A New Force at Sea Book Preview

Early Praise

"In equal parts generous and critical, David A. Smith has given us the most comprehensive view of George Dewey to-date. More than just a naval hero and administrative figurehead, Smith shows us a naval leader deeply immersed in the many important technological, strategic, intellectual, and cultural questions of his time. A New Force at Sea is at once brisk and elegantly-written, precise in its analysis, and a resource both for serious and lay readers of naval history." —Jason W. Smith, Southern Connecticut State University, Author of To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire

“Transformation in naval and military affairs requires not only the theorists of war, but the commanders and warfighters who translate theory and strategic thinking into operational and tactical action. Admiral George Dewey was that officer as the U.S. Navy became a world naval power prior to World War I. A New Force at Sea superbly places Dewey at the forefront of the U.S. Navy’s transformation from a coastal defense, inward-looking force to that great world naval power.”

Stanley D.M. Carpenter, US Navy (Ret.), Professor Emeritus, U.S. Naval War College

A N E W FO R C E AT S E A

George Dewey

AND THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN NAVY

DAVID A. SMITH

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

Introduction

The green hills of sleepy north-central Vermont had never seen anything like it. A crowd of 40,000 people descended on the little town of Montpelier to welcome back its favorite son, the local boy who had sailed to the other side of the world and given the United States its most one-sided victory in war since Andrew Jackson beat the British at New Orleans. In anticipation of the crowds, the Vermont Central Railway laid at least a dozen temporary rail lines into the capital, turning a local cow pasture into a muddy, trampled bog. Special trains brought people to Montpelier from every village and hamlet in the state and beyond. But no one seemed to mind the mud and the press of the crowds. They came to see Admiral George Dewey, and the sixty-one-year-old was ready to give them all they wanted.

Evening was coming on and the sun had dipped below the hills to the west when the sound of a train whistle suddenly echoed through the quiet valley. A buzz shot through the crowd. It was just before 5:30 when the train pulled slowly into the Montpelier station. The engineer backed into town from the junction across the river so that the admiral, casually sitting on the platform at the rear of his railcar, would be the first thing everyone saw. He’d seen enough plays and operas in his day to know how to make a good entrance. Along with the streetlamps there was still enough light left in the autumn sky for him to see the countless American flags and the red, white, and blue bunting that lined the streets of his little hometown. He was a man whose emotions could sometimes cause his words to catch in his throat and this would have been one of those times. At long last, he was home.

The instant the train squeaked to a stop the cheering crowd surged forward from every direction. He kindly deferred from the shouts of “Speech! Speech!” saying he simply couldn’t talk just then. The admiral’s two brothers, Charles and Edward, who still lived in Montpelier, were waiting for him and shouldered their way through the people and up the steps to the platform. The three stepped into the car for a quiet talk while outside the cheering continued unabated. Soon they remerged from the railcar and waved to the crowd, which only made the cheering grow louder. Through constant shouts of welcome the three walked the short distance to Edward’s house, where they disappeared behind the closing front door.1 Later that night, pops and sizzles from colorful fireworks high overhead drew gasps of astonishment from the crowds. A roaring bonfire on the hillside behind the capitol illuminated the little valley in which Montpelier nestled and cast dancing shadows across the vast lawn. Years later locals would still be joking that the fire that night was so big it consumed a hundred cords of wood, a pyramid of a thousand empty barrels, and two adjacent houses.

Theodore Roosevelt explained in his autobiography that when he was president, he dispatched the U.S. fleet on a celebrated around-the-world cruise from 1907 to 1909 so “we should have it clearly understood, by our own people especially, but also by other peoples, that the Pacific was as much our home waters as the Atlantic.” The boisterous and assertive president no doubt believed that his fleet had accomplished what he intended, and to be sure, the cruise was an impressive logistical undertaking for its day. But the statement that Roosevelt sought to make, that of showing the United States was now as much at home in the Pacific as the Atlantic, had already been made with clarity a decade earlier by the taciturn naval officer from the Green Mountains of Vermont who, in doing so, became a national hero.2

George Dewey was sixty years old when he steamed into Manila Bay in the Philippines, and his life spanned a remarkable period in American history. When he was born, Martin Van Buren was president and there were twenty-six states in the Union, none west of Missouri. In thirteen of them, slavery was legal, and no one was talking about the possibility of civil war being the inevitable result of it.

By the time Dewey died, Woodrow Wilson had been elected to his second term

in office, there were forty-eight states, and the United States was on the verge of joining World War I and transporting an army of unimaginable size back across the Atlantic Ocean to fight alongside the British in France.

