For the world’s navies, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, the years from 1865 to 1914 marked a golden age of tactical thought, without parallel before or since:
One cannot read letters and papers of naval officers such as Ambroise Baudry, Bradley Fiske, Romeo Bernotti, William Bainbridge-Hoff, and Stepan O. Makarov, and naval journals around 1900 without being inspired by the tremendous outpouring of technical and tactical creativity.
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In the end, tactical analysis erred in only two significant respects: it too often overvalued the impact that greater speed would have on fleet actions, and it failed to foresee the limitations that poor visibility would continue to impose.
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With the exception of modern methods of fire control and the self-propelled torpedo, all of the elements for the transition from sail to steam warships were conceived between the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War. The list included steam propulsion and screw propellers; iron hulls and armor; bigger guns with greater muzzle velocity and more penetrating power; breech-loading guns; effective shells and their necessary companions, fusing and rifled gun barrels; and gun turrets.
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The British, slow as they were to adopt iron hulls, never built another wooden-hulled ship after they launched the formidable nine-thousand-ton HMS Warrior in 1860; instead, the Royal Navy was replaced from scratch. Strategy, too, was overturned. The advent of reliable steam propulsion set off a worldwide race to provide for coaling stations—a move made necessary by the spread of colonialism; in turn, the construction of more coaling stations made it easier for countries to support still more colonies.
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Not only could a superior fleet now attack directly into the wind, but it could close an enemy in the lightest wind and run the gauntlet of opponents’ fire at double or triple the former speed.
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At this stage armor was ahead of armaments in the race for technological superiority, so the attractiveness of the ram was linked to tactical mobility, kinetic energy, and the ability to close an enemy whose effective range and rate of fire had not kept pace with ship speed.
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Ironclads, not very seaworthy, nonetheless demonstrated their ability to stand up to forts and land batteries—a capability that hastened their development over the next several years and in the U.S. Civil War. In 1853 the Battle of Sinope was seen as the proving ground for the explosive shell. Six large Russian ships descended out of the haze on 7 hapless Turkish frigates and smashed them all, killing or wounding nearly 3,000 Turks with the loss of only 266 Russians.
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The U.S. Civil War was almost devoid of fleet-on-fleet battles. Almost all fleet actions were what we call today littoral operations—inshore work—undertaken to control seaports, harbors, and rivers.
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The ascendancy of armor plate over gunshot and early shells was so fleeting that some analysts are prone to make light of the ram. But writings of the 1870s and 1880s extolled the ram. For some twenty-five years the mobility of steamships enabled them to “charge”—a common description at the time—through a gauntlet of effective fire that was short, only a half mile deep at most. A fleet of rams could run eight hundred yards in three minutes or less and (it was thought) devastate a column that was armed with guns. And it could steam right into the wind. The more a defensive column closed up to concentrate its fire, the more vulnerable it was to ramming. The bigger the fleet was in single column, the longer the column and the easier it was for a ramming fleet to concentrate on a single segment.
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Between 1877 and 1879, just before the end of the ram’s perceived dominance, there were some engagements on the west coast of South America that indicate what might have happened had major fleets engaged in battle. In four drawn-out fights between one or two ironclads and other warships, there were several attempts to ram the opposition force, and nearly all of them were unsuccessful. The performance showed that it had been underestimated how difficult it would be to hit a moving target, especially in engagements where ships were freer to move than they would have been in larger fleet actions.
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It is widely thought now that gunnery usurped the ram, or that the ram was never an effective weapon at all. A better conclusion is that the torpedo superseded the ram. The Whitehead torpedo was a ram with reach: if it hit, it was almost as lethal and was a lot safer to use. As a result, the study of gunnery became as obsessed with countering torpedo boats as it had been with regard to penetrating armor.
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The Spanish-American War proved that even when gun shells had the potential to penetrate iron and steel plates, in at least two navies the gun could seldom hit a target in motion.
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Admiral Fiske presented three rules of thumb:
A 6-inch gun fired eight times as fast as a 12-inch gun.
A 12-inch projectile carried eight times the energy of a 6-inch-gun projectile.
A 12-inch-gun system weighed eight times as much as a 6-inch gun.
Therefore, on equal ship displacements, 6-inch guns delivered eight times the projectile energy of 12-inch guns.
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A significant break point occurred at the 6-inch gun, because its 100-pound projectile was the heaviest that sailors could handle.
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Small-and medium-caliber gunfire could inundate an enemy at short range, as the Japanese amply demonstrated at Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War (1905), where their gunnery ranges were maintained at four thousand to six thousand yards. To dominate the battle, big (10-or 12-inch) guns needed accurate fire control at ranges beyond the reach of medium (4-or 6-inch) guns.
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Around 1910, when continuous-aim fire and director control replaced local gunlaying, the all-big-gun ship was certain to dominate.
