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April 1921 Proceedings—In his excellent “Sea Power and American Destiny,’’ Naval Academy professor Herman F. Krafft discusses seven wars we have fought since 1775, and devotes the least space but clearly not the least thought to the War of 1812.
He agrees with Mahan that we should have been fighting Napoleon, not England. But gratitude to France was too deep and memories of George Ill’s tyranny were too strong. With only 14 frigates and sloops-of-war opposing 600 British ships of the line. U.S. sea power could win only momentary glory on the ocean. But stunning victories on the Great Lakes by Perry in 1813 and Macdonough in 1814 forced an emergency, and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, was invited to come and take command.
In November 1814, the Iron Duke replied, “Neither I nor any one else can achieve success unless you have naval superiority on the lakes ... If we cannot, I shall do little good in America; and I shall go there only to . . . sign a peace which might as well be signed now.”
Seven months later, Lord Wellington engaged his old enemy Bonaparte near the Belgian village of Waterloo and told his staff, “Hard pounding this, gentlemen; let’s see who will pound longest”—as fitting an acknowledgment of sea power as might be composed by any nation in any age.
April 1941 Proceedings—In “American Sea Power—1941 and Beyond,1' David W. Kendall spoon-feeds us naval history in bite-sized chunks. So strong was our pull toward the sea that even when we turned our energies to conquering a continent, we built the curving body of the ubiquitous Cones- • toga Wagon so much like a ship that it became known as the prairie schooner. From 1861 to 1865 we couldn’t build ships slowly enough. And from 1875 to 1883 we didn’t build any at all.
From 1898 to 1921, Roosevelt, Dewey, and Mahan stabilized our boom- or-bust shipbuilding industry. But all three had died by 1922, when, according to Kendall, we gave away the store at the Washington Naval Conference, shortchanging ourselves by a number of first-line battleships, second- line battleships, and battle cruisers. Worse yet, under the London Treaty of 1930, we paid an additional opportunity cost in battleships, cruisers, destroyers, light minelayers, and submarines.
Kendall’s point? However this now-discouraging war ends, our future naval policy must not relapse to the status of “innocuous decay, political badminton, or mistaken idealism.”
April 1961 Proceedings—A distinguished latter-day Aesop gets much of his message across by putting words in the mouths of the British lion, the American eagle, and the Russian bear. Thus, the answer to Professor Anthony E. Sokol’s title, “Disarmament—Is It Possible?”, is, as the lady gnu told her suitor: “Gno, gno, gnever!” If we believe the lion’s version, the bear began speaking with a forked tongue just after the Napoleonic Wars, when Tsar Alexander I proposed to the European powers a “simultaneous reduction of the armed forces of every kind.” Britain’s Prime Minister was gross enough to point out “the difficulty always of obtaining any true data from Russia.” Much later, Sir Winston Churchill chimed in with his own fable about the first Animal Disarmament Meeting. “When the animals had gathered, the lion looked at the eagle and said gravely, 'We must abolish talons.’ The tiger looked at the elephant and said, ‘We must abolish tusks.’ The elephant looked at the tiger and said, 'We must abolish claws.’ Thus each animal in turn proposed the abolition of weapons he did not have, until at last the bear rose up and said in tones of sweet reasonableness: 'Comrades, let us abolish everything—everything but the great universal embrace.’”
Clay Barrow
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