warfare at sea

warfare at sea. As soon as seafaring began ships were used for warlike purposes.

Ancient Tactics and Weapons.

By about the 7th century bc specialized warships were being used in the Mediterranean. These oared galley-type vessels, with considerable operational and tactical mobility, would be the major warship type in this region for the next millennium. Galley warfare was essentially about boarding and entering, a land battle at sea in which enemy ships were taken in hand-to-hand combat. Other weapons could be mounted in the bows, such as projectors or Greek fire and, later, guns. The ship itself could be used as a weapon, although ramming was better directed at the oars of hostile ships to deny mobility rather than sinking the enemy outright. Galley battles were fought bow to bow, in line abreast, and could be large-scale events with hundreds of ships on each side. To be powerful on land meant being powerful at sea as well.

In the Orient, too, maritime power became more important. ‘China must now’, wrote one commentator in 1131, ‘regard the Sea and the River as her Great Wall, and substitute warships for watch-towers.’ Within a century China had warships whose armament included trebuchets firing gunpowder bombs, and paddle-wheel boats protected with iron plates.

In northern European waters a very different type of oared ship originated. These longships and knarrs were capable of longer voyages under sail. Their oarless merchant ship derivatives and other northern cargo vessels, such as the cog, also began to be used for war, fitted with both after castles and forecastles to give a height advantage for weapon projection and entering. The expense of maintaining a Mediterranean-style galley navy was beyond all but the richest states, and ships that could double as warships and merchant vessels were at a premium. The treasure ships of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which dominated the Indian Ocean, were both traders and warships, and with them China had, around 1420, a navy as powerful as any European nation.

During this early period naval battles took place in coastal waters and were parts of maritime campaigns in which the movement of troops and their supplies were the dominant objectives. Piracy on seaborne commerce was always endemic in a situation where state power at sea was limited. Rulers had to work with the pirates rather than against them, encouraging them to direct their activities against the political opponents of the day.

The Ship of the Line.

The 16th century saw the development of the ocean-going sailing ship armed with guns. Though guns were added to the castles of ships, and later through gunports in the sides, naval tactics remained dominated by galley thinking. Engagements were still bow to bow with the side-mounted guns trained as far fore and aft as possible, and well-handled gun-armed galleys and larger galleasses still had advantages. They were necessary complements to the sailing ships. Only with the development of the galleon, combining a galley's prow with a sailing ship's range and flexibility, did the oared fighting ship face obsolescence. The gun-armed sailing ship also gave Europeans the military superiority to spread over the world. Still, however, the expense of naval operations forced states, notably England, to attempt to utilize private enterprise both as an aid in waging naval war and as a way of raising additional income. Although large fleets could be mobilized for specific operations, naval power was still episodic and uncertain; the weather played a greater part in the defeat of the repeated Spanish attempts to invade England, including the Spanish Armada of 1588, than the English fleet.

During the 17th century recognizably modern navies came into being, permanent national maritime fighting forces maintained by funds raised by increasingly powerful states. The pressure to put more and more guns on ships—originally as much for prestige as to increase fighting capability—led to the main power of warships being in their broadsides. The line of battle replaced the line abreast and fighting instructions were introduced to organize these long and unwieldy formations. Gunnery power was still limited, and taking rather than sinking the enemy remained the primary aim. It was not easy to achieve decisive results, and in the mid-17th century battles often lasted for days. Success, however, might lead to the blockade of an enemy's coast. Maritime commerce also continued to be attacked but in a more organized manner. The system of privateers, authorized commerce raiders who often employed the stinkpot as a weapon, was regularized. The French guerre de course against commerce did much to neutralize the effects of English victories in fleet actions in the war of 1689–97.

The dynamics of war at sea created in the 17th century reached maturity in the 18th. The line of battle continued to hold sway. Only ships of 50 guns or more that could hold their own against the largest enemy warships could stand in the line of battle and these ships became known as ships of the line, or ‘line of battleships’, the components of the battle fleet. Smaller vessels were used for ‘cruising’ duties for commerce protection and destruction, as well as scouting for the battle fleet. By the middle of the century the frigate had emerging as the main cruiser type and in the second half of the century the two-deck 74-gun ship became the backbone of the line of battle; 50-gun ships were no longer considered suitable.

The Anglo-French Struggle for Supremacy at Sea.

Navies increased in reach and endurance as Britain and France fought globally for empires from the 1740s onwards. Long blockades could be carried out and ships attempting to escape them were intercepted in the open ocean. Major actions, which had previously been close to shore, could now be undertaken on the open seas, such as the two battles of Finisterre in which French convoys escorted by battle squadrons were attacked by small British fleets of ships of the line. Escorted convoys continued, however, to neutralize the guerre de course of smaller warships and privateers.

