Naval Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. Volumes 1-3 (review)

In his thematic introduction to Naval Warfare, James C. Bradford praises the three-volume encyclopedia for a "widening of perspective to include more than battles, leaders, ships, and strategy" (p. xxxv). The addition of such diverse aspects of naval power as medicine, food, and logistics to the conventional list of battles and gallantry under fire makes this compendium, in Bradford's judgment, "truly an encyclopedic work in every sense of the word" (p. xxxv). It is indeed wide-ranging, with more than fifteen hundred succinct essays, each one concluding with a helpful cross reference to related subjects and brief bibliographical suggestions for further inquiry. The massive index at the end is an all-inclusive topical guide through all three volumes.

Less compelling is the claim that earlier naval encyclopedias overlooked the multifaceted nature of their subject. In 1884 a group of naval officers and nonuniformed specialists published A Naval Encyclopaedia (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1884; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research, 1971). Their compilation is extremely broad in scope. A perusal of some of the many topics turns up interoceanic canals, the routine of duty in a man-of-war, courts martial, maritime law, naval hospitals, naval hygiene, and British service clubs. The diversity of these categories and the temporal and professional closeness of the authors to their material mean that anyone seriously interested in the pre-Mahanian U.S. Navy and how it viewed itself as an institution must place Hamersly alongside the Tucker work.

Tucker, his four associate editors, a seven-man editorial board of distinguished Anglo-Canadian-American naval historians, and 155 contributors undoubtedly have created the premiere twenty-first-century point of departure for anyone investigating global naval history from antiquity to the present. Nonetheless, there are a few surprising lacunae in Naval Warfare. For example, in his introduction Bradford discusses the creative "Maritime Strategy" of Ronald Reagan's secretary of the navy, John F. Lehman, Jr., but there is no entry for the man who, after James V. Forrestal, must rank as the Cold War's most important American naval secretary. Nor is there an entry for John D. Long, the secretary of the navy who prepared the navy to fight the Spanish-American War, the catalyst that transformed the historic mission of the United States Navy from coastal defense and "gunboat diplomacy" to commanding the seas with fleets of battleships.

These quibbles notwithstanding, one must praise the editors for their even-handedness and inclusive imagination. Bradford's Mahanian introduction borrows from Clark G. Reynolds's concept of the inherent superiority of "thalassocracies," but the editors commendably offset twentieth-century Anglo-American chauvinism by including an entry for the late nineteenth-century French Jeune École. This prudent strategic movement sought to discontinue the historic circular rivalry by which major navies sought to outbuild one another in the category of sail-driven ships-of-the-line and, later, steam-driven battleships. The editors also wisely embrace James Fenimore Cooper as the first intellectually significant nineteenth-century historian of the pre-Mahanian U.S. Navy. On the other hand, they lamentably omit Commodore Foxhall A. Parker, whose several books and numerous articles grappled with the bewildering operational implications of the evolving technologies of steam and steel in the uncertain years that began with the epochal duel between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia and culminated in Mahan's publication of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890).

In the final analysis, pettifogging ill becomes a reviewer fortunate enough to be asked to comment on this landmark publication. It therefore is only fair to conclude by proclaiming a hearty "well done" to Tucker and his colleagues for having produced a new and indispensable reference work that belongs on the shelf of every serious student of the world's...