Less than twenty years before Dewey was born, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told Congress that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and decades later, when Dewey was a junior officer in the U.S. Navy and the nation had become a continental power fronting two oceans, there remained a substantial portion of the public and politicians who thought a seagoing, power-projecting navy was nothing but a recipe for trouble. For them, the proper navy for the United States was defensive in nature, tasked with nothing more than protecting the coasts of the homeland and convincing any would-be invader that the costs of crossing an ocean to threaten the country were simply too high to assume. Still, in the second half of the nineteenth century there were a few in the press, politics, industry, and the Navy who, when they looked outward at the broader world, saw an active role for the United States to play.3

Over the course of Dewey’s lifetime, the service in which George Dewey made his name changed as much as did his country. When he joined the Navy, veterans of the War of 1812 still held sway in naval circles with their romantic tales of sailing ships, broadside cannonades, and shootouts with the hated British on the cold, tempestuous Atlantic. Against this backdrop, Dewey became a key member of the generation of naval officers who helped win the Civil War, transformed the Navy, and then used it to turn the United States into a great power, a global power. By the time he died, steel hulls and steam engines were the longestablished hallmarks of battleships that, in the largest cases, now ran upwards of 30,000 tons—ten times heavier than British vice admiral Horatio Nelson’s massive three-decked flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar. In terms of guns and armor there was no comparison. Sailors on the cruisers and dreadnoughts that fought it out in the 1916 Battle of Jutland could hardly see their opponents without binoculars. One shot from the HMS Valiant or the SMS König would’ve reduced the USS Constitution to floating splinters. Now the most celebrated thinker in the world on naval warfare was not English, French, or Dutch, but an American from the Hudson River Valley whose ideas had transformed how modern nations thought about and built their navies. Finally, below the surface and far above,

submarines and aircraft held the potential to radically remake what countless generations of sailors going back to the Battle of Salamis had thought of as constituting war at sea.

Amid all the attempts to analyze naval history of this crucial period, authors tend to separate the energetic and forward-looking officers into two groups: intellectual reformers and technological reformers. But George Dewey was neither. Instead, he was a leader of ships and sailors, cast in the mold of a Francis Drake, Paul Jones, Horatio Nelson, or David Farragut. Still, he was no hidebound conservative. He had served in enough outdated ships to appreciate innovation and to embrace all the changes they demanded, even in the traditional structure of the Navy itself. He was someone whom the technicians and the intellectuals both needed to translate their revolutionary ideas about the future of the Navy into contemporary operational success.

George Dewey “was not only a master in the ways of the sea, following the Farragut traditions,” said Admiral Ernest King, who, as chief of naval operations during World War II saw the U.S. Navy attain an unquestionably global reach and power, but he also “had a sure touch in his handling of diplomatic situations.” The world-shifting circumstances that catapulted Dewey to fame also demanded that he be a master of both the sea and diplomacy in a way expected of few naval officers before him. In the wake of the victory that made him a household name, he was the single representative of American presence and purpose in a suddenly unstable region, unwittingly baptizing the United States, as another officer put it, “in the turbulent waters of imperialism,” for better or worse.4

Winston Churchill said that a “great deed like the victory of Manila is not the accomplishment of an hour, nor yet of a day, but of a lifetime.” Indeed, long before the Battle of Manila Bay, New York newspapers were writing of Dewey’s brilliant reputation in the service, so it wasn’t as though he came out of nowhere to win his victory in May 1898. Dewey’s long years in the Navy shaped how he looked at the world, the South China Sea, Spain in the Philippines, other countries in the Caribbean, and the changing role of the United States and its naval strength.5

The waters on which Dewey won his fame today constitute one of the most strategically critical regions of the globe. Nearly a third of the world’s entire maritime trade passes through the South China Sea, waters Dewey knew well. And

now, as then, the balance of power in these waters is at stake. George Dewey would look at the South China Sea today and see in the competition between China, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United States something very similar to what he saw when he sailed there himself. For more than a year, his presence was instrumental in maintaining a balance of power that would contribute to China being kept open. Today, American ships and sailors are called upon to help maintain a balance of power that will keep open that same body of water. The United States must retain a presence here, says Admiral James Stavridis, who, in addition to being the first naval officer to be supreme allied commander for global operations for NATO, was, like Dewey, a surface warfare officer well acquainted with the oceans of the world on which international tensions constantly played out. It is a region in which “we should cooperate when we can, but confront where we must.” George Dewey couldn’t have said it better.6

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