One does not have to dwell upon the complicated and confusing nature of the first post-World War II decade. One should not restate the obvious; yet, sometimes, in the process of establishing one’s basic propositions, a brushing against the obvious is almost unavoidable. It is my proposition that the two greatest developments of the last decade have involved not Asia and not the Russian Empire, the expansive desires of which Empire were, after all, nothing new in history; they have involved the enormous extension of American reputation (i.e. prestige) and of American military responsibilities (i.e. power) virtually all over the world.
I wish to examine in this essay the following questions:. First, How did this change affect the traditional exercise of American naval power? It will be here that I shall endeavor to take some advantage from the perspective furnished by the distance of a decade. Second: We all recognize the existence of naval power, but is there such a thing as naval prestige? My third question will be: Is there a clear relationship between the concepts of “power” and of “prestige”? To these last two questions my answer will be: “Yes, there is.”
I
Toward the end of World War II certain assumptions arose that aimed to determine the new and revolutionary principles of warfare for what seemed a new and revolutionary era. Some of these assumptions were certainly far removed from what may be called the postulates of classic strategy. But it is not only due to the climate of a confusing and radical decade that these new and ultra-modern assumptions arose. They were partly the results of quick reflection, recalling how during the last war entrenched military doctrines, like fortified lines, seemed to have fallen before energetic and modern military challenge.
Yet, while these new strategical assumptions were correct in analyzing new and revolutionary means of war, they have not sufficiently considered that certain ultimate truths pertaining to the ends of war, inasmuch as they relate to the nature of man, have not changed at all. Consequently, a decade after 1945 we are witnessing a slow and uneasy but nonetheless gradually developing return to those classic principles of war that rest upon a proper understanding of the nature of man and of human societies. This does not say that many of these new assumptions have been discarded, or that they do not have determined and eager advocates today. It does reveal, however, that a number of ancient military principles seem to have been quietly vindicated by events, and among these principles those relating to sea power stand foremost.
It was logical that this should be so. It does not mean that the strategists of the Navy are endowed with gifts of wisdom superior to those of the other armed service?. Rather, it means that the revolutionary changes in transportation, weapons, and other communications that affected land, air, and sea alike have wrought their effects on land and in the air more than on the sea. The basic principles of land movement and warfare may have been immediately affected; the basic principles of seagoing were relatively least touched. And now, in a decade, the main intellectual marks of which in military science as well as in literature or in human affairs may be characterized as painful rediscoveries of ancient truths, the following post-war assumptions have suffered at least partial eclipse:
The (basic) assumption that the last war demonstrated a decline in the importance of sea power;
The (parallel) assumption that it was air power that has proven decisive during the last war;
The (consequent) assumption that the decisive emphasis would lie with air and, particularly, with strategic air power in future wars;
The (converse) assumption that the importance of naval power would further diminish in the future;
The (derivative) assumption that in a future diplomatic or military conflict with the Russian Empire naval power would prove of indeed limited value;
U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings
The (subsequent) assumption that Russia has neither fear of, nor a first-rate interest in, naval power;
The (relative) assumption that, at any rate, the United Nations and other collective international agreements may render armed conflict unlikely for some time to come;
The (subsidiary) assumption that future wars would, however, be of total and global nature, involving hitherto not known superweapons of global range, and possibly leading to the total destruction of certain areas of this earth.
These eight assumptions, generally accepted a decade ago, have been damaged without exception, by the merciless logic of history. I shall now illustrate their gradual collapse.
The errors of the first assumption about the decline of naval power became evident soon after 1945, when the first interrogations of the enemy, the earliest captured documents and intelligence estimates heralded the later flood of memoirs, analyses, and reminiscences.
