The work of Sir Julian Corbett in the field of history and strategic thought, like that of his great elder contemporary Mahan, was achieved in the heart of the pressures and controversies of the years which led up to the outbreak of World War I. It was in the final troubled decade of this period that the British sea power was seriously challenged for the first time since its last great battle at Trafalgar a hundred years before, during which time it had been a mainstay of the general European peace which has never since the summer of 1914 been fully and firmly reconstructed. Not the least vital of the developments of this closing decade of the Pax Britannica was the reawakening and rearming of the sea power upon which the peace, with its long record of British progress and growing prosperity, had largely depended.
The study of war as a real and effective instrument of national policy was largely discredited in the eyes of the British public at that time. As Churchill was later to remark, “Children were taught of the Great War against Napoleon as the culminating effort of the British peoples, and they looked on Waterloo and Trafalgar as the supreme achievements of British arms by land and sea.” Gladstone had resigned, bitterly opposing the “bloated Armaments” of the 1890’s, and. the liberal and humanitarian views which had come to dominate political thought in Great Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century worked to enforce a pacific view of history on the public. The very idea of war violated the dearest values of the age, and its catastrophic nature fitted ill with the current theories of inevitable world progress, expounded by such historians of the new school as Green.
“Therefore,” as an eminent British military historian later observed,
The attempt was made to decry its importance in the annals of mankind, and to explain that it was normally a mere tiresome disturbing element in human progress, which settled nothing.
This he concluded, “is pacifist and humanitarian prejudice falsifying the real record of the ages. It is simply a negation of history.”
It was against this background that Corbett worked and played his part in what he himself later called “the revival of naval history”; a great movement embodying the renewed study and discussion of strategic, political, and administrative problems in the light of informed historical investigation and analysis. Mahan’s great historical treatises had cleared the way for sound historic studies in strategy, but much remained to be done in development of his historic theses, as well as in their correction and application to the problems of the time; and of the group of British writers which sought to accomplish this, Corbett became in time the leader. Deeply humanitarian in interests, and active even during his war-time duties in Liberal politics, he became recognized by the out- break of war as the foremost British authority on naval history, wielding a considerable influence on the Naval Staff through which it was sought to reform and prepare the Navy for what was to be the greatest trial up to then of its long career. The present-day naval historian Brian Tunstall has remarked:
Without the work of men like Sir John Laughton, M. Oppenheim, John Leyland, and Sir William Laird Clowes, Naval History would be a mere historical backwater. Of Sir Julian Corbett it is no exaggeration to say that his writings and teachings not only created an entirely new outlook on naval strategy and tactics, but have exercised a very considerable influence on naval policy.
All these writers were connected with the work of the Navy Records Society, founded in 1893, after the appearance of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power Upon History, and Colomb’s Naval Warfare. These works had benefited in turn by the great revival of interest in naval affairs following the debates on the Naval Defence Act of 1889, planned to bring the Royal Navy back from the low level of strength and general state of obsolescence into which it had fallen since the Crimean War. It was this program which set on foot the first great program of heavy battleships of uniform design, and the modern growth of interest in naval affairs may be taken to date from this period. Both Mahan and Colomb treated naval history in a higher and more analytical aspect than had been done before, opening a widespread interest in the problems of naval strategy, hitherto largely neglected or at best half- understood. As Corbett remarked of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, “For the first time Naval History was placed upon a philosophical basis.”
The history of the Royal Navy had been well and fairly comprehensively written, even before the appearance of the first volume of Clowes’ History, to a later volume of which Mahan contributed, in 1897, but much correction in detail proved necessary in the light of the scientific historical methods advanced by the Navy Records Society, and the real study of the growth of British sea power had been lost, so to speak, for the trees.
Since the Libelle of English Polyeye of Adam de Moleyns, in the early 1400’s (reprinted by Hakluyt in 1598), the works in the field seem only occasionally to have shown any real grasp of the strategic realities underlying Britain’s position in world politics. Colliber, Hervey, Campbell, Charnock, and Southey had all followed a more or less biographical approach in their early histories, Southey calling it “the most convenient form for a compendious naval history of England.” As early as the 1790’s, Charnock had fully appreciated the unique character of England’s position and interest in maritime power, but had confined his remarks on this subject to an “Introduction” to his Biographia Navalis (1794). Hervey, writing a decade earlier, had recognized the importance of making his Naval History (1780) more than a recital of victorious battles, but had done in the end little enough to integrate it in a larger frame, while the naval writers of the nineteenth century did not begin to achieve the breadth of Clowes’ work, which was itself designed to be a purely naval history. Even so brilliant a student as Campbell, writing in the eighteenth century before the Napoleonic wars, had confined himself mainly to the biographical approach, though capable of the strikingly modern breadth of vision revealed in the following prefatory remark:
The great figure we make in the world, and the wide extent of our power and influence, is due to our naval strength, to which we stand indebted for our flourishing plantations, the spreading of British fame, and, which is of far greater consequence, British freedom, through every quarter of the universe.
