The Rise of American Sea Power

Lisle A. Rose, long a student of naval history and the author of eight previous volumes on the subject, served a demanding apprenticeship in preparation for his present work. The result, Power at Sea, turns a powerful light on issues that have often remained obscure. To quote Edward J. Marolda, the senior historian at the Naval Historical Center, Rose's subject is "the undeniable but little understood impact of sea power on the modern history of the world." Rose's accomplishment is such that he should stand ready to be mentioned beside such naval historians as Mahan, Morison, Potter, and Nimitz because his work is a magnum opus devoted to the development, influence, rise, or fall of all the great navies during the industrial age. Nothing here stumbles or flags; instead Rose presents reasoned analysis in ways so clearly focused that his work moves everywhere with energy and verve. His observations, sometimes sharp but always honest, puncture several national myths; and, if they excite debate, such debate will be the healthy fulfillment of his purpose.

In The Age of Navalism, 1890–1918, Rose first analyzes Alfred Thayer Mahan's influence before showing how Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred von Tirpitz, and John Fisher became the architects for a revolution in sea power. Rose then shows how the destruction of the Spanish fleets off Santiago and in Manila Bay and the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima ushered in a century of warring states and collapsing empires. Both battles seem to have taught the world that in the scramble for empire and resources, markets and power, battleship navies would be essential both for security and status. As a result the industrial powers launched a frantic naval arms-race that would conclude in the destruction of not only navies but nations and would lead to the ascendancy of the most democratic nation of all.

In developing his history, Rose pursues several themes. The most important, the one upon which his initial volume hinges, turns upon the historical significance of the battleship. Today everyone understands the potential threat of nuclear war, but in 1910, 1920, 1930—indeed, as late as the Bismarck's ill-fated breakout into the Atlantic during World War II—the battleship created the same kinds of fear. To understand the threat, one must grasp the fact that a battleship could steam into any harbor—Boston, New York, Tokyo, Naples, Bombay, Sydney, or wherever—and murder thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, while leveling a city. Appreciating the gross destructive power of a single battleship, above and beyond its ability to sink other ships, places a new meaning on the blow struck by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and unlocks our understanding of the naval arms race that had raged across the preceding decades.

America's rise to dominance began during the period covered by Rose's first volume, and Rose attributes our eventual ascendancy to our democratic character. In 1890 the Royal Navy, supreme in numbers, was also thought to be supreme in naval matters; but in fact, as Rose reveals, it seems to have been a paper tiger.

When Jacky Fisher became first sea lord of the Royal Navy in 1904, he found it to be filled with aging ships whose gunners could not shoot, whose watch-keepers had seldom been to sea, whose officers knew little about their profession, and whose sailors were still living under extremely harsh discipline. In fact, as Rose reveals in a later volume, as late as 1940 the Royal Navy still flogged some classes of men, and its sailors were frequently confined to their ships, working seven-day weeks, for eighty-eight days each quarter. Rigid discipline and equally rigid class distinctions were...