Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  Each of the battles discussed in this book provides insight into the essential features of naval combat and command at sea. From the Age of Sail to the modern era, the one constant element is fighting spirit. While there have been many personalities among the Navy’s great commanders, from the flamboyance of “Bull” Halsey to the reticence of Raymond Spruance, fighting spirit has always been the one essential characteristic of them all. Without the warrior ethic, without courage under fire, a naval officer cannot command.

  DECISION AT SEA

  PROLOGUE

  Naval Battles and History

  History is about change, and more than any other human activity, war both causes and accelerates change. War propels history into fast forward, precipitating social and cultural transformation so swiftly and profoundly that often it is that transformation, rather than the object that provoked hostilities in the first place, that emerges as the principal consequence of war. Occasionally the change is self-conscious, the product of deliberate revolution, such as the one that took place in France in 1789. More often, however, change is a by-product of war, unforeseen and even unimagined, as in the dramatic social and cultural revolution that resulted from the mass mobilization and ghastly bloodletting in Europe from 1914 to 1918. Despite the best efforts of policy makers who struggle to fulfill the Clause-witzian dictum that wars ought to be a means by which nations secure clear and discrete national policy objectives, wars create a momentum of their own that constantly threatens to seize control of events from the hands of the decision makers and send history careening forward like a runaway train.

  War also reflects change. Indeed, because war places society under pressure, it casts a bright light onto the values and character of the societies engaged in it. War invites—even demands—that citizens sacrifice their time, their treasure, their very lives, to the object of the war, however ill defined or imperfectly understood that object might be. In consequence, it is in the midst of war that citizens are most frequently called upon to embody the dominant values of their culture. The archaic chivalry of medieval warfare, where one army commander might politely offer another the opportunity to strike the first blow, reflected one set of values; the cold-blooded matter-of-factness with which the German Einsatzgruppen conducted the mass execution of Soviet Jews in 1942 reflected another. Once begun, war often becomes the dominant governmental and cultural concern, and because of that, war most accurately reflects both the prevailing technology and the dominant culture of the societies engaged in it.

  As is the case with all nations, the history and culture of the United States have been both defined by and reflected in its several wars. From the earliest days of the Republic, war delineated the stages of American transformation as the country evolved from a frontier society along the Atlantic seaboard to become first a continental power, then a world power, and eventually the greatest power in history. At each stage of this metamorphosis, America’s wars reflected the dominant national focus of its generation. In the early nineteenth century, America’s wars focused on defending the frontier and protecting its overseas trade; at midcentury, the Civil War resolved a fundamental disagreement about the nature of American democracy and began a social and political revolution as profound as any in the country’s history; at the end of the century, the United States defeated Spain in a war that marked America’s emergence as a world power. In the twentieth century—the American century—the United States confirmed its status as world power as it participated in two world wars, and by the end of that century many Americans accepted as a matter of course that the United States had both the right and the responsibility to act as the world’s policeman and to extend its military power into every corner of the globe. All these profound changes were the product of wars; all of them are likewise reflected in the way the nation conducted those wars.

  These changes were not instantaneous, nor were they the product of a single event. Still, it is possible to identify one battle from each epoch to serve as a useful historical milestone that illuminates the nature of these changes. No less an authority than Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about both history and war, insisted that “battles are the landmarks of secular history.” Churchill was referring to land battles when he made the remark, but as a “former naval person,” he surely would not have dissented from the assertion that naval battles, too, are milestones of historic change. For Britain, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the victory at Trafalgar in 1805, and the victory over the U-boat menace in 1943 were all crucial and historic moments, marking as they did the dawn, apex, and sunset of British naval supremacy. For the United States, too, the stages of national transformation can be identified with specific naval battles that both reflected and provoked cultural and societal change. This book is based on the premise that five landmark naval battles were milestones not only of American naval history but also of the country’s national history.

  • Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie in 1813 was a rare fleet engagement for the U.S. Navy in the Age of Sail and a bracing bit of good news in an otherwise disappointing war. But more importantly, Perry’s frontier navy, itself constructed of the trees of the western forests, secured the American claim to the Northwest Territory and was therefore an essential prerequisite for the subsequent westward expansion that would eventually make the United States a continental power.

  • The Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 was the world’s first engagement between armored warships, and in that respect it foreshadowed the age of machine warfare, but in the process it also demonstrated the industrial strength and economic resilience of the Union states, factors that helped ensure the survival of the Union itself and launched the reunified United States into the age of industry.

  • The Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 was the nation’s first that involved the oceangoing steam and steel warships of what historians have labeled “the New Navy.” It also marked America’s debut as a nascent world power and secured a series of overseas possessions that dramatically altered America’s place in world politics. After that, the national insularity that many Americans had taken for granted would prove impossible to sustain, and the United States became, if not quite an empire, then at least a major power on the world stage.

