The United States Navy 1914-18
48 pages
Andy Field
‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is the old adage, but I often do. This one didn’t initially inspire me though, with three illustrations of USN personnel. Fortunately, I was wrong in my initial impression.
The book follows the usual Osprey layout and is a brief, readable and informative outline of the US Navy and its role in the Great War. Coverage is wide-ranging, including ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Navy’, its’ command structure, strategy, doctrine, the fleet’s organisation, supporting yards and bases, a section on ships, aircraft and ordnance, the operations undertaken between 1914 and 1918, a section on personnel and a short, but no less informative, ‘Aftermath’.
In 1914 the US Navy, the third largest navy in the world, was a navy with the battleship at its core, built to defend US coasts and defeat any enemy in a decisive, battlefleet action. As the author points out though, neither President Woodrow Wilson, nor his Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, provided any political or foreign policy guidance to help formulate policies, something that suited the conservatively minded navy. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D Roosevelt, like his superiors, a man with no professional experience, expressed his own frustrations with the naval hierarchy, when he said that: “To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right hand and you punch it with your left hand until you are finally exhausted, and you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching it.” (p4)
Unsurprisingly then, pre-war, strategic planning focused on fleet encounters, War Plan Black, against the Germans in the Caribbean, and the equally unrealistic War Plan Orange, against the Japanese fleet, which postulated the US battle fleet sailing, unscathed, across the Pacific before engaging and defeating the Japanese fleet in their home waters.
Wartime experiences necessarily changed the US Navy, and by the end of the war it had integrated battleships into the Grand Fleet, experienced patrol work, escorted convoys and transported troops across the Atlantic, conducted anti-submarine warfare, used of aircraft for maritime patrol and for strategic bombing, undertaken minelaying and even fought on the Western Front, with 14” naval railway gun batteries and the USMC’s 4th Marine Brigade forming a part of the American Expeditionary Force in France. All that it had not experienced was, as Mr Lane Herder points out was “…the epic fleet battle that it had spent decades rehearsing to fight and win…..”. As far as the US Navy was concerned, the end of the war highlighted what Brian Lane Herder suggests was a “crisis of purpose” quoting an unnamed, USN planner: “…We have no enemy in view. We have no war plan to meet the enemy, even if we had one in view…” (p42)
Strategic attention turned towards the Pacific and in 1919 Secretary Daniels divided the battle fleet into Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. With no realistic European rivals, and with the US Senate’s failure to ratify the Versailles Treaty, or join the League of Nations, the US turned its back on European problems, and the US Navy re-focused on the Japanese as a potential adversary.
The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty “gutted Wilson’s and Daniels’ plans for a world-class battle fleet”, a total of 16 battleships being scrapped, with a further 13 battleships and battlecruisers cancelled. However, as the author points out, by 1927 the navy possessed three aircraft carriers and, despite the post-war reductions, possessed 15 battleships and over 100 relatively new, ‘flush-deck’ destroyers. It was these survivors that Brian Lane Harder points out, “were the seeds of the leviathan that would ultimately win World War II in the Pacific.” (p42)
If feel that I’ve only scratched the surface with this review as Brian Lane Harder has presented a lot of information to readers. The book is brief, but I think authoritative and I enjoyed reading it as well as learning some things. At £12.99 it’s not going to break the bank, and I would unhesitatingly recommend this book to interested members.