It became obvious, for example, that the thesis, according to which the appearance of extensive air power had tolled the death- knoll for the era of large surface battlecraft, the thesis that seemed to have acquired dominance during 1940-42 through such amazing events as the swift German occupation of Norway, the aerial descent and conquest of Crete, and the dramatic tragedy of the Prince of Wales and of the Repulse in the first forty-eight hours of the Japanese War, was not really tenable. The very first answers of German generals and Admiralty staff affirmed that the decisive and insuperable obstacle that stood between Hitler and ultimate victory in 1940 was the same eighteen-mile breadth of water that had frustrated Napoleon at Boulogne a century and a half ago. This, however, was not all. From discovered German staff papers and reminiscences it clearly emerged that Hitler never really had his heart in the invasion of Britain. Since 1948 we have known that the project for such an invasion existed in the form of priority planning for two months only—from mid-July to mid-September 1940. This was not the way to prepare an amphibious invasion of a large, bristling, determined, and dominant island. Meanwhile the German Navy and the Air Force were quietly bickering, and passing the responsibility to each other, for the answer that lies in the German naval files and memoirs is startingly obvious: The German Navy had been re-built too late. There were not enough ships. The invasion of England was impossible. Hitler could not conquer the sea.
Thus we have learned that at the two turning-points of the Western war sea power was decisive and predominant. The Germans could not invade Britain because they lacked sea power; the Allies could invade Europe at numerous places and, despite strong (though overestimated) coastal fortifications, because they had sea power. (In this respect it is also instructive to compare the success of virtually all Allied seaborne landings with the failure of the mass airborne attempt at Nymwegen and Arnhem in September, 1944.) A further lesson that has been now frequently stated by both sides is that the greatest danger to Britain had come not from the air but from the sea: the German submarine packs in 1941 and 1942 brought more danger than the later rain of flying-bombs and rockets. Throughout the war the German Admiralty rued one, paramount condition: That the Fuhrer did not really understand the importance of sea power; that in expenditures the German Navy proved the orphan arm of the three services. Had there been a few dozen more submarines, as few as two carriers, things might have been different. This opinion is not the monopoly of German sailors; it is held by others and shared by their British ex-enemies.
Similar is the story of the Mediterranean. There Malta was not destroyed from the air, but sustained from the sea. The defeat of Rommel was spelled out by the long convoys that had steamed around Africa to equip and succor Montgomery before El Alamein, and by the warships that brought the Allies to his back, to Algiers; and the post-war foothold of the Western World in the Eastern Mediterranean was secured by a dozen transport ships under the dark skies of December, 1944, when these brought a solitary British brigade in face of a million glowering Communist partisans and Tito’s and Stalin’s armies behind them. That brigade secured the freedom of Greece and of the Straits when, on December 3, 1944, six years before the Korean War, it answered the fire of Communist rioters in Athens.
On the Russian Front, where almost exclusively land armies fought, the Russians held on bitterly to their Black Sea ports and to Leningrad; other, greater cities, nearer Moscow, were abandoned during retreats, but Odessa, Sevastopol, Rostov, Kertch, Novorossiisk, Tuapse—each was given orders to hold out to the last; and from the diplomatic memoirs opened by 1948 it appears that the Russians had lost valuable months during the year 1944 by insisting during the secret armistice negotiations that the Finns lease them a naval base.
There has been, and there still is, excited debate about many issues of the Pacific War. The Battle of the Midway and the great naval and amphibious offensive aimed straight at Japan’s central islands have often been retold, and also re-argued. Yet the many excellent recollections of the War, both American and Japanese, are unanimous in acknowledging that it was the prime inadequacy of her sea power that stopped Japan at the edge of her conquests, around New Guinea and in the Aleutians. And the Japanese Admiralty papers and memoirs told us in 1949 what we had not known before, that the great moment, that breathtaking moment of chance which history so sparsely grants, had come for a few hours to an admiral and not to a general, to Kurita who, had he realized the chance that lay before him beshrouded in the smoke of battle, might have smashed our invasion of the Philippines, despite our bridgehead on land and our domination of the skies above it.
Of a decline in the importance of sea power during the last war there is no evidence. Rather, the opposite appears to be true: that during the last war many great chances existed for the Allies which they missed because of their underestimation of their own naval potentialities. From the diaries of Gobbels, from the papers of such generals as Kesselring, Rundstedt, Giraud, Alexander, Clark and of almost all the Italians’ memoirs, opened and published between 1948 and 1952, we learned that our Mediterranean commanders had not realized their great military and political chances. On April 30, 1943, for example, Gobbels wrote that if the Anglo-Americans would land in south-eastern Europe, this would prove the greatest catastrophe in Germany’s war. “Let us hope,” he recorded, “that the English and Americans are not clear about the opportunities awaiting them there.”
