The armistice of 11 November 1918—80 years past—marked the end of the first phase of a historic transformation in relations between Great Britain and the United States. When World War I, or “The Great War,” began in 1914, the two nations still were in thrall to the legacy of mutual antagonism that had characterized their posture throughout the 19th century. When the guns fell quiet four years later, the world had not been “made safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson had dreamed, but the foundation had been laid for an Anglo-American strategic partnership that would preserve democracy in the face of the lethal assaults mounted by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the mid-20th century and beyond.1 Of all who served in uniform for the United States during World War I, Admiral Sims stands out as the strategist who did the most to weld the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy into the force that thwarted the Imperial German Navy’s challenge to the survival of Britain and to the security of the United States. A lifetime of questioning naval orthodoxy made his ultimate achievement possible.
Sims was born of a Canadian mother and an American father on 15 October 1858 in the village of Port Hope on Lake Ontario, midway between Toronto and Kingston, Canada. This geographic happenstance caused the future naval officer erroneously to be considered a Canadian national and to be accused of excessively pro-British sympathies. To this, Sims’s graphic retort was, “Had I been born in a stable would I have been a horse?”2
This acerbic query typified the style of the young man who entered the U.S. Naval Academy in June 1876 after residing in Pennsylvania for only four years. An irresolute and indifferent student, Sims ranked 33d among 62 graduating cadet midshipmen in the Class of 1880. He served the next two years as a “passed midshipman” on hoard the Tennessee, an obsolescent steam frigate that showed the flag throughout the Gulf of Mexico. In port, the passed midshipmen and junior officers spent as much time as possible entertaining young women, and in March 1882 Sims swooned at the sight of “the ‘belle’ of Memphis, one of the most beautiful blondes I have ever seen, also Miss Davis, the daughter of Jeff Davis, Ex. President of the Ex. Confederacy (so called), [sic.]’”
A year later, serving in the equally obsolescent USS Swatara, a third-rate ship-rigged sloop-of-war, he learned of his promotion to ensign. Soon after becoming a member of the officers’ wardroom, he busied himself writing essays for New York and Chicago newspapers about conditions in Haiti and the strategic significance of the Isthmus of Panama, which President Rutherford B. Hayes recently had defined as virtually part of the U.S. coastline. Sims also anguished about whether to remain in a badly outdated navy that appeared to be shrinking even further in size. But the prospects of “confined office work” in the business world were not appealing, as he informed his father in June 1883: “I think I have finally made up my mind to remain in the Navy. I like the life, and am afraid I should not like civil life.”4 He could not know that his decision coincided precisely with the birth of the “new navy,” which he was destined to serve with great distinction as an innovative critic, creative tactician, inspiring leader, and single-minded wartime strategist.
The “new navy” of the 1880s and afterward differed from the old in several fundamental ways. Wooden hulls gave way to ones of iron and then steel; wind-driven sails yielded to steam-powered propellers; small muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon bowed to much larger breech-loading rifled guns that eventually reached a bore diameter of 16 inches; electricity took over to train and elevate the new guns. To employ these revolutionary new ships an offensive battleship strategy emanated from the U.S. Naval War College, established in 1884 at Newport, Rhode Island. Forever afterward associated with the name of its most prolific exponent, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the strategy for the age of steam espoused battle fleet engagements aimed at destroying the enemy’s fleets. The objective was to win command of the seas and break the opponent’s will to fight. Mahan derived his doctrine from a study of the Anglo- French navies in the age of sail.
