While in London last winter on a special mission for the United States Shipping Board I saw on the wall of one of the offices of the British Board of Trade an old English shipping text. I liked it so much that I brought a copy back to America and now have it framed in my own office. It is this:
As concerning ships, it is that which everyone knoweth and can say, they are our weapons, they are our ornaments, they are our strength, they are our pleasures, they arc our defense, they are our profit; the subject by them is made rich, the Kingdom through them, strong; the Prince in them is mighty; in a word, by them, in a manner, we live, the Kingdom is, the King reigneth.
We knew all this at various and sundry times, knew it well, and practiced it. It is the Law of Gravity of Shipping. For all practical purposes it may be called the great Natural Law of Sea Power. Now, a natural law requires unceasing obedience. It is not something to be obeyed every other generation or every seventh year or only when we have a Republican administration. All this we know, too, and yet—
History should be taught, not as a mass of dates, or a succession of wars, or a compilation of kings, but as a series of steps by which man has risen from barbarism to civilization, this stairway of progress being illumined along the way by the light of a relatively few significant facts that make it possible to trace the causes of the movements and forces back of our development. But even when thus taught properly, of what use is our history if it does not guide us and help us to profit by the mistakes of the past, if it does not force us from sheer fear, if nothing else, never to disobey a natural law!
It is hardly necessary or desirable to carry our argument back to the dawn of history and prove, as we could by a lengthy series of examples, the unfailing operation of our Law of Gravity of Shipping. It would require a book to do this and, indeed, that book has already been written, a very remarkable book, an epoch-making book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, by Rear Admiral A. T. Mahan, U. S. Navy.
We will consider only a few incidents in our own American history which show how well and how often we have known this law, known it and forgotten it, practiced it and then ceased, known it and forgotten it again and again, and finally known it as the greatest single lesson of the greatest of wars and yet today are forgetting it again. A nation so forgetful cannot always expect its national luck to hold.
We knew it when we learned as little children how America was discovered by ships furnished by Spain, then the world’s greatest sea power, and we knew it when we learned how America was lost to Spain by the rise of a greater sea power, England. We knew it again when, a century later, English sea power defeated Holland and annexed the Dutch colonies here. Another century passed and we knew it again when English sea power defeated France and annexed all of North America east of the Mississippi.
Then came our own Revolution, and what were the two decisive actions? The first was when Arnold won the first battle of Lake Champlain and thus paved the way for the later surrender of Burgoyne’s whole army. The second was the battle of Yorlc- town, which was won as the direct result of sea power supplied this time by the French under Admiral De Grasse. He had outwitted the English fleet and appeared at just the right moment off the Virginia Capes, cutting the sea communications of Cornwallis, which were all he had, and causing his surrender. George Washington’s generous acknowledgment of this fact is found in his letters to De Grasse at the time. He says;
The surrender of York (town) from which so much glory and advantage arc derived to the allies, and the honor of which belongs to your Excellency, has greatly anticipated our most sanguine expectations.
Your Excellency will have observed that, whatever efforts arc made by the land armies, the Navy must have the casting vote in the present contest.
Very early after we became a nation, we again saw our law in operation. In 1799 France began seizing our merchantmen in the West Indies and our Navy had to convoy our merchant ships. While doing so it captured enough French cruisers to make plain that we were able to uphold our neutrality and dignity, and ultimately we virtually forced Napoleon to make a new treaty of peace with us.
We knew it again several years later when our sea power forced terms from the Barbary pirates of the North African Coast after they had harassed our merchantmen beyond endurance. Our success there was the beginning of the downfall of this whole nest of pirates that had for centuries been preying upon the commerce of all nations.