His hopes were to be fulfilled. There is a host of similar evidence available in parallel quotations. The campaign in Italy could have been concluded a year earlier, stated Kesselring, Cunningham, Badoglio, Wilmot, had the Allies landed further north than Salerno during the Italian armistice period. There are at least a dozen such instances of evidence in Churchill’s own memoirs. I am taking one at random, from a memorandum which the Prime Minister sent to General Ismay in January, 1944: “We ought to assert domination of the Dalmatian coast. . . . We are letting the whole of this Dalmatian coast be sealed off from us by an enemy who has neither the command of the air nor the sea.” Throughout 1943 and 1944 an Allied foray in the Adriatic would have met with very little resistance; half a brigade, “transported in mere launches,” wrote the Tries- tine historian Coceani, quoting German staff officers in Trieste, could have captured Trieste in the northeastern arm-pit of the Adriatic; and the thesis, according to which such Adriatic landings would have resulted in the arrival of Western armies in Western Yugoslavia, Vienna, and perhaps Budapest well ahead of the Russians has been vigorously sustained by Winston Churchill, Chester Wilmot, Generals Mark W. Clark and J. F. C. Fuller, and Hanson W. Baldwin, among others. But this was not done. If we consider further revelations about how the Germans feared Allied landings in such distant places as on the Rumanian Black Sea Coast in late 1943 and within the German Bight itself in early 1945, the conclusion is clear: the Allies consistently under-estimated the potentialities of their naval power.
The second assumption, that concerning the decisive import of air power during the last war, received a staggering blow from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The spectacular success of the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki obscured the issue but the later flow of Axis military papers, analyses, and memoirs destroyed that assumption. It was proven that the aerial Battle of Britain was far from being as decisive as was thought during the war; official figures compiled by 1949 indicated that the British ratio of victory was nearer 2:1 than to the 4:1 to 6:1 claimed during and after the war. It was strongly indicated that even a partial German victory in the air would not have meant an invasion of England. It was discovered that the Allied bombing harmed Germany and her allies far less than expected.1 It was established that strategic air power played practically no role at all in the vast and decisive land war between Germany and Russia with about 400 divisions involved; it was proven that aerial warfare was really most efficient when it was employed tactically, at times limited to what may be called a massive employment of aerial artillery; by 1948 it emerged from the Japanese papers that the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities was, in fact, not necessary at all, for the Japanese were inclined at least two months earlier to negotiate about their surrender.
Now we are leaving these retrospective assumptions and World War II behind. We are passing to the assumptions, widely held in 1945 and thereafter, that in future wars the decisive emphasis would never lie with sea but with air, and especially, with strategic air power.
But there developed a future war between 1950-53, the Korean War, the lessons of which drastically disproved the above hypotheses. For a whole year we held absolute air superiority over Korea, an extraordinary condition that is unlikely to be repeated in future wars. Despite this condition, we had to retreat during the first (June-September 1950 and the third (November, 1950-March, 1951) phases of the campaign. On the other hand, our mastery of the sea proved the major safeguard in avoiding shameful defeat on that peninsula.
It was the steady, undisturbed, unchallenged, quiet movement of ships back and forth between Japanese ports and Pusan that provided the vital, uninterrupted flow of men and supplies. Into that bridgehead flowed men and guns during the bleak days of August, 1950, when gunfire was heard along the docks of Pusan, and when the cargo ships, after they put out to sea, strangely sailed forth in complete peace reigning around them. Neither the North Koreans, nor the Chinese dared to challenge our control of the seas. Without that control neither the remarkable amphibious .landing at Inchon nor the evacuation of Hungnam could have succeeded and the war, at least on the Korean peninsula, would have been lost.
Could it have been won? There are emotional as well as cogent arguments stating that if our strategic air force had only been given a free hand to punish the Chinese in Manchuria, all would have been well. But apart from the merits of the Manchurian issue, it is forgotten that the demands of war, even upon such embittered opponents as Americans on one hand and Red Asiatics on the other, imposed certain silently and punctiliously observed limitations. The Chinese and the Koreans did not interfere with our vital, basic, unavoidable supply route between South Korea and Japan. We, in turn, gritted our teeth and did not interfere with the Chinese supply routes leading to North Korea. Now, especially after what we again learned about the inaccuracy and ineffectiveness of much of our bombing of North Korea, I think that we perhaps got an equitable bargain in this mutual limitation. I may be disproven in the future. At any rate, this limitation that again rested on the enemy’s appreciation of our naval power, resulted in the limitation of a conflict that may have otherwise spread to, and cost much American blood in, Asiatic wastelands. It was our naval and not our air power that safeguarded our limited military victory on the Korean peninsula. It is the silent threat of our naval power that for the past four years has safeguarded the independence of Formosa.