Ensign Sims was a direct beneficiary of the U.S. Navy’s new interest in the British and European navies. It caused the powerful chief of the Bureau of Navigation, John G. Walker, to approve the young officer’s somewhat unusual request for a year’s leave to polish his French in Paris. A year of study in 1889 led to Sims’s selection in 1896 as U.S. naval attaché in Paris, where he remained until 1900. For four years he meticulously catalogued the forbidding superiority of the naval gunfire systems of Britain, France, and even Russia. Some of his reports reached the desk of the uniquely gifted and energetic Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt. A keen student of U.S. naval history, patron of the Naval War College, admirer of Mahan, and fierce champion of naval expansion, Roosevelt took time “to add my personal appreciation” and admiration for “the energy, zeal, and intelligence” of Sims’s dissections of European warships and naval establishments.5
Roosevelt’s flamboyance as second-in-command of the “Rough Riders” during the Spanish-American War won him popular and political acclaim and election to the vice presidency in 1900. Sims, meanwhile, completed his tour as naval attaché and in November 1900 headed directly for the China Station on board the USS Kentucky (BB-6), the Navy’s newest battleship. He and his shipmates were welcomed aboard British men-of-war in Hong Kong and at English naval officers’ clubs in Chinese cities. As Sims said, “We got to know the officers very well.”6 He particularly admired Captain Percy Scott, the father of “continuous-aim firing,” a technique that radically increased the accuracy of ships’ guns by keeping the target constantly in the gunners’ sights.
In his two years on the China Station, Sims bombarded the Navy Department with highly technical reports extolling Scott’s method of aiming and discrediting the armor protection and interior structure of the big-gun turrets of the U.S. Navy’s latest ships. Frustrated by what he viewed as the Navy Department’s stifling of his criticism, he audaciously took his case directly to Theodore Roosevelt, who had become President upon the assassination of William McKinley. On 16 November 1901, Sims wrote a personal letter to the President, alleging “the extreme danger of the present very inefficient condition of the Navy, considered as a fighting force.” The irrepressible lieutenant’s bill of particulars dealt mostly with the rapidity and accuracy—or lack thereof—of U.S. naval guns in comparison with “those of our possible enemies, including the Japanese. . . Many years later he conceded publicly that by writing to the President he had been guilty of “the rankest possible kind of insubordination.”7
Roosevelt was not a man to take offense at the circumvention of normal bureaucratic channels, but he did chide Sims gently for being an alarmist: “I think you [are] unduly pessimistic, as you certainly were at the outset of the Spanish-American War, when, as you may remember, you took a very gloomy view of our vessels even as compared with those of Spain.”8 But he also invited Sims to write again and ordered that his critical assessments be published (many in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings) and distributed to all serving officers of the Navy. The insurgent had found a patron at the highest level, a point not lost on the officer in charge of naval personnel.
Rear Admiral Henry C. Taylor, a naval reformer who approved of Sims’s campaign, ordered the maverick back to the United States for a tour as the Inspector of Target Practice. The job perfectly suited Sims’s talents and personality. He remained the Navy’s authorized critic for the duration of the Roosevelt presidency.
As the free-wheeling Inspector of Target Practice, Sims forged close personal links with the top naval hierarchy in Great Britain. He continued to correspond with Percy Scott and in an early visit to London he met with Admiral John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, and Admiral John Jellicoe, the Director of Naval Ordnance. Sims was witnessing at close hand the historic Anglo-American rapprochement of the early 20th century. At Fisher’s insistence, the Royal Navy closed its base at Jamaica, leaving the U.S. Navy as the unquestioned master of the Caribbean and West Indies. This withdrawal from age-old cruising grounds facilitated enforcement of President Roosevelt’s “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the pledge of December 1904 that henceforth the United States would police the area. London also agreed to unilateral U.S. construction and fortification of the Panama Canal, which became a secure conduit for rapidly shifting the U.S. Navy’s battle fleet from its home waters in the Atlantic to danger zones in the Pacific. Japan’s stunning military and naval victories in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 dramatized the vulnerability of the United States’ island possessions in the Pacific and demonstrated the strategic necessity for interoceanic mobility of a battle fleet that was growing at an average rate of one battleship per year.
In 1906, Admiral John Fisher dramatically challenged the wisdom of the U.S. Navy’s capital-ship building program with the secret construction of an entirely new class of battleship, the Dreadnought. Completed at the Royal Navy’s Portsmouth dockyard in December, this fast, heavy, and thickly armored “all-big-gun ship” mounted a main battery of ten 12-inch guns. Sims and most other experts immediately recognized that the vastly extended range of the Dreadnought’s large guns rendered all existing battleships vulnerable and hence obsolete. To gather data about the new threat, he visited England and through his friendship with Fisher and Jellicoe arranged a clandestine tour of the highly secret leviathan, which he reported to the White House.
