have been studied by scholars capable of placing these events in their social, political, and naval context, these authors have been the exception, not the rule. For this reason, this book hopes to fill a major gap in the academic literature.

This volume will focus on how and why naval blockades are adopted and conducted in both non-war and war-time conflicts. When re-examining some of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most important naval blockades, several factors become immediately apparent. First, while naval blockades have most frequently been conducted by sea powers against land powers – the most well-known examples of this, of course, were the British attempts to blockade Germany in World Wars I and II – there are times when a continental country tries to cut an island nation off from international trade, as Napoleon tried to do with Britain’s trade with the rest of Europe from 1803 to 1815, or China tried to do with Taiwan in 1996.

Second, blockades can be very time-consuming affairs, especially if the country being blockaded – and this applies in particular to land powers – can turn away from its sea lines of communications (SLOCs) and instead open new land lines of communications (LOCs) to help fill the gap. As shown positively by the Crimean War and negatively by the Nationalist blockade of China during the 1950s, speed is essential, and the longer a land power has to create new communication and trade routes the less effective the blockade will be.

Third, the role of technology in naval blockades has been especially crucial, from the transition from wood to copper-hulled ships in the early nineteenth century, from coal to oil combustion in the early twentieth century, and then with the inclusion of air power and submarines to assist surface ships to keep the blockade tight; perhaps in no other sphere of military activity have changes in technology had such an immediate and obvious impact on naval tactics. Although almost all of the chapters in this volume prove this point in one way or another, good examples include the more dependable coal supplies of the U.S. Navy during the Spanish–American War, just as the modern and hi-tech ships of the 1990s gave the coalition in Iraq the leverage it needed to halt oil smuggling.

Another important factor is the relationship between International Law and blockade. As Wolff H. von Heinegg shows, confusion about the legal meaning of blockade is the norm, not the exception, when evaluating naval blockades. Because of the intricate international rules governing blockades, countries that adopt this tactic have often been hesitant to identify it as such. By never officially declaring war they can avoid many restrictions. Calling the conflict a “civil war,” rather than an international conflict, allows them to ignore one group of laws, while calling blockades a “quarantine,” “embargo,” or “sanctions” can also affect how international law regards it.

While legal definitions of naval blockades attempt to be precise, the range of activities that have historically fit under this rubric are vast indeed. The eighteen case studies in this book reflect this wide range of activities, as well as the extraordinary diversity of experience navies have encountered while attempting to carry them out. If there is a deliberate bias in this book, it is towards naval blockades that have had major repercussions in a particular war or international conflict. The authors have focused on these cases because they provide more applicable lessons about when, how, and in what manner naval blockades have most effectively been utilized in past, and so perhaps may also be useful in future conflicts.

There is a popular image of the naval blockade as a line of ships standing off an enemy’s coastline with blockade runners attempting to break their way through the wall. While sometimes true, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that naval blockades frequently take other forms. They are not always directed against a specific port or stretch of coastline, nor do they have to take place at sea at all, so long as their goal of disrupting naval trade is achieved.

In chronological order, we begin our study with one of the most famous cases of a non-naval blockade: Napoleon’s “continental” blockade against Great Britain. Beginning in 1806, immediately after France’s 1805 naval defeat at Trafalgar that had ceded control of the seas to England, and evolving until Napoleon’s final fall in 1815, the continental blockade attempted to halt all British exports to the continent. As Silvia Marzagalli shows, however, Napoleon’s blockade was undermined by greedy customs agents, desperate smugglers, and merchants who were not only willing, but eager, to purchase British goods.

Next, we turn to an example of naval blockade in the age of sail, the British blockade of American shores in the War of 1812. In his chapter, Wade Dudley challenges the prevailing scholarly opinion that this blockade was highly effective, and instead discusses how the United States exited the war with a larger merchant marine and greater exports than before the conflict began. In particular, inadequate British interdiction gave the U.S. government the time it needed to build and outfit many new vessels. After the war, these technologically superior ships-of-the-line became the core for a new and highly modern United States Navy.

Similar to the War of 1812, the blockade during the Crimean War was a naval affair, but this time conducted in two widely distant theaters: the Baltic and the Black seas. However, as Andrew D. Lambert shows us, it remained a comparatively short war and the blockading parties had the relatively limited objectives of degrading Russia’s military capabilities, weakening the state’s resources, and pushing the Russian Tsar to accept peace negotiations. For the first time, steam power gave British and French warships the necessary mobility and speed to be able to enforce a tight blockade, while more powerful armaments allowed a naval fleet to attack and destroy fortified harbors. Finally, a new set of international laws, codified in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, would help regulate naval blockades during limited wars for the next 60 years.

Only a few years after the short and limited Crimean War, the much longer American Civil War revealed other uses for naval blockades. David G. Surdam shows how the Union blockade of the South reduced cotton exports, undermined the Confederacy’s buying power, and inhibited the ability of the southern states to import necessary military goods, such as British iron for building railways and – most importantly – warships. Since the Civil War was not a limited war, and the goal was never to achieve a negotiated peace but total victory, the Union blockade’s attrition-style methods presaged in many ways the blockades of the two World Wars.

During the late nineteenth century, Japan and China modernized their respective militaries and acquired state-of-the-art naval equipment. But Japan also Westernized its domestic political, legal, economic, and educational institutions, overturning the traditional social order, whereas China did not. S.C.M. Paine shows how these reforms bore fruit in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95, when Japan overturned the traditional balance of power in the Far East to supplant China as the regional hegemon. A tight naval blockade and a highly successful land campaign captured the Beiyang Fleet at anchor in Weihaiwei harbor, thus making the new maritime balance of power permanent.