It had remained for Mahan, writing in the very twilight of the Pax Britannica, to show how the sea power on which it had been based had come to be of such extent and influence, and for the work of such men as Laughton and the early contributors to the Navy Records Society to establish the factual accurate basis of the processes of its growth. As Corbett later remarked, speaking of the aims of this group that followed the lead of Laughton (to whom Mahan himself acknowledged his debt):
We want, in fact, to see Naval History take its place as part of General History. Above all, we desire to have it based on sound and critical study of all relevant authority. It is the movement in this direction that we mean by the Revival of Naval History. . . .
And it was of this movement, a great activity of fundamental revision and reorientation of naval history and the principles of naval strategy, that Corbett became in time the acknowledged leader, following Laughton’s pioneering work in the field, and Mahan’s great philosophical outlines. Upon the outbreak of the war he was commissioned to write its official naval history, which was published after the war as Naval Operations, and it is as the author of this large and rather difficult work that Corbett is perhaps chiefly known today.
The main body of the independent work by which he first made his name, however, was accomplished in the years before the war, and particularly in that final decade in which the British sea power rearmed for the coming struggle. It was in this work that his real contribution to the study of naval history lies, with his most profound and original thought in the field, in works such as England in the Mediterranean, The Seven Years’ War, and the classic Principles of Maritime Strategy. While naval thought and historiography owe an immense debt to these volumes, and to the papers he edited for the Navy Records Society, comparatively little is known of the conditions under which these works were written, and how they came about. It is with these aspects of his work that this essay is mainly concerned.
It was only slowly, and indeed reluctantly, that Corbett was drawn into the activities which led to the writing of his greatest works. Starting out as a somewhat discontented lawyer, he studied archaeology, published a few romantic novels, and became something of an artist before at the age of forty-five he decided to put his main effort into the field of naval history.
Born of well-to-do parents in 1854, he had given up the attempt to make his living by legal work by 1882, and devoted himself to the arts, his archaeological studies, and widespread travel, which took him to Egypt, India, Canada, and the United States. It was in this leisure time, forming so great a contrast to the devoted service of his later years, that he turned to writing novels, mainly of historical setting, beginning with The Fall of Asgard in 1886, a tale intimately interwoven with his studies in Norse mythology. For God and Gold, published in the following year, was essentially a study in the Elizabethan spirit, that curious fusion of ascetic devotion and swashbuckling love of adventure which started Britain on the road to world power. The work shows a deep acquaintance with the work, of the age, and a minute observation of the details of sea life quite strange to the literature of the time. It is evident in this work that Corbett’s studies had led him beyond romantic or even archaeological considerations to a more purely historical interest in his subject, and in 1889 he published his first non-fictional work in the field, contributing the life of Monk to the English Men of Action Series, followed up in the next year by a life of Drake. Both these little biographical studies benefited considerably by the revival of historical interest and knowledge of their periods, but both broke new ground in the field, and set what was then a high standard of scientific investigation. Sir Francis Drake (1890), particularly, remains an eminently readable and well- organized study in its field, and certainly the best brief fife of Drake available today.
After this Corbett wrote one more novel, and then, in 1898, at the age of forty-four, published his first full-scale study in naval history, called Drake and the Tudor Navy: With a History of the Rise of England as a Maritime Power. Here the biographical element is kept well to the fore, with invaluable sketches of political and military figures worked into the narrative, as well as a detailed archaeological study of Elizabethan ships and ordnance which has served as a basis for all further work in the field. Perhaps the greatest historical service of this work, however, which put Corbett at once in the front rank of naval historians, was to sweep away the trashy legends that had grown up to obscure the true figure of Drake, commonly regarded hitherto even by responsible historians as a romantic and lawless ruffian. Corbett’s original work revealed Drake’s true stature as a strategist of the first rank, with strong powers of organization, and a devoted ideal of service and a gift for personal leadership which was to be unmatched until Nelson’s time. Corbett’s extensive studies in the preparation of this work had brought him into close contact with the Navy Record Society, for whom he was persuaded to edit, in the same year, the Papers Relating to the Spanish War, 1585-87. This volume, which shows the value of an informed and careful editing, with valuable comments by Corbett on the significance of its material, was the eleventh in the series published by the Society, and served as a prologue to the first two volumes, edited by Laughton, entitled State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, Anno 1588, which have remained the standard in the field. The Society was but five years old at this time, having been founded in 1893, and its members were eager to secure Corbett’s further services in the field, on the basis of these first contributions.