  • Midway was not the world’s first carrier battle, but it was the carrier battle that changed the course of the Second World War, not only in the Pacific but globally, and put the United States on the path to superpower status.

  • Operation Praying Mantis in 1988—the most obscure of the battles profiled here—not only revealed the capabilities of a new generation of electronically integrated missile systems but fixed the United States at the center of the Middle East political struggle and marked the emergence of the United States in its new role as the world’s policeman, a role it would continue and expand upon in the twenty-first century.

  Technologically as well as culturally and politically, each of the battles described in this book marked a departure from an existing paradigm—all but the first. The Battle of Lake Erie occurred near the end of an era in which the dominant model of naval warfare had remained relatively static for two and a half centuries. Ever since the end of the sixteenth century, warships had been essentially floating platforms for artillery. War at sea entailed maneuvering wooden-hulled, sail-driven vessels in such a way as to bring their broadsides of cast iron guns to bear against the enemy. The most effective way to do that was for warships to sail single file in a long column, what was called a line ahead. Because a line is no stronger than its weakest element, it soon became evident that only those ships carrying more than fifty guns should occupy a position in this line. They were called ships of the line. They carried their heavy guns in two (or sometimes three) long rows along each side, and when those guns were fired all at once this was known as a broadside. There were smaller warships, too: frigates carried fewer guns (usually between twenty and forty) in one row on the weather deck and were used to scout for the enemy battle
fleet or to escort merchant ships from port to port. Even smaller vessels, sloops and brigs with twelve to twenty guns, carried dispatches from place to place and harried the trade of others. But in the European wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the ships of the line that won or lost wars.

  The product of three centuries of evolution, ships of the line were magnificent engines of war. Each of them carried between sixty and one hundred guns (though seventy-four eventually became standard), and each required a crew numbering up to a thousand men. With their three towering masts, complex webs of ropes, lines, and cables, and hand-carved and gilded filigree (especially around the stern), they were works of art as well as engines of war, and it is no wonder that they have been the focus of painters and model builders ever since. The French in particular built beautiful ships. If pressed, many British naval officers would admit that French ships were often better than their own. But during the century and a quarter of almost continuous warfare between the two countries after 1689, many of those beautiful French ships ended up flying the British ensign. This was because what mattered most in a fleet engagement during the Age of Sail was not the beauty of the design or the sophistication of the technology but the skill and discipline of the crew. Because France, as a continental power, necessarily focused on land war, her naval crews were often less experienced than those of Britain, and in battle after battle, British fleets with fewer ships and fewer guns outperformed their French counterparts.

  Throughout all those wars, a pattern or template of naval warfare emerged that served to guide the naval officers who were charged with the command of war fleets. The keys to success, they learned, were:

  A fleet commander had to maintain strict control over his ships, deploying them in a well-ordered line-ahead formation so that an enemy fleet would face an unbroken wall of cannon. Such a battle line might number anywhere from a half dozen to three dozen ships of the line, and when so many vessels were arrayed end to end a cable’s length apart (two hundred yards), the battle line might extend for several miles. A watchful fleet commander would maintain the discipline of this extended battle line by signal flags, enjoining each captain to keep his ship in its proper place.

  British commanders, at least, also sought to gain and hold the “weather gage”—that is, they tried to ensure that the wind blew away from their fleet and toward that of the enemy. The side with the weather gage could control the action. No fleet could attack upwind, so whoever held the weather gage could choose the moment of attack.* In addition, the wind blew the white smoke from hundreds of cannons on the ships with the weather gage into the faces of their adversaries. These well-understood advantages often led to elaborate maneuvering before the battle as each fleet commander sought to gain the weather gage.

  Finally, once the two fleets were side by side sailing in parallel lines a half cable’s length apart (one hundred yards), victory or defeat depended on how quickly the gunners could fire their guns. Other factors being equal, a ship whose crew could fire a round every three minutes was likely to defeat a ship whose crew could fire only every five minutes. Aiming the guns was a very imprecise science. But given the close range at which the ships fought, pointing the gun in the general direction of the enemy was often all the aiming that was required.

  To be successful in all three of these predictors, the secret was constant drill: drill in fleet maneuvers, in station keeping, and in gunnery. Service in war fleets of the Age of Sail, therefore, meant endless days of nearly constant drill: officers called for the men to make sail, shorten sail, clear for action, secure from quarters, and fire as the target bears. But sometimes, too, success depended on the willingness of a bold commander to violate these time-tested rules of engagement and do the unexpected.

