Sentiment vs Strategy: British Naval Policy, Imperial Defence, and the Development of Dominion Navies, 1911–14
This article examines British naval policy towards imperial defence and the development of autonomous Dominion navies in 1911–14. It shows that the Admiralty's main goal under the leadership of Winston Churchill was to concentrate British and Dominion warships in European waters, and ideally in the North Sea, to meet the German threat. Churchill's approach to naval developments in the Dominions was also shaped by his desire to fulfil the Cabinet's policy of remaining strong in the Mediterranean Sea. He made some concessions to sentiment in the Dominions, but his attempts to create a coherent imperial policy for the naval defence of Britain and its empire were ultimately unsuccessful. By 1914 it was clear that the Dominions would not provide the additional warships Britain required for the Mediterranean, and on the eve of war the Admiralty was beginning to prepare an imperial naval strategy that more accurately reflected the Empire's capabilities.
A Service Ready for Total War? The State of the Royal Navy in July 1914
The image of Britain’s military leaders as conservative, reactionary, unimaginative, technophobic and resistant to change is all too well established in the popular imagination and memory. Britain, it is often said, always begins its campaigns with disaster on the battlefield because those in charge of the war effort, if they have thought about the art of war at all, are too preoccupied with fighting the last conflict to have taken any proper notice of subsequent developments. Consequently, being unprepared for future challenges, they fall at the first hurdle. Such shortcomings in strategic and tactical thinking, all too frequently revealed in the short wars of the nineteenth century, were, it is said, especially obvious when that most demanding of tests—modern industrialised warfare against a coalition of major powers—was faced in 1914. The main victim of this caricature of disaster through thoughtlessness and incompetence, especially when it comes to the First World War, is the British Army. Books such as John Laffin’s British Butchers and Bunglers of the First World War proclaim in the most forceful terms that Britain’s devastating casualties on the Western Front were a result primarily of an intellectual failure—a failure of command, a failure predicated on a rigid adherence to outmoded tactical ideas and faulty operational thinking, which led to the unnecessary slaughter in the trenches.1 The bête noire of such historians is Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the epitome, for some, of inflexible leadership and the rigid refusal to adapt to new circumstances.2 This ‘lions led by donkeys’ thesis has gained enormous popular traction;3 and yet, as numerous military historians have laboured over the years to show, the British army command, while certainly not without fault, was not the inflexible and hidebound organisation of this common portrayal.4 Indeed, the army that introduced to the world armoured warfare, gave prominence to close air support and perfected combined arms tactics was far from resistant to change, irrespective of any general perception to the contrary. It is also worth recalling that the Imperial General Staff was an organisation dedicated to learning and innovation, and had been created specifically to think through the problems of future warfare. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered
Between 1890 and 1913, Captain Alfred Thayer Mathan published a series of books on naval warfare in the age of the sail, which established his reputation as one of the founders of modern strategic history. This text argues that Mahan's two principle arguments have been misunderstood ever since. Instead of representing Mahan as an advocate of naval supremacy, it shows him asserting that only a multinational naval consortium could defend international trade. Instead of presenting Mahan as a man who adhered to strategic principles, the book shows that he stressed the importance of an officer's judgement and character, formed by the study of history.