The writer graduated from the Naval Academy soon after the beginning of our last “Naval Holiday.” The navies of the world were entering upon that great revolution in warship construction started by the United States in the building of monitors, wherein wood was abandoned for iron and steel, sails for steam engines, and guns were installed in revolving armored turrets. With that fatuous sense of security born of our peace-loving disposition and our ignorant belief that the breadth of our oceans put us beyond the reach of the new type of warship, our government balked at the enormous expense of building such vessels and decided that we only needed the wooden steam frigates left over from the Civil War to “show the flag” in foreign ports and to protect our citizens during disorders among our then turbulent Latin American neighbors. Building was entirely suspended ; navy yards were appraised for sale and navy personnel was put through a drastic process of reduction by promoting only one officer at the head of a grade for every two vacancies in the grade above. In other words, if no casualties occurred in between, it took the retirement of sixty-four rear admirals to promote one ensign to the next higher grade. Under these conditions the personnel of the Navy soon settled down into three distinct groups; the older officers, like Rowen, Porter and the Rodgers, who had made their reputations and reached the height of their careers in the Civil War; the "Coburgers" who, seeing nothing to be gained by striving to excel in their profession, managed through personal influence and favoritism to sit in swivel chairs in comfortable offices in the large social centers amid leisure, feasting and other entertainment, and a third group of those who, having no influence to prevent it, were obliged to eke out their existence on board ships lying for years at a time in foreign ports, or to risk their lives without prospect of reward amid the diseases and disorders of tropical countries.
There were a few belonging to none of these groups, though usually found in the last, who believed that national jeopardy or common sense would some day resurrect the Navy, and that it was their duty to do something to keep the officers and men in training for that day. When these became conspicuous through their activities and propaganda they were called cranks, and it is of three such “cranks” that I am now writing.
One day while I was a third classman at the Naval Academy I was standing with an upper classman in front of our quarters when our venerable-looking, white-bearded Superintendent, a member of the first group mentioned, approached along the sidewalk accompanied by another officer who seemed to be discoursing with unusual earnestness. I also noted that many midshipmen had popped their heads out of their windows to look.
“Who is that officer in whom they seem so interested,” I asked.
“Why,” said my companion, “that’s Commodore Stephen B. Luce, the author of our book on seamanship.”
Gazing closely at him I saw a lean, wiry man of medium height, with thin features between iron gray side-whiskers, a prominent, hawk-like nose, thin lips and determined chin, and the most piercing gray eyes I had ever seen in my life, and as he passed I caught the words, “We need an officers’ school in the art of war.”
This expression, coming from him, astonished me, for I had judged him by his books on seamanship to be one of the most practical men in the Navy, and my youthful mind could not conceive anything practical or practicable in an academic study of the art of war, especially at that unpropitious time; so I then and there began to fear that he was a crank.
He was at that time in command of a little group of wooden sailing ships known as the training squadron which he took on long cruises under sail to train apprentices for seamen, and many were the stories of the nervy maneuvers he performed and of his imperturbability in performing them. One of these I recall and will tell it as I remember it. The squadron was cruising in column early one morning in a moderate gale. The next ship astern of the flagship was a faster vessel and it was only by incessant luffing that she could be kept from overtaking her leader. Her captain, who was not much junior in rank to Luce, became so nervously afraid of a collision that he posted himself on the forecastle at the very how of the ship to conn (or direct the handling of her) from that point. While so doing he looked down into the large stern-cabin windows of the flagship and saw the commodore shaving.
"Look here, Luce,” he cried out, “I’ve taken off every sail you will let me and am still in danger of colliding with you every minute. Our jibboom is almost over your taffrail now.”
“All right, old man,” said Luce, waving his razor at him. "We’ll stand by for a bloody bear-off until I get through shaving; then I’ll go up and take a look at things.”