It was not until his marriage in the following year, however, that Corbett was persuaded by his young wife, Edith Alexander, whom he had known all his life as a cousin, to devote his main energies to this work, and in the next year, 1900, he published a sequel to The Tudor Navy, called The Successors of Drake. The period treated in this volume had been even more extensively misunderstood by general historians than the pre-Armada period. Generally regarded as a triumphant mopping-up after the dazzling victory of 1588, Elizabeth’s war actually dragged on without distinction until her death sixteen years later, and, as Corbett points out, the period was really one of “splendid failures” on the British side, the balance of credit going to the Spanish, with the creation of Philip’s new navy, and the activities of the Spanish galleys in the Channel, under the brilliant leadership of Spinola at Sluys.
“The great lesson the period teaches,” Corbett remarked, “is the limitation of maritime power,” and the work resolves itself into a straightforward study of the conditions under which that power operated, and the reasons for its limitation. Freed from the dominating influence of Drake, whose transcendent genius seemed alone able to understand the war, plan its most successful campaigns, and conduct them better than anyone else, Corbett was now better able to consider the conditions of the war itself. While the work contains fresh and valuable studies of Essex, Raleigh, Vere, Montjoy, and others who conducted the war from 1596 onward, and a long appendix on Elizabethan ships and ordnance, the biographical and archaeological aspects of the subject now begin to be subordinated to the more purely strategic analysis, overtones of which had sounded through the earlier volumes on Drake
With his next great work, England in the Mediterranean, published in 1904, Corbett laid aside his earlier interest in side issues, and entered on a direct strategic analysis of a whole epoch in English maritime history. This was undertaken somewhat in the manner of Mahan’s historical works, but with certain restrictions and strong modifications. Corbett had labored long on the groundwork of his craft, mastering the minor studies that are at the roots of naval history, and he undertook this work from a fresh standpoint. “We speak glibly of ‘sea power’,” he had written at the end of The Successors of Drake,
and forget that its true value lies in its influence on the operation of armies. For a defensive war a navy may suffice alone, but how fruitless, how costly, and long drawn out a war must be, that for lack of an adequate army is condemned to the defensive, is the great lesson we have to learn in the failure of Drake’s successors.
This work, in which Corbett had to consider the century in which England did at last take her first positive and enduring steps on the road to world power, was preeminently designed to bring out the relationship of land operations to naval strategy, and attempted in effect to show how the great leaders of the period had framed a state policy designed to subordinate naval strategy to the highest diplomatic ends. To show the development of this policy he sought his leading line in the growth of British power in the Mediterranean, guided by leaders such as Cromwell and William III, who understood “how largely the position of England in Europe depended on the possibilities of fleet action.” The Mediterranean was still the pivotal area of European trade and politics, as Corbett saw it, and the point where England could most effectively apply her growing power.
Early in the seventeenth century, in the reign of James I, the young sea power had reached out to this area, guided more firmly by Cromwell, with his vision of England’s great role in European politics, and supported by Charles II, through the second and third Dutch Wars. But the real significance of British power in the area, as Corbett pointed out, was only appreciated toward the end of the century, when with the Mediterranean policy inaugurated by William III, with his great interest in European politics, “the truth took visible shape”:
Once established in his island realm, he was quick to see how the ships could be made to give what his battalions could not achieve. First of all men he saw that the new and unsettled national system of Europe could never be brought to a stable balance till the northern sea power was free to assert itself in the ancient basin of dominion.
The essential thing in this vision, as Corbett interpreted it, was that armed power set afloat could be brought to bear on the very center of the complex European politics, and, wielded by an outside power, could have effects beyond its nominal strength and reduce the Continent to order. He went on to insist, in a passage anticipatory of some of the problems of the age of world conflict just over his horizon, that the Mediterranean would continue to retain this profound strategic importance over and above its newly developing importance as a lifeline of imperial trade. “In our day,” he wrote,
when the new European system has grown so solid that it seems as though nothing could seriously disturb it, the new meaning has almost buried the old. The world-wide empires dominate our imagination. Yet their roots still lie in the European system, and when that is shaken, all will shake. The main guaranty of its stability is the British power in the Mediterranean, and the general and lasting acquiescence of Europe in the situation which the Peace of Utrecht founded within the Straits is a recognition of that vital truth.