We knew it again in 1812 when England began to seize hundreds of American citizens from our merchant ships and even our naval vessels. We went to war about it even though totally unprepared on the sea. We were promptly blockaded so tightly that none of our vessels could appear on the Atlantic Ocean and so we turned our seagoing activities inland to our Great Lakes. Here Perry won his victory on Lake Erie, forcing the retirement of the British right wing and a year later Macdonough won the second battle of Lake Champlain which forced the retreat of General Provost with a large part of the British Army into Canada and ultimately decided the war in our favor. How decisive sea power was in this war may be seen from the reply of Wellington, Napoleon’s conqueror, when he was asked in the emergency to take command over here. He replied:
Neither I nor anyone else can achieve success, in the way of conquests, unless you have naval superiority on the Lakes The question is, whether we can obtain this naval superiority on the Lakes. If we cannot, I shall do you little good in America, and I shall go there only to prove the truth of Provost's defense, and to sign a peace that might as well be signed now.*
*Wellington to Liverpool, November 18, 1814. Castlereagh Letters, Series III, Volume II, 303.
And peace was signed several months later.
For a long time after this we knew it and practiced it and we prospered mightily. It is said that we are not “ship-minded,” but do you know that between the years of 1795 and 1810 we carried ninety per cent of the world’s off-shore commerce in American-flag ships? Do you know that for fifty years afterwards we sailed the smartest, fastest ships in the world? We were the first to carry full sail through the night; all the others shortened sail. Our clipper ships with their lovely lines and huge areas of sails commanded the high priced cargoes of the world and left our rivals idle or trailing far behind with low priced freights.
The Civil War came and gave us another splendid example of the operation of our law. The gold rush of 1849 bad brought urgent need for ships and more ships and had taught us to build still larger and faster vessels. With this knowledge and skill the North soon had over 250 ships blockading the seaports of the South. A little later more ships extended the blockade up the Mississippi River, splitting the South in two. Eventually, except for a few blockade runners, the South was cut off from all manufactured articles until Lee’s armies were without clothes, shoes or ammunition and even without proper food. All authorities agree that the blockade of the South by the sea power of the North was the most decisive single factor in the war.
Until the Civil War we were a real sea power. Then we began to forget it. There is no one reason for it. The explanation is a combination of many reasons.
Much of our tonnage was destroyed in the war and foreigners, especially England, reaped a harvest in the trade that gravitated to them. Just at this time came the evolution from wood to steel, and a whole new era came into being. England’s coal and iron ore were at or near the seacoast, and she was lightning quick to seize her advantage and learn the new art of steel shipbuilding. She was quick, too, to grant large subsidies to this infant industry. We were slow to appreciate the value of steel construction, far too slow, principally because of the ease of making fortunes through the development of great natural resources in the interior of our country. Our gaze and our energies were all turned inward toward the “winning of the West,” toward internal empire building, toward the greatest railroad building and industrial development the world has ever seen. We slowly left the sea for the temptations of the land until by 1910 we were carrying only eight per cent of the world’s commerce. In 1898, when the Spanish War came, we had no merchant ships to carry supplies or troops to even the pitiful little army that we had sent to Cuba—and do you know how we got our men back from Cuba and the Philippines? Plow do you suppose? In merchant vessels of the Spanish merchant marine that we had to charter! Would you believe it possible? and yet, it is history.
It is true that, due to Secretary Whitney and several others who followed him, we had a Navy when the Spanish War came, but just how did we get it? I know because my father helped to build it. He was one of the first two naval constructors of our Navy. There was no school or college in this country where he could learn the art of naval architecture and marine engineering and he had to be sent abroad in 1880 to England and Scotland. Every year for twenty-two years after that we had to send all our naval constructors abroad for the technical training and education. Our first battleship, Texas, was built to plans purchased from an Englishman.
I was a member of almost the first class to graduate from an American institution in naval architecture and that was in 1906, —forty years after the close of the Civil War, forty years after a great maritime nation had plunged headlong away from the sea. In that same year when I went to duty at a navy yard, the master shipfitter, the master shipwright and dockmaster, the foreman joiner, the foreman machinist, and the chief draftsman were all Englishmen or Scotchmen.