In my day at the Naval Academy the course was four years at the school and two more years at sea before final graduation. For the two years at sea I was assigned to the steam frigate Tennessee, flagship of the North Atlantic Squadron, and while I was in her, Commodore Luce, as acting rear admiral, became commander-in-chief. We immediately ceased to spend the summers at the principal New England watering places and the winters at the New Orleans Mardi Gras, and went into most intensive and, as many seemed to think, most irritating and unnecessary tactical maneuvers. The captains and higher officers were marked on their performance of these as if they were in school and the other officers down to the last midshipman were made to take the deck under steam and sail and put the ships individually through the evolutions of tacking, wearing and making and shortening sail. Throughout all of this Admiral Luce would pace the poop of the Tennessee, patting a long spyglass and watching everything with the keenness of an eagle. One day when the squadron was approaching an anchorage near Gardiner’s Island, Long Island Sound, in double column and in inverse order to permit the lighter draft vessels to utilize the shoal-water for anchoring close to the shore, the Yanlic, which was just ahead of the flagship, anchored too soon and collision with her by the Tennessee appeared inevitable. Just as the situation seemed hopeless the Yantic unshackled and slipped her chain with the end buoyed and steamed out of danger. This quick presence of mind on the part of her captain filled Admiral Luce with delight and he called out to him:
“Well done, W--------- ! T’ll give you a four for slipping and a zero for anchoring there!”
Rear Admiral Stephen B, Luce, U. S. N.
Immediately after that anchorage every officer and man, excepting a few on each ship, was sent into camp on the island, and Luce steamed across the Sound with the whole squadron to leave them upon their own resources for a week. That night he sailed a dinghy back across the Sound alone, and, in civilian clothes, attempted to slip past the sentries and get into camp in order to test their vigilance, but was arrested and locked up in the guard tent. Again he was delighted.
On another occasion he put the whole squadron through the most intricate maneuvers among the islands of upper Narraganset Bay. His own ship, being the one drawing most water, caused her captain much anxiety. At one time the latter called from the bridge to the poop:
“Admiral, we have only a foot of water under our keel.”
“Just enough, Captain X---------------- , just enough, Sir!” the admiral replied.
A little later the flagship actually slid gently and firmly aground as she was passing the end of an island.
“There! Admiral,” exclaimed the captain. “Here we are, hard aground. What shall we do next?”
Luce (who knew the tide was rising) answered:
“What time is it, Captain?”
“Just twelve o’clock, Sir.”
“Then I think we had better go to dinner.”
Luce’s home was in Newport, R. I., and whenever the North Atlantic Squadron was maneuvering in the bay he was importuned by the “400” to let his officers attend their big social functions. This always irritated him and he would anchor his squadron far up the bay whenever such an invitation came and give orders that no officer should go beyond signal distance. Once, however, he got caught between two fires, as it were, for in running away from a Newport social function he anchored within reach of another one at Providence. He saw the humor of it, however, and let everybody off duty go to the party, even going himself and entering into the gaiety of the evening with almost boyish enthusiasm. In fact, so completely did he relax from his usual austerity that a lifelong friend, looking at him as he stood in the hilarious crowd of the dining-room with a glass of champagne in his hand, said: "Stephen, I believe you are tight.”
“My dear fellow,” said the admiral, “if Stephen B . Luce how can Stephen be tight?”
Probably no one outside of his personal staff, and possibly not even the members of that, knew how persistently and determinedly Luce was working out in those days his plan for the establishment of that school for the study of the art of war, but in everything he did he was leading up to it: by his association in the foundation of the U. S. Naval Institute and by his articles in the Proceedings of that Institute and in popular reviews; by official recommendations to the Navy Department; by indoctrinating conversations with all officers who showed any realization that the Navy had a future, and by the constant tactical maneuvers in which he so persistently drilled his vessels. Neither did those around him know how his idea was scorned, ridiculed and cold shouldered; how, in fact, he was coming to be looked upon in departmental circles as the arch crank of the Navy. So when his tour of sea duty was over and we youngsters were expecting him to be ordered to some high post in the Navy Department at Washington, we were actually shocked to learn that he was ordered ashore as president of a Naval War College at Coaster’s Harbor Island in Narragansett Bay. Coaster’s Harbor Island was the site of the poorhouse of the state of Rhode Island and there was nothing on it at this time, when it passed into the possession of the Navy, excepting the old stone poorhouse building and farm.
