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Guerre de Course

When John Paul Jones pleaded for a fast-sailing ship because he intended "to go in harm's way," he set the tone for the first hundred years of American naval history. The navy in the age of sail and in the early years of steam was built around fast ships skippered by bold captains, officered by ambitious lieutenants, and manned by individualistic seamen. The navy in the era of the sailing frigate was designed to hit and run, to attack enemy merchant vessels and small warships and flee if faced with a stronger naval opponent. This strategy, which the French call guerre de course, reached its apogee in the transitional years between sail and steam, when Captain Raphael Semmes set a world-class standard for commerce raiding as skipper of the famed Confederate raider Alabama.

For the American navy, Germany's decision and Wilson's response meant a complete reorientation of strategy from long-range planning to immediate war-fighting. As late as January 1917 the General Board had remained committed to planning "for American naval domination of the western Pacific" at Japan's expense, a preoccupation that again would characterize naval planners in the decades between the two world wars. In April 1917, however, the overriding problem was not Japan and its battlefleet; the enemy was Germany and the modern commerce raider, the Unterseeboot or "U-boat."

Prewar German naval planners had believed that the battleship was the ultimate naval weapons system and that guerre de course was an obsolete strategy. They had concentrated on building a battlefleet and had laid down fewer than fifty U-boats, but during the war the impasse at Jutland and the ravages their submarines inflicted on merchant shipping bound for Britain forced the German naval strategists to reorient their strategy from guerre d'escadre to guerre de course.

Every major maritime nation had conveniently underrated the lethal power of the submarine at the onset of World War I. The British especially, but also their naval disciples, the Americans, had anticipated "a new Battle of Trafalgar which would destroy German sea power as decisively as Nelson had destroyed French and Spanish sea power." The stalemate at Jutland had given the lie to this easy solution, but American naval planners remained unrepentant. On 5 April, the day before Congress declared war, the General Board recommended to Secretary Daniels that he "steadily increase the strength of the fighting line" of battleships, because of "the possibility of the United States being in the not too distant future compelled to conduct a war single handed against some of the present belligerents." Almost immediately following the American declaration of war, the navy was forced to challenge those cherished assumptions and prepare to defend against the guerre de course which Mahan had proclaimed trivial in the age of steam and steel.

In April 1917 the Mahanian preoccupation with decisive battlefleet engagements continued to dominate British thinking as well. When advised that the German submarine oflensive would very soon lead to the defeat of Britain, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, who had commanded the fleet at Jutland, concluded that the Admiraltv had no strategic solution whatsoever to the U-boat menace. The first sea lord could not conceive of drawing destroyers from the blockade of the German High Seas Fleet to convoy cargo vessels past the submarines.

The officer who would redirect both British and American naval strategy away from the stalemate of the battlefleets toward defeat of Germany's modernized guerre de course was Rear Admiral William S. Sims. Ordered to London in April 1917 as the direct link with the British Admiralty, the Canadian-born Sims was notoriously pro-British. He focused on the immediate naval menace, the U-boat, rather than on the postwar anti-American coalition of Germany, Austria, and Japan hypothesized by planners in Admiral Benson's office. The chief of naval operations himself was extremely distrustful of the British throughout the war, and Sims later recalled that the CNO's parting advice had been, "Don't let the British pull the wool over your eyes. It is none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans."

Benson was not Sims's only obstacle to a successful campaign against the U-boat. He also had to overcome Jellicoe's fixation on guerre d'escadre. This he did by appealing directly to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who became convinced that convoy escorts held the key to victory at sea. Lloyd George intervened directly with the Admiralty, permitting Sims to form a working alliance with some of the less senior British naval officers who shared his views. By early May the British were diverting ships from the Grand Fleet to escort Convoys of merchantmen.

In convincing his own Navy Department of the validity of his strategy, Sims was helped immeasurably by Captain William V. Pratt. Perhaps the shrewdest officer on Benson's staff, and regarding himself as "straight Anglo-Saxon to the bone," this close friend of' Sims gradually overcame the Navy Department's dual fear of Japanese aggression and a German naval breakout into the Atlantic. He concurred with Sims's war-winning formula for scores of destroyers to convoy hundreds of ships - cargo vessels and troop ships - to England through U-boat-infested waters. That became the navy's policy on 21 July 1917, when Secretary Daniels approved a building program that would bring the navy's destroyer total to 273. Public and private shipyards would he employed exclusively to build antisubmarine craft and transports, except where capital ships had actually been laid down. The end result was the commissioning of a grand total of 406 submarine chasers of all classes in 1917 and 1918, of which at least 235 crossed the Atlantic.

As Rear Admiral Sims had predicted a few days before Daniels made his decision, "the convoy system . . . will be the solution to the submarine question. That is, . . . it will reduce the losses [of transports] considerably below the rate of the building, and this will mean that the submarine campaign will be defeated." And so it was. The institution of a systematic Anglo-American convoy system dramatically reduced the allies' shipping losses to U-boats, while the number of U-boats sunk increased steadily. "By mid-1918," concludes the historian Elmer B. Potter, "the U-boat had ceased to be a serious menace except to the vessels that continued to sail independently." It was the elimination of the U-boat threat that permitted the American Expeditionary Force to cross the Atlantic. As Paolo E. Coletta has noted, "during the summer of 1918 the United States was landing seven soldiers and their equipment in Europe every minute of every day and night." Of a total of 450 transports used by the United States during the war, only eight were lost to enemy action.