Here we see Corbett no longer merely righting the misconceptions of the past, and founding bis appreciation of the most painstaking labour in the field, but drawing the threads of a wide and sustained investigation together to speak directly to his countrymen, and inform them of the strategic realities of what was shortly to be a threatened international position. “In that,” he concluded, “lies our duty, whatever distractions may arise, to keep green the memory of those old strategists who guided the hand of England to the Straits.”
Corbett had not, of course, worked all this time in a vacuum. The naval rearmament of 1889 had been supplemented by the Spencer program of 1894, which ensured a continued heavy augmentation of the battle line, following the war scares of the Franco-Russian naval alliance, and brought about the discouraged Gladstone’s resignation. In 1895 the Navy League was founded, in the midst of this great revival of naval activity and the impact of Mahan’s first works, to be successfully built up in the following years by such men as Wilkinson and Lord Charles Beresford, full of a great and uncritical enthusiasm for the new Navy. By 1904, the year of England in the Mediterranean, the European picture had been radically altered by the appearance of Germany on the scene as a naval power of the first rank, as a result of the great fleet programs of the turn of the century. In December of that year the Admiralty began the concentration of the battle fleet in home waters, which marked the essential turn from the policy of the previous hundred years to the new alignments necessitated by the rise of German naval power. In effect, Great Britain had made the swing from nineteenth to twentieth century politics. The European order of which Corbett had written was already imperilled, and the sea power upon which it had so largely depended was being mustered to its defence.
It was just two years after the inauguration of this policy that H.M.S. Dreadnought was commissioned, in December, 1906, and inaugurated the greatest race in naval armaments the world had ever seen up to that time, culminating in the outbreak of world war in August, 1914.
While the historical ancestry of the ship which set off this construction race can- be traced to several sources, the ship herself was primarily the work of Lord Fisher. It was felt that the all-big-gun battleship, which would outdate all existing battleships, was technologically overdue, and Fisher, a reforming Admiral appointed First Sea Lord in 1904, wanted to ensure that England was first to float such a vessel. When in 1905 the general characteristics of the new type of battleship became known, the programs of construction of the leading naval powers were radically altered, as the perusal of the naval annuals of the period will show, and that of the German Navy was actually held up until further information should be available.
While this new type did not, as has been claimed, render all previous ships instantly obsolete, it did give Germany a chance to embark on the naval race with England less handicapped by the immense British lead in pre-dreadnought types of battleship, and from this time on, Anglo-German rivalry became the important fact of the naval situation. In the year of the Dreadnought’s commissioning a retired First Lord of the Admiralty set forth the final statement of the famous two-power standard of naval construction which had its origins in the days of the Hapsburg-Bourbon alliance against England, and by 1908 this policy had been formally abandoned in the face of the German threat. In 1912 Winston Churchill, the newly appointed First Lord, clearly formulated a policy designed to render the Royal Navy strong enough to defeat the new German sea power in the event of war.
Together with this great rearmament and shift of policy, a movement of reform throughout the whole structure of the Navy was set on foot, led mainly by Sir John Fisher and his supporters, who formed a school within and without the Admiralty who soon came to glory in the service appellation of “Fishermen.” lusher had joined the Admiralty in 1902 as Second Naval Lord, and “The following year,” in the words of a contemporary observer, “witnessed an activity at the Admiralty which had never before occurred in times of peace.” Appointed First Lord in 1904 (a reversion to the old form of the title which had been one of his first acts of office), he speedily set the building of the Dreadnought on foot, and embarked on the over-all movement of reform and reorganization which characterized his reign.
Beyond merely technological and organizational changes, the movement was from the first caught up with sweeping changes of naval policy, leading necessarily to a new study and re-evaluation of strategic thought within the Navy; and it is with this work that Corbett became principally concerned in this period. The task ahead, involving in effect the re-education of the entire Navy to a state of preparedness for the conditions of modern war, was immense. As one officer with personal experience remarked,
Prior to 1901, the Navy had provided no facilities for the study of tactics, strategy, or the conduct of war as a whole. . . . Although a few men, such as Colomb, Bridge and Sir George Clarke, had endeavoured to arouse interest in these subjects, nothing had been done to introduce them into the naval curriculum.
In 1901 a Naval War College was at length established at Portsmouth (later moved to Greenwich), which Corbett joined in the following year, in the capacity of Lecturer in Naval History. His next main work after England in the Mediterranean was England in the Seven Years' War, which grew out of his lectures at the Naval College. This study showed the developing aim of his studies and teachings to secure just the ends mentioned above, aiming at the re-evaluation of traditional ideas of naval strategy demanded by the modern conditions of imperial defense.
