'Prepare, Prepare, Prepare!'

‘GENERALLY speaking, the more money the Navy can get, the more happy it is.’ —Testimony of Secretary Charles Francis Adams before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee

IT is a curious fact that, after some thirty or forty years of almost incessant debate over the great problems of national defense, the simple principle enunciated by the Secretary of the Navy remains about the only practical, intelligible explanation of American naval policy discoverable by the lay mind. The ‘naval needs’ of the United States have held the headlines at least since the beginnings of our modern navy in 1883. By the slow accretion of time there have been amassed since then unnumbered volumes of expert testimony and violent disputation, all presuming to show why we have required a navy, and how big a one, from time to time, we should maintain. The net result has been to bring us from a point at which we were perfectly happy with practically no navy whatever to a point at which we spend from $350,000,000 to $400,000,000 a year on maritime defense, and accept, as if it were an unassailable law of nature, the ‘necessity’ for maintaining a naval establishment equal to that of Great Britain and larger by 60 per cent than that of Japan.

Yet the factual data from which this law has been deduced remain strangely obscure. In the great mass of literature upon the subject it is really very difficult to find any rational or convincing explanation of why the present policy has been adopted or of what, in practical fact, it is designed to achieve. The naval expert is commonly very severe upon the ‘abysmal ignorance’ of the layman; but if the layman (who, though ignorant, is after all supposed to foot the bills) seeks enlightenment upon such obvious questions as these, he gets singularly little help from the experts. He will hear a great deal of dogma about ‘naval needs’ or the ‘defense of national interests.’ He will wallow in technical profundities about tons and guns. But when it comes down to just what he is to get for his money and why he should get it, the argument dissolves into an unsatisfactory vagueness. ‘Look through the whole hearings,’ a Congressional critic of a big navy bill once exclaimed, ‘and the advice from these experts does not show, when you work it out as a lawyer works out a case, that we need a single thing to defend ourselves against an attack reasonably to be expected from any power.’ That was some fifteen years ago, but still, as year by year the naval appropriations bills roll round, the same strange difficulty persists.

It is too bad. It is bad for the navy; it is bad for the taxpayer; it is bad for the true requirements of national security. It is particularly unfortunate at a time of universal near-bankruptcy, when the American people, with a disarmament delegation at Geneva and a destroyer squadron in the Yangtze, seem about to be called upon for some pretty fundamental decisions in naval policy. To make them properly requires some understanding of the way in which our naval policies have actually developed, of the real bases upon which they rest. More than that, it requires some broad idea of the true uses and limitations of modern navalism as a practical factor in the lives of peoples. Yet it is upon precisely these larger and essential questions that the naval expert is ordinarily silent. It is the layman’s license for exploring a field that is quite as fascinating as it is important.

I

Though Admiral Mahan was able to discern the influence of sea power as far back in history as the Phœnicians, the influence of modern navalism, which is not quite the same thing, actually dates only from about 1880. Its seeds had been sown some twenty years earlier, when the first experiments with iron side armor and turret mountings, as well as with steam propulsion, had definitely introduced the machine age into the time-honored methods of maritime war. By 1880 the seed had sprouted; the extravagances of the experimental period were over and the modern navy — a relatively elaborate, costly, and technically intricate weapon, difficult to build and operate and therefore always on a nearwar footing — had begun to take shape. By the early eighties, too, American interest in the new toys (it had flagged almost completely after the Civil War) had been reawakened. Naval defense became an active issue. The new and powerful fleets being built abroad aroused our fascinated attention, and in 1883 we laid down the first installment of the ‘new navy.’

It was, however, a very modest one. There was no serious thought of disputing the ‘dominion of the seas’ with the great armadas of Europe; indeed, Admiral Mahan had yet to rationalize naval history and so add the concept of ‘sea power’ to our mental equipment, and it was a long time before Congress could be educated out of a distressing tendency to authorize battleships for ‘coast defense’ only. Moreover, the growth of shipyards, armor-plate factories, and munitions works — the essential counterparts of the machine-age navy — was necessarily slow, so that the development of those economic interests which have proved so powerful an influence in modern naval expansion was slow likewise. As late as 1894 we were content to stand about sixth on the list of naval powers; we were spending only $30,000,000 a year on the navy, and the idea of ‘ parity * with the immense fleet of Great Britain would hardly have been advanced by the most ambitious of our experts.

Yet only ten years later the whole scene had been transformed. In 1894 we had felt secure enough in a naval position roughly analogous to that occupied by Italy to-day; in 1904 we had built or projected a fleet definitely surpassed only by that of Great Britain. The British were still in the lead by a safe margin; behind them, however, the American, the French, and the new German navies were now about on a level, with ours perhaps slightly the stronger. We were spending about four times as much on the navy as we had a decade before, while we had taken as our object a fleet ‘second only to Great Britain’s.’

Thus we not only had greatly enlarged our naval defense, but had committed ourselves to a standard that was definitely competitive. This was a development of the utmost importance, for the new standard was itself to act as a first cause in subsequent policy. Strangely enough, however, it does not seem to have been deduced from any exact technical calculation of ‘naval needs.’ It is true that the Spanish-American War had given us Porto Rico and the Philippines, involving commitments which might reasonably have called for some expansion of naval power. It would be very difficult to prove, however, that they called for a fleet always second to the British, no more and no less. For a true explanation of the new standard one must turn, rather, to such emotional imponderables as the new desire to cut a figure on the world stage, the martial enthusiasms generated by the victory over Spain, and the big-navyism of Theodore Roosevelt and the statesmen grouped about him.