Roosevelt trusted Sims explicitly. In October 1907 he assured the commander, “I shall make a strong bid for the all-big-gun-battleships, of course. Is there any point you would especially like me to bring out in my annual message, or any other action you would recommend my taking?”'7 A month later, Sims was appointed to the additional post of naval aide to the President. For his loyalty in this sensitive billet, Roosevelt rewarded Commander Sims in a most unusual way: by ordering him to the command of a battleship, an honor reserved universally for senior naval captains who had distinguished themselves as commanding officers of smaller warships.
On 1 March 1909, Commander Sims took command of the USS Minnesota (BB-22) just after she and 15 other battleships returned from the global cruise of the Great White Fleet. Commissioned in 1907, she was one of the finest pre- dreadnoughts in the U.S. Navy. In late 1910, the Minnesota joined other units of the Atlantic Fleet for a goodwill cruise to France and England. In London, Sims and his crew participated in a week of festivities culminating with two banquets hosted by the Lord Mayor in the historic Guildhall. On 2 December, the Lord Mayor’s welcome included what Sims described as a confident assertion that the United States would come to the British Empire’s aid if it were ever threatened seriously by a foreign enemy. Intoxicated by the oratory and ceremony, Sims the next day replied in kind: “If the time ever comes when the integrity of the British Empire is seriously menaced by an external enemy, it is my opinion that you may count upon every man, every dollar, every drop of blood, of your kindred across the sea.”10 For this gross indiscretion Sims easily could have been relieved of command and forced into retirement. Instead, he was promoted to captain and whisked off to the Naval War College, where for two years he studied strategy and tactics.
When he emerged from the college to assume command of a flotilla of destroyers in July 1913, he perceived an absence of doctrine to guide tactics in battle. As if he were the proctor in a seminar, he began to gather officers from all the ships and conduct mock battles on the deck of his flagship’s wardroom. This “war college afloat,” as Sims referred to it, gradually developed sound procedures for systematic and coordinated night torpedo attacks by destroyers on the fleet’s battleships.11 For a mind conditioned to thinking of heavy armored ships and big guns, the seagoing experience with thin-hulled small warships opened vast new possibilities about naval operations. The delayed bonus came with the decisive antisubmarine campaign that Sims masterminded from 1917 to 1918.
Detached from the flotilla on 25 October 1915, Captain Sims was ordered to command the battleship Nevada (BB-36). Laid down in 1912 and commissioned on 11 March 1916, the Nevada displaced 9,000 tons more than the standard-setting Dreadnought. The culmination of U.S. battleship evolution that had begun in the late 1880s—at the time Ensign Sims was studying in Paris—the Nevada mounted ten 14-inch guns to the Englishman’s equal number of 12-inchers. As her first commanding officer, Captain Sims established high standards for collegial leadership in afternoon sessions of tea-drinking with his officers. “It is the Warrior’s beverage,” he proclaimed, as he directed the ship’s paymaster to equip all junior officers with proper tea pitchers and cups.12
For a moment, Sims epitomized naval orthodoxy and the firm belief that capital ships could command the sea against all challengers. On 19 December 1916, shortly after being selected for promotion to rear admiral, he testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Naval Affairs: “Submarines are no good at all in the face of an enemy who commands the surface of the water.”13 He soon changed his mind.
In January 1917, over-confident German naval officers finally persuaded the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II that unlimited U-boat attacks on transatlantic cargo ships flooding Britain with war munitions and food from the United Sates could drive England out of the war within six months. Entry of the United States into World War I was inevitable, and William S. Sims was the Navy’s man of the hour. He had barely assumed his new position as President of the Naval War College when he received a telephone call from Washington ordering him to report at once to the Navy Department. There he learned that in a cable of 23 March the U.S. ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, had requested the immediate dispatch of “an Admiral of our own Navy who will bring our Navy’s plans and inquiries.”14 By 31 March he was under way on the fast passenger liner New York, traveling incognito in civilian clothes with his aide, Commander John V. Babcock. He brought no war plans and only verbal orders, but the lack of firm direction proved highly advantageous when he met in London on 10 April with his old comrade, the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Jellicoe.