The fifth assumption, that in future diplomatic or military conflicts with the Russians our naval power would be of very limited value could, before all, be argued alone on the basis of historical experience. Today the political experiences of the last decade alone are sufficient to disestablish it.
Despite the tremendous land advances of Charles XII, of Napoleon, and of Hitler, the Russians defeated them. There were three great defeats, however, that Russia suffered during the past three centuries, all three mainly from the sea: in the Crimea in 1853- 56, in the Far East in 1904-5, in the Baltic in 1919-20. The decisive event in the Crimea was the arrival of the Allied navies and the landing and reduction of Sevastopol. The landing at and the reduction of Port Arthur and the great naval victory at Tsushima decided the Russo-Japanese War. In 1919-20 the temporary absence of Russian, and the advance of Allied, naval power in the Baltic led perforce to the retreat of Russia and to the establishment of Baltic independence.
The first strategic countermove to the most successful Russian offensive that aimed at the incorporation of the several overrun Central and Eastern European nations between 1944 and 1947 was taken by the United States in 1947, with the sudden and courageous decision to extend military aid to endangered Greece and Turkey. The visible instrument of this new American determination was, of course, the Mediterranean Fleet, ferrying supplies, extending help, but, above all, showing the flag in Eastern Mediterranean ports, about the effects of which action our Russian opponents were bitterly aware. With the extension of our naval radius to cover Turkey and parts of the Near East, Russian sensitiveness increased, and the improving diplomatic position of Turkey was impartially attributed to growing Russian fears, lest the prized Straits become the channel for a Western offensive against the southern ramparts of their Empire.
For the Russian preoccupation with naval affairs and dangers became evident soon. As late as 1949 the late General H. H. Arnold, USAF, wrote that “Russia has no fear of a navy, as she does not see how a navy can be employed against her.” All Russian reactions since that time disproved this hasty and ill-founded assertion. Since 1951 the world has grown aware of a steadily increasing Russian naval program, concentrating on surface ships as well as submarines.2 By 1953 the extent of their construction profoundly surprised and surpassed Western estimates.
But there have been other indications to disprove this alleged relative lack of Russian concern with their vulnerability from the sea. Some of these were: the sporadic Russian insistence toward the acquiring of naval bases in neighboring countries; their extreme sensitivity in their coastal regions; their insistence upon a twelve, but in practice, a forty to sixty-mile limit off their Baltic and Black Sea shores; the ambitious extension of the Russian whaling fleet; the indiscriminate purchasing policy of merchant ships in many foreign countries; the complete sealing off of their coastal areas even after the death of Stalin, when other restrictions were gradually lifted in other areas3—all proofs that the present rulers of Russia are by no means impervious to the high importance of the offensive as well as of the defensive meaning of naval power.
The seventh assumption about the United Nations and other international agreements rendering war impossible for a long time to come has, of course, been disproven by the Korean War by 1950; but I have to devote a few paragraphs to the critique of its subsidiary assumption widely held in the last decade: that the armed conflicts of the future would be global and of hitherto unknown horror, leading to the destruction of entire civilizations.
Indeed, thoughtful historians pointed out certain features which the global position of the United States after 1945 has assumed that were similar to the position of Great Britain after 1815. Then, as now, after a world war fought against a dictator, an Atlantic and naval power emerged as the main architect of victory. Then, as now, the victor had almost complete supremacy over the seas. Consequently, neither Britain in 1815, nor the United States in 1945 had extensive territorial ambitions. They mainly wished to secure the peace of Europe and of the Atlantic which in 1815 as well as after 1945 was mainly threatened by the expansionist ambitions of Russia. Already in January, 1815, the outlines of a British alliance with her age- old enemy, France, were visible on the horizon in face of this Russian danger; already in 1946 it was discernible that the United States must, sooner or later, rally to the side of Germany against the Soviets.
