In December of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent sixteen battleships out of Hampton Roads on the first leg of what turned out to be a cruise around the world. This irritated both the United States Navy and the chancelleries of Europe, gave an unexpected turn to American foreign policy, and indicated that the country had reached physical maturity without entirely shedding its innocence. Baffled but proud, the American people at last concluded that it was a Good Deed, and the fantastic cruise of the new battle fleet passed into a legend that endures to this day.
The trouble with legends is that sooner or later you have to ask what they really mean. This particular legend holds that in addition to making a fine romantic spectacle, the world cruise was a demonstration of American naval authority that induced American friends abroad to take hope and made American enemies take thought and walk softly. Today, more than half a century later, the business does not look quite as it looked at the time. It may be that the legend needs re-examination.
Re-examination it gets in Robert A. Hart’s outspoken new book, The Great White Fleet. A member of the history faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Hart turns a historian’s eye on the whole performance and concludes that it contained a good deal that we never stopped to think about.
Like a good historian, Mr. Hart goes to the sources—Navy Department papers, State Department correspondence, papers of President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root, British and German official documents, letters written by naval officers who made the cruise, and various learned studies of the affair. He finds that the basic reason for the cruise was a simple desire to win prestige—to dramatize American emergence as a world power, to make a big gesture, to impress the American people and to “advertise the United States to the world.” Because relations between America and Japan were badly strained, it was also felt that to get the battle fleet into the Pacific might convey a useful warning to Tokyo: useful, and not really dangerous because the President’s economic advisers assured him that Japan had been so drained by her recent war with Russia that it would be at least a decade before she would be able to go to war again. And so, late in 1907, with naval officers (firmly muzzled, by stern presidential orders) privately expressing grave doubts about the whole matter, the sixteen battleships set sail, all painted white, as spectacular an armada as the world had ever seen.
Reactions abroad were not what Mr. Roosevelt had expected. Great Britain was deeply perturbed. The Admiralty felt that this mighty gesture had to mean something—probably war with Japan, a valued British ally—and even if it really meant something less, the whole venture struck London as a bull-in-a-china-shop affair. The German Kaiser, on the other hand, was delighted. He too believed that America was going to make war on Japan, and if she did he wanted to help her. When the fleet got into Japanese waters, the Kaiser sent the German High Seas Fleet cruising far out in the Atlantic and massed a cruiser squadron in the Far East as a blunt warning that if Britain joined Japan in a war on the United States she would have another navy to contend with. At one point the Kaiser was even prepared to announce a firm alliance between Germany and the United States, and Berlin openly speculated that the two nations might join hands with China to bring about a new order of things in the Orient.
The Great White Fleet, by Robert A. Hart. Little, Brown and Co. 362 pp. $6.95.
The Latin-American countries had no idea what was up, but they felt, like the British, that this exercise of battleship diplomacy must mean something, and as the fleet cruised down the Atlantic coast of South America and up the Pacific coast, they competed bitterly for the right to entertain it, each in the hope that a lucrative alliance with the colossus of the North might be forthcoming. All in all, this part of the cruise created a rather large amount of misunderstanding and ill feeling.
When the fleet got to the west coast of the United States, the citizens there took it for granted that it had come to the Pacific to teach Japan a lesson, and they said so in jubilant chorus. A little later, when the fleet moved on to visit Australia and New Zealand, the uninhibited people down under reached the same conclusion and made even more noise about it. London newspapers remarked glumly that the cruise had vastly increased the tensions of an uneasy world.
And then the fleet sailed up to pay a formal visit to Tokyo.
By now Washington was worried. It was impossible to call the visit off, and yet it seemed fearfully risky to go through with it. The sixteen battleships were impressive fighting machines, yet they were on the far side of the Pacific without a chain of supplies and without proper bases; it seemed that if the Japanese felt like having a war they could have one with all of the advantages on their side. As it happened, the Japanese did not want a war (apparently the British exerted some pressure on their ally at this point), but they did want to turn this visit into something that would benefit Japan—and, in the end, they succeeded.
By mutual agreement, then, the fleet visited Tokyo and got an extremely cordial reception. At the same time, American plans for an ostentatious visit to China were whittled down almost to the vanishing point; furthermore, in Washington, Japan and America concluded an agreement to settle their differences in the Far East. The agreement included a perfunctory pledge to respect the Open Door in China, bound both nations to respect each other’s territorial possessions in the Pacific, agreed to maintenance of the status quo in Asia, and promised that “the integrity of China” would be protected. The original draft had spoken of “territorial integrity”; the word “territorial” was dropped, in the final version … in effect, says Mr. Hart, China was left helpless.
