The Tradition of the Offensive in the United States Navy

In order to understand how this tradition has developed, a fundamental knowledge of the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely necessary. Strategy concerns itself with the broader plans and ideas by means of which it is proposed that the forces of the enemy will be brought to battle, or by means of which battle will be delayed or refused. Offensive strategy is not possible unless a nation has a fighting force capable of meeting the enemy on somewhere near even terms. Tactics has to do with the problem of how, once contact is made, to engage the enemy. Offensive tactics at sea means attack. From 1776 to 1846 the United States Navy was limited to offensive tactics because it had no battle fleet with which to meet its antagonists on terms approaching equality; therefore, offensive strategy, which envisaged seeking out the enemy’s main force and destroying it, was impossible. The Navy was limited to offensive tactics of commerce destruction and single ship engagements, and it is in these tactics that the tradition of the offensive has its beginnings.

The first commanding officer in the Continental Navy was appointed by Congress in December, 1775. This gentleman, Captain Esek Hopkins, set the pattern of the offensive tradition in the first action in which he led the small naval forces of the Colonies. In February, 1776, he took seven small vessels to sea to annoy the ships of the enemy off the Southern coast line. Finding no such ships, Captain Hopkins went to the Bahamas with his squadron and raided the town of New Providence, capturing valuable stores. Upon returning to his base, Hopkins was relieved of his command and court-martialed for exceeding his instructions.⁴ While the writer would hesitate to advocate disregard of orders by naval officers, the actions of Captain Hopkins were successful and are indicative of the initiative and type of mind which have developed the American tradition of the offensive. That this idea has dominated throughout American history can be seen from a glance at the table, at the end of this article. It shows that during the Revolution there were 21 naval engagements of consequence, and that the character of 12 of them was clearly offensive. The remaining 9 were defensive because the odds were decisively against the American vessel, or vessels. In addition to these actions, the offensive tradition is evident in the capture of some 800- odd commercial vessels⁵—a form of offensive tactics. The limitation of the offensive to the field of tactics is understandable in the light of statistics on the relative strength of the Colonial and British naval forces in the Atlantic in 1778. The British ships assigned to this area totaled 89 and carried 2,675 guns, as against the meager total of 14 ships and 332 guns for the Colonial Navy.⁶ Furthermore, the largest American vessel carried 32 guns, which made offensive combat with the British 74-gun ships of the line foolhardy.

When the Revolution was over, the attempt to determine the naval policy of the new nation started a controversy which was to last for a century. This was, whether the interests of the country would be better served by building commerce raiding cruisers or harbor defense vessels and land fortifications. In debating such policies, the statesmen of the nation made

• Maclay, Edgar Stanton, A History of the United States Navy from 1775 to 1898. 3 vols., New York, 1898- 1902; v. 1, pp. 38-42.

• Ibid., I, p. xi.

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it very evident that they had failed to understand the important naval lesson of the Revolution—that only by building ships capable of obtaining command of the sea could the coast line be adequately defended and the enemy’s commerce seriously crippled. The obvious corollary of this was that offensive strategy was impossible without a battle fleet—and the Congress did not provide one. In varying degrees, both Federalists and Republicans subscribed to this limited idea of naval warfare,⁷ and thereby restricted the actions of the Navy to offensive tactics of commerce raiding and single ship engagement.

While these policies were being debated, the country found itself engaged in an undeclared naval war with France, in which the naval lesson of the Revolution was again brought home—namely, that supremacy on the seas in the area of conflict was absolutely necessary to bring a decision. The Navy, though lacking a battle fleet and unable to assume the strategic offensive, conducted its limited tactical operations with enthusiasm and initiative, thus adding to its developing tradition of the offensive, within the limits placed upon it by Congress. A glance at the table at the end of this article will show that there were 9 major engagements in this undeclared war and that 6 of them were brought about by offensive action on the part of American commanders. The table, as in the period of the Revolution, lists only those engagements of some consequence and does not attempt to include such items as the capture of 84 French prizes.^[4] The willingness of the naval commanders and their crews to adopt offensive tactics with the limited material provided them did not prevent the war from dragging on for four years. Neither France nor the United States could bring the decisive weapon to

⁷ Sprout, p. 71.

