Battle Line: The United States Navy, 1919–1939

"I wanted to include books about the US Navy. There’s no shortage of books about the US Navy, most of which are perfectly dreadful because they’re practically all written about the glories of America. And they’re written entirely from inside. They’re not reflective. They’re not good at stepping outside themselves and asking whether it looks that way from outside, or whether other people do it the same way. The Hones are father and son and they’re very good. They do know a lot about the outside world. And they do write with a good sense of the big picture, the outside world, what was going on around the US Navy, what was going on around the US. Most books about the US Navy are about glorious US victories, which the US Navy wins single-handedly. Here we’re looking at the US Navy in peacetime, in a period which tends to be dismissed by US naval historians as all a bit of a disaster because the politicians are frightful people who are to blame for everything and failed to give the US Navy all the money it wanted, which is very wicked thing. So the story of the US Navy between the wars has not been written up very intelligently. But this is a very intelligent book at different levels. It talks about the professional challenges which they faced, trying to prepare the US Navy for a future war. Everybody faces the challenges of the future, of course. If you’re building an armed service, by definition, you’re preparing for the future, which is always unknown. So the only thing you’ve got to go on is the past, or your vision of what the past means. And the US Navy, because it basically had to stop shipbuilding at the end of the First World War because of the Washington Naval Treaty , was stuck with a battle fleet designed according to the ideas of about 1910. Moreover, you do have to have at least a public theory as to why there may be enemies out there. And this was difficult for the United States because it had no serious enemies. It was too far away from any possible enemies for it to be plausible to imagine that they were going to be attacked. They finished up fighting a war against the Japanese but the Japanese were never anywhere near the United States. The best they managed was to overrun the United States’s colony in the Philippines. There was never any danger that the Japanese fleet was going to steam under the Golden Gate Bridge and bombard San Francisco. They never got within 2,000 miles of there and never could have done. “Most people have guessed the future wrong, because that’s the nature of the future. The US Navy got it very wrong” So what was the US Navy there for? Theoretically, it was there to steam across the Pacific to fight a great battle against the Japanese because they were there. But actually, that wasn’t ever going to happen either. Because the Japanese had found out what the US Navy was going to do, and didn’t intend to hang around and wait to fight a battle on US terms. The US Navy had a huge force of destroyers built at the end of the First World War to fight a very particular kind of war in a flat calm in the Caribbean. Who were they going to find in the Caribbean in a flat calm? South American navies—they’d planned to do that in the 1880s, against the Chilean Navy, the great threat to the survival of American democracy. But this time this was not such a plausible line. So now it was going to be the German Navy, but how was it going to steam across the North Atlantic, given that it was actually incapable of doing so because it didn’t have the range? Anyway, it was going to arrive in the Caribbean, there was going to be a huge battle and it was going be fought in the Caribbean, because that was the only place a US Navy could fight it. And so that was where it had to be. So they built this new fleet. They’ve got an enormous fleet of destroyers, which are not fit to go to sea in the open Atlantic and which, by 1939, were all worn out. Another problem is that they’ve got some very, very old battleships, which are the great battleships which are supposed to be able to steam across the Pacific. But they don’t have the range to steam across the Pacific. And the US Navy doesn’t have any oilers to refuel them, to take them across the Pacific. So actually, the great plan to steam across the Pacific and fight a battle against the Japanese is impossible. And, by the 1930s, there are some people in the US Navy, who can see all this. The question is, what do they do about it? The cost of building a new navy that is fit for purpose would be huge. Congress refused to provide the money. So they were stuck only with the old ships and they carry on stuck only with the old ships, basically until about 1937 or ’38 when somebody notices that something untoward has been happening in Europe, and some people are beginning to say that perhaps they ought to start getting a few more ships just in case something were to happen. And then, in 1940, there is the war against the Germans and the Norwegian campaign and, suddenly, the US Navy contemplates with unspeakable horror a modern naval world in which there are aeroplanes not doing the things which the US Navy’s aeroplanes were doing, and ships doing things that the US Navy was not equipped to do, ships with anti-aircraft guns, of which the US Navy had hardly any. They woke up to the fact that their guesses about the future were even more out than everybody else’s guesses. Most people have guessed the future wrong, because that’s the nature of the future. The US Navy got it very wrong. Anyway, Hone and Hone are really very interesting about what the US Navy was doing in the interwar years, what it was really thinking and what happens when it begins that nasty process of colliding with the modern naval world and discovering that it’s got entirely the wrong kit facing in the wrong direction."