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DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060
The Navy: The Oceanic Period, 1890-1945
by Michael A. Palmer
In the 1880s, the United States entered an era of dynamic
change. Their country reconstructed, Americans began once again
to turn outward, imbued with a renewed sense of nationalism, mission,
and purpose. Robert L. Beisner (1986) characterizes this period
as a transition from an old paradigm of U.S. foreign affairs to
a new paradigm of U.S. foreign policy. At home, Americans sought
change through reform, broadened democracy, efficient bureaucracy,
and professionalization, as evidenced by the steady ascent of
progressive politicians in local and national government.
When Americans looked abroad, they saw a new global surge
of imperialism. The products of the industrial revolution-- the
repeating rifle, the machine gun, the telegraph, and the railroad--allowed
Europeans to expand their political and economic control from
the periphery into the hearts of Africa and Eurasia. The United
States, its own frontier closed, now saw its overseas economic
frontiers threatening to close as well. The Ottoman and Chinese
empires, for example, long the target of U.S. commercial and missionary
interest, were under severe and steady pressure from the European
powers and appeared at times to be on the verge of collapse. In
the Western Hemisphere, the European powers became increasingly
involved in the internal affairs of the states of Central America
and South America.
Under such circumstances, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 suddenly
took on new meaning. In the Western Hemisphere, the industrial
revolution had brought about a dramatic change in strategic geography.
When distances had been measured in sailing days, because of prevailing
winds and currents, much of the Caribbean basin and all of South
America had been closer to Europe than to the United States. The
advent of steam-powered fleets that measured distances in nautical
miles meant that the Caribbean, Central America, and South America
were, for the first time, truly in the backyard of the United
States.
The U.S. Navy quickly found itself assigned new missions.
During the Chilean crisis of 1891-1892, it supported a policy
aimed not at preserving an existing market but at keeping open
a potential market and preventing a possible penetration of the
Western Hemisphere by Great Britain. The use of U.S. naval power
as a tool of a national foreign policy during the Chilean crisis
and battles over Samoa, Hawaii, Venezuela, and Cuba marked the
beginning of a new era for the U.S. Navy. A renewed consensus
supporting the development of naval power was an element within
the new paradigm of U.S. policy. Among those who worked to shape
the navy were civilian leaders, such as Presidents Benjamin Harrison,
William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt; secretaries of the navy,
such as William H. Hunt, Benjamin F. Tracy, and Hilary A. Herbert;
and historians and propagandists, most notably former U.S. Navy
Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, who defined sea power for the world
at the end of the century.
The U.S. Navy would no longer serve only the interests of
the commercial community but would protect the nation as a whole.
A strong navy would allow the United States to command the oceanic
approaches to the continent and prevent European powers from threatening
the United States or the Western Hemisphere and would also allow
the United States to play a more forceful role in the Far East,
keeping open the door of commercial opportunity. U.S. policymakers
saw commerce as the lifeblood of a modern industrializing nation.
The Spanish-American War helped define the new roles of the
navy. As soon as conflict began in April 1898, the navy found
itself in the forefront of operations in the Pacific and the Atlantic.
As planned, in an effort to destroy the Spanish fleet in the Pacific,
Rear Admiral George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron entered Manila Bay
and annihilated the enemy force. In the Atlantic, other navy squadrons
blockaded Spanish naval forces based in Cuba, while transports
moved U.S. troops to the island. Ultimately, the navy destroyed
Spanish naval power in the western Atlantic, sealing the fate
of Spain's empire in the New World and demonstrating, once again,
the value of sea power to the United States.
After the Spanish-American War, the United States continued
to expand its naval forces. In 1907 and 1908, President Theodore
Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet of sixteen new battleships
on a global cruise to demonstrate U.S. naval power to the world,
and especially to Japan. Under the administrations of Roosevelt
and William H. Taft, the United States continued to build battleships.
The U.S. Navy had become the nation's first line of defense, defending
a line drawn far from American shores.
By 1913, when Woodrow Wilson became president, support for
a strong navy had become a bipartisan issue. Behind a shield provided
by U.S. naval power, Wilson held the European powers at bay while
naval and ground forces sought to preserve order in the Western
Hemisphere. In 1914 U.S. marines and sailors returned to Veracruz.
That same year, as the Panama Canal finally opened, allowing the
Atlantic and Pacific fleets to become mutually reinforceable,
World War I began in Europe.
The European war threatened U.S. freedom of the seas, as German
submarines struck at Allied and neutral shipping indiscriminately.
Great Britain exploited its control of the seas to the detriment
of U.S. commerce. Wilson worked to maintain U.S. neutrality (which
tended to favor the Allied powers) and to bring the belligerents
to the bargaining table. In 1916, increasingly frustrated, Wilson
and the U.S. Congress responded to the actions of Great Britain
and Germany by launching a massive naval building program designed
to make the U.S. Navy second to none. The following year, Wilson
ended his three-year effort to keep the nation out of the conflict
when the Germans rejected his efforts to broker a peace, resumed
unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around the British
Isles, and tried to inveigle the Mexicans into a conflict with
the United States. On 2 April 1917 Wilson went to Congress and
asked for a declaration of war against Germany. He then sent the
U.S. Navy and the American Expeditionary Forces across the Atlantic
in a move that ensured Allied victory.
Despite this victory, by the end of the war the foundations
that supported Mahanian concepts of sea power had been shaken.