Presumably both governments were happy. A desperately dangerous situation had been met and passed. Americans were able to say that the mere appearance of their fleet had forced Tokyo to stop acting warlike and to assume an attitude of friendship: Japan had assurance that she could follow her own course in respect to the moribund Chinese empire and could pursue her activities in Manchuria without interruption. The Japanese indeed were very well pleased by the whole affair, considering that they had won a diplomatic victory. Great Britain also was happy; the projected German-American alliance, which at one point looked so real, went down the drain and was never heard of again.
The rest of the voyage was anticlimactic. The fleet at last made its way home, coming up through the Suez Canal and the length of the Mediterranean, and in February of 1909 it got back to Hampton Roads. Technically, the cruise had been an impressive achievement. Never before had so many battleships gone so far without mishap. A new respect for the capacities of American naval officers appeared in foreign navies. But the officers themselves were not happy. As Mr. Hart puts it, they considered this cruise “the most detested task ever undertaken by the Navy.” Also, they reflected that they had shown the world an obsolete fleet: the new dreadnoughts were coming in, and the sixteen fabulous battleships were out of date before they got home. Professionally, they felt that the trip had been wasted effort.
But it had made a prodigious splash in the world.
By BRUCE CATTON
Dangerous—But Skeptical
One Japanese naval officer who did not witness the American fleet’s visit because he was on duty elsewhere was a young man who had been born Isoroku Takano. He changed his family name before long to Yamamoto, and he was to have most intimate dealings with the United States Navy a generation later. It was Yamamoto who, as commander of the Japanese fleet, devised and caused to be executed the famous blow at Pearl Harbor, and ever since then Americans have remembered him as one of the most dangerous enemies America ever had.
As a capable naval strategist, Yamamoto undeniably was dangerous. But he is remembered in America largely as an unbalanced braggart who gravely under-estimated American power: the author of the boast that he would force his way into Washington and dictate a peace in the White House.
Actually the Japanese admiral did not say that, and what sounded like a boast was simply an attempt to warn his fellow countrymen that they were biting off more than they could chew. This is brought out forcefully in an interesting new biography, Yamamoto: The Man Who Menaced America, by John Deane Potter, which offers a fascinating new glimpse at the great Pacific war.
Ten months before Pearl Harbor, says Mr. Potter, Yamamoto warned a friend that if war with America came it would be much harder than Japanese patriots supposed. It would not be enough, he said, for Japan to take Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, even San Francisco; to win, “we would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House.” He added soberly: “I wonder if our politicians who speak so lightly of a Japanese-American war have confidence as to the outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices?”
Yamamoto himself did not have that confidence. On November 11, 1941, when he was just about to launch the blow at Pearl Harbor, he confided that he was in a strange position—“having to make a decision diametrically opposed to my own personal opinion, with no choice but to push full-speed in pursuance of that decision.” He realized that America simply had too much muscle. If Japan expected to win it would have to win very quickly, because if it came to a long war Japan would be hopelessly outclassed.
But his letter about signing the treaty in the White House became public; Japanese propagandists broadcast it as an expression of hope rather than as an appraisal of long odds, and naturally it was read with indignant interest in this country. It made Yamamoto one of the principal villains of the war as far as America was concerned, and that is how he is chiefly remembered to this day.
Yamamoto: The Man Who Menaced America, by John Deane Potter. The Viking Press. 332 pp. $6.50.
Yamamoto realized very well that Pearl Harbor did less than he had wanted it to do. It did not destroy the American aircraft carriers—which Yamamoto recognized as the decisive weapon in modern naval warfare—and it did not compel America to think about surrender. Yamamoto had to have a decisive, overwhelming victory, and he had to have it before the war turned into the kind of endurance contest which Japan could not hope to win. Six months after Pearl Harbor he tried to get it by mounting the great thrust at Midway, hoping this would lead to a conclusive showdown.
His figuring was correct. The showdown came, and Midway was “the greatest sea battle since Trafalgar.” But it was not the kind of showdown Yamamoto wanted. It was the Japanese carrier force that was wrecked. After Midway, Japan was fighting the wrong kind of war. It was moving on to defeat, and Yamamoto knew it.
