Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I

Chapter 5. Planning for Victory

The decisive battle between the German and U.S. battleship fleets took place off the coast of New England.A German battle force of twenty-two battleships,five battlecruisers,forty-four torpedo boats,and about fifty submarines had rapidly crossed the North Atlantic after the declaration of war. In its wake a fleet of transports carrying an invasion force of more than 150,000 troops had followed. A U.S. Atlantic Fleet consisting of sixteen battleships, two battlecruisers, thirty-two torpedo boats, and twelve submarines had moved to intercept the advancing German fleet. In the ensuing showdown, the Americans suffered catastrophic defeat, due to inferior numbers, matériel, and organization.The outcome of the battle gave the Germans command of the sea and cleared the way for the subsequent invasion of the northern United States,including the occupation of major cities such as Boston and NewYork. This battle was an imaginary event. German and U.S. battle fleets never directly confronted each other in combat. Set in 1920, this operational scenario of an American-German war, with its decisive battle at the outset, was concocted by J. Irving Hancock, a prolific author of juvenile fiction in the United States that tended toward military themes; it was laid out in the first volume of his The Invasion of the United States series, published in 1916. Chapter 5 Planning for Victory 126 The Cult of the Battle This series belonged to a flourishing fictional literature about future wars that surrounded the campaign for “preparedness” between 1914 and 1917. This literature,in turn,was part of a larger genre of tales about the next war that enjoyed great popularity in both Europe and North America.1 The writers of this genre were not the only people in the business of imagining future wars. Naval officers, too, drew up plans for imagined battles. In fact, Hancock’s scenario followed the same script of battle fleet warfare and climactic combat as those of his professional military counterparts . In its basic premises, the scenario mirrored thinking about an imaginary German-American war by German and U.S. naval planners at the beginning of the twentieth century.The scenario did so even as these professional strategists eventually discarded the idea of immediate German action against New England in favor of an emphasis on the Caribbean as the initial key theater of war.The lines between popular fantasy and military thinking were blurry. Preparing for war was central to the navalist enterprise of the German and U.S. navies in the global age. Operational planning functioned as the interface between the geopolitical agendas and military imagination of the two naval elites. On the one hand, thinking about maritime warfare became embedded in war plans. On the other hand, war plans served the purposes of threat and deterrence and envisioned geopolitical confrontation with other major powers.Welding together aggressive and defensive motives with political and military ones, naval strategists tailored their scenarios to the specific geopolitical and operational conditions characteristic of individual theaters of war.Yoking their tenets of warfare and global politics to national geostrategic and imperial circumstances, German and U.S. maritime militarists moved within the same self-contained conceptual world, which was defined by shared notions of war, strategy, and politics.Thus, in the case of an imaginary American-German military confrontation, the plans devised on both sides of the Atlantic mirrored each other. Operational planning provided the ultimate field of enactment for the commitment to battle fleet warfare and climactic combat. Casting the war at sea as a discrete, calculable undertaking, navalists strove to assure wartime military success in their scenarios, regardless of which fleet would be on offense or defense.The cult of the decisive battle and visions of large-scale fleet operations became the hallmark of the war plans devised by both navies for big-power wars. By seeking to achieve their operational goals in regional concentration and concerned with operations until the decisive Planning for Victory 127 military showdown, plans for big-power wars limited war both temporally and spatially. In each country, doctrinal attachments combined with a relentless devotion to victory to shape the rationality of navalists’ operational planning. Strategists developed scenarios that assumed symmetrical commitments to battle fleet warfare on both sides and strove to promise wartime success even against the greatest odds. Both navies struggled to create plausible scenarios to ensure successful outcomes, even within the contexts...