Do you know that in 1900 no American- flag ship sailed from our shores to the following countries: Russia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Greece or Turkey. In that same year only two small sailing vessels left our shores for France and both of them returned in ballast. One small vessel left for Belgium and returned in ballast.
When President Roosevelt sent the fleet around the world in 1908 we had to use foreign-flag merchant vessels to carry the coal and supplies for those few naval vessels. We had only eight auxiliary vessels and had to charter fifty and we had to pay very dearly for them. Applying our Law of Gravity of Shipping, we learned then that in time of war we could not count on using the other fellow’s vessels. We learned that a modern navy is not just a fleet of warships and that it must have a merchant marine to support it. To operate on the offensive or even on the defensive at any distance from home, warships must be accompanied by a great number of auxiliary vessels, such as scouts, ammunition ships, tankers, supply ships, refrigerator ships, hospital ships, mine layers, mine sweepers, submarine tenders, destroyer tenders, etc.
This type of craft must be drawn from a merchant marine, because it would be an unthinkable waste to build these auxiliary ships and keep them idle, and besides, you would never build enough of them. If you have no merchant marine, if you have not built enough auxiliary ships, if you cannot charter them, as of course you cannot when the enemy holds the sea, then a navy alone, however powerful, is fit only for coast defense. A navy without a merchant marine is no navy.
It was about this time that we in this country learned to know the real meaning of the term sea power. It was not just a navy plus a merchant marine but it included great harbors with dockyards and repair facilities, skilled mechanics to build ships, a sea-minded population to design and man them, a highly commercial nation to provide the trade in which the vessels could be used, colonies to provide naval bases and ports to act as fueling and repair stations for the fleet. All these elements go to make up that very comprehensive term sea power. A navy is merely one of its constituents.
But now to return to our law. All this Roosevelt knew well. He tried to drive it home to the American mind by exposing our weaknesses and advertising our helplessness. He was not exposing any deep military secret. Every foreign government, every naval expert already knew it. But Americans would not heed. Every morning of that memorable cruise around the world every American could read on the front page of his newspaper that a merchant marine is vital to a navy and that naval bases with protected drydock and repair facilities are vital to both. They could read it, they did read it, but they would not learn, mark, or inwardly digest it.
We would not heed the words of Roosevelt, we continued to rely on our national luck, we would not see with any understanding the working of our Law of Gravity of Shipping. We were satisfied merely to improve our Navy, even though we realized how helpless it was without a merchant marine of auxiliary ships.
Then came the lesson of the World War, a $3,500,000,000 lesson this time. The rest you all know. How our export trade was paralyzed for lack of ships; how great lines of full freight cars blocked all the tracks from Jersey City to Philadelphia; how nearly all our ports had to declare embargoes on incoming materials for ocean shipment; how the South was crucified for years on the cross of “No more ships” with its cotton and other products piled high on every pier and most of its business men and farmers in the hands of the banks.
The Germans saw clearly and felt deeply the menace of the Allied sea power. They had accomplished prodigious feats of arms on shore but it was not enough. They felt the same slow strangulation of death setting in that the South had felt in our Civil War due to the sea power of the North. They were driven to take the most desperate chances and finally went too far by sinking our neutral vessels without warning and forcing us into the war against them.
Again you will remember what happened. We built ships as ships had never been built before, hundreds of ships, thousands of ships, steel ships, wood ships, concrete ships, cargo ships, tankers, transports, tugs. We built great shipyards, whole towns to house their workers, and trolley lines to take them to work. We built drydocks and marine railways and great piers and terminals and warehouses. We requisitioned all ships building in our country for any and all interests and ordered ships built in Japan and China.
We performed a miracle in ships, and yet, it was not enough, it was not in time. You know that, you remember it well. You know how few, how very few of our men we sent over on our own vessels. You know, too, that we were on the side that held the sea, or at least the surface of it. How would it have been had German sea power been in control? How truly lucky we were.