England in the Mediterranean, published after his first two years at the College, had clearly suggested the line of development to be followed in England in the Seven Years’ War, and may be said alone to have established Corbett’s reputation as a strategic thinker of major importance. Mahan referred to it repeatedly in the lectures at the U.S. Naval War College which later went to make up his Naval Strategy, published in 1911, and in 1905 Colonel C. E. Caldwell, writing the first thorough-going attempt to integrate a military strategy within the essentially maritime strategy that for Britain must always predominate, cited Corbett as “one of the ‘bluewater school’ who has not allowed an intimate acquaintance with the sea to develop bias.”
England in the Seven Years' War took a still more intensive and deliberate strategic analysis of the over-all conduct of war as its theme, and to such a degree that the historical narrative is occasionally allowed to suffer, although the work remains today the recognized authority on the great Chatham’s conduct of the war. In this work, having suggested a higher focus of interest in England in the Mediterranean, Corbett clearly defined a new area for the study of wars based on sea power:
Rising higher and wider than what is usually understood by naval strategy, it is a branch of the art as vital for statesmen as it is for sailors, for diplomatists as it is for soldiers, and by history alone can it be mastered. We may call it the function of the fleet in war.
In Chatham’s conduct of England’s most successful war Corbett had found the ideal expression for the new idea of strategy he had been reaching for. It was as though, having followed the British maritime experience from its very source and spring in the Elizabethan age, Corbett’s own ideas had been shaped as those of the great leaders whose naval and diplomatic policy he studied had been shaped, until at last he was able to stale the meaning of the elder Pitt’s consummate over-all strategy in a theoretical frame large enough to accommodate its full meaning. The previous works on naval strategy had assumed that the command of the sea was the supreme end of the fleet in war. “But,” as Corbett pointed out, “the historical method reveals at once that the command of the sea is only a means to an end.” Working from the historical analysis which alone can tell how strategic ideas are really applied in war, he arrived at the following conclusion:
For all that long series of wars which gave Britain first her position in Europe, and then in the world, the answer is simple and constant. The function of the fleet, the object for which it was always employed, has been threefold: firstly, to support or obstruct diplomatic effort; secondly, to protect or destroy commerce; and thirdly, to further or hinder military operations ashore.
He warned, further, against the dangerous tendency of naval thought to “confine itself to the perfection of the weapon and to neglect the art of using it,” and concluded this introductory analysis in a glowing tribute to the elder Pitt’s near-perfect interpretation of these historic principles:
For Pitt army and navy were the blade and hilt of one weapon, and from the moment the weapon was in his grip he began to demonstrate the force and reach of his method. Not only was he able without destroying the enemy’s naval force to strike beyond the ocean at the ulterior object, but at home he was able to break down the time-honoured strategy of France, and force her, by goading her into a desperate attempt at invasion, to deliver her main fleets into his hands.
It was in Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911), the last and most disputed of Corbett’s pre-war works, that he set forth the full statement of his studies in t he British maritime experience. His aim in this work was to erect a theory of war in which classical military and naval strategy are regarded as a means to an end, as they were treated, in fact, in the great wars of Britain’s rise to world power. Corbett felt that strategic thought had too long regarded these elements of the one final strategy of war direction separately. “It is the theory of war which brings out their intimate relation,” he wrote.
It reveals that embracing them both is a larger strategy, which regards the fleet and army as one weapon, which co-ordinates their action, and indicates the lines on which each must move to realize the full power of both.
The importance of this study to the period in which it was written can hardly be overemphasized. In 1911 Britain stood on the eve of a time of conflict in which her responsibilities throughout the world were to be tried to the full, stretching from the war she was shortly to enter, through the crises of the 1930's, the Second World War, and into the present troubled period. She, and the English-speaking world at large, had need of all the strategic thought that could be brought to bear on the great problems of maritime defense which were to bind them increasingly together. Corbett, while personally convinced that war would not occur, bent all his energies to the new task.