* Maclay, I, p. 213.

bear—the battle fleet: France, because her fleet was occupied in Europe, and the United States, because she had none. This war with France added to the growing tradition of the Navy that the offensive was the best course of action, whenever possible.

But it was in the War of 1812 that the most convincing proof was offered that the strategy forced upon the Navy, that of passive coast defense and commerce raiding, was unsound. As this war began, the ranking officers of the Navy were called upon to express their views on the subject of how the limited naval forces of the country should be used. Proof that the tradition of the offensive was already dominant, is the fact that every one of them advocated that their small navy take the offensive, as best it was able with its limited force.^[5] The only success of the American Navy in this war was in a relatively few single ship engagements and in capturing about 1,500 British vessels.^[6] Again glancing at the appended table, it will be seen that there were 22 engagements and that 17 of them were offensive in character. Some of the meetings with enemy craft which are called “defensive,” it is interesting to note, were long stern chases of American ships by one or more British vessels of superior power. Perhaps the best single example of how strong the tradition of the offensive was is the celebrated encounter between the Shannon and the Chesapeake. The American Captain James Lawrence accepted the challenge of Captain P. B. V. Broke, who commanded what was probably the finest frigate in the British Navy. Lawrence not only accepted the challenge but he left the security of a well-defended harbor, knowing that he had a raw, untrained crew and

that he was going out to meet England’s best.¹¹ Whether or not one admires the wisdom of Lawrence’s decision, it is indicative of the hold the offensive tradition had upon some naval officers, at least, in 1813. “Despite the subsequent legend of victory,” the American naval strategy of the defensive, that is, the limitation to commerce raiding and single ship actions, “destroyed the foreign commerce of the United States, disrupted its internal economy, and opened the way for armed invasion from the sea.”¹²

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The significance of this lesson was not grasped, either by the American people or their government—any more than the lesson of the Revolution had been. Almost in spite of themselves, the people of this country were given a taste of what it meant to have command of the sea in the next war in which they engaged. In the Mexican War, for the first time, the Navy had forces superior to that of the enemy and it immediately took command of the sea—in other words it assumed offensive strategy for the first time in its history. This meant that it was able to blockade the Mexican coast, was able to prevent the arrival of much-needed supplies in that country, and was able to deliver the army to a point where it could strike decisively. Had Mexico been a sea power with a battle fleet, the United States Navy would again have been limited to commerce raiding and single ship actions—that is, to offensive tactics.

Perhaps the experience of having real naval power for the first time had something to do with the decision to display this force in the interests of the nation’s commerce. In any event, a squadron of naval vessels was sent to Japan in 1853 under Commodore Matthew C. Perry and there put on an offensive display which achieved the desired results of securing acceptance by Japan of commercial ideas

^u Mahan, op. cit., II, pp. 130-148.

^u Sprout, p. ISO.

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more in keeping with those of the Occident. While Japan was adjusting herself to the new concepts of life resulting from Perry’s expedition, it became necessary to impress some of the daimio with the fact that the new ideas and way of life would not tolerate certain practices. The major sea powers sent an expedition to bombard Shimonoseki and the United States was represented in the mixed fleet. These experiences, the Mexican War and the Opening of Japan, did not materially alter the naval policy of the nation, for up to the beginning of the Civil War the Navy was composed of vessels unfit to fight an engagement with the battle fleet of any first- class power. It was still restricted to offensive tactics and defensive strategy; commerce raiding and coast defense.

It was fortunate for the Northern States that the Confederate States did not have a modern, first-class warship; for if they had, such a ship could have destroyed most of the Northern Navy without ever coming within reach of its guns. This, in turn, would have meant that the blockade would have been impossible. But neither the North nor the South had such a ship, and the antiquated squadrons of the North, together with a hastily assembled group of ferryboats and such craft, were able to assume offensive strategy and tactics. Apparently both the Northern and Southern Navy Departments recognized the value of the offensive,¹³ but the South did not have the ships nor facilities to undertake it. The table at the end of the article shows that all engagements of the Navy during the Civil War were offensive, except two; and those two were the actions of vessels whose commanders had seen a consort sunk by an ironclad. The contribution of the Navy to the winning of the war was great, for it instituted a blockade which slowly but surely strangled the South; with the army, it split the Confed-

^u Owsley, Frank Lawrence, King Cotton Diplomacy. New York, 1931, chap. 13.