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By World War I, a mere ten years after Tsushima, big guns of the 12-to 15-inch class were the weapon, hitting repeatedly on a clear day after a few ranging salvoes out to eight miles and more.
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Battleships did not defend themselves against torpedoes; light cruisers and destroyers were built for that purpose, and they would be responsible for fending off enemy destroyers and torpedo boats. Scouting cruisers were the eyes of the fleet and would remain so until airplanes or dirigibles were sufficiently advanced to do the job. Battle cruisers, a vestige of the late nineteenth-century influence of land combat on naval thinking, would be a heavy cavalry in support of the scouting cruisers and able in theory to outrange or outrun any opposition. Mines were a wicked and ungentlemanly threat in shallow water, but they were largely defensive and had to be planted by surface ships. Submarines, like mines that had a deep-water offensive potential, were worse—an instrument of the devil. The wireless radio was a new tool of command, above all useful tactically to speed the results of scouting.
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When the big gun dominated, it was weapon range that made “crossing the T” so advantageous; instead of a single ship of the line in raking position, the whole fleet could concentrate fire on the enemy van.
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Tactical discussions centered on how to cross the T. In tabletop tactical studies, the only means of achieving this concentration by maneuver was speed, and speed along with armor and armament was in every tactical and technological discussion. As events transpired, the tabletop would prove to be misleading.
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Greatly increasing weapon range and effectiveness was also having a profound influence on the need for reconnaissance. The commander of a large fleet in World War I had to have information about the enemy’s force well before he could see it.
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At Jutland both the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet committed 20 to 25 percent of their heavy firepower and 35 to 45 percent of their supporting cruisers and destroyers to scouting forces.
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The scouting line, which covered about 35 degrees on either bow of the battle fleet, was sufficient to sweep out a wide swath of ocean and protect against an undetected approach. No enemy could make an end run past the scouting line as long as the fleet was steaming ahead smartly. Reorienting the axis of advance of such a disposition was a tense and prolonged experience for every flag officer and ship captain.
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The wireless made scouting lines feasible and enabled commanders to alter the cruising and battle dispositions of fleets themselves.
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First, experience is the best way for a crew to learn the intent of its commander; teamwork is the result of a lot of work as a unit. Second, developing a set of simple, clear signals, used navy-wide and practiced frequently, is the next best technique for avoiding ambiguities and misunderstandings. Third, some messages will be lost, delayed, and misunderstood anyway; no human system can eliminate communication errors—they are to be expected and as far as possible hedged against in tactical doctrine. Finally, the more commanders plan in advance, doctrinally and operationally, and the simpler the plan, the fewer the communication gaffes will be and the more smoothly the action will flow.
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And as for the execution of some theoretical tactical initiative on the spot, it would have been impossible. Only today’s game-players, who have the magical power to move whole fleets on video screens with buttons, can carry out such unpracticed maneuvers. An admiral of a fleet does not expect to exploit opportunities with tactics that have not been inculcated.
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A handful of tactical surprises, however, did arise. Prominent among them was an almost total disregard before World War I of the importance of deception. Every major engagement in the North Sea, the cockpit of the naval war, was part of an effort at seduction. Both sides knew the advantage of numbers and the N-square law (described in footnote 11). Neither fought voluntarily when it was outnumbered ever so slightly; as a result, trap and counter-trap became the method of war, and more often than not the schemes backfired—even at the Battle of Jutland.
If planned surprise through traps did not work very well, unplanned surprise resulting from failures in scouting abounded.
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A dominant feature of Jutland was poor visibility, caused by the gun and engine smoke of 250 warships. There is something about the game floor or video screen that deludes the tactical planner, who may forget that circumstances can drastically foreshorten opening ranges and change the whole nature of the battle. Certainly that is what happened to the Americans in the night actions around Solomons Island in 1942–43, when, unlike the rehearsals of the 1930s, the battles often opened at point-blank range.
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Prewar writers thought, correctly, that gunfire would work very quickly once forces were within effective range. As a result, they envisioned elaborate maneuvers beyond effective range to achieve an advantageous position. In practice, however, it usually was futile to use engineering speed to achieve tactical advantage. The practical speed of a fleet was the speed of the slowest ship in formation.
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The speed that mattered was in the realm of decision-making: decisions had to be made quickly and transformed into simple, correct maneuvers.
As usual. If it noticeably contributed to superiority of the Eternal Brit (or later Brit 2.0), it was Predestination, otherwise a fleeting fad.
Hence taunts like «But before, and before, and ever so long before…» from those in the know.
Also, before the self-propelled torpedo, there was pole mine ram.
The first carrier ships launched mine boats.
Offensive minelaying was a thing from IIRC the same Russia vs. Turkey war, but without a fast minelayer it required slow mine transports built for defensive work to tarry near a hostile port, thus obviously was only a very situational trick. The first minelayers designed to move and work reasonably quick were Amur & Enisey, built in 1898-99.