Congress had declared war on 6 April, so the reunion with Jellicoe constituted a meeting of allied commanders rather than a shadowy consultation between belligerent and neutral senior officers. It was a sobering experience for Sims, who had arrived in England confident that the British had the war at sea well in hand. On the contrary, Jellicoe informed him somberly, German submarines were ravaging British and neutral shipping at such a rate that the Allied Powers unquestionably would lose the war for want of food and materiel, possibly as early as August, certainly by October. The astonished Sims realized immediately that “Britain did not control the seas.” Germany’s successful deployment of the submarine had made “control of the seas to-day a very different thing from what it was in Nelson’s time— That is, the surface navy can no longer completely protect communications as it could in Nelson’s and Farragut’s times.”13 He later remembered asking Jellicoe, “Is there no solution for the problem?” The First Sea Lord had replied, “Absolutely none that we can see now.”16
Less than a week elapsed before the thunderstruck Sims fired off a cable to the Navy Department, outlining the desperate plight of Britain and prescribing the remedy. The U.S. Navy must immediately dispatch a “maximum number of destroyers . . . accompanied by small anti-submarine craft,” and the government must provide unlimited amounts of merchant tonnage.17 Then, working closely with Prime Minister Lloyd George and innovative British junior officers, Sims helped persuade the Sea Lords to experiment with the convoying of merchant vessels by destroyers “as the general plan of campaign.”18 This concession led to Anglo-American naval victory in World War I.
The figures speak for themselves. When Sims first arrived in London, Admiral Jellicoe predicted that in April 1917 the U-boats would sink 900,000 tons of merchant transports. By December 1917 the Allies were losing 350,000 tons a month. In October 1918, the month before the war ended, the U-boats could sink no more than 112,427 tons. This massive reduction in loss, with the corollary monthly increase in tonnage of materiel being shipped from the United States, was accomplished between May 1917 and November 1918 by 1,500 convoys of 18,000 ships. The U.S. Navy provided about 27% of the escorting vessels in British waters, the Royal Navy 70%. Simultaneously, the United States initiated a separate category of shipments: troops and their equipment, which were routed to Brest, France, on a more southerly track around the British Isles. By war’s end, 2,000,000 U.S. soldiers had reached Europe without the loss of a single troop transport. Sims’s full integration of his destroyers into the Royal Navy’s operational command structure at Queenstown, Ireland, made the war-winning achievements of the convoys possible.19
In early 1918 the grateful British offered Sims honorary membership on the Board of Admiralty, an unprecedented distinction that would have made him privy to the innermost deliberations of the Royal Navy’s central headquarters. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels forbade acceptance, saying later, “I regarded it as rather a love of glitter and foreign recognition and honor than anything else.”20 The Navy Department refrained from taking any further action inimical to its London commander for the rest of the war, and in December 1918, it even promoted him to four-star admiral. This was a bittersweet, ephemeral reward for Sims. Once he left the London command, he reverted to two-star rank, the highest permanent grade in the U.S. Navy at the time.21
The postwar U.S. Navy had little room in its inner sanctum for a senior officer who was overtly enthusiastic about close cooperation with the Royal Navy. Secretary Daniels and Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson coldly excluded Sims from the peace negotiations of January to May 1919, and at Paris they personally formulated a U.S. naval policy antagonistic toward the principal U.S. wartime partner. In a memorandum of 13 March 1919, Benson gratuitously described the United States as Britain’s “sole naval rival . . . and every ship built or acquired by Great Britain can have in mind only the American fleet.”22
Appalled by the resurrection of an Anglophobic naval policy, Sims sailed for home. At his request, he resumed the presidency of the Naval War College, a bully pulpit for the aging critic of the Navy. On the bottom of his orders, he noted wryly “how pleased all hands are to give me the College. It relieves them from the embarrassment of [not] knowing what to do with me.”23