Now it is significant that despite this constant conflict of interests, Britain and Russia never got to direct blows throughout that whole long century, speckled as it was with little wars, except for one instance, the Crimean affair—and that itself was a limited war. So were the border wars that the British fought against Russian or satellitic incursions in Afghanistan, in Persia, in Tibet, in Northwest India. There were at least two occasions when China and Constantinople seemed to fall into the hands of Russia. Yet British naval power and prestige dispelled the danger of world wars for a century.
I have not the courage, or the presumption to state that we are at the threshold of another Victorian age. Nor do I believe that history repeats itself, while it is true that certain historical circumstances do. But I wish to remark that our experiences, at least in Korea or Indochina, strongly indicate that, given the terrible impact of modern superweapons, the role of the United States may have a certain similarity to the role of another sea power a century ago, in the defense of far-flung areas in limited contests fought with limited means, primarily relying upon the means of overseas transportation—naval, aerial, and amphibious power and prestige.
It should be remarked here that the great land-campaigns of the last world war obscured a very important development that grew up largely unnoticed during that struggle. This was that in the expenditure of manpower and artillery the battles of the last war consumed less than what was, for example, expended in the great offensives and counteroffensives on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. In the number of cannon and combat troops (but not in their effects) the second Sedan, Warsaw, El Alamein, Avranches, The Bulge were much smaller than the Battles of the Somme or the Aisne, for example. It was the ferocity and strategic import but not the extent of the Battle of Stalingrad that makes it more memorable than the Battles of Tannenberg or of the Masurian Lakes. A careful examination shows that many of the swift and decisive campaigns of the last world war were virtually separate “little wars,” determined, fast-moving campaigns, with a broad employment of psychological and political means, and often fought out by armored kernels of elite armies. Some proofs already exist for a hypothesis according to which the future will not bring global wars of ideological nature, fought for unconditional surrender, but smaller wars, fought for determined political ends, behind which the control of the seas, as ever, would loom in the form of a formidable guarantor against the undue extension of armed conflict.
Before the last world war, the mass employment of bombers had been widely predicted and their impact even overestimated, but the radically new employment of aircraft carriers was scarcely foreseen. Tremendous material battles around and above underground fortification lines were also predicted in vain; but the varied and extensive application of amphibious landings with relatively small forces yet with immense strategic results was hardly expected. Perhaps future days will further reveal that minor but determined amphibious forces, and daring naval incursions by small flotillas surprisingly appearing in silent bays may prove decisive despite the present claims of intercontinental super-rockets.
This unorthodox thesis, establishing the growing frequency for the conditions of “little wars” as well as the Russian historic fear of seapower was presented by this author in The European Views the Inter-Service Dispute, which was written before the Korean War and which appeared in the November, 1950, Proceedings.
II
The word “prestige” is broader than the word “reputation,” for while it is possible to establish reputation solely based upon naked power, the sense of “prestige” harks back, however faintly, to the realms of ethical conduct and of morality, to the intangibles and imponderables that, even in a world seemingly dominated by materialism and technology, in reality govern the imagination of men and thus ultimately decide their affairs.
The prestige of a Navy is immediately evident in the external sphere. Through the era of fleet demonstrations and majestic naval displays may have passed with 1914, we have used the display of naval strength and determination quite often, and with judicious results, in what is now popularly called our “Cold War” with Russia. In the waters of the Mediterranean, in the Far East, around Persia, American warships have made their appearance when their presence— always symbolic, never aggressive, always potential—was meant to illustrate American determination to defend the free world in troubled areas and at uncertain junctures.
Naval prestige abroad is closely related to naval discipline, for it is obvious that the impression of ill-kept ships or notoriously undisciplined sailors will affect not only the population but responsible foreign officials deeply. In this respect it is well known that it is a hundred times easier to lose a naval reputation than to build one. That such impressions leave profound marks on other nations is well-known and often illustrated by history; and they often have surprisingly direct effects upon diplomacy.
Thus does the element of prestige enter in the impression of the naval arm abroad. It is this impression of respect that the United States Navy has always left upon a wondering world. The sailor-nations of the world know the virtually undefeated record of our Navy on one hand, and the established reputation of American seamanship on the other. It is another intangible but very important factor in the maintenance of American prestige and power abroad.