So, in the presence of a small group of officers from the squadron and a few civilians from Newport, Admiral Luce stood in front of the vacant poorhouse building one morning and read his orders establishing the Naval War College and making him its first president. As we went away and left him sitting on the steps with only his negro mess boy and a suitcase, we youngsters felt extremely sorry for him. We could not realize that those piercing gray eyes of his were seeing far into the future and that that crank was about to turn the greatest war engine this country has ever had.
Meantime another crank had been encouraging his brain to work during those navy doldrums. This was Captain A. T. Mahan. Being without influence, he had been relegated to that third group of officers, which had to go to sea in undesirable localities, and he was cruising in command of an old wooden steam frigate on the west coast of Central America. Epidemics and insurrections being quiescent, he indulged his bent for the study of history, especially maritime history, and for writing magazine articles and essays.
At that time our Civil War had gone far enough into perspective to become historically interesting to a new generation, and the well known publishers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, started to get out a series of episode volumes upon The Army and The Navy in The Civil War. Seeking among naval officers for authors for the latter they turned to Mahan and Professor James R. Soley, the instructor in Naval History at the Naval Academy. Their books came out at the very time Luce was scanning the navy lists for possible instructors, or rather, lecturers, for the War College, and while Mahan’s literary tendencies were marking him in the eyes of the navy powers-that-were as a crank and a highbrow of practical professional incompetence, it marked him for Luce as one of the men he wanted, especially as it confirmed Luce’s calibration of him when they were together as instructors at the Naval Academy, Newport, R. I., in the beginning of the Civil War.
So, with Mahan and Soley almost contemptuously assigned to him as an academic staff, the new war machine of which Luce was the main crank began to turn. Mahan began to prepare and deliver his splendid series of lectures on strategy and tactics which have since been published under the title of Naval Strategy. Officers permitted themselves to be ordered to the College for instruction, some out of curiosity and some because Newport was a nice place to spend the summer. As McCarty Little, another crank who soon after helped to turn this great engine, used to paraphrase it: “They came to scoff, hut many remained to pray.”
The greatest single product at that time, and for all time, of Luce’s school of instruction in the art of war did not come from the classes under instruction hut from the staff itself in the person of Luce’s coordinate crank, Mahan, he now had the opportunity and incentive for that analytical and comparative historical research which had always been his hobby, and side by side with his instructive lectures he wrote that wonderful book which gave a new meaning to naval power and finally awoke us from the torpor of our naval holiday: The Influence of Sea Power upon History.
It was my good fortune to serve with Captain Mahan a few years after „the publication of this hook and just after he had
CAPTAIN A. T. MAHAN, U. S. N.
completed his second term as president of the War College, when he was in command of the flagship of the European Station. Tall and spare; courteous, yet always aloof; uninterested in the interior details of ship keeping and crew drilling, and always intensive and scholarly in his conversation, I could readily understand how he could be looked upon by the average naval officer of that day as a crank. Our ship was much in England in those days in order to permit the British to bestow upon Mahan the boundless entertainment and honors which his great book had evoked, and, of course, all officers attached to his ship participated in these, but never did I see him in the least degree emotionally elated, but rather always displaying a dignified shrinking and diffidence.
It was his habit, when the ship was at anchor, to walk up and down the quarter deck with the officer-of-the-deck during the “first dog watch” from four to six p. m. On one of these occasions he told me of his long struggle to find a publisher for The Influence of Sea Power; how the Navy Department refused to consider its publication as an official War College document, and how one after another of the leading American publishers returned it until at last, as I recollect, he reluctantly sent it to England.