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eracy by the successful campaign up the Mississippi River; and it either captured, or rendered useless, most of the ports on the Atlantic coast of Virginia, the Caro- linas, Georgia, and Florida. In short, it took and held the control of the sea and waters in the vital areas, which is the object of naval strategy. The Confederate Navy, on the other hand, being the weaker, was forced to revert to the defensive strategy and offensive tactics which the United States Navy had had forced upon it up to 1846. These tactics, “though well planned and skillfully executed, had not affected the outcome in the slightest.”^[7] During the Civil War the first important signs of change in naval policy began to appear, notably in the report “On Light Draft Monitors,” signed by two naval officers, John Lenthall and Benjamin F. Isherwood. This report considered the new developments in armored vessels and called attention to the fact that the advent of this type of craft gave the United States an opportunity to enter the race for command of the sea on terms of equality with the other naval powers.^[8] Here can be seen the dawning realization that the previous naval strategy of the United States had been unsound and that only by providing an adequate battle fleet could offensive strategy be considered. Unfortunately this was a “false dawn,” for the two decades after the war saw a reversion to the old strategy of passive defense and commerce destruction. “The prevailing defensive strategy still rested on the ancient doctrine of stopping an enemy at the coast.”^[9] As late as 1886 and 1887 the ranking Admiral in the Navy, David Porter, was advocating that future building include as many monitors as cruisers, the only two types of vessels considered, and that the

former were the more important.^[10] These monitors were virtually useless as seagoing craft and were therefore limited to harbor defense. Hampered by such concepts of strategy, the Navy drifted along until about 1890, when the influence of the greatest of American naval strategists began to make itself felt. This remarkable man was Alfred Thayer Mahan.

It was in 1890 that Mahan’s first great book was published, but during the late 1880’s his influence was already exerting itself upon those who came in contact with it. Benjamin F. Tracy, the Secretary of the Navy, in presenting his annual report for 1889, made it clear that he had come under this influence. His report advocated battleships for the purpose of prevention of blockade of the coasts of the United States and to drive the enemy’s battle fleet away. “War,” said Tracy, “may be conducted most effectively by being offensive in character.”^[11] In this sentence lies the point of most of the teaching of Mahan and the apogee of present- day strategy of the Navy. The ideas of Mahan were inculcated in the minds of naval officers during his years of teaching at the Naval War College. Among the most important of this great teacher’s concepts of strategy are the following: The duty of a weaker navy is to act, or threaten to act upon the offensive ;¹⁹ the main objective of the fleet is the enemy’s fleet;²⁰ a battle

¹⁷ “Report of the Secretary of the Navy, December

1886. ” 49 Congress, 2d Session, House Executive Document No. 1, Part III, Serial No. 2466, pp. 54-61; and “Report of the Secretary of the Navy, December 6,
1887. ” 50 Congress, 1st Session, House Executive Document No. 1, Part III, Serial 2539, pp. 34-35.

^ls “Report of the Secretary of the Navy, November 30, 1889,” 51 Congress, 1st Session, House Executive Document No. 1, Part III, Serial No. 2721, pp. 3-4. Mahan’s basic ideas will be found in his Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, pp. 83-88.

¹⁹ Mahan, Alfred Thayer, Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practices of Military Operations on Land. Boston, 1911, p. 235. This book is composed of lectures delivered by Mahan at the Naval War CoUege from 1887 to 1911.

«Ibid., p. 199.

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fleet at sea is more effective than fortified positions;²¹ “the further toward an enemy you advance your tenable position by the acquisition of strategic points, or by the positions occupied in force by an army and navy, the better”;²² new inventions and improvements in ships and equipment do not change the principles of strategy, they merely affect the application of those principles.²³ Hardly more than a decade after Mahan began teaching at the War College, the Navy was to have an opportunity to put his ideas into practice, which it did with thoroughness.

