The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ writers in the age of steam

As late as the end of the nineteenth century, Philip Colomb still complained that no one had written seriously about naval warfare. Thenceforth, he thought most naval writers were obsessed with ‘[t]he struggle … for the mastery at sea, whether territorial conquest was or was not to follow success in this respect’. Philip Colomb maintained against this the argument that commerce across the oceans had grown, and intercepting it and appropriating the wares was advantageous in itself (Colomb 1891: iiif., 32). Despite the actual rarity of naval battles, the naval orthodoxy of the late nineteenth century read something like this: ‘The primary object of our battle-fleet is to seek out and destroy that of the enemy.’ The parallel to the contemporary prevalence of the Napoleonic paradigm is obvious. As Corbettremarked, however, the enemy might not oblige – he might simply ‘remove his fleet from the board altogether. He may withdraw it into a defended port, where it is absolutely out of your reach without the assistance of an army’ (Corbett 1911: 156).

The matériel and the historical schools

We have seen in writing on warfare in general how the mid nineteenth century ushered in an understandable obsession with new technology and the changes it brought to warfare, which brought challenges to the Napoleonic paradigm and to the view that lessons of history could be applied to Strategy in a very simple way (see chapter 7). This pattern of a clash of a ‘historical’ and a ‘technological’ or ‘matériel school’ is paralleled in the naval warfare literature of the same period. The writers who focused on technology are the least interesting in the long run, as the technology that fascinated them itself became quickly outdated, unless they reflected also on how technology would allow them to attain political aims. So we shall confine ourselves here to only one prominent example of this ‘matériel’ thinking: Admiral Sir John Fisher, who was to direct Britain’s naval war effort between 1914 and April 1915, wrote on the eve of that war:

Such shocks were produced by several successive technological innovations – steam, the torpedo, the ironclad, aviation, radar, missiles, to name but some. These did indeed introduce major changes, providing new dangers and new opportunities, not necessarily changing the strategic purpose of the use of navies. Therefore, more interesting than the matériel school, for our purposes, are members of the historical school. As we shall see, they diverged in their findings, and there were sub-groupings, such as the blue water school (or the British Mahanians), or the bricks-and-mortar school, mainly soldiers writing on naval matters. Their interest in the past as a data bank for them to draw upon, analyse and interpret was not different from the methodology used by writers on warfare in general since Vegetius, but in the context of writing about naval Strategy, it seemed new.