Joining the Naval War College in the same year that Fisher first came to the Admiralty, he was inevitably caught up in the wave of reform that followed in the wake of the Dreadnought. As early as 1893 Fisher had noted the lack of a good naval thinker to evaluate the meaning and uses of sea power in the light of Mahn’s work, dismissing Colomb’s contemporary effort with his usual trenchancy of manner; “He is not a naval authority, and he never comes to the point.” In Corbett he would seem to have found his man, with sufficient breadth of vision to understand and intelligently support Fisher’s policy while carrying on his own independent line of study. Corbett, at any rate, worked in close cooperation with Fisher during this period, and became one of the leading spirits among the Fishermen, writing a defense of the Dreadnought policy for which the Admiral later expressed his strong gratitude. As a leading post-war writer on naval affairs remarked, “Corbett more or less inspired Fisher in his operational projects,” and some of his more hostile critics would seem to have regarded him as something like an evil genius to the old Admiral in his strategic ideas.
However this may be, Corbett certainly played an important part in the formation of naval policy during this period, while continuing the work for the Society which resulted in such volumes as Fighting Instructions, 1503-1815 (1905), Signals and Instructions, 1776 -1794 (1908), and The Spencer Papers (1913-14), completion of which was interrupted by the outbreak of war. He also published in 1910 The Campaign of Trafalgar, a remarkably interesting and well-written study of the cooperation of Nelson at sea and Barham at the Admiralty which produced the great victory of 1805, from which he drew fresh material for the Principles of Maritime Strategy in the following year, and contributed a chapter on “The Capture of Private Property at Sea” to Mahan’s Neglected Aspects of War (1907). During all this period he continued his connection with the Naval War College, working to help secure a sound understanding of naval operations within the profession itself, while continuing the development of his own strategic thought. In time he became recognized as the leading spirit of the new movement of education in the principles of war within the navy, as he already was of the general revival of naval history at large. As one observer remarked after the war,
The school founded by Julian Corbett is an essentially naval school in close touch with the Admiralty, the Fleet, and the sources of naval thought on historical lines. Its way had been prepared by the Navy Records Society, which has engineered a road through the intricacies of old naval literature, and done much to resurrect the doctrine of the old Admirals who had seen the dawn of sea [lower and had studied the anatomy of Empire in its birth. It received little enough encouragement, and yet it is an essential part of naval education.
In truth, there was hardly lime enough to revitalize the whole structure of British sea [lower for the trials immediately ahead. The crucial problem of over-all direction of strategic operations remained Corbett’s main interest throughout this period, and the problem of inter-service cooperation, particularly, preoccupied thoughtful members of the reform movement. As early as 1890 a Royal Commission had investigated the problem, and proposed a joint council to be presided over by the Prime Minister, but it was 1895 before a Cabinet Committee of Defence was established, which was nebulous in function and remained ineffective in practise. In 1905 Balfour belatedly established the Committee of Imperial Defence, which began functioning effectively in 1904, and which Churchill, as First Lord, was to call “the instrument of our preparedness.” Corbett was early taken into the confidence of this group, and it was as head of the Historical Section of the Committee that he worked as official naval historian during the war: “institution el paste créés plus on mains pour lui," Castex remarks.
The real coordination of over-all strategy through a Naval Staff had to wait upon the appointment of Churchill as First Lord in 1911, however, and it was the action of Lord Haldane, Secretary for War, which brought about the creation of this body, after the Agadir crisis had revealed that the plans of the army and navy in the event of war were still hopelessly at variance. The naval war plan at this time, indeed, seems still to have been based upon the idea of a close blockade of the Herman coast, and the change from the idea of a modified intermediate blockade, running from Holland to Norway, would not seem to have been finally abandoned until July 1914, a month before the outbreak of war! Corbett was in the confidence of the Naval Staff at this time, helping to organize the naval war games, and his work undoubtedly helped to bring the Admiralty to a more realistic view of the conditions of modern naval war. beyond this, however, education in the problems of war in the Navy at large still tended to lag behind the realities of the time, and peacetime habits of thought continued to predominate. As Churchill was to observe with some justice:
The Royal Navy had made no important contribution to Naval literature. The standard work on Sea Power was written by an American Admiral [Mahan], The best accounts of British sea fighting and naval strategy were compiled by an English civilian [Sir Julian Corbett]. The “Silent Service” was not mute because it was absorbed in thought and study, hut because it was weighted down by its daily routine and by its ever-complicating and diversifying technique. We had competent administrators, brilliant experts of every description, unequalled navigators, good disciplinarians, fine sea-officers, brave and devoted hearts; but at the outset of the conflict we had more captains of ships than captains of war.