I have said it was not enough—but in a larger sense it was enough and too much. As soon as Germany realized that her submarine warfare could not obtain command of the sea for her as it promised to do for a time, as soon as she realized that the element of sea power would always be against her, that her enemies could obtain unlimited supplies while she herself must continue to undergo the frightful hardships of the blockade, she knew the war was lost. Again sea power had "the casting vote.”
We came out of the World War nine short years ago, with all the elements of sea power—a Navy, an “emergency” merchant marine, shipyards and artisans to build and maintain them, colonies, naval bases, a highly productive population backed by great natural resources, and an immense world trade of nearly $10,000,000,000. Today we are the greatest and richest of all commercial nations. We must have a navy to protect our coasts, our commerce, and our colonies. We must have a merchant marine to provide (1) vessels that every modern navy is helpless without, and to provide (2) a seafaring personnel on which the navy may draw in emergency, and to provide (3) a means of bringing in our needs and carrying away our products. Our sea power is our most precious national possession, but what are we doing about it here and now in the year 1927?
Our Navy is not being maintained at treaty strength in accordance with the 5-5-3 ratio. This is admitted officially and I say it without fear of contradiction. Our merchant marine is not being maintained in a condition to compete for the share of the world trade that is rightfully ours, because no new vessels are being laid down to take the place of slow vessels now nine years old and that were never designed for the trades in which many of them arc operating. Sea trade is open to the nations of the world and no business is more competitive. To be successful you must have ships that are at least equal to those of your competitor. England, Germany and Italy are building like mad, fast ships, motorships, passenger ships. We are building nothing.
Do you know that we are not building a single hull for foreign trade? The very few vessels that are building are for our coastwise trade.
The condition of our shipyards is pitiable. Most of them have gone out of business and the very few that are left have only skeleton forces of draftsmen and mechanics and have made no renewals of shop tools and equipment for over five years. It is only a matter of months before more yards will close their doors, and when we do decide to build ships (as we inevitably must), how long will it take, how much will it cost, and indeed where will we find the yards to build them at all?
The position is far more critical than those in high authority appreciate. The ships of the future will be larger and faster vessels than those of our wartime-built fleet and will require far more skill to design and build. It requires years to collect an organization of men trained to do this work and during the past eight years the shipbuilding industry has lost more than half of its trained men and is losing more every day. Our building yards must have some work and have it soon or this great element of sea power will fail us when we need it most.
But this is not a thesis in favor of our shipyards, or a merchant marine, or a navy. It is a short article supported by history and fact intended to convince intelligent Americans of the great meaning of ships. I have shown, as briefly as I could, that since America was discovered, sea power has played the decisive part in our destiny. You have seen how, except for the Mexican War, it has been the governing factor in every war we have ever had—seven of them. You have seen, too, that we have never used it except
in self defense or in the cause of human liberty, and there is no likelihood that we ever will.
In the future as in the past, sea power must inevitably play the leading role. Our destiny lies on the sea. When we leave it we are through. Every American ought to know this. Every boy and girl ought to be taught it in our schools. The decline of our sea power marks our decline as a nation.
As concerning ships, it is that which everyone knoweth and can say, they arc our weapons, they are our ornaments, they are our strength, they are our pleasures, they are our defense, they are our profit; the subject by them is made rich; the Kingdom through them, strong; the Prince in them is mighty; in a word, by them, in a manner, we live, the Kingdom is, the King reigneth.
This is the first great law, and the second is like unto it:
Take it all in all, a ship of the sea is the most honorable thing that man as a gregarious animal has ever produced. By himself, unaided, he can do better things than ships of the sea; he can do poems and pictures and other combinations of what is best in him. But as a living being in flocks and hammering out with alternate strokes and mutual agreement what is necessary for him in those places, to get or produce a ship of the sea is his first work. Into that he has put as much human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self-control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly wrought handiwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgment of God as can well be put into a space 400 feet long and fifty feet broad and I am thankful to have lived in an age when I can see this thing done.