That this was the real basis for the effort seems the more probable from the fact that it was not to be maintained. When we made our big stride forward in the years around 1904, the financial burden was still not great; nevertheless, matters were already getting both complicated and expensive, and the British were almost immediately to complicate them even further. Alarmed by the growth of German navalism, they brought out in 1906 H.M.S. Dreadnought, the first all-biggun battleship, designed to render obsolete at a stroke the painfully acquired tonnage of the Germans. The design succeeded; unfortunately, it also rendered obsolete the British navy and every other navy as well.

In effect, the whole thing had to be done over again. The great battleship fleet bequeathed to us by the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations was now only a second-string defense. The great preponderance of the British fleet had been removed; all the nations could now start at scratch in the new race for dreadnought tonnage, which had become the only thing that counted. The Germans were quick to seize this opportunity and to plunge into the disastrous ‘battle of the shipyards’ which was to end in their ruin. The American people refrained—again, less because of any scientific calculation of actual needs than because of an unscientific reluctance to repeat so soon, and upon so much costlier a scale, the great effort which they had just made. In the result, the AngloGerman race swept past us, leaving us a poor third.

By 1914, at the end of the next tenyear period, the British had built or authorized no less than forty-six dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers; the Germans had twenty-eight; and even the Japanese, who had been getting into the great game in earnest, had ten. The United States had only twelve. The ‘second power’ standard had been abandoned as irrationally as it had been undertaken. It had, however, served to instill the competitive idea into the popular psychology; and the memory of it, surviving, was to have a curious influence upon the course of naval history.

For ten years later the entire position had once more been revolutionized. Where in 1914 we had discerned no necessity for a fleet much superior to that of the French or the Russians, by 1924 we were asserting the right to a navy at least equal to that of the strongest power upon the seas and greater by one third than the next most powerful armada. How had it happened ?

II

The answer is usually couched in terms of that convenient mysticism which so often enshrouds the discussion of international affairs. The new naval policy, it is assumed, was simply a ‘natural’ consequence of our postwar trade expansion, of our ‘wider national interests,’ or of similar vague cosmic forces. National interests, however, have rarely been capable in themselves of computing ship tonnages or writing naval appropriations bills and, though they no doubt had a great deal to do with it, the curious will still seek for a more exact and less transcendental explanation.

Once more it seems to have been the outcome less of technical calculation than of historical accident. The outbreak of the war in Europe, to say nothing of the excitements of the Vera Cruz landing and the Mexican border, had naturally reawakened an interest in the state of our own military machinery. President Wilson, however, had at first considered the subject with calm. ‘A powerful Navy,’ he declared in his annual message of December 1914, ‘we have always regarded as our proper and natural means of defense.

. . . But who shall tell us now what sort of a Navy to build?’

The question was not unreasonable. The European War promised to give, for almost the first time in the history of the machine-age navies, an adequate laboratory trial of their effectiveness. It was no idle supposition that the result might transform the whole design. It had happened, at any rate, with even the brief and inconclusive tests of the past. The Japanese at the Yalu had wrought great execution with their light-calibre ‘quick firers’ upon their heavily armed Chinese opponents, and immediately the navies of the world had sprouted with light-calibre guns. At Santiago, the Americans had succeeded in hitting rather better with their 8-inch than with their 12inch batteries, and no doubt the world’s heavy ships would have continued to mount the tactically unsound combination of two major calibres had not the 12-inch guns of the Japanese at Tsushima produced a more efficient slaughter than had our own seven years before. This restored tactical sanity; everybody rushed for the all-big-gun ship, and the elaborate navies constructed to refight the Battle of Santiago were rendered obsolete by those designed to repeat the Japanese victory over the Russians.

But after some four months of the greatest war the world had ever seen there had been no second Tsushima, and it seemed rather doubtful whether the immense fleets constructed to improve upon it would do any fighting at all. Though we had reason to look to our defenses, there was undoubtedly logic in Mr. Wilson’s reluctance to plunge into a vast building programme on the eve of developments which might very probably render it obsolete long before its completion. The very horror of the Great War, however, exercised its own illogical fascination; with the year 1915 the diplomatic excitements began, and soon there was the first submarine campaign and the Lusitania. A wave of angry emotion swept the country; and under the human impulses alike of fear, of emulation, and of belligerence, the great campaign for ‘preparedness’ began to take form. It seemed less and less likely that logic would be the ruling factor in our defense policies.

Exactly what we were to prepare for, and how in consequence we should best go about it, were never very clear from the beginning. But as the emotional enthusiasms arose it did not seem to matter. General Wood was inaugurating his Plattsburg training camps, and the patriotic élite were flocking thither. Mr. Roosevelt was elevating his shrill but powerful voice, in speeches and magazine articles, for blood in general; while it is at least possible that more material motives — entertained by gentlemen who saw that, wherever preparedness might lead, it was certain to involve the expenditure of a great deal of public money — also played a part. Stimulated by the diplomatic incidents with Great Britain and Germany, the movement gathered strength, and the naval bill for 1915 carried increased appropriations. It was not enough.

