This People's Navy. The Making of American Sea Power

470 Pages·1991·140.147 MB·English

by  Kenneth J. Hagan

THIS
PEOPLE'S NAVY
The Making of American Sea Power
J.
Kenneth J-Iagan
11
2 lehrJ 'uhl fUr
i Auslandswissenschaft
1~1
THE FREE PRESS
A Division of Macmillan, Inc.
NEW YOHK
Collier Macmillan Canada
TORONTO
Maxwell Macmillan International
NEW YORK OXFOHD SINGAPOHE SYDNEY
1 (, (;.
/ ..lJ
Copyright © 1991 by The Free Press
A Division of Macmillan, Im:.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means. ele<:troni<: or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the Publisher.
The Free Press
A Division of Macmillan, Inc.
866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.
1200 Eglinton Avenue East
Suite 200
Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1
Printed in the United States of America
printing number
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hagan, Kenneth J.
This people's Navy: the making of American sea power/Kenneth J·
Hagan.
p. em.
I.1cludes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-02-913470--6
I. United States-History, Naval. 2. United States. Navy-
History. I. Title.
E182.H16 1991
359'. 00973-clc20 90-44722
CIP
-
TO
CHARLES SOUTTER CAMPBELL
Mentor
AND
CHARLES CONRAD CAMPBELL
Critic
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
l ntroduction xi
1 The American Way of War at Sea, 1775-1783 1
2 "A Good Occasion to Begin a Navy," 1783-1800 21
3 "Strength and Bravery in Every Sea," 1801-1815 54
4 Extending the Empire of Commerce, 1815-1846 91
5 Brown-Water War for a Blue-Water Empi1·e,
1846-1860 125
6 A Navy Divided Against Itself, 1861-1890 161
7 "Not Merely a Navy for Defense," 1890-1898 193
8 "Incomparably the Greatest Navy in the World,"
1898-1918 228
9 Facing the Island Empires, 1919-1933 259
10 Guerre de Course Once Again, 1933-1945 281
11 The Navy's War in the Pacific, 1941-1945 305
12 In Search of a Mission, 1945-1962 333
13 Toward a Six-Hundred-Ship Navy, 1963-1990 362
Epilogue 389
Bibliographical Essay 391
Index 412
Acknowledgments
THIS book evolved during my teaching of American
naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy for the last seventeen years
and while I was counseling officer-instructors in the Naval R. 0. T. C.
program on how to teach the subject at fifty-plus universities and
colleges across the land. My greatest debt therefore is to the mid
shipmen and naval officers who have more or less willingly endured
my lectures, discussions, and questions. I hasten to add that nothing
herein necessarily represents their views or the opinions of anyone
else in any way connected with the United States Navy. The inter
pretations offered in this work are mine alone.
The members of the history department at the Naval Academy
who helped in special ways were Thomas Brennan, Elaine Maurer,
and Max Shaw. Dean Karl Lamb made a crucial decision permitting
the completion of the book, and John Cummings of Nimitz Library
provided me with a study carrel for seven years. Lieutenant Com
mander Don Thomas Sine was present at the inception, for which J
am especially grateful. Joyce Seltzer of The Free Press was present
throughout the writing, and her abiding confidence was a great in
spiration. Among the others who encouraged me were Louis Mor
timer, Thomas Paterson, Michal McMahon, and the late Patricia
Berg.
My most devoted academic readers were Michael T. C01·gan,
Lincoln Paine, and Sari Hornstein. Patti Patterson read proof and
spotted many errors that the word processing "spell checker" missed.
Jane Price and Maureen Ward helped me find time to respond to
last-minute inquiries from New York. Patty Maddocks and Sigrid
Trumpy made a joy of the search for illustrations.
Charles Soutter Campbell, my doctoral advisor at Claremont
Graduate School, was generous enough to approve my dissertation on
naval history two decades ago. At the other end of the temporal
ix
X Acknowledgments
spectrum, Charles Conrad Campbell has made the repeated reading
and editing of the present work a labor of love for the last two years.
Whatever merits this book may have are the result of his merciless
but beneficent interrogations of the author.
My family once again endured my preoccupation with matters
that most people find only marginally interesting. For their tolerance,
I thank my parents, James and Mary Hagan; my wife, Vera; my
children, Douglas, Meiling, and Kevin; my son-in-law, Matthew Cur
tis; and the recently arrived but allegedly as yet unspoiled Joshua
James Curtis.
-
Introduction
WHEN John Paul Jones pleaded for a fast-sailing
ship because he intended "to go in harm's way," he set the tone for
the first hundred years of American naval history. The navy in the age
of sail and in the early years of steam was built around fast ships
skippered by bold captains, officered by ambitious lieutenants, and
manned by individualistic seamen. The navy in the era of the sailing
frigate was designed to hit and run, to attack enemy merchant vessels
and small warships and flee if faced with a stronger naval opponent.
This strategy, which the French call guerre de cow·se, reached its
apogee in the transitional years between sail and steam, when Cap
tain Raphael Semmes set a world-class standard for commerce raiding
as skipper of the famed Confederate raider Alabanw.
By the end of the nineteenth century the technology of warships
was changing remarkably, as was the geopolitical balance of Europe.
Battleships with enormously destructive guns and heavy belts of ar