Blockades encouraged fine seamanship. In 1759, in stormy conditions, the British Admiral Hawke (1705–81) drove a major portion of the French fleet to disastrous and decisive defeat in Quiberon Bay during the Seven Years War (1756–63). France then improved its navy and put it to good effect in the War of American Independence (1775–82). By driving away the British fleet off the Virginia Capes in September 1781, Admiral de Grasse (1722–88) enabled the Franco-American land forces to force the surrender of the isolated British at Yorktown.

The French Revolution was a disaster for the French Navy. Its gunnery and tactical skills declined and, combined with the longer-term decline of the Spanish Navy, allowed daring commanders such as Nelson to score stunning victories against long odds. Such battles, even Trafalgar in 1805, should not, however, be overrated. It was the blockade that prevented the invasion of Britain and exerted the economic pressure on France that eventually forced Napoleon to overreach himself, just as it was the trade convoyed in and out of Britain that allowed it to continue the conflict and support allies ashore.

The Age of Steam Arrives.

The 19th century began, in naval terms, after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. New technologies and techniques began to revolutionize war at sea. As early as the 1820s, commanders were beginning to consider paddle steamers powered by steam propulsion as key components of any fleet. They gave extra mobility to sailing ships as well as being useful warships in themselves; China, whose maritime heritage had been in decline for centuries, had nothing to match them during the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60). Paddle steamers, however, were prevented from acquiring the fighting power of the broadside sailing ship, as the paddles took up much of the space normally allotted to guns. Paddle sloops and frigates were therefore used with sailing ships of the line in mutual support.

Naval firepower was also decisively improved in this period by more powerful guns, new forms of explosive and incendiary projectiles, and new, more accurate gunnery. Ships could more easily sink others; the days of boarding, entering, and taking were finally coming to an end. Ironically, these technical factors that allowed ships more safely to engage forts, combined with the strategic dynamics of a long peace and a stable balance of power, led to shore bombardments becoming the standard form of naval engagement. The last fleet action under sail did, however, take place in 1827 as part of some robust peace enforcement by a British-led coalition fleet during the Greek War of Independence.

The advent of the screw propeller in the 1840s allowed steam propulsion to be applied to the battle fleet in the following decade. Although steam had great benefits in operational and tactical mobility it did diminish the strategic reach of navies, and operations close to the shore (littoral operations) remained the norm. Armour was developed in the first instance to protect ships from the fire of forts. Ship-to-ship engagement became a secondary, though important, dynamic in the development of armour-plated ships, colloquially known as ironclads. The major battle between Austrian and Italian ironclads, off Lissa in 1866, demonstrated the difficulties of contemporary guns penetrating armour and the importance of damaging the enemy underwater by ramming. The age of the galley seemed to have returned.

Technology increased the underwater threat with the development of ‘torpedoes’, underwater explosive charges. At first static—what were later known as ‘mines’—or carried on spars in front of small craft, known as spar torpedoes, these were developed by Robert Whitehead (1823–1905) into self-propelled torpedoes powered by compressed air. Adopted avidly by the world's navies from the 1870s, these weapons promised more than they delivered, being slow and short ranged, and it was only in 1891 that the first armoured ship succumbed to a torpedo, in an attack in harbour during the Chilean Civil War.

Despite a lack of evidence, there were those, especially in the French Jeune École, who argued that the torpedo boat had made the armour-plated ship obsolete. The latter was following an uncertain developmental path, evolving towards low freeboard vessels—the smaller examples of which were sometimes known as monitors—with a few big slow-firing guns that were only really useful for attacking enemy bases. In the 1880s, however, a combination of new, more economical engines giving longer range, lighter armour utilizing steel that allowed high freeboard and greater seaworthiness, and rapid-firing, higher-accuracy medium-calibre guns made the battleship fully practical once more. These improvements also allowed the development of faster cruisers, the largest of which were armoured, making them usable as fast components of the battle fleet. Torpedo boat destroyers were also developed.

The reversion to a seagoing fleet designed to operate as the earlier sailing fleets had done led to a renaissance in naval strategy. Writers like Mahan in the USA and Colomb and Corbett in Britain drew lessons from the age of sail in developing concepts such as ‘sea power’ and ‘command of the sea’. All emphasized the role of the battle fleet. These ideas seemed to be vindicated by events. In the Spanish–American War of 1898 a US fleet of battleships and armoured cruisers annihilated a Spanish armoured cruiser squadron off Santiago. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 culminated in the battle of Tsushima, a Trafalgar-like defeat of the Russian fleet by Admiral Togo's mixed fleet of battleships and armoured cruisers.

Enter the Submarine and Air Power.

The torpedo came of age at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th with the development of, first, gyroscopes to allow reliable long-distance running and then heaters to improve automotive performance. This had the effect of forcing improvements in gun