From 1919 until his retirement in 1922, and beyond retirement almost to his death in 1936, Admiral Sims continued in his lifelong role as the most critical voice within the Navy’s loyal opposition. In speeches, congressional testimony and Proceedings articles, he advocated promotion by merit and the disestablishment of the U.S. Naval Academy for failing properly to train young men in the essentials of leadership. He recognized at an extremely early date that carrier aircraft could sink battleships. “Therefore,” wrote the former commanding officer of the Nevada in March 1922, “the battleship is dead.”24 As if seeing 20 years into the future, he intoned, “If, in turn, this is true, it also follows that a nation that puts its money into airplane carriers, instead of battleships, will have a stronger fighting force than a nation which continues building many battleships and only a few carriers.”25
For Sims to question the battleship and the Naval Academy in the last years of his life seems at first glance to justify the final judgment delivered in March 1942 by his distinguished biographer and son-in-law, Elting E. Mori- son: “To play the attractive role of elder statesman was quite beyond him. He never did grow old and he never had possessed the qualities of statesmanship. He lived and died an independent.”26
From the perspective of 1998, another evaluation is equally persuasive. On the eve of the 21st century, the Anglo-American coalition first forged by Admiral Sims in 1917 is embedded in all U.S. foreign policy and naval strategy. To use a nautical term, this partnership is “180° out” from what Passed Midshipman Sims knew on board the Tennessee and Swatara, when the Royal Navy loomed as the world’s most lethal threat to U.S. national security. That William S. Sims helped in ways small and large to end a century of reciprocal hostility between the two major English-speaking powers is certainly the most significant and lasting transformation brought about by a man who always sought change while wearing a uniform that symbolizes permanence, conservatism, and tradition. It attests to statesmanship of a high order.
1. Wilson’s war message, 2 April 1917, quoted in part in Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Relations: A History, to 1920, Volume 1, 4th Edition (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995), p. 302.
2. Sims quoted in Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modem American Navy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942), p. 7.
3. Sims to his mother, 19 March 1882, U.S. Naval War College Archives, Manuscript Collection 168, William S. Sims Papers: Personal Letters Sent, 1882-1885, Box 1.
4. loc. cit., Sims to his father, 4 May and 22 June 1883.
5. Roosevelt quoted in Morison, p. 49.
6. Sims’s much later reflection quoted in Morison, p, 426.
7. Sims to Roosevelt, 16 November 1901, quoted in Morison, pp. 102-104; Sims before House Naval Committee in March 1916, quoted in Morison, p. 328.
8. Roosevelt to Sims, 12 December 1901, quoted in Morison, pp. 104-105.
9. Roosevelt to Sims, 13 October 1907, U.S. Naval War College Archives, Presidents: Sims, William Snowden, Folder (1).
10. Sims quoted in Morison, p. 281.
11. Sims’s phrase quoted in Morison, p. 299.
12. Sims quoted in Morison, p. 329.
13. “Statement of Captain William S. Sims, United States Navy,” Committee on Naval Affairs, House of Representatives, Tuesday, 19 December 1916, p. 868, filed in U.S. Naval War College Archives, Presidents: Sims, William Snowden, Folder (1).
14. Page quoted in Morison, p. 337.
15. William S. Sims, The Victory at Sea (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 16. Italics in original.
16. Jellicoe quoted in Sims, p. 7.
17. Sims to Secretary of the Navy [cable], 14 April 1917, in Sims, p. 319.
18. Babcock’s phrase quoted in Morison, p. 351.
19. The integration of the commands, in which the U.S. Navy was necessarily the junior partner, reached the extent of joint courts of inquiry. See William N. Still, Jr., ed., The Queenstown Patrol, 1917: The Diary of Commander Joseph Knefler Taussig, U.S. Navy (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1996), pp. 58-59.
20. Daniels in 1920 congressional hearings, quoted in Morison, p. 391.
21. Sims was promoted to admiral on the retired list by Act of Congress dated 21 June 1930.
22. Benson memorandum quoted in Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 262.
23. Sims quoted in Morison, p. 467.
24. Sims quoted in Morison, p. 506.
25. Sims, “The Battleship and the Airplane,” World’s Work, May 1921, pp. 26-29.
26. Morison, p. 468.