Yamamoto himself never saw the end of it. In the spring of 1943, American fighting planes gunned down his transport plane in the jungle fringe of Bougainville, and he lost his life. His ashes were returned to Tokyo, where there was a spectacular state funeral—on the first anniversary of the great Battle of Midway.
By BRUCE CATTON
The Faithful British Tar
No student of naval history is likely to forget Admiral Mahan’s famous line about the storm-tossed British warships that stood between Napoleon’s army and the dominion of the world. Britain stayed afloat during the desperate wars that followed the French Revolution largely because the British fleet did its long, hard job with such fidelity and confidence. The legend of Britain’s indomitable Jack Tar seems to get most of its substance from the two decades that began in the mid-1790’s.
Yet the record of those great years contains one very singular chapter that is too often overlooked. For in 1797, when Britain stood alone against a Europe dominated by France’s revolutionary armies—a moment of crisis just about as sharp as the one that followed Dunkirk, nearly a century and a half later—the British fleet mutinied. During the most critical weeks of the war, 50,000 British sailors manning more than 100 warships went completely out of control. The instrument on which the British nation relied for survival suddenly became unusable, and all that saved the day was that Britain’s enemies did not know what was happening.
James Dugan tells the story of this amazing episode in The Great Mutiny, a thoughtful, well-documented book that makes absorbing reading and casts a revealing light on the great legend of British sea power.
Heaven knows, the British sailor at that time had reason enough for mutiny. His pay was much too low, and in addition he rarely got it; his food was atrocious, his living conditions aboard ship were bad enough to cause a riot in a penitentiary, and he was subjected to a brutal discipline that makes what Captain Bligh did to the crew of the Bounty look mild. (As a matter of fact, it was mild: Bligh was skipper of one of the ships involved in the 1797 mutiny, and from the record it appears that he was one of the better captains in the fleet.) And so, at a moment when the French were preparing to invade either Ireland or England itself, and the hostile Dutch fleet was waiting its chance to come out and make an attack of its own, there came a crippling mutiny.
The first chapter came in the principal fleet anchorage at Spithead, just outside the great naval base at Portsmouth. It resembled a sit-down strike, and one is tempted to remark that as a mutiny it was typically British: that is, the crews showed no disrespect to their officers, there was no violence whatever, the mutineers even promised to drop everything and go back to work if the French fleet really put to sea, everything was very orderly, and the ships were kept in full readiness for action. But the Admiralty had lost every vestige of control, and after a lot of indignant hemming and hawing, the government finally buckled down to it and dealt with the mutineers just as a factory management might deal with a militant union.
The Admiralty was lucky in the person it chose to deal with the seamen—Admiral Lord Richard Howe, a retired naval hero highly popular with the enlisted men, who knew him as “Black Dick”: a man who seems to have had none of the knock-’em-dead stuffiness traditional with British admirals of that day. Howe talked with the leaders of the mutiny as if they were reasonable men, found out that they were, and at last worked out a deal; his biggest problem apparently was to get government and Parliament to ratify the deal after it had been accepted by the seamen.
The deal was simple enough. There was a raise in pay, an improvement in food, some modification of the harsh rules that kept sailors from getting shore leave, and—not put down in writing, but nevertheless binding—an arrangement to get the most sadistic of the officers transferred to other assignments. It worked, the mutiny suddenly ended, and the battle fleet could be used once more.
The Great Mutiny, by James Dugan. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 511 pp. $6.95.
That was the first chapter. The second came in the anchorage at the Nore, at Sheerness near the mouth of the Thames. The sailors there found out what was up, put on a mutiny of their own, were assured that the gains made at Spithead would apply to them—and then undertook to raise some additional demands and created a very different sort of situation. This mutiny became everything that the mutiny at Spithead was not: that is, it was rough, disorderly, strongly tinged with an overlay of political radicalism that seemed to owe something to the Jacobin fervor of the French revolutionists. At Spithead, the leaders of the mutiny were all but unidentifiable: at the Nore they were way out in front, fighting partly for better working conditions and partly for their own aggrandizement. They overplayed their hand, and in the end the Nore mutiny was suppressed by force of arms, with two or three dozen hangings and a vast number of floggings.
And, in the end, the fleet went back to duty and the moment of crisis passed. It was a strange, strange business, altogether: two mutinies, one bloodless and almost friendly, the other as grim as any mutiny could be; the two together casting a strange light on the undying legend of the stouthearted British sailor.
