Information at Sea: Shipboard Command and Control in the U.S. Navy, from Mobile Bay to Okinawa

Introduction

Introduction It is the duty of historians and students to seek to know how active combat commanders think and reason. William F. Halsey Jr., 1950 American history is full of famous naval officers, from Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones to Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong. Why, then, investigate comparative nobodies like Edward Very, John Hudgins, Benjamin Miessner, Samuel Robison, Morris Smellow, and Caleb Laning? Even among leading historians, the work of these individuals remains virtually unknown. That anonymity is puzzling. Without their pioneering efforts to develop technologies and processes in information management, America’s victory in World War II would have cost even more in blood and treasure than it ultimately did.1 For much of modern history, warships have been the most technologically complex creations of the nation-state. Perhaps nowhere today is this more evident than in Portsmouth, England, where a visitor can tour Mary Rose, Victory , and Warrior. The first of these vessels served in the navy of Henry VIII, the second achieved renown as Horatio Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, and the third was the Royal Navy’s earliest iron-hulled warship. To borrow a phrase from one historian of technology, these ships provide stirring visual evidence of the technological sublime.2 Americans, too, embrace their historic warships. In Boston, one can see sailing frigate Constitution; in Charleston, Confederate submarine Hunley; in Philadelphia, steel cruiser Olympia; and in San Diego, aircraft carrier Midway. Farther west, lying in the mud of Pearl Harbor, rests Arizona. The ill-fated battleship serves as a somber reminder that, for all their grandeur, warships are not built for tourists. From Salamis to the Cold War, naval affairs have in- fluenced world history. At times, they even have decided the fates of nations. 2 Information at Sea Little wonder that historians since Herodotus have studied navies and naval operations. At heart, navies consist of two interrelated and indispensable components: people and machines. Much has been written on both subjects. In studies of the former, one finds stories of the mighty and the oppressed, the skilled and the incompetent, the bold and the timid, the exotic and the mundane. Whether investigating admirals or seamen, this genre, at its best, provides a window into the human experience. Historical studies of naval machines generally emphasize the warship. For navies of the industrial era, innovations in warship design are pivotal: the introduction of the ironclad, the adoption of the all-big-gun battleship, the rise of the aircraft carrier, the development of the nuclear-powered submarine. Underlying this narrative is a theme of progress. Individuals who promoted the adoption of new warship types were progressive; those who supported older paradigms were unreasonably resistant to change. For many historians, a textbook example of technological conservatism is the U.S. Navy’s failure to recognize the full potential of carrier aviation before the Second World War.3 According to this school of thought, American naval officers retained an irrational devotion to the battleship despite overwhelming evidence that carrier warfare was the wave of the future. The battleship was a sacred vessel, a warship type whose “reputation as terror of the high seas persisted long beyond the point that pure logic might have dictated.” As one scholar colorfully proclaims, the supporters of naval aviation were like “orphan boys being raised by a committee of wealthy men each of whom had his own sons to consider first.”4 Recent scholarship has exposed the oversimplifications that lie behind such views.5 American naval officers inhabited a complex world of shifting political, financial, institutional, and operational environments, and their thinking about the interrelationships between warship types was both multifaceted and diverse. Yet even the best of this recent work maintains a focus on what one might label the brawn of navies: ships, aircraft, ordnance, and propulsion . Largely missing from the literature is an examination of the brains behind this brawn—that is, the people, equipment, procedures, and facilities used to coordinate naval operations between ships or between forces at sea and ashore.6 Collectively, these are known as command and control systems.7 Perhaps inevitably, improvements in the brawn of navies significantly increased the difficulties of command and control. Literally and figuratively, air- Introduction 3 craft and submarines added a new dimension to naval operations. Combined with nineteenth-century innovations in steam-driven screw propulsion, automobile torpedoes, and long-range gunnery, the...