Ostensibly, the question was to find a correct technical solution for the strategic problem presented by the changed international situation. But apparently it was not only the international situation which counted. More and more, as 1916 and the Presidential election began to loom upon the horizon, were eminent Republicans to be heard belaboring the weak-kneed attitude of the Wilson administration on defense. It seems to have been a factor quite as important as the diplomatic difficulties in shaping the administration’s programme for the navy. Upon what standard, however, could one calculate the amount of naval expenditure necessary for defense against the Republicans? This problem, which might otherwise have appeared insoluble, was now to find an answer ready prepared — the old ‘ second power’ standard. Whatever its military virtues, it now offered the great political advantages that it was simple, sanctified by precedent, and was what the Republicans themselves had aimed at. Moreover, since it would involve a duplication of the German fleet, it would appear (without saying so) to equip us against the unpopular Germans.

III

By the fall of 1915, Mr. Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, had summoned the General Board to prepare, not simply an increased building project for the following year, but a full-dress, five-year programme designed to restore us to our traditional position. In October, Mr. Daniels’s own Raleigh News and Observer explained the situation: —

The plan of Secretary Daniels to increase the Navy for five years . . . has taken the wind out of the sails of the critics who say the Wilson administration is neglecting national defense. . . . President Wilson and Secretaries Daniels and Garrison have virtually destroyed the ‘issue’ of ‘preparedness’ thrust upon the United States by the European War and seized by certain desperate Republicans for the political capital they could make out of it.

This was a trifle optimistic; the issue had not quite been destroyed. But the programme which had been created — the celebrated 1916 programme — was to make history. President Wilson endorsed it, and when Congress reopened, in December 1915, the diplomatic tensions abroad and the patriotic furor at home had become so great that he devoted his entire annual message to the one subject of the national defense.

I have spoken to you to-day, gentlemen [he declared in summary], upon a single theme, the thorough preparation of the nation to care for its own security and to make sure of entire freedom to play the impartial rôle in this hemisphere and in the world which we all believe to have been providentially assigned to it.

Here, at least, was a definite statement of what we were preparing for. But was the proposal to build a battle fleet just superior to the Germans’ even remotely calculated, in view of the realities before us, to prepare for it? Were we promoting our ‘security’ with a five-year programme (requiring in all some eight years to complete) which could not be ready until long after the war which alone menaced us would be over? Or was freedom to play an ‘impartial rôle’ in the post-war world to be assured by a fleet which, though perhaps superior to the Germans’, would be far inferior to that of the Allies and very probably obsolete anyway? And what, in a world torn and exhausted by war, would be the real effect of this new essay in navalism? As a matter of fact, did the 1916 programme bear any relation whatever either to the military actualities or to those political ends which naval establishments are alone supposed to serve?

In the utterances of the statesmen during the ensuing months it is not easy to find any rational answers for such practical questions. The naval experts seem never even to have paused to ask them. When Admiral Knight, the President of the Naval War College, was asked when it would be ‘advisable’ for us to have on hand the largest fleet in the world, he simply replied: ‘To-morrow.’ Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, perhaps the leading Republican exponent of the big navy, was equally unworried by technical detail. ‘I shall try,’ he was writing in February 1916, ‘to get everything I possibly can for the Navy, and of course shall move all the increases I can think of over what the Secretary recommends.’ That was simple enough, anyway; and, considering the incalculables involved, a policy of building everything one could think of may have been as valid as any other. But was it really as a naval, or more strictly as a political, expert that the Senator was thinking?

It was the President himself who was to give the next great extension to our mounting navalism. At the beginning of 1916 he had undertaken a speaking tour on behalf of preparedness and in defense of the nation against the Republicans. It ended at St. Louis on February 3. Speaking in the afternoon, Mr. Wilson had painted the horrors of the conflagration in Europe: —

We must keep our resources and our strength and our thoughts untouched by that flame [he declared] in order that we may be in a condition to serve the restoration of the world, the healing processes. The world will not endure, I believe, another struggle like that which is going on now.

At the Coliseum in the evening, however, his subject was preparedness. The audience, at first rather hostile, warmed to him as he made a stronger and stronger plea for defense, until at last, perhaps carried away by the emotional response, he cried that the American navy ‘ought, in my judgment, to be incomparably the greatest navy in the world.’¹ Thus was the idea of the United States not simply as the second power of the McKinley and Roosevelt days, but as the supreme naval nation, definitely introduced into the purview of our policy. And yet it was advanced as a fit way of keeping our ‘ thoughts untouched ’ by war and as enabling us to assist in the ‘healing processes’ of an age in which ‘another struggle like that which is going on now’ would not be possible. Whatever this was, it was certainly not realism.

IV

The economical House, in the meanwhile, had been devising what looked like a technical compromise between the claims of preparedness and of the taxpayer. The experts, it found, were in a great fervor for battle cruisers, a new type with us. Ignorantly supposing that, since the experts were all clamoring for battle cruisers, battle cruisers were what we most required, the House cut the Daniels programme to five of these ships and let it go at that.

Strangely enough, this bill had not reached the upper chamber before the Battle of Jutland, in which three British ships of this class vanished instantaneously, with the 4000-odd lives of their crews, had indicated that perhaps the experts had been wrong about battle cruisers. It did not matter, however; we were to be saved from the House’s ignorance, first by the Senate, more completely by history.

The Senate perceived that it was no time for half measures. Vast ‘preparedness parades ’ were being organized in the major cities, in which hundreds of thousands of the citizenry were marching gloriously to the chant of ‘Prepare, prepare, prepare.’ Defenseless America, a truly extraordinary document from the pen of Hudson Maxim, brother of the Sir Hiram Maxim whose machine guns were being produced in enormous quantities for the impartial slaughter of all the belligerents, swept the country. ‘The Battle Cry of Peace,’ a spectacular film in which improperly prepared American troops sought to protect home and fireside from the brutal and licentious soldiery of an unnamed power (they were uniformed, strangely enough, in old felt hats cut to resemble the German helmets), was packing the movie houses. Topical stanzas were added to the popular song, ‘You’re a Doggone Dangerous Girl’ (the reference was to Columbia), and these mixtures of art with policy were promising to be so effective that the Senate never even considered the paltering programme of the House.