During these talks I found that Captain Mahan was obsessed with two strange apprehensions. One was that his ship would some day be cut down in collision with another vessel, and for this he prepared by unusually frequent collision drills, and the other was that our form of government was still experimental and would some day go through another disrupting test of its endurance, either from within or from without, more serious than our Civil War. In connection with the latter obsession an amusing incident occurred one Sunday when we were lying in the harbor of Ville- franche in the Mediterranean.
It was at the time of the great labor riots in Chicago during President Cleveland’s administration. The news of Mr. Cleveland’s call for troops to suppress the riots reached the flagship one Sunday morning by the Paris Herald. A few hours later church was “rigged” on the gun deck in the usual man-of-war manner; benches for the crew facing the chaplain’s reading-desk and chairs for the officers arranged in a semi-circle behind it. There was an
CAPTAIN Wm. MCCARTY LITTLE, U. S. N.
unusually large attendance of both officers and crew, the former including the Admiral and Captain Mahan.
The Chaplain prefaced his sermon by saying he had intended to preach on another subject, but the news of our crisis at home bad decided him to make a short address on law and order. At this, Captain Mahan sprang up in alarm and started toward the Chaplain, but was pulled back by the Admiral with an undertone admonition: “Sit down, Mahan. Let him go ahead.” This, and one or two subsequent impulses of Mahan, were unseen by the Chaplain as they took place behind him and he concluded what proved to be quite a harmless address. As he was going toward the companionway after the service, however, Captain Mahan intercepted him, saying he wished to see him in the cabin.
After removing his vestments the Chaplain went to the cabin and found Mahan pacing it in much excitment. A heated colloquy ensued during which the Captain charged the Chaplain with not confuting himself to preaching the Gospel, and preaching upon dangerous political topics, and ended by ordering him to submit his sermons to the Captain on Saturdays for revision. The Chaplain protested that he could not do so because his sermon was a matter between himself and his God, and he afterward made a written report to the Admiral of the interview and the stand he took in the matter. This report was referred to Mahan, who endorsed it with his version and views.
Admiral E--------------------- was a bluff and hearty old sea-dog to whom such a controversy was extremely distressing, but he was a resourceful old gentleman with a keen sense of humor. After tugging at his white, spiky side-whiskers for some time and frowning at the correspondence, he broke into a deep, hearty laugh and made upon it the following endorsement:
“As Chaplain S--------------------------- claims this to be a matter between himself and his God, I do not feel that I have sufficient authority to adjudicate it. I therefore refer it to the Navy Department.” Captain Mahan was a skillful and confident pilot and a fearless navigator, but his fear of collision when another vessel hove in sight was curious. Finally the dreaded catastrophe came. We were anchored in the River Scheldt, in its sharp bend below Antwerp, when, very early one morning, a deeply laden British collier coming down the river around the bend became unmanageable in the current and rammed us near the starboard how, cutting us open to a point some feet below water. Captain Mahan was in his cabin taking his morning bath and rushed on deck clad in little more than a short smoking jacket. Happily our officer-of-the- deck, a Danish lieutenant who had been through a hard school of emergency work on Danish sailing ships and who had been assigned to us as an auxiliary officer for instruction at the request of the Danish Government, was equal to the emergency. He had foreseen the inevitable collision the moment the unmanageable collier appeared, and, with our crew letter perfect in collision drill, he and they had acted so promptly that our collision mat was dropped over the hole as the collier backed out and we were quickly out of danger. Nevertheless, one of Mahan’s two apprehensions was realized. Will the other one ever be? And if so, will we be prepared then through his teaching and foresight, as his ship’s crew was in that collision?