All this is in turn bound to the element of tradition. At home, we are still dazed to contemplate that revolutionary change which now is taking, in peacetime, our sons and daughters to serve in garrison cities and air bases far away, amidst the hills of hunter- green Germany, in saffron-colored Korea, in chalky Cyprus, in the hot sands of Libya. Gone, irrevocably gone, seems the age when the garrisons of the United States Army exuded the peculiar, pioneer charm of forts deep in the plains, with the smell of leather, horseflesh, and spent gunpowder barely mixing in the clear Western air. Yet the great overseas’ commitments of our Navy are not at all new. One wonders whether Americans toiling at air and naval bases under the white sun of Tunis and Tripoli recall that American guns had boomed from the sea, and Marines had stormed the decks of pirate ships atop the same, calm waters one hundred and fifty years ago. One doubts whether American military personnel, ambling on leave in the bustling Turkish port of Iskenderun, know that in that port, known as Smyrna to the world at that time, an American frigate bobbed manacingly up and down in 1851, forcing an Austrian vessel to release a Hungarian patriot who was to travel to the United States aboard that frigate. One ruminates whether among those Americans who stormed Seoul twice during the Korean War and who broke into the flanks of a vicious enemy at Inchon there were many who knew that there, in 1871, American naval guns had fired angry salvoes to avenge murdered missionaries and to establish American prestige as well as determination in the then darkest reaches of the Far East.
Nor should it be forgotten that the first “cold war” in our history was fought by the Navy. It was our undeclared war with France, between 1798 and 1800.
I now turn inward to ask whether there exists such a singular thing as the prestige of the naval arm at home? Here I depart from the examination of traditions; on the other hand, nothing is further from my mind than to extol the prestige of one armed service to the detriment of the others. I shall try, instead, to mark some recent developments that establish the singular function which the Navy and her discipline, in addition to the maintenance of our prestige abroad, fulfills in American life. To establish the existence of such inward prestige one should go beyond enumerating the names of many distinguished men that connect the American people with their Navy. One should concentrate rather on those intangible elements in the American national character that are often clearly reflected within the naval arm of this Republic.
By the mid-fifties it is increasingly being recognized by some American scholars and thinkers that there exists a deep conservative strain within the American character. For the past few years we have been witnessing in our education, in our letters, in our politics, in our approach to religion a growing awareness of the spiritual imponderables that we, during our preoccupation with world-and-work-saving technical schemes may perhaps have underestimated.
In military affairs these imponderables are every way as important and ultimately tangible as within the affairs of a family or of a community. Now, when we seem to have survived the onslaught of intellectual debunking, it is painfully evident that “morale,” “discipline,” “esprit de corps” are exactly as important in the democratic armed services during the Age of Democracy as when they were the mainstays of imperial and professional armies and navies.
Now it is true that certain conservative practices, such as the acceptance of rigid discipline and of a hierarchy of service in action as well as moderation outside of it form the very requirements of seafaring. It is here that the essentially conservative character of the United States Navy emerges. It would be, again, foolish to presume that the Navy forms an armed service automatically imbued by special virtues or by special wisdom; it is due to the universally recognized prerequisites of naval service that such radical ideas that may have partially invaded other services, caused less harm on the body of the Navy than elsewhere. I wish to refer, among others, to the factor of discipline. Here the excessive experiments in “democratization,” the weakening and partial abolition of military hierarchy and authority have influenced the order and composure of the Navy much less than was the case with the other branches of our armed services during this troubled decade.
Those great thinkers and historians—and Admiral Mahan was among them—who made broad statements about the different characters of plainsmen and sailor-nations undoubtedly had engaged in generalizations. Yet some generalizations have a decided value, if we understand them to be general observations of tendencies rather than irrevocable statements of facts having general validity. There are certain conservative characteristics that sea-faring nations had in common from ancient times to the present day. In both the tremendous world wars of our century, the fighting navies emerged with their moral reputation largely unharmed.