Germany's revival of guerre de course had failed because the United States Navy, with great reluctance, temporarily abandoned its capital ship construction program to send to sea an overwhelming number of transports and escorting submarine destroyers, which were hardly less fragile or more seaworthy than their underwater prey.

The American navy that defeated the U-boat had its roots in the European guerre de course of the eighteenth century as absorbed by the great American commerce raiders of the early national period. The tradition of commerce raiding had vigorously reasserted itself in the post-Civil War postulations of the Alabama as a prototype for future American naval warfare. World War I had now shown how lethal commerce raiding could be when wedded to the new submarine technology. The next world war would witness another defensive American antisubmarine campaign in the Atlantic and expose a new American mastery of offensive, unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. guerre de course was alive and well.

For the most part, the pride of the American battlefleet sat comfortably in Atlantic Coast ports throughout the war. Keeping the battleships concentrated at home was part of Admiral Benson's plan to be ready for anticoalition warfare following World War I. Also, by hugging the Atlantic ports, the battlefleet could interdict German surface raiders in the unlikely event that any broke through the British blockade. Such a role of coastal defense was anathema to most offensive-minded battlefleet enthusiasts, although it had been suggested as a dubious justification for battleships in Secretary Tracy's 1889 report calling for a fleet to "beat off the enemy's fleet on its approach."

The upshot of the conservative deployment of the American battlefleet was that the Navy Department procrastinated in meeting the British request for a division of battleships to relieve a group of British pre-dreadnoughts whose crews were needed on antisubmarine patrols. The decision to attach five American dreadnoughts to the British Grand Fleet as a battle squadron under Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman came only in November 1917, when the Lansing-Ishii Agreement temporarily calmed the administration's apprehension that Japanese aggrandizement in China might lead to a Pacific war that could be fought only by long-legged capital ships.

The British government not surprisingly discouraged the residual American sentiment in favor of renewed capital ship construction. In the spring and summer of 1917 Britain's foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, promised the United States "some sort of call upon Allied capital ships" in exchange for a shift in American naval construction "from capital ships to . . . vessels suitable for antisubmarine warfare." The British purported to believe that the Americans were wasting their resources in building heavy ships, since they already enjoyed a "considerable preponderance" over Japan in battleships. In truth, of course, London feared postwar competition with the United States in the class of warship universally acknowledged at the time as the only meaningful standard of world-class navies.

The competition would be fueled by the resentment felt in Washington toward Britain for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and by American apprehension that the British would further strengthen America's major transpacific sea power rival by permitting Tokyo to acquire some of the German-held islands as a reward for Japanese participation in the war. By the summer of 1918, therefore, Secretary Daniels and the General Board were taking the first steps toward construction of two 40,000-ton battleships, and First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Eric Geddes invited himself to the United States for a preemptive plea. Secretary Daniels advised Wilson that Geddes's public opposition to renewed American capital ship construction was an attempt to perpetuate British naval supremacy after the war. The president fumed: "I don't like it a bit." He was barely civil to Geddes, and on 15 October, two days after the first lord departed for England, he approved a new three-year naval construction program replicating the 1916 act. He would ask Congress for $600 million to build ten battleships, six battle cruisers, and 140 smaller vessels.

The revival of American capital ship construction in 1918 had nothing whatever to do with the defeat of the Kriegsmarine. Geddes's arrival in Washington had coincided precisely with a German overture to Wilson looking toward a peace based on the American president's Fourteen Points; the Briton's departure occurred just as Admiral Benson was sailing for Paris, where he would supplant Sims as the senior American naval officer on the Allied Naval Council.

William S. Sims had correctly sensed the essence of twentieth century naval warfare, even though in doing so he perhaps willingly served the long-term British goal of maintaining the Royal Navy's international lead in capital ships. By contrast, in doggedly focusing on that long-range challenge at the beginning of the war, Admiral Benson had missed a paradigmatic moment in naval history. At war's end he was about to repeat his mistake. He and his colleagues remained mesmerized by the largest capital ship navy in the world: "With Germany disarmed," his planners in London reminded the chief of naval operations, "there is no occasion for Great Britain to possess a Fleet greater than her present Fleet, unless the power of the Fleet is designed to restrain us." The battle with Germany was over; the battle with Britain and Japan was about to begin.

Kenneth J. Hagan. Incomparably the Greatest Navy in the World. This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. The Free Press. Copyright 1991.

U-Boats of the Kaiser's Navy As was the case in the Second World War, one of the greatest threats to Britain during the First World War was the German U-Boat menace. Gordon Williamson traces the development of the U-Boat from the Brandtaucher, designed by Wilhelm Bauer, the father of the German submarine arm, in 1850, through to the commissioning of Germany's first U-Boat to go into service, the U-1, in 1906, All of the main types-of First World War U-Boat are then covered. The operational history of the U-Boat service is also covered in some depth. Including the campaigns in the Atlantic and Mediterranean are also covered, along with the slow build up of anti-submarine measures by the allies.

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