War with Spain developed in 1898 and the Navy was as ready as the conservative tenor of its Secretary’s views would permit. Admiral William T. Sampson, who commanded the fleet in the Caribbean, was ready with a strategically offensive plan which included immediate advance on Havana in force, in order to forestall the expected arrival of the Spanish Fleet.²⁴ This was in the tradition of the offensive of his predecessors, but with the difference that he had the battle force to adopt offensive strategy of such a nature and was not limited to offensive tactics. In other words, he would secure the advanced post, advocated by Mahan, and then set out to find the enemy’s fleet and destroy it. His plan was sound. His brother-officer in the Western Pacific, Commodore George Dewey, was able to proceed with a highly offensive strategic move, which included steaming into Manila Bay, under the guns of the Spanish land batteries, and there sinking the Spanish Asiatic Squadron. In this action Dewey showed “singleness of purpose and dispatch in execution,”²^ which did credit to the teaching of Mahan. While the Navy in the Atlantic was not able to show

“ Ibid., p. 190-191.

“ Ibid., p. 127.

^a Ibid., p. 3.

^u Chadwick, French Ensor, The Relations of the United States and Spain; The Spanish-American War. 2 vols., New York, 1911, vol. I, pp. 63, 88.

* Sprout, p. 231.

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such “dispatch,” it did seek out and destroy the fleet of the enemy off Santiago, thereby further developing the tradition of the offensive which Dewey had evidenced. In this war, for the first time in its history, the Navy was able to adopt offensive strategy in the full meaning of the word, for it had a battle fleet, or fleets, which sought the fleets of the enemy and destroyed them. By so doing it was able to preserve the shores of the nation against attack, to insure the commerce of its own country, and to destroy the commerce of the enemy in the vital area. Furthermore, the enemy was prevented from reinforcing his army in the principal theater of war. The lessons of the Spanish-American War substantiated the strategy taught by Mahan and further set the tradition of the offensive in the Navy.

When the United States entered the World War in 1917, it contributed a well- organized battle fleet to the already superior surface forces of the Allies. That this fleet was to be used offensively is clear, for we have two letters which are conclusive proof: one from the Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, to Admiral William Sowden Sims, and the other, Sims’ reply. Daniels wrote on July 10, 1917,²⁶

. . . the Department cannot too strongly insist on its opinion that the offensive must always be the dominant note in any general plans of strategy.

Sims replied on July 16, 1917,²⁷

I have assumed that our main objective would be to project, or prepare to project, our maximum force against the enemy offensively.

Much as the Navy Department, the officers, and men may have wished to take part in a decisive naval engagement, they were doomed to disappointment, for it was

* Sims, William Sowden, The Victory at Sea. Garden City, 1921, p. 391.

" Ibid., p. 393.

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decided that the main effort of the Navy was to be to insure the pushing home of the military weapon on the Western Front.²⁸ This could only be done by convoying and protecting the troops and supplies which were so urgently needed in France. When the war ended in November, 1918, the Navy had 354 vessels in European waters²⁹ and had just completed the North Sea Mine Barrage. From this brief summary it can be realized that offensive naval strategy was subordinated to offensive military strategy, probably correctly, but the important thing here is that the Navy conducted its operations within its tradition of the offensive as far as higher policy would permit.

Soon after the war, the United States called a conference to discuss ways and means for accomplishing the limitation of armaments. The result of this conference of 1922 was to give the United States parity with Britain in total naval tonnage, and to give victory to the tradition of the offensive, for from that time onward the Navy was theoretically able to conduct such operations against any power in the world, including the foremost.³⁰ This fact, together with the development of ships and cruising radius, brought about a new application of Mahan’s theory of seeking out the enemy’s fleet and destroying it.

Prior to 1914, the United States had derived marked advantage not only from the comparative weakness of Japan but also from the multilateral balance of power which supported at least the semblance of a commercial Open Door and the pretense of China’s political unity. The war destroyed this multilateral equilibrium, and immensely strengthened the military power of Japan.

28. Frothingham, Thomas G., The Naval History of the World War. 2 vols., Cambridge, 1926, Vol. Ill, p. 129.
29. Sprout, p. 361. This total breaks down as follows: 8 battleships, 5 cruisers, 5 gunboats, 68 destroyers, 9 submarines, 26 converted yachts, 121 subchasers, 112 miscellaneous craft.
30. The best available accounts of the Washington Conference are Yamato Ichihashi’s, The Washington Conference and After, Stanford, 1928; and Harold and Margaret Sprout’s, Toward a New Order of Sea Power, Princeton, 1940.