mor seemed to make all other ships obsolete, and Germany chal
lenged Britain for the supremacy of the Atlantic that the Royal Navy
had commanded since the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). American naval
observers sensed the magnitude of the changes and sought a new
philosophy of sea power. They welcomed the theories of Captain
Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose books, beginning with The Influence of
Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 in 1890, shattered commerce
raiding and commerce protection as the backbone of American naval
strategy. Mahan and his disciples advocated a peculiarly British strat
egy centered on very large warships designed to fight fleet engage
ments against concentrations of similar enemy fleets, a strategy the
French call guerre d'escadre.
Since the age of Mahan, the U.S. Navy has hewn to a doctrine
of challenging all rivals for command of the sea. One mode of en
counter has been massive fleet operations, most notably those in the
XI
xii Introduction
Pacific during World War II, but diplomatic maneuvering and shift
ing alliances with other major naval powers have also served the
ultimate purpose of ensuring that in terms of massed fleets the U.S.
Navy has been second to none.
In the 1920s that determination led to a single-minded emphasis
on battleships, and since World War II it has led to an equally res
olute preference for battle groups of large aircraft carriers. In the
mid-1980s Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., restated the
operational rationale for carrier groups in terms consciously reminis
cent of Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt, and this concept of a "mar
itime strategy" remained the navy's doctrine as the 1990s opened.
In 1989, however, winds of change began to sweep through
Europe fi·om the Urals to the Rhine. Overnight the Soviet empire in
Eastern Europe dissolved, and the Soviet Union itself stood exposed
as economically primitive and politically vulnerable. For the first
time since Mahan wrote in 1890 , suddenly there was no major co n-
tinental European power capable of mounting a cre~ib~~ .military and
naval threat to Anglo-America. The "velvet revolutiOn Immediate)
called into question the premises of twentieth-century U.S. nav~
policy and strategy, particularly the expensive battle groups of bi :r
warships patrolling the high seas in search of worthy opponents. g
If the end of the twentieth century and the opening of the
twenty-first continue to be marked by revolutionary geopo:itical shifts
in. Europe as well as in Asia, then the makers of American naval polic:y
wdl have to calculate carefully their impact on the United States
Navy. In the search for a relevant philosophy of sea power, the past
may very well ofler navigational beawns.
The two-hundred-year history of American naval power dem
onstrates that certain variables have always been at work. At any
given time the task of the navy's leaders has been to assess their
relative weight when constructing a policy and strategy. The most
prominent of the permanently interacting variables- or elements
include the external political and economic environment; the poli
cies of the president and his advisers, whether in peace or in war·
the temperament of the Congress as the putative embodiment of'
the people's will; the state of warship technology, that is, hulls, pro
pulsion systems, and armament; the attitudes and competence of
the officer corps; and the prevailing concepts about the nature of
naval warfare.
This book traces the interaction of these variables as they have
shaped the American people's navy. What emerges is a broad tapes-
Introduction xiii
try woven of many strands of colorful thread. The history of the U.S.
Navy from its origins in the mercantile and agrarian age, through its
maturity in the industrial age, to its enduring presence in the "post
modern" era is an epic story worthy of the people it has always
served with dedication and honor.
1
The American Way of
War at Sea
1775- 1783
ON
3 October 1775, at a session of the Continental
Congress, Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward introduced a resolu
tion of the Hhode Island General Assembly seeking relief from recent
depredations by ships of the Hoyal Navy. The fi·igate H. M.S. Rose
had patrolled Narragansett Bay for months, single-handedly closing
those waters to commerce and infuriating the local residents. Con
vinced "that the building and equipping [of] an American fleet, as
soon as possible, would greatly and essentially conduce to the pres
ervation of the lives, liberty and property of the good people of these
Colonies," the assembly begged the Continental Congress to fund
and build "a fleet [to] contribute to the common defence." The pe
tition failed to move Congress. Christopher Gadsden of South Caro
lina opposed the "extensiveness of the Hhode Island plan," while
Samuel Chase of Maryland angrily proclaimed, "It is the maddest
idea in the world to think of building an American fleet; .. . we
should mortgage the whole continent." Congress tabled the resolu
tion, but the H.hode Islanders had opened a debate about American
naval policy that would last fi·01n the Revolution to the present.
The defeat of the Rhode Island resolution sounded the opening
gun of one of the periodic outbreaks of that debate over American
naval policy. Congress soon learned that on 11 August 1775 two
unarmed and unescorted brigantines loaded with weapons and pow-
1