A History of Strategy by van Creveld Martin

Author:van Creveld, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Castalia House
Published: 2015-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

6. War at Sea

In our survey so far, naval warfare has barely been mentioned. This is not because the role it played in war was unimportant. After all, from the Peloponnesian and the Punic Wars to the wars of the Napoleonic era, ships and navies had often figured prominently, sometimes even decisively. Not only had naval warfare always been a highly complex and technical subject, but the ancient Greeks clearly recognized the importance of thessalocratia (command of the sea). Nevertheless, navies were never made the subject of any major theoretical treatises.

To be sure, several authors either appended chapters on naval warfare to their works or had others do so, as Vegetius and Jomini e.g. did. With Vegetius the discussion of naval theory consists of a single page about the importance of having a navy always ready. To this were appended eight short chapters on the principles of building ships, navigating them, and fighting them. To Jomini ships were merely an aid to the movements of armies. What he has to say about them is completely unremarkable. As to Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, the greatest writers of all, judging by their published works one would think they did not even know that such a thing as the sea existed.

In the study of history, room must be allowed for accident. The first staff colleges were founded in Prussia and France from about 1770 on. Having discovered strategy as the most important subject they could teach, they began to flourish after 1815 and even more after 1871 when every important army in the world felt impelled to have one. Navies, however, remained backward. It was not until 1885 that an American, Commodore Stephen B. Luce, was able to persuade his country’s Navy Department to set up a Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. Even then keeping it open and functioning was an uphill struggle. After two officers had turned down the job, Luce chose a forty-five-year-old naval captain of no great distinction, Alfred Mahan, to act as chief instructor. Mahan was the son of a well-known professor at West Point, Dennis Mahan. He had also written a volume called The Navy in the Civil War, The Gulf and Inland Waters. With that, though, his qualifications ended.

If a death sentence is said to “wonderfully concentrate the mind,” so—in the case of some people at any rate—does the requirement to stand in front of a class and teach. Mahan taught class from 1886 to 1889. In 1890 he published his lectures in the form of a two-volume work, The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783. It was an immense success, probably selling more copies than all its predecessors put together (e.g. the first edition of Clausewitz only comprised 500 copies) and earning its author fame not only in the U.S but in Britain and Germany. The Kaiser himself was said to have kept it at his bedside, and made sure every naval officer read it. This success in turn was due to the fact

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