Senator Lodge and Senator Swanson (to-day an ornament to our disarmament delegation at Geneva) simply went back to the naval General Board and took over the programme it had been delighted to prepare for Mr. Daniels. According to Mr. Lodge, Senator Swanson ‘got the President and Daniels together and told them we were going to stand on the floor for eight capital ships . . . whereupon they fell into line.’ Mr. Lodge then decided that the thing must be done in three, not five, years; again Mr. Daniels ‘fell into line,’ and so in the event it was ordered.

In its final form the 1916 programme did not authorize a navy ‘incomparably the greatest in the world.’ It did, however, seek to commit the nation to the undertaking within three years of 813,000 tons of naval vessels — considerably more than we had authorized in the entire preceding decade. Designed to fulfill the second-power standard, it called for ten dreadnought battleships and six battle cruisers, ten light cruisers, fifty destroyers, sixty-seven submarines, and some lesser types, the whole estimated to cost from $544,000,000 up. In the first year (for which alone actual appropriations could be made) it provided for four battleships, four battle cruisers, and four light cruisers, as well as for varying numbers of the lesser vessels.

To what purpose? In the complex of emotions amid which the 1916 programme was born one seems to distinguish two principal, though vaguely formulated, aims. Some wanted to protect our commerce from the wartime restrictions of the British or from the German submarine raids; the greater number, probably, were imagining that in case Germany should win she would attack us in order to recoup her war losses from our wealth. Yet as a technical solution for either problem the 1916 programme was fantastic.

As to the first, a few half-finished hulls on our building ways could add nothing to the menace which a mere embargo on the export of munitions already held for the British, and even less could the Germans be frightened by battleships — a type of which the Allies already possessed a superiority so overwhelming as to be useless. As for the second problem, by 1916 it should have been patent to any sane naval technician that Germany could only win at the price of an exhaustion so complete as to put an attack upon the United States out of the question. The public may have believed in the German bogey; for the expert, a glance at that 3000-mile line of communications (flanked, of course, by embittered enemies) should have been enough.

Only upon a third calculation does the 1916 programme make sense. To some shrewd minds it may have occurred that now, while the great powers were locked in their fearful struggle, was the golden chance for the United States to seize world domination. Now, by playing upon the excitement of the moment, the American people could be launched on a great armaments programme and accustomed to bearing the huge military burdens necessary to such a rôle. There, at least, was a rational (if strangely Prussian) motive for the 1916 programme. Yet if some realistic statesmen actually entertained it, it was not avowed. The public would never have dreamed of supporting a naval building bill for such a purpose; the sole end which the programme might reasonably be expected to serve was an end which the American people at that time had no conscious desire to achieve.

The peculiar folly of the 1916 programme as a practical answer to the situation actually confronting us did not escape every mind. There was at least one recalcitrant Texas Congressman, Mr. Callaway, who was moved to the last stages of angry exasperation by what seemed to him the obvious and inexplicable absurdity of the whole business.

There is no testimony in the hearings [he exclaimed] showing any reason whatever for a five-year programme. On the contrary, the hearings are replete with testimony like Admiral Badger’s, which shows that no man can tell what the navies of the world will be at the conclusion of the foreign war; that at its conclusion will be the best time to bring about a general agreement for disarmament; that none of the building authorized by the five-year programme can, in all human probability, be completed for use either during or immediately on the conclusion of the war; and that the relative fighting value of the ships now built may be shown by the lessons of the war to be obsolete altogether; that all building material is 50 to 100 per cent higher now than ever before.

But it all fell upon deaf ears. The 1916 programme, it was calculated, would restore us to the position of ‘second power’; it would give us a mathematical ‘superiority’ over the dreaded Germans — or more precisely over what the Germans would have had without the war. For what the Germans were actually building, what losses might be suffered in action, and in what way the peace treaties might, through requiring the surrender of ships, augment the fleets of one power or diminish those of another, were alike incalculable.

To make the computation at all, in other words, it was necessary first to disregard the fact that there was a war in progress. It is upon such hard realism that naval programmes are constructed.

V

Almost at once history was to succeed where Mr. Callaway had failed. In a bare eight months after the President had signed the measure which was to prepare us for eventualities, war with Germany, the most probable of the eventualities, had come. And the 1916 programme had been junked completely.

Under the swift test of reality it was perceived — it should have been apparent from the first — that as far as the World War went the 1916 programme was as useful as a project to build so many Nelsonian threedeckers would have been. What was required to fight the Germans was not battleships, battle cruisers, or the impressive paraphernalia of peace-time ‘supremacy’; it was merchant ships to carry food and light men-of-war capable of dropping depth bombs on submarines. Of the eight leviathans which were to have been commenced by July 1917, we actually laid down just one. But the destroyer programme, which had called for a modest twenty of these vessels in the first year, was trebled and then trebled again. When Senator Lodge’s three-year period finally expired in the middle of 1919 we had undertaken some five times as many destroyers as had been authorized for the whole 1916 programme. Of the ten battleships, however, we had barely got started on two; we had laid down only two of the ten light cruisers, and of the six majestic battle cruisers we had actually laid down not a single one.

