Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (review)

The purpose of this collection is to retrieve naval mutinies from popular writers and subject them to scholarly analysis. The editors claim to have avoided mutinies which are already well treated in English, and concentrated on mutinies in the first half of the twentieth century which affected squadrons or groups of ships. Single-ship disturbances, they argue, "tend to stem from simple and obvious causes and offer fewer lessons." The incidents treated here are Russian (the famous Potemkin mutiny of 1905), Brazilian (1910), Austro-Hungarian (the Cattaro affair of 1918), German (the High Seas Fleet in 1918), French (the Black Sea in 1919), Australian (the Australia mutiny of 1919), Chilean (1931), British (Invergordon in 1931), American (Port Chicago in 1944), British and Indian (the Royal Indian Navy in 1946), Chinese (the defection of the Chongqing in 1949) and finally the Canadian incidents of 1949. In a final chapter the editors offer a typology of naval mutiny, distinguishing "naval" mutinies concerned with service grievances, from "political" mutinies aiming to change national policies, and "secession mutinies" aiming either to promote outright revolution, or to escape to a foreign country.

The essays naturally vary, both in quality and relevance. Paul Halpern on the Cattaro mutiny, Michael Epkenhans on the High Seas Fleet and Christopher Bell on Invergordon are all outstanding. One or two other contributors get lost in detail: Bruce Elleman has insufficient evidence to say anything very definite about the Chinese mutiny; and Philippe Masson on the French Black Sea mutinies has been ineptly translated. The Australia affair of 1919 and the Canadian discontents of 1949 seem so trivial that one wonders if they really had a place in this volume—though both are well handled, and Richard H. Gimblett's reinterpretation of the Royal Canadian Navy and the Mainguy Report is in itself important and well worth publishing. The Port Chicago trouble, which involved neither ships nor seamen but black personnel who were essentially stevedores in uniform, also seems tangential to the subject—perhaps it was considered essential to include something about the U.S. Navy. Readers will probably be able to think of other mutinies which might have been good candidates: my choice would have been the Dutch cruiser De Zeven Provinciën in 1933, which has several unusual and significant features, and was all but unique in having been suppressed by successful air attack.

Overall this is a pioneering effort to impose intellectual rigour on a subject which is important both for social and political history. It is particularly refreshing to read scholars like Gimblett and Bell who argue that the importance of their subject has been over-estimated; that both Invergordon and the Canadian troubles were essentially minor incidents which cannot bear the weight of interpretation which has been piled on them. The editors would not claim to have exhausted their subject, but they have certainly opened it up, and they deserve the flattery of imitation.