August 4, 2007
The Guerre de Course II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 PM EST Just a few thoughts regarding Fredric Smoler’s thoughtful post on this subject. We will, of course, never know if the Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic by having concentrated on submarines before the outbreak of war instead of trying to build a surface fleet to take on the Royal Navy. But surely had the shipbuilding capacity and the design talent that went into building such ships as Bismarck and Tirpitz (quite possibly the finest battleships ever built) gone into submarines instead, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been an even nearer-run thing than it was. The Bismarck and Tirpitz proved useless. The former was sunk in a week (after a thrilling chase to be sure), and the latter was bottled up in a Norwegian fjord until sunk by bombs late in the war. Germany had only 57 U-boats at the outbreak of the war and most of them were small, short-range vessels intended to operate in British coastal waters. Even the long-range U-boats were essentially of World War I design. If Germany had had a large fleet of submarines of state-of-the-art design, it could have devastated British shipping before Britain could have acquired the escort vessels and long-range aircraft (properly armed to attack submarines) that finally proved the key to winning the battle. Speaking of poets, a very good if often very didactic one, Rudyard Kipling, understood the threat of the guerre de course. I don’t think the Confederate guerre de course was designed to win the war for the South. As always it was a faute de mieux strategy, and the question is whether the resources devoted to the guerre de course against the North could have been deployed elsewhere with more effect. It seems to me that the resources were small and the effect large, giving the strategy more bang for the buck than any other. The effect, especially if unexpected, can be huge. John Paul Jones managed to put the British maritime industry (a large part of the British economy) into fits and deeply embarrass the British Admiralty when he captured British warships in home waters. Jones didn’t come close to winning the American Revolution, but he sure helped, psychologically and thus politically. Mr. Smoler writes, “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.” Indeed it did, which just goes to show that Alfred Thayer Mahan was right in his remarkably influential book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: the superior naval power wins the big wars. I wish someone would write a new book on Mahan and how his theories affected twentieth century warfare. I have the perfect title for it: The Influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History Upon History. Catchy, don’t you think?
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