The United States is blessed with many ports, with long and abundant shorelines, and with rich and variegated tidelands, as well as with the great American bread-basket, the plains stretching in all their majestic width between the two mountain ranges that dominate the physical geography of the North American Continent. It is probably not a mere coincidence that first our so-called “isolationists,” and now our advocates of “unconditional aerial warfare” are well-meaning Americans in the armed or the public services who hail from these plains, and who have not had that intimate acquaintance with the sea. The sea is an organic miracle of God and not a technical miracle of man, bringing us forever close to the shores and peoples beyond, trading with them and at the same time, guarding the potential conquerors beyond them with caution and anxiety, making us maintain simultaneously that deep-seated scepticism about the affairs of men and that deep-seated belief in the inscrutable wisdom of God that characterized seafaring and free nations through the course of centuries and that equally is a mark of the singular American character.
III
Having endeavored to establish both the continuous existence and the immediate relevance of the concepts of naval power and of naval prestige to our national and international affairs I wish, in conclusion, to examine the relationship of power and prestige.
I think that future historians may incline to see a fundamental and radical change in the direction of American popular thinking during the decade that lasted approximately from 1945 to 1955, and that at least part of that radical change can now be expressed in terms of the primacy of prestige versus power. By this I mean that a decade ago there existed a vast body of misguided idealism dominating many American forums that thoughtlessly and optimistically felt inclined to state that the prestige of Democracy was the most important thing in the world that followed the destruction of the Hitlerite and the Japanese (but not of the Soviet) Empires. This faulty emphasis or, rather, this equation of power and prestige wrought much harm that proved near-irreparable. Much of this is now realized; but the emotions which accompanied this realization curiously resulted in an ever-growing climate of opinion which now seems to glorify and emphasize power at the almost complete expense of prestige or, rather, to believe that prestige resides exclusively in power.
But “power and prestige,” said Harold Nicolson as early as 1937, in the Rede Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge,
“are not synonymous, since, although you cannot acquire prestige without power, yet you cannot retain prestige without reputation. Moreover, a prestige which contains a high percentage of reputation is able to withstand a loss of power; whereas even a temporary decline in power will destroy a prestige which is devoid of reputation. . . . The problem is not, therefore, one of power alone; it is a problem of the proportions in which power and reputation should be mixed.”
During that turbulent decade which followed 1945 the record of the American Navy showed a remarkable degree of constancy. Our doctrines of sea power were perhaps singular in not having undergone radical and revolutionary revisions; if anything, they have been at least partially vindicated. The same holds for the now recognized existence of those imponderables that I tried to define under the heading of naval prestige. To the recognition of this joint existence of naval power and naval prestige this essay is devoted.
This does not mean that American naval power and prestige were singularly immune to many of the changes of that decade. Discipline, in the Navy also, seemed for a time to have been eroded. Certain radical changes, later partially readjusted, left for awhile deep marks on the maintenance of traditional standards as well as upon training for seamanship. I have already mentioned the sometimes amazing lack of recognition of the efficacy of the American naval arm in the conflicts of our age, a broad lack of recognition that strained individual tempers and seemed to have left, at least for awhile, its impact on American naval morale. The writer of this essay is not an officer of the United States Navy. Nor is he bound to the Navy through any kind of professional connection or vested interest. He has, however, the vested interests of a citizen who continues wishing to see in the naval arm of his country an arm that is forceful and yet guided by a conservative temper, furnishing that traditional American element of moderation and manliness which is neither blind to its own prestige nor puffed up with pretensions of power.
1. The head of our War Production Board, Donald W. Nelson, staked so much hope on the strategic bombing of Germany that on October 5, 1943, he informed General Eisenhower that in his opinion “if weather had permitted the continuation of the bombing two days more, the Germans would have given in,” a fantastic estimate that Eisenhower did not share and that looks doubly fantastic from the retrospect of today.
2. Possibly reinforced by their observation of the Korean experiences—where the effects of naval bombardment, among others, re-floated those heavy surface craft in the minds of “experts” who had buried them in 1945—the Russians, despite their limitations, have never relented in their construction of heavy cruisers and in the maintenance of their battleships.
3. The condition of their coastal areas should remind us of the caustic observation of the British General J. F. C. Fuller, who musing on the tremendous Battle of Stalingrad, remarked that in 1920, coming from the Caspian, that “impregnable” city was taken during the chaos of the Russian civil war by a British “amphibious task force” consisting of a tank, a major, and five sappers.