European battle fleets had fought few actions, and none of them,
most notably at Jutland (1916), had been decisive. The advent
of new instruments of warfare, such as the submarine and the airplane,
had raised serious questions about the utility of the battleship
and the worth of existing naval programs. Americans, along with
their British allies, had discovered that large, expensive battleships
were useless against the German guerre de course. To counter
German U-boats, the Allies needed destroyers and other smaller
warships.
These new realities, combined with a widespread desire to
reduce military expenditures and to ensure that the Great War
proved to be the war to end all wars, led inexorably to postwar
naval disarmament. Throughout the 1920s, the United States and
the other major naval powers of the world reduced the size of
their navies. The series of naval treaties signed in Washington
in 1923 ensured parity between Great Britain and the United States
but also gave Japan, despite an inferior ratio of naval forces,
veritable dominance in the western Pacific.
For a nation determined to avoid military entanglements overseas,
a powerful navy was an unnecessary luxury. As a result, for more
than a decade after World War I, the U.S. Navy struggled to maintain
force levels at treaty limits, to keep pace with rapidly changing
technology, and to remain the nation's first line of defense.
During the 1920s the service also successfully warded off the
first of many assaults by air power advocates who believed that
airplanes had made navies obsolete. The U.S. Navy embraced the
airplane, coopting air power in the form of the aircraft carrier.
The service, with the benefit of knowledge gained from captured
U-boats, also sought improved designs for submarines capable of
coastal operations and fleet support in the vast Pacific.
The navy faced yet another challenge with the beginning of
the Great Depression, when construction of warships all but stopped.
The global depression also undermined the stability of the existing
order, and ultimately led to the growth of the navy, as Americans
grew concerned about Japanese expansion in the Far East and the
rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt
viewed military spending both as a means to meet these potential
international threats and as a method to stimulate the U.S. economy.
Throughout the mid- and late 1930s, the United States began
to build a two-ocean navy capable of meeting threats in both the
Atlantic and the Pacific. The navy remained wedded to the battleship,
the centerpiece of the U.S. Plan Orange strategy for a war with
Japan that was to be won by a climactic and decisive engagement
in the central Pacific. By 1939, however, the navy had also begun
building long-range submarineswhich, after 7 December 1941, would
prove capable of conducting a guerre de course against
Japanese commerce--and carriers armed with sea-based aircraft
whose capabilities approximated those of land- based aircraft.
Between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt
tried to use U.S. naval power to deter war. In the Pacific the
fleet moved from the California coast to the Hawaiian islands
in an attempt to discourage further Japanese expansion. In the
North Atlantic, Roosevelt waged an undeclared naval war against
German U-boats.
Despite these efforts, on 7 December 1941 Japanese carrier-based
aircraft raided Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Pacific Fleet battle line
was all but destroyed. On 11 December, Germany declared war on
the United States. The country now faced a two- ocean war.
The initial phases of World War II went poorly for the United
States, and especially the navy. In the Atlantic, U-boats torpedoed
Allied tankers and freighters within sight of the eastern coast
of the United States. Throughout 1942 the navy found itself relearning
many of the lessons of the anti-U-boat campaign of 1917-1918.
Victory in what British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill
termed the Battle of the Atlantic was essential if the products
of the U.S. arsenal of democracy were to be shipped from the new
world to the old and brought to bear against the Axis. Although
U-boats remained a menace throughout the war, by the middle of
1943 the Allies had largely controlled them through technological
advances, code breaking, and the productive capacity of U.S. shipyards
and factories, which turned out new tankers, freighters, escorts,
and patrol aircraft in great numbers.
Once the Atlantic shipping lanes were secured, the Allies
brought to bear their land and air forces, supported by sea power,
around the periphery of Adolf Hitler's empire. The Allies staged
massive amphibious assaults that cracked Hitler's western wall
and assured the defeat of Nazi Germany, including assaults in
North Africa in November 1942, Sicily in July and Italy in September
1943, Normandy, France, in June 1944, and the southern coast of
France in August of that same year.
In the Pacific Ocean, the United States fought what was primarily
a naval conflict. For the U.S. Navy the war against Japan marked
the service's final coming of age. Having operated for nearly
a century and a half in the shadow of the Royal Navy, the U.S.
Navy now secured for itself the mantle of naval leadership. In
the central Pacific it sought a modern-day Trafalgar--a decisive,
annihilative battle against the Imperial Japanese Navy. No single
battle or campaign proved decisive, but a series of carrier battles
fought in 1942 in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and in support of
operations in the Solomon Islands turned the seemingly inexorable
tide of the Japanese advance. Large-scale amphibious operations,
part of an island-hopping strategy, supported by carrier-borne
aviation, carried the Americans back across the Pacific. In 1944
the Battles of the Philippine Sea--the Marianas Turkey Shoot--and
Leyte Gulf virtually ended the threat posed by Japan.
By 1945 the United States and its allies were closing in on
Japan. U.S. Navy submarines had devastated the Japanese merchant
marine and isolated the home islands from the Asian mainland.
Amphibious forces seized Iwo Jima and Okinawa, strategically placed
islands guarding the approaches to Japan itself. From bases in
the Marianas, U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 heavy bombers pounded
fragile cities with massive incendiary raids. Strikes from U.S.
Navy carriers, ranging along the eastern coast of Honshu, added
to the destruction. Rather than acknowledge their defeat, the
Japanese continued the struggle until the entry of the Soviet
Union into the war and the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked Japan into surrender.
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19 December 1996