Upon the outbreak of the war, when it came, Corbett took charge, with Sir William Slade, of the newly-organized Historical Section of the C.I.I., with the object of studying and collating all the reports of actions received, which were then to be written up, criticized by the principal participants, and issued officially by direction of the Department. The main aim and result of this program was the publication, after the war, of Naval Operations, the work by which Corbett is perhaps most generally known in this country. The work itself, while representing in a sense the crowning achievement of Corbett's historical writing, could not by nature embody his most independent study and thought. The difficulties and peculiar dangers of the task, undertaken on a scale perhaps never before attempted, led inevitably to limitations of outlook and defects in statement which have not failed to arouse hostile criticism, especially among the interested factions which debated the merits of the war leadership in the post-war period.
Nevertheless the merit of the work, hampered and burdened as it was, was sufficient to lead one eminent critic to call its author “a master-builder in his craft,” and Jellicoe, at least, praised Corbett’s work in terms which rise beyond the factional dispute in which it was involved, remarking of his Jutland appreciation:
The manner in which he read into my intentions, by study of the reports, dispatches, signals, etc., is really wonderful. . . .
It was for the initial draft of this appreciation, issued anonymously by the Admiralty at the time, that Corbett was knighted in the following year; a piece written “in six or eight hours, 1 think,” as an eyewitness later remarked, “and very grateful we were for it, for it was a work of art, and as true and impartial a record as one could ever get.”
Corbett turned out a number of minor, pieces during the war, including two pamphlets in defense of the British blockade policy, which the current idea of American sensibilities obliged him to omit from the official History. He also found time to deliver a lecture on “The Revival of Naval History,” which set forth his ideas of the aims and achievements of the movement in which he had played so large a part. His insistence on the wartime value of public understanding is well known. “From the first day,” he wrote,
every publicist, with full understanding and complete conviction, has tried to teach what he had learned from the revival of Naval History, and the nation listened with results of incalculable value to those who had to direct the war.
He went on in this essay to conclude that the events of the war, huge and all-obliterating as they appeared, would never be properly understood nor assume their true proportion until after the war had passed, and history was free to evaluate its meanings. Corbett himself did not live to take part in this work, for Naval Operations, which stands as his only writing in the field, could not pretend to any significant degree of independence or finality of viewpoint. As one authoritative reviewer remarked, on the publication of Corbett’s last volume in this work,
Sir Julian Corbett’s work is, primarily, a history; the critical study of the war, which would have been so valuable coming from his able pen, is almost entirely lacking. . . .
The crushing burden of his labors on this work prevented any further development of that line of independent study and thought he had pursued in the pre-war period. In 1921 he completed a brief preliminary study on “Napoleon and the British Navy after Trafalgar,” a subject to which he had always hoped to return, but on 21 September 1922 he died unexpectedly, a few hours after completing his work on the third volume of Naval Operations, containing his Jutland appreciation.
Even had he lived a few years longer it is doubtful whether Corbett could have added very much to his appreciation of that battle, the main facts of which have hardly emerged from the mists in which it was shrouded, and the principles of which were to be debated long after. As it is, Naval Operations remains a magnificent testimony to Corbett’s service in the cause of naval history, and a work which continues to be read because of its comprehensive outlook and literary quality; but his real contribution to the advancement of naval thought and learning must be found in the earlier works completed before the war.
The importance of this contribution to later work in the field is widely recognized. Dr. Brodie calls the Principles of Maritime Strategy “a classic work on naval strategy,” in his standard Guide to Naval Strategy, and ‘referred to him as a reviser of Mahan in his earlier Sea Power in the Machine Age, while the Robisons, in their standard historical summation of naval tactics, refer to his work more often than that of any other writer. His contribution to the over-all study of war is best seen in the works of such successors in the field as his pupil Richmond, who wrote of Corbett on his death:
He raised the study of the History of War a study so vital to officers, and, indeed, to statesmen—to a wholly new level. In all his works he kept the unity of war steadily in view.
Castex, however, a foremost naval authority of the period between the wars, challenged the whole structure of Corbett’s pre-war strategic thought, in the summary history of theoretical naval strategy he gave in his Theories Strategiques. While giving Corbett full credit for the pursuit and destruction of the “legends reproduced and transmitted from generation to generation by means of works done at second hand,” he felt that his work was mainly critical in nature, “bitter and cruel for those who had previously arrived at a robust conviction in a group of truths which they believed beyond all attack.” Calling him “unbeliever,” “trouble-fete,” and “franc-tireur de la strategic,” he concluded: “Besides, this iconoclast is rather mediocre as a builder himself.”
It is quite possible, as Castex argues, that Corbett’s influence on the pre-war formation of naval thought was not all to the good. Certainly he was pre-occupied with the dangers of the new technology to the dominant fleet, shown so clearly in the Russo-Japanese War, of which he made a study for the Admiralty in 1915, and his provisional pre-war judgment against the use of convoys may, as has been argued, have held up the Admiralty’s adoption of that form of commerce defense during the war. It is also likely that not all of Fisher’s reforms were good or desirable, and that Corbett supported mistaken policies at times in his pre-war work with the Admiralty.