It was a sufficient demonstration of the wisdom of the 1916 programme as a technical solution for the real problems of 1916. The sequel, however, was to prove that those shrewder minds who had supported it as an essay in Machtpolitik (that activity so abhorrent in Germans) had known what they were doing. If there were also (as Representative Callaway had charged) those among the war industrialists who had supported it as a cushion against the moment when peace would abolish their markets, they too were to be justified. Peace ultimately arrived; the markets vanished, but the vast war-materials machine could not simply be stopped dead. It was a crisis; in the midst of it, however, there stood the 1916 programme, complete in practically all its original perfection, duly authorized by Congress and much of it already contracted for. It is true that the whole world had been transformed, the whole defense problem altered, since the authorization had been made. It was of no consequence; amid the wild chaos of 1919 people were far too preoccupied to notice what went on in the shipyards, and it proved a simple matter to resume the programme just as if nothing had happened.

The second of the 1916 battleships was laid down in 1919, and in that year and the next, as the war-time destroyer and submarine orders finally ran out, we made a start upon the other eight. In 1920 the remaining eight light cruisers were also begun, as well as the first of the battle cruisers. In 1921 we continued all these and got started on the last five battle cruisers. This constituted a very considerable renewal of navalism; such were the beauties of the 1916 programme, however, that the American Government could undertake it with scarcely one in a hundred of the pacific American people even realizing what was going on. Yet the programme itself had actually carried a rider ordering the President, as soon as the war was over, to call an international conference to consider peace and disarmament!

The thing was wonderful. It bordered upon the miraculous. Not only was the 1916 programme working just as well as if the necessity for fighting a war had not intervened; it was actually working far better. Its authors had modestly calculated it to make us ‘second power,’ and perhaps that is all it would have done had we begun it on schedule. By waiting until 1919 we had all the lessons of the war at our disposal, and as a result the new ships were to be so much more powerful than the earlier dreadnoughts as entirely to outclass them. In the meantime, moreover, the German navy had disappeared, while the construction of more battleships was the last thing in the minds of the British or French. In December 1920, the Washington Post made a startling and happy discovery:—

Within three years the United States will hold supremacy on the seas. After three hundred years of undisputed supremacy, the British navy will take second place and the Stars and Stripes will float over a fleet stronger than the two fleets that fought the Battle of Jutland.

Automatically, as it were, and certainly without any clear public intention, the policy of ‘incomparable’ superiority which President Wilson had incautiously proclaimed five years before was approaching its realization. A programme adopted by the American people in order to make us the second power was in fact about to make us supreme. The result was as natural as it was illogical. Instead of cutting the programme to fit the purpose, the purpose was enlarged to fit the programme.

Forgotten were those lengthy arguments in which the proponents of the 1916 programme had proved that equality with Great Britain was wholly unnecessary. Few paused to ask what, in view of the politico-naval realities of the post-war world, our building policy should be; because the ships were already on the ways they simply became our policy. Thus Mr. Daniels could exclaim that unless we joined the League we should have to maintain the greatest navy, and though Mr. Daniels intended it as an argument for joining the League it was more generally accepted as an argument for naval supremacy. By the time the Republican administration arrived in the spring of 1921, there was little question about it; and Mr. Denby, the new Secretary of the Navy, seems to have thought that he was stating only an established aim when he declared for a navy second to none, and added no proviso. Mr. Wilson by that time had many bitterer things to think of than naval policy, but if his mind did turn to the subject one wonders with what emotions he regarded this outcome.

VI

The happy vision of the navalists, however, was soon to be overcast. Though they had launched us upon this great naval effort, there was still no military reason for it, to overcome the pains of footing the bill. No longer, moreover, were people reading Defenseless America, or parading our chief cities to the chant of ‘ Prepare, prepare, prepare.’ The intoxication had worn off; the headache had arrived, and in the cold, gray light of the post-war world it threatened to be severe. Mr.Denby’s innocent pronunciamentos called down an unexpectedly violent outburst from eminent gentlemen in Congress. When the naval appropriations bill came up in the late spring they scrutinized it with care. The 1916 programme, they discovered, was in reality only a beginning; though the individual ship designs had been modernized, the programme as a whole now represented an obsolete conception of the navy (just as Mr. Callaway had predicted) and new demands were being made to bring it up to date. Senator King resorted to pad and pencil, emerging with a disquieting result. The estimated cost of the original programme, he pointed out, had been $544,000,000.

There has already been expended toward its completion substantially that amount, and it will involve the expenditure of at least $500,000,000 more before it is finished. But with its completion we will not have a modern or an efficient navy . . . and the bill now before us seeks to supplement the programme by carrying stupendous amounts for airplanes and airplane carriers.

Nor was this all. Calculations like that of the Washington Post rested on the assumption that our new building would bring no answer from abroad, and that we could plunge into a project for supremacy without arousing other people’s navalists. The assumption was unwarranted. Speaking in the House of Commons on March 17, 1921, Lieutenant-Colonel Archer-Shee explained to his compatriots: —

By 1925 this great nation overseas will have built a fleet which will practically make obsolete all of the battleships of our fleet with the exception of the Hood. . . . To meet this situation the government proposes to lay down four ships only this year.

But the four, it was said, would go to 50,000 tons apiece and would mount 18-inch rifles. The ‘superdreadnoughts’ which we were constructing would then be retired by these ‘ super-superdreadnoughts,’ and beyond that the vistas of naval competition stretched toward heights of folly and of expense calculated to give pause even to the navalist.

