News, Articles and Comment

Ed. Capt Stocker’s forthcoming Navy Records Society volume The Postwar Fleet is highly anticipated. Provided here is a sample document, written in 1949 by the Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff, Rear Admiral Ralph Edwards, later Controller of the Navy and then Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean. It was circulated to the First Sea Lord and other members of the Admiralty Board. The original is held at the National Archives, Kew [ADM 205/83]. A 20 minute read.

Ed. The increasingly Joint and interservice nature of senior command raises fascinating possibilities regarding the career paths of future RN and RM officers. Through research and interviews the author asks, and answers, the question of what path a Royal Marine might follow to become First Sea Lord. A 30 minute read.

Ed. David Waters concluded his 1995-1996 series of reflections on the Battle of the Atlantic [84/2 & 84/3] by returning to the question of convoy ‘laws’ and his concern that ideological assumptions and abstract thought concerning future operations would once again take precedence over the scientific conclusions he had reached forty years before. A 25 minute read.

Ed. In this second instalment of his reflections on the Battle of the Atlantic [84/1, p. 68], former Naval Staff historian David Waters, wary of the pernicious abuses of language so frequent in military affairs, asked the difficult question of why the convoy lessons of the First World War were not learnt before the Second. Republished here as part of the 80th Anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic. A 20 minute read.

Ed. The author surveys the Delivering Combined Seapower (DCS) concept, with the goal of moving from interoperable USN-RN operations to a more thoroughly integrated interchangeable dynamic. Credit to the United States Center for Maritime Strategy, originally published on the Maritime Ops Center website (https://centerformaritimestrategy.org/publications/strengthening-the-special-relationship-delivering-combined-sea-power/). A 5 minute read.

Ed. In 1995 staff historian David Waters began publishing in the NR [83/4, p. 349] a series of commentaries on the Battle of the Atlantic, a subject he had mastered while working on The Defeat of the Enemy Attack upon Shipping (1957). He was inspired in this case by the renewed naval history discourse, evident in a review of S. Howarth and D. Law, eds., The Battle of the Atlantic 1939-1945 (1994), the International Naval Conference on the battle held in Liverpool in 1993, and related writings in the NR [83/1, p. 84 & 83/2, p. 159]. Republished here as part of the 80th Anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic. A 15 minute read.

Ed. Former Naval Staff historian D. W. Waters originally presented this essay as the Presidential Address to the British Society for the History of Science in 1978. It was reprinted in the NR over two volumes in 1984 [72/3 & 72/4]. Waters’ conclusions, based on the rigorous data analysis conducted for the Defeat of the Enemy Attack upon Shipping (1957), demonstrated mathematically the superiority of escorted convoys over independent sailings during the U-boat conflicts of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. Reproduced here as part of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic. A 40 minute read.