But the main weakness of his conception of maritime war was one overlooked by Castex, and shared by almost all the contemporary writers on naval problems, who followed Mahan in assuming the indecisiveness of the guerre de course, or unrestricted policy of commerce-destruction. This policy, which was to come dangerously close to success with the German submarine campaigns of 1917 and 1942, was based on the main argument of the jeune ecole, that to defeat Britain or to negate the effects of any maritime effort, it was only necessary to deny control of the vital routes of war commerce to that power, rather than to control them oneself. Among the English strategic thinkers in the prewar period, only Jane would seem to have appreciated the possibilities of this form of war, when he warned Britain in his Heresies of 1906: “Always it must be remembered that . . . the real guerre de course has never been attempted.”
Beyond these questions of policy, however, and this one defect of strategic vision shared by almost all his contemporaries, the central validity of Corbett’s work, and its value to the development of war thought and strategy, would seem beyond dispute. Castex’s charge that England in the Seven Years’ War sustained a theory of the “deflection of strategy by politics,” can only be called wilful misunderstanding of Corbett’s development of the Clausewitzian doctrine of the imperative subordination of strategy to political ends, and of naval strategy to the over-all conduct of the war. Corbett’s aims in the development of this theory were admittedly grand, and intended to measure up to his subject. As he remarked in the Principles of Maritime Strategy,
Standing at the final point which Clausewitz and Jomini reached, we are indeed only on the threshold of the subject. We have to begin where they left off and inquire what their ideas have to tell for the modern conditions of world-wide imperial States, where the sea becomes a direct and vital factor.
This study included naval strategy in the concept of a “maritime strategy” which could accomodate the peculiar influences of sea power, in much the same way as Clausewitz in Der Krieg had included military strategy in a larger concept including war in the whole frame of politics; but the peculiar conditions of world-wide trade, diplomacy, and the mustering and transport of great overseas forces which was to be so characteristic of the coming wars made up a field which Corbett by dint of his deeply reasoned reading in history made his own. Essentially, his task was a widening of vision to include the ultimate aims and subsidiary methods of war in relation to a primarily maritime foundation. This had been the way of the elder Pitt, Corbett’s ideal in war leadership, who had used the wealth of England’s overseas trade to win his war on the continent, while working his will all over the world wherever there was water enough to float a 74, and in 1940-45 it was to be the means by which Britain under Churchill staved off German invasion until the combined Anglo-American maritime effort was able in turn to land and support the invasion which won the Second World War.
The importance of purely theoretical work of this sort can, of course, be overestimated, and the study of the past alone will never solve present problems of defense. Yet, as Corbett himself had remarked in The Revival of Naval History, “a great war does not kill the past, it gives it new life:
It may seem a catastrophe which renders all that went before insignificant and not worth study for men of action. . . . But it is not so. As time gives us distance we see the flood as only one more pool in the river as it flows down to eternity, and the phenomena of that pool, however great it may be, cannot be understood unless we know the whole course of the river and the nature of all the tributary streams that have gone to make its volume.”
And it was study of this nature, ranging through the whole history of the British maritime experience, to which Corbett devoted his deepest thought, working always to this “new life” of the understanding. This was the cause Mahan had worked for when in pointing out the true interest of America in sea power, he insisted on the idea of naval power as “a political factor of the utmost importance in international affairs, one more often deterrent than irritant.” A true national understanding of this concept of the American interest in sea power might have saved us from the half-truths of isolation and “Hemisphere Defense,” with their result in 1941-45 in the agony of a war for which the nation at large was only half-prepared. It was Corbett’s service to labor effectively on this problem of maritime defense in the era which saw the very beginnings of this present age of conflict, and to labor with results of incalculable value to those who could listen. Lord Fisher, who was at the very center of the effort of reform and rearmament by which Britain and the Royal Navy braced itself for its vital role in the opening period of this struggle, sounded a note of high praise for Corbett and of warning which might well be remembered today when he wrote:
Julian Corbett writes one of the best books in our language upon political and military strategy. All sorts of lessons, some of inestimable value, may be gleaned from it. No one, except perhaps Winston Churchill, who matters just now, has even read it. Yet you and I are fussing about a strategical history of this war. Obviously history is written for schoolmasters and arm-chair strategists. Statesmen and warriors pick their way through the dusk.