In the Spanish–American War three years later, it was the American naval and land forces that surrounded, smoked out, and eventually defeated Admiral Cervera’s Spanish Fleet off Santiago de Cuba. As described by Mark L. Hayes, this was really a battle of logistics, since the fleet with the most dependable energy supplies and the higher grade coal could dominate the seas. The U.S. Navy’s close blockade of Cuba proved conclusively the all-important role of logistics in a new era of technological warfare.

The British blockade of Germany during World War I was an undeclared economic blockade that has gained general approbrium as a “starvation blockade.” As Paul G. Halpern shows in his chapter, it took many years for the blockade to have any effect in Germany at all, and only in late 1916 and early 1917 was there even a noticeable impact on food prices. During this delay, the allied countries of Serbia, Rumania, and Russia were either overrun or collapsed from within. But it cannot be denied that, in combination with victory on the battlefield, the British blockade helped defeat Germany.

For Japan, World War II began in 1937 with the outbreak of a full-scale war in China. As Ken-ichi Arakawa shows, a Japanese naval blockade of the Chinese coast remained “pacific” and so had difficulty halting neutral trade with China. The Nationalists could also compensate for the blockade by relying increasingly on the overland trade between the USSR and China, and on the Hanoi and Burmese trade routes. Finally, Japanese actions in China triggered a counter-blockade by the United States in the form of a trade embargo that eventually widened the war. By 1945, it was clear that the unlimited U.S. naval blockade of Japan, not Japan’s pacific blockade of China, had the greater impact.

In Europe, meanwhile, Britain had its hands full with its naval blockade against the Axis powers. According to Geoffrey Till, Britain’s task was made more difficult by the neutral powers, including the United States. Over time, however, the blockade tightened, and by July 1940 the Navicert system became compulsory. Once the United States entered the war, interception of German blockade runners became easier, and in 1943 over 60 percent of German imports by sea were intercepted. Although it is difficult to assess the economic impact of the British blockade when viewed in isolation, in combination with Allied bombing and with military victory on the battlefield it undoubtedly played an important role in the war effort.

Four years later in China, the Nationalists tried to create a similar impact by blockading the enormously long Chinese coast. As Bruce A. Elleman shows, the Nationalist forces based on Taiwan made use of China’s many offshore islands to institute both a sea-, and later in the 1950s, an air-patrolled blockade of south-eastern China. The Nationalist blockade met with only limited success, due to widespread corruption and the resultant smuggling. However, it did force the Communists to increase their reliance on trade with the Soviet Union, which may have helped exacerbate Sino–Soviet tensions.

The first “hot” conflict of the Cold War, on the Korean peninsula, was a limited war, with fighting taking place on mountainous and rugged terrain. As Malcolm Muir shows, these political and geographic limitations meant that the U.S.-led sea and air blockade of North Korea, and in particular of Wonsan harbor, met with only limited success. Although the city of Wonsan was devastated, the movement of crucial supplies to North Korean and Chinese troops at the front continued uninterrupted, especially at night. Air bombardment of truck convoys and bridges was more successful, but the enemy could replace and repair the damage for a fraction of the cost of destroying then. In the end, the very primitiveness of the North Korean transportation network, when added to an almost unlimited pool of cheap labor, made the naval and air blockade indecisive.

The U.S. “quarantine” operation against Cuba proved to be more successful, since it forced the USSR to back down and halt delivery of additional strategic missiles to Cuba. As Jeffrey G. Barlow reveals, however, while the overwhelming force that the U.S. Navy could bring to bear, and especially the sustainability of these forces over many weeks at sea, were essential elements in the success of the blockade effort, it was the Soviet leadership’s fear of an American amphibious invasion of Cuba that most likely convinced them to withdraw the nuclear weapon systems already present on the island.

In Vietnam, there were in effect two U.S. blockades, the first against naval infiltrators from North Vietnam into the South beginning in 1965, and the effort beginning in 1972 to mine North Vietnam’s major harbors. Both operations registered successes. As Spencer C. Tucker explains in his chapter, U.S. ships in the first of these blockades interdicted and sank more than 50 ships attempting to bring supplies to insurgents in the South, and in the second aerial mining virtually cut off all foreign imports through Haiphong harbor. None the less, adequate military supplies continued to reach the Viet Cong through Cambodia and along the Ho Chi Minh trail, while land routes through China were sufficient to keep the regime in North Vietnam supplied. Politically, both blockade efforts did help push North Vietnam into signing the January 1973 Paris Peace, but only two years after the blockades ended South Vietnam was invaded and absorbed by the North.

Great Britain’s blockade of Rhodesia from 1966 to 1975 was a very different affair from the naval and mining blockades of the Vietnam War. As discussed by Richard A. Mobley, interdicting the oil flow through Mozambique’s port of Beira soon became the most visible sign of London’s determination to uphold UN sanctions against the breakaway South Rhodesian government (today Zimbabwe). Because of intensive exposure by the press, however, Whitehall soon discovered that ending the highly visible blockade would send the exactly opposite message. As a result, it became a virtual prisoner to the inflexible language embodied in Security Council Resolution 221, a resolution it had itself submitted to the UN. Because Great Britain felt it could not afford to halt the blockade, the increasingly ineffective Beira blockade dragged on for ten weary years at an estimated cost of a hundred million pounds.

British experience with naval blockades in the Beira patrol bore fruit against Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War. As Charles W. Koburger shows, the British Navy enjoyed a technical edge over its opponent, in particular with vertical/short take-off and landing (VSTOL) aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, and advanced missiles, even while the highly trained crews and pilots were able to defeat their, in many cases, equally well-equipped enemy. Widely described as a “limited blockade,” the British – with the exceptio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Blockades and Seapower
• PART II: Blockades Through World War II
• Part III: Blockades after World War II
• PART IV: Contemporary Blockade Strategy
• Notes
• Bibliography