It was doubtful whether the British taxpayer could stand the financial strain; it was even more doubtful whether the American taxpayer would stand it. In its technical aspects, moreover, the whole thing was getting out of hand. A development so rapid that every new programme of one power threatened to upset everything that had been done by another introduced an extreme of instability into the whole structure of navalism. Modern navalism had been founded upon the idea of competitive building. Its driving force had been such arithmetical standards as the ‘two power’ or the ‘second power’ or the ‘second to none’ policy implied. Such standards were becoming unworkable, such comparisons difficult. Navalism as a whole, it might almost be said, was threatening to commit suicide. It seems to have occurred to some navalists on both sides of the water that there was a better way.

On November 11, 1921, the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments convened; and a few months later Senator Lodge, a principal author of the 1916 programme, was defending before the Senate the treaty whereby that programme was annulled, and some of its proudest ships were scrapped unfinished on the ways. Many American naval experts, too dull to see farther than those imposing hulls, have ever since denounced an agreement whereby we ‘ surrendered ’ so much to the British. They never even realized what it was all about. The truth was that our navalists, having brought their taxpayers to a policy of supremacy by accident more than anything else, were standing upon an extremely uncertain pinnacle which might collapse at any moment, and at best could not support them in a naval race of such monstrous illogicality as that which had loomed ahead. In a rare act of naval (no less than of political) realism, a momentary and paper supremacy had been traded for a permanent and genuine advantage. It had been used to purchase from the British a treaty which would supply the one thing that American navalism, throughout its variegated history, had most lacked — a simple, positive, absolute standard of naval building.

To navalism, the great dogma of ‘parity’ was worth, certainly, all the hulls we had ever projected. Once enshrined in a treaty as an allowed maximum, it became, as a simple matter of psychology, the irreducible minimum. As such it was the greatest lever ever put into the hands of the American navalist for windlassing appropriations out of the reluctant taxpayer. There was no technical reason for this standard. No naval expert could show just what military results it would achieve, or indicate in what way national policy would have to be modified if we went so many thousand tons below or above what the British possessed. He did not have to. ‘Parity’ was never rooted in the sands of naval technology, but in the far firmer soil of mass emotion. The retreat to parity was one of the strategic retreats of history.

Just how useful it was is indicated by the unhappy history of the sister service. The army, too, had evolved a 1916 programme; the army, too, had ended the war with bright hopes of future greatness. They were, indeed, embodied in the 1920 revision of the National Defense Act. But for the army there could be no appeal to ‘parity’; and the grandiose structure had scarcely been completed before a heartless and economical Congress began cutting the appropriations for it right and left. Who can doubt that without parity — so simple, so dogmatic, so well calculated to arouse a ready prejudice, and so insusceptible to reasoned argument — a similar misfortune would have befallen the navy? Even the navy was to have a harder struggle with its taxpayers than it had anticipated, and that dream of an automatic building standard which would overcome Congress’s inconvenient right of control through the purse strings was not fully to be realized. The value of the principle, however, is demonstrated by the fact that from the Washington Conference onward the navalists never appealed to any other.

They eschewed all complex considerations of what we really needed to defend or of what technically would be the best method of defending it. They took their stand upon the rock of parity, which, being totally unintelligible, was completely unassailable. Why should we build fifteen light cruisers of an unproved design, of doubtful usefulness, and for an uncertain mission? Twenty years before, the answer would have been a flood of questionable technicalities. Now it was simple: because Great Britain had them. They were necessary for parity. Thus parity had placed the whole subject on a plane of complete and convenient unreality; it had brought a comfortable order and stability into that strange fictional world which the naval expert had created, and it permitted him to retire there to compute his tonnages and gun calibres undisturbed by any practical problems from the far more complicated real world of men and women. By a temporary alliance between the shrewdest members of two naval groups the position had been stabilized, the publics reconciled to their burdens, and navalism saved for democracy.

VII

The way in which it worked can readily be understood from the subsequent history. The next chapter had its beginnings, oddly enough, in a tactical slip made by the British at Washington.

The stabilization of types had been an aim quite as important as the stabilization of tonnage totals, and the British, failing to secure a limitation on cruiser tonnage, had been quick to recommend a limit upon the size and armament of individual cruisers. It was here they made their mistake. In the war navies the typical light cruiser was a small vessel of about 4000 tons mounting 6-inch rifles, and most of the great British cruiser fleet was composed of vessels of this class. In 1916, however, the British had laid down four more or less experimental ships of 9750 tons mounting 7.5-inch rifles, and in order to save these handsome units they proposed a limit of 10,000 tons and 8-inch guns. Forgetting their own experience with the Dreadnought, the British were risking the substance to save the shadow. In 1921 no other country had actually laid down a cruiser of such power, and the British might have been able to establish a lower limit. As it was, the 10,000ton ‘treaty’ cruiser instantly became, not the maximum, but the minimum; and the way was open for any power which wished to build such vessels to throw into the shade the enormous existing preponderance of the British in cruiser types.

The United States at first neglected this chance; while for the British to keep pace with the few 10,000-tonners laid down elsewhere required only a modest programme, not difficult to extract from Parliament and admirable for keeping up employment (as well as earnings) in the shipyards. Unsuspecting, they laid down in 1924 their first five ‘treaty’ cruisers. If the American public, however, had overlooked its ‘opportunity,’the American General Board had not. As early as December 1922, it had prepared and Secretary Denby had signed a statement of ‘ United States Naval Policy.’ Ostensibly a revision of policy to accord with the treaty limitations, its real purpose seems rather to have been to consolidate the psychological gains of Washington. Its first aim was: —

To create, maintain and operate a Navy second to none, and in conformity with the ratios for capital ships established by the treaty. . . . To make strength of the Navy for battle of primary importance.