These results, together with other developments, compelled American naval strategists to envisage a war fought under enormous technical difficulties, thousands of miles from home, in virtually the local waters of a militant and expanding Japan, whose navy seemed at that time to be rapidly approaching unchallengeable supremacy in the Western Pacific.⁵¹

Here is the offensive tradition, but under what difficulties!

Throughout the nineteen twenties and thirties, the officers of the Navy continued their study of the problem of strategy, in which the offensive dominated. This type of thinking is evident in the writing of officer after officer and a few examples of it are given below. The late Holloway H. Frost, in his authoritative work on The Battle of Jutland, concludes that,

Jellicoe, in our opinion, conducted his fleet ably in accordance with an inherent erroneous conception of naval warfare [the defensive] . . . [he] executed a poor conception of war excellently, while Scheer executed an excellent conception of war [the offensive] poorly.^[12][13]

Were this an isolated instance of the opinion of an outstanding naval officer who advocated the offensive, it would hardly be worthy of notice, but there are innumerable others. In July, 1940, Rear Admiral J. K. Taussig wrote,

The mission of the Navy in time of war is to attain and maintain control of the sea in order that the enemy may be deprived of those essentials necessary for carrying on the war, and in order that our own communications may be safeguarded and our shores kept inviolate from overseas expeditions . . . our studies of probable future naval operations substantiate this, that the first essential in obtaining control of the sea is to defeat or control the enemy’s fleet as represented by the combatant ships.^[14]

Another illuminating statement by a contemporary officer is to the effect that,

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... a navy that provides adequate defense must be sufficiently strong to defeat an enemy whenever and wherever it can be brought to action.^[15]

In each of these quotations can be seen the predominance of the tradition of the offensive in molding the thinking of present-day naval officers.

In January, 1940, Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, was called before a Congressional Committee to give expert testimony on proposed increases in the naval establishment. One of the Committee members suggested that it might be possible to establish a defense zone of great proportions around the United States—perhaps out to the limit of the Continental Shelf. When the Admiral was asked his opinion of such a plan, he stated,

I believe any such conception of a campaign would be impracticable and dangerous. We must protect our commerce and our interests wherever we can, and we must seek and strike an enemy wherever and whenever we can effectively weaken him.^[16]

Three months later, on April 16, when again appearing before a Congressional Committee, Admiral Stark stated that the Navy command believed,

. . . that the further we keep the enemy away from our shores, the safer the country. In other words, the stronger the Navy, and the further we can project it toward the other fellow, the better off we are.^[17]

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From the above statements there can be but one conclusion—the United States Navy will follow its offensive tradition if war comes and it will proceed to act under strategic plans based upon such a tradition.

To summarize—from 1775 to 1861 the nation never had a naval establishment large enough to adopt a strategic plan that could be called offensive. At no time were there ships of sufficient size and strength to make it possible to meet even the American squadrons of a first-class naval power. Although limited to defensive strategy, the naval commanders of this country chose offensive tactics whenever the odds were not preponderantly against them. The Civil War gave the Navy its first chance to try strategy in the grand manner—that is, to seek and hold command of the sea in the vital sea areas. In the course of the war the tradition was developed and expanded by offensive actions of the highest order. Though a period of reversion followed, the teachings of Mahan wrought a change which made itself evident by the time of the Spanish-American War, when the Navy had the strength to go on the offensive in the larger sense. The World War may have been a disappointment to the Navy, for it was prevented from seeking a decisive engagement with the enemy by factors beyond its control. Whatever the course of national policy may be in the near future, if the United States goes to war, all present indications point to the fact that the Navy will follow its tradition of the offensive by keeping the enemy away from our shores and by seeking out the battle force of the enemy wherever it may be found.

States Navy, etc.,” hearing on H. R. 8026, Senate Naval Affairs Committee, 76 Congress, Senate, p. 69.

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Table op Naval Engagements of United States Vessels