The vicissitudes of the War College in its early days and the struggle of its intrepid founders to keep it going in the face of hostility, scorn and ridicule on the part of the officials in Washington and even throughout the service; the attempts to abolish it, or to merge it with the Torpedo School or Training Station, and the attempts to starve it out by refusing it officers for its classes or its staff and appropriations for its equipment and maintenance cannot be told here, but this story would not be complete without mention of the third and last of the trio of cranks which started the College going; Lieutenant, afterwards Captain (retired), William McCarty Little. He was a “plebe” at the Newport Naval Academy when Luce and Mahan were instructors, but probably at that time attracted little, if any, attention from them. He developed into an officer of theories and fads and crotchets, with such enthusiasm for each of them that he was usually a bore to his messmates; in other words, from the outstart of his career he was regarded as a crank. A long European cruise and subsequent leave in Europe had given him almost a foreign and quite a French mannerism, and, although a large man, his way of wearing a small pointed moustache and imperial, coupled with his mastery of the French language, made him appear decidedly like a Frenchman, but there never was a more ideal American.
A few months before Luce was left with his mess boy and suitcase on the steps of the poorhouse at Newport, Little met with an accident which ended his active naval career and turned the intense energy and lifelong current of his super-active intellect toward the War College. When out driving one day a stick or stone was knocked up by a wheel or the horse’s foot and struck him in one eye, completely destroying its sight, and in spite of all the protest and influence he could bring to bear he was railroaded on to the retired list. Living in Newport, and then well known to Luce, it was not long before the latter recognized in him an ardent disciple and had him attached to the War College staff, and on it he remained with but one short interval the rest of his life, carrying along from president to president, from faculty to faculty, and from class to class, the very incarnation of the indoctrination of the founders until both Luce and Mahan had passed away and he himself passed on to join them. To him no obstacle thrown in the way of college progress was insurmountable. On one occasion he had a problem in fleet tactics which he wanted the fleet, then in Narragansett Bay, to try out, but this was not approved; he then asked for the steam launches from the fleet but they too were denied him, whereupon he proposed to borrow a lot of boat hooks, and assuming their lengthy to be the turning radius of his vessels, to give one to each member of the class, place the members on the parade ground at the proper proportionate distances to represent his ships in formation and put them through the maneuvers, directing them to hook their boat hooks in the ground and walk around at the ends of them where the maneuvers involved changes in direction.
There came at last a time when the potency of Luce’s creation was fully and universally recognized; when its opponents had either seen the light or faded into obscurity, and it was my privilege to be present as a member of the War College staff on a day which was typical of the new order of things. The Atlantic Fleet was assembled in the harbor and the splendid library of the new college building was filled with officers from the fleet, high and low; with officials from Washington, civil, naval and military; with distinguished civilians from Newport; with army officers from the forts around the bay, with ex-presidents of the college and with the college staff and class, all standing in reverent silence as a flag was swept aside from a magnificent oil portrait of Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, painted by one of our best artists through almost universal subscriptions; and the original, standing in our midst with Mahan and McCarty Little, said in a choking voice and trembling with embarrassment:
“Words would fail me if I tried to say more than that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
It was when reading an article by Admiral Luce many years later that I discovered what probably prompted his conversation with Admiral Balch, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, when they passed me on the sidewalk in the Academy grounds, about an officers’ school in the art of war. Luce tells in his article how, in command of a monitor in 1865, he was ordered to report" to General Sherman at Savannah, after the “March to the Sea,” to protect his army in crossing a river in its northerly march along the coast. Sherman then said to him in effect: “You navy fellows have been battering Charleston out of shape for the last three years without making it surrender. Now I’ll show you how I will make it fall into your hands like a ripe pear.” I le then captured Columbia, which cut Charleston’s line of communications, and the city promptly surrendered. It was then, Luce said, that he realized that there were fundamental principles of warfare alike on land and sea which the Navy did not seem to know and which could be academically taught. Now Luce and Balch had both been in the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron which did that three years’ senseless hammering in front of Charleston, and Luce was, no doubt, expatiating to Balch upon the light he had seen after his conversation with Sherman.
As a postscript I will add the interesting coincidence that when the prospective first president of the War College was cooling his heels in that guard tent on Gardiner’s Island, after failing to slip past the sentries into camp, a recent president of the War College, then an ensign and now Rear Admiral (Sims) with the writer and two others, had successfully slipped out of camp and was making a negro caretaker of the Gardiner Mansion do a buck and wing dance in its kitchen for our amusement.