Thus was parity transferred from the capital ships, to which it officially applied, to the lesser types to which it did not. This much, however, was fairly implied in the policy established by the civil government at the conference. The same can hardly be said for what followed: —

To make strength of the Navy for exercising ocean-wide economic pressure next in importance.

Throughout the naval debates of many years, the idea of exercising ‘ocean-wide economic pressure5 had never seriously been advanced. The theory upon which Secretary Hughes had based our policy at Washington was that the cruiser was simply a battle-fleet auxiliary. The General Board itself, in devising the 1916 programme, had provided for only ten of these ships and had designated them, significantly, as ‘scout’ cruisers. There had been no thought of a great independent cruiser fleet to attack commerce far from the battle lines. Only on the auxiliary theory was it reasonable to extend battleship ratios to cruisers; indeed, if cruisers were an independent arm, it would have been necessary under the principles adopted at Washington to confirm the great superiority that the British then enjoyed. For the foundation of the Hughes plan was the acceptance of existing strengths as a measure of naval needs, and our programme had made no pretense, even, of duplicating the huge light-cruiser squadrons of the British.

Having been educated to believe in parity, however, the American public would now believe in parity of cruisers as readily as in parity of any other type. This being so, the General Board had found a technical reason for demanding what it had not even thought of in 1916. In addition to a battle fleet capable of repelling British attack, we would now go in for a commercedestroying fleet capable of menacing the absolutely vital British lines of communications. Then followed the next step. The section on ‘building policy ’ laid down the aim: —

To complete ten light cruisers [the ex‘scout’ cruisers of the 1916 programme] now building. To replace all old cruisers by building sixteen modern cruisers of 10,000 tons displacement carrying 8-inch guns, and in addition to lay down and build cruiser tonnage at a rate that will maintain in cruiser strength the capital ship ratios. To build no more small cruisers.

Parity combined with the high treaty limit on individual ships would produce a fleet as large as the British in tonnage, but overwhelmingly superior in fact. To meet such a threat the British would have to replace a very large proportion of their existing light-cruiser tonnage, all of which was still entirely serviceable, with the heavier 8-inch-gun ship. American naval men, as more than one of them was later frankly to intimate, did not believe that the Admiralty could squeeze the money for it out of their overburdened people. The pleasant prospect loomed, not simply of parity, but of superiority, — on paper, at any rate, — in at least one branch of navalism. However, the General Board had been rather too optimistic of its own taxpayers, and for several years the scheme was to remain in distressful abeyance. Not until 1926 were the experts (aided by the new sound of riveting in British shipyards) able to stir Congress from its lethargy and breathe the first signs of life into the new programme. Then the British experts realized what they were about to be let in for.

At once they rallied, to repair the breach which they had themselves left in the Washington treaty structure and to save their great accumulation of light-cruiser tonnage from an untimely senescence. In the modern naval vessel, it is important to remember, old age is a phenomenon having little to do with the physical deterioration of hull, engines, or armament. It is a condition induced not by the passage of time, which is calculable, but by the other fellow’s building something better — which can be neither anticipated nor, without treaty limitation, prevented. The British rose to the emergency. With great ingenuity they set out to disparage the ' treaty’ cruiser. They invented bad names for it — the ‘suicide class,’ the ‘tinclads,’ the ‘ten-second ships.’ They pointed out that it was a technically faulty design, combining great offensive power with an almost complete absence of protection, and thus repeating in exaggerated form the precise defect in the older battle-cruiser type which had been revealed so tragically at Jutland. It was also, they added, expensive to build; and they proposed that the cruiser limit should be reduced to about 6000 tons and 6-inch guns.

Actually, the technical criticism was sound enough, while the proposal, though it would involve the surrender of a paper advantage to the British, was by no means unreasonable if disarmament and economy were the real aims. The American naval experts saw this only too well. To the insidious propaganda of the Briton, therefore, they at once opposed an American campaign of education. As rapidly as the British thought up bad names for the 10,000-tonners, the Americans thought up new reasons for retaining them. They made the interesting, but curiously sudden, discovery that the 10,000-tonners were peculiarly ‘suited to our needs’; though why they had not known this when they saddled the American taxpayer with the ten 6-inch cruisers of the 1916 programme (eight of which had not even been laid down until after the war) they never explained. Instead, they ranged the field of naval technology for new proofs of an American ‘need’ for large ships as opposed to the British ‘need’ for small ones.

The whole process, in fact, was more than a little reminiscent of that whereby General Greatauk, of the Penguin Island army, proved the guilt of Pyrot. Like that celebrated military man, the more our experts thought of it the more convinced did they become; while the technical arguments to which they appealed, if never entirely intelligible, had the great merit that they were beyond lay criticism. The one fact that was simple, obvious, and intelligible — that we needed 10,000-tonners primarily because the British fleet was largely made up of 6000-tonners — was never stressed by either side. To do so might have been fatal to both positions; it would almost certainly have been fatal to the American. Our people believed in parity, but they cared little about the ‘exercise of ocean-wide economic pressure’ and nothing at all for an expensive naval race.