  The archetypal naval battle of the Age of Sail was the victory of Lord Nelson over the combined fleets of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, a victory that certified England’s undisputed command of the seas during the Napoleonic Wars and which is still celebrated annually in England. For the United States, however, the most important naval battle of this era was the one that took place twenty-five years earlier, on September 5, 1781, off the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. No Americans participated in this battle, and by the standards of the age it was neither a very big battle nor tactically decisive. Nevertheless, the Battle of the Capes was the battle that secured American independence, for it prevented the rescue of Lord Cornwallis and his trapped army at Yorktown and was the proximate cause of his surrender. Though it may be technically incorrect to cite this as one of America’s great naval battles, a short description of it is appropriate here, for not only did it contribute significantly to American victory in the Revolutionary War, but it provides a useful benchmark for the consideration of the subsequent battles that are discussed in this book, and in that respect it is a useful prototype of naval warfare at the apex of the Age of Sail.

  A modern drawing of a British ship of the line in combat depicts many of the elements of naval warfare in the Age of Sail. At left a gun crew manhandles a gun into firing position while the gun captain sights along the barrel; in the center a powder monkey (perhaps a midshipman given his uniform) runs toward the crew with a new round of ammunition; and at right officers carry on a shouted conversation amidst the din. (U.S. Navy)

  A PROTOTYPE OF NAVAL WAR: THE BATTLE OF THE CAPES

  On the morning of September 5, 1781, the British frigate Solebay was sailing southward, running before the wind, as it approached the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. At nine o’clock a lookout stationed in the foretop called down to the deck to report that he could see a fleet of warships anchored just inside the southern headland, Virginia’s Cape Henry. The Solebay’s captain, Charles H. Everitt, was skeptical. He suspected that the lookout was fooled by the bare trunks of trees on the edge of the American wilderness. Taking a long glass with him, Everitt climbed the rigging to have a look himself. As he steadied himself in the foretop and the image swung into view through his glass, he could no longer doubt. There were indeed a number of large warships anchored there—and they were ships of the line. Since all British ships of the line were accounted for, these vessels could only be French. He counted them as his own vessel drew closer. When he got to eight, he thought it must be the squadron of Admiral de Barras from Newport, though how the Frenchman came to be there, he could not imagine. Then he kept counting, and when he reached the mid-teens, he knew that it could only be the French main battle fleet of the comte de Grasse from the West Indies. After returning to the deck, Everitt sent signal flags whipping up the halyards of the Solebay to be read by the flag lieutenant on the British flagship London, several miles astern, where the news then became the problem of the British fleet commander, Rear Admiral Thomas Graves.1

  The sequence of events that brought the fleets of Graves and de Grasse to Chesapeake Bay in the first week of September 1781 had begun more than a year earlier when Major General Charles Cornwallis initiated a lengthy land campaign in the Carolinas that was designed to pacify the southern colonies. Harassed by irregular forces commanded by Thomas Sumter (the Gamecock) and Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox), Cornwallis’s small army nevertheless worked its way north from Charleston, fighting a series of small and indecisive battles with American forces at places such as Camden in South Carolina and Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina before entering Virginia in the spring of 1781. In late July Cornwallis marched his army to Yorktown on Chesapeake Bay to await support from the Royal Navy. Instead, on August 26 it was the French fleet of Admiral de Grasse that arrived.2

  The arrival of de Grasse’s fleet at that time and place was one of the most unlikely and at the same time consequential events of the whole war. The Franco-American alliance signed three years before, in 1778, had prompted George Washington to nurture a hope that with French naval support he might at last be able to win a decisive victory over the British. Washington knew that as long as the Royal Navy commanded the sea, the British army
could never be pinned down and defeated unless it foolishly ventured inland (as John Burgoyne had done at Saratoga). Because the Royal Navy did command the sea, whenever British land forces got into trouble, they headed for the coast, where their navy could resupply, reinforce, or if necessary evacuate them. But with the French alliance, the Americans, too, had a fleet—or at least a fleet that was on their side. To make maximum use of it, however, the Franco-American allies would have to achieve a kind of coordination that was virtually unprecedented in the Age of Sail, and in the end it took more than two years to achieve it.

  The first piece of the puzzle—the key piece—was the fleet of Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, marquis de Grasse-Tilly (or simply the comte de Grasse) in the West Indies. De Grasse’s orders specified that the protection of French possessions in the West Indies was his first priority. After all, most Europeans held the sugar islands of the Lesser Antilles to be of far greater value than all of the mainland American colonies combined. But in midsummer of 1781, de Grasse received a letter from the French general Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, who wrote him from Newport that the American Revolution was foundering, and that swift action by de Grasse and his fleet might be essential to sustain it. Boldly de Grasse took it upon himself to ignore his orders and focus instead on the needs of his American allies. “I believe myself authorized to take some responsibility on my own shoulders for a common cause,” he wrote. Despite the pleas of French merchants in the Caribbean, and the risk to his own career, de Grasse decided to take his entire fleet to the American coast.3