August 1, 2007
The Guerre de Course Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:55 PM EST In this website’s lead piece earlier this week “The Confederates’ Devastating Naval Weapon,” John Steele Gordon wrote that the Confederacy’s campaign against U.S. merchant shipping “was perhaps the South’s greatest victory of the war”, noting that “an inferior naval power, unable to slug it out gun for gun with a stronger power, has little alternative but to adopt the strategy of the ‘guerre de course,’ or war on the run. It means attacking the enemy’s commercial shipping with fast vessels that can strike quickly and then flee over the horizon and hide in the vastness of the ocean. This has a greater effect than merely capturing a few ships and cargoes, for it sends insurance rates soaring and forces the enemy to divert naval resources needed elsewhere.” He continues, “The strategy can be devastatingly effective. Had Germany concentrated more on building submarines before World War II instead of diverting much of its shipbuilding capacity to a surface fleet that could not match the Royal Navy’s, it might well have won the Battle of the Atlantic and thus the war.” As for the Second Word War and the Battle of the Atlantic, maybe, and Churchill later claimed that he’d worried about this more than he did about any other part of the war. On the other hand, had the Germans deployed more submarines sooner, the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy might then have earlier adopted convoying, and more quickly allocated long-range aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic, which could have shut down the threat, because when the Allies eventually did that, they won the Battle of the Atlantic. Submarines were so devastating because the Allied navies initially fought them so ineffectively, resenting the diversion of resources to antisubmarine warfare, and made the early mistake of committing too large a force to an attempt to hunt down enemy subs, when there was not enough force left over for escort duties. But what the Allies had to do was have their merchantmen avoid the subs, or drive off subs that found merchantmen; finding and sinking enemy submarines was by comparison irrelevant to the outcome of the war. Aircraft forced the subs below the surface, where most of them were slower than most merchantmen, which did a lot to win the crucial defensive portion of the battle, and convoying did the rest. But however great a mistake the Germans made in not committing more resources to the guerre de course, I think that for the Confederacy the guerre de course was a strategic blind alley. The reason the guerre de course had to fail was that in the 1860s the industrialized United States already spanned a continent, and in the long term it needed to import very little—maybe nothing—to prosecute the war. The Confederacy had a feeble industrial base and needed to import a good deal while exporting cotton to pay for what couldn’t be had on credit. The C.S.A. did superbly at the guerre de course, and lost anyway. The U.S. Navy applied our sea power via the Anaconda Plan, which Mr. Gordon notes worked brilliantly, and made a significant contribution to the American victory; compared with the casualties inflicted on the battlefield by the Confederate armies, the Confederate navy’s effort never produced effective political pressure on the American government. All the Confederate navy did was add to the United States’ costs, and whatever the C.S.A. spent on naval war was money wasted. Come to think of it, when did the guerre de course ever produce a victory in war, rather than merely add to a war’s cost? Commerce raiding was the naval strategy of the Confederacy, the Wilhelmine empire of Germany, and also of the French monarchy, the French Republic, and the Napoleonic Empire. It failed every time. This is not to say that total blockade by a superior naval force, one that strangles an enemy’s economy, will not make a great contribution to victory—blockade was part of the mix of forces that worked against the Confederacy, also against Wilhelmine Germany. Blockade did terrible damage to imperial Japan, and it would almost certainly have inflicted many millions of casualties had it gone on into 1946. Blockade might do terrible damage to the Islamic Republic of Iran if we tried it, and its probable effects on the Chinese economy may be keeping Taiwan free. But the guerre de course waged by an inferior naval power has a pretty feeble record.
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