In such bad odor, indeed, was the idea of competitive building that our naval men devised a pleasanter synonym for the form of it upon which they were engaged. ‘Competition,’ Admiral Jones once gravely explained, ‘exists when two nations start to build against each other, — to try to seek superiority,—whereas relativity is merely when two nations agree upon a tonnage beyond which they agree not to build.’ Competing with the British by building a greater tonnage, in other words, was ‘competition’; but competing by building more powerful individual ships within a limit was simply ‘relativity.’

But the British, perverse men, never appreciated the impartial beauties of relativity, and from Geneva to London the great war was waged, ending finally in the compromise which was of course the only possible solution. The experts on each side had appeared to imagine that if they only invented enough technical ‘reasons’ the other side would sign a treaty of surrender. In the end it took the civil power of both governments to rescue them from their world of fantasy. Admiral Pratt almost alone among the American experts had sense enough to see that a treaty was possible only through concession, and the further sense to see that in any long view of navalism and national policy a compromise and a treaty were worth immeasurably more than any paper ‘right’ to build this or that type of cruiser. His reward, in ordinary naval opinion, was to be excoriated as a traitor to the cause.

VIII

This seems to suggest a glaring deficiency, if not, indeed, an ‘abysmal ignorance,’ in the naval experts. They spend their lives in the study of navies, but they seem rarely to pause for the study of navalism as a whole, in all its aspects — social, political, and economic, as well as military. Naval men know all about ships; they seldom appear to realize that the ships are only the relatively unimportant tools or counters in an intricate human process. Of the ultimate nature of this process, over which they presume to minister, they apparently know little and care less.

The result is that they imagine their professional duty to have ended when they know how to fight a naval war and have done everything in their power to argue or cajole their people into supporting an ‘adequate’ navy. The trouble is that the practical question of what constitutes adequacy is precisely the question which they are never prepared to face. Yet this is the central question which the expert adviser is supposed to advise upon. In theory, the desired national policy is outlined to him by the civil power, and it is then his function to report whether it is technically possible of achievement, and, if so, what are the technical means necessary to achieve it. Actually, the naval expert has preferred to reverse this, to use the authority of his special knowledge to secure the maximum of means, and to let them determine the policy. Admiral Rodgers, a former member of the General Board, once revealed how completely and how dangerously they have done so: —

For many years the national platforms of both parties in this country have mentioned an adequate Navy. They have not said ‘adequate to what,’ so that the General Board, which has been charged since its inception with the general characteristics and size of the Navy, has been obliged to find out what the Navy is to be adequate to. In the Navy policy sheet it has been defined to carry out the policies of the United States.

Such a conclusion might be well enough in an ensign just out of Annapolis, but to a layman it does seem as though the most authoritative experts in the United States could do better than that. ‘To carry out the policies of the United States’ is meaningless; or, rather, it means that in the considered view of the General Board the sky is the only limit.

Now, if the half century of modern navalism indicates anything, it indicates that adequacy on that basis is a political, social, and psychological impossibility — and perhaps a technical impossibility as well. It simply cannot be done. Theoretically, one might be able to maintain a navy sufficient ‘to carry out the policies of the United States’ by computing the total military power of every other nation in the world and then constructing a navy large enough to beat them all at once, though even in theory the thing is by no means certain. In practice, such an aim is totally impossible of realization. Reality imposes upon the naval expert the harder task of calculating what he can and cannot defend with means which there is some political and economic possibility of maintaining, and then of telling his people what, with a given naval establishment, they can reasonably expect to do and what it would be technically dangerous for them to hope to do.

A wider view of his own profession should, it seems to the writer, equip a naval expert to discuss his subject in such hard and realistic terms as these. His failure to do so is bad for the navy and bad for the nation. On the one hand, because it provides no sound and historic basis for naval policy, it exposes the navy to precisely that treatment at the hands of politicians which the navy so often denounces as destructive to its own efficiency. On the other hand, it leaves the nation with no safe and satisfactory guides in a matter of absolutely vital importance both to ourselves and to our neighbors. For the truth is that the experts and the admirals are seeing only the minor tactics of their subject, not its broad and essential strategy.

It is a barren business. It is like taking a trench and losing the war; it is like the wisdom of the British in making themselves so absolutely supreme in ‘command of the sea’ that the submarine nearly starved them to death. It is to forget human reality for technical fictions. The consequence is the focusing of naval eyes upon paper comparisons, upon ‘parity’ or ‘ratios’ instead of upon the actual ends which navies are capable of serving. It is the concoction of such grotesqueries as the 1916 programme. It is the devotion of immense energies to such footling issues as whether the Japanese have a 10-6 or a 10-7 ratio in cruisers, to the exclusion of the basic fact that whether it were 10-6 or 10-7 we could no more ‘defend’ our Far Eastern trade from the Japanese than the Japanese could ‘ defend ’ their American trade from us. Finally, it is to leave the American people in the catastrophic belief that it is militarily possible for them to do anything they please anywhere, when all experience shows the reverse to be the truth.

For in the end the whole naval debate of the past ten years has revolved not around real politico-naval facts but around an adding machine. What we have been listening to is not a discussion of the national defense; it is a discussion of paper figures, tabular ‘supremacy,’ arithmetical dominion of the seas, and that mystical sort of prestige discoverable only in the pages of Jane’s Fighting Ships or similar manuals. Only remotely are these things connected with genuine security, national needs, or actual war. It is for this last, however, that the taxpayer imagines that navies and navalism are providing. The taxpayer, who puts up the money, has to be a realist. It is a misfortune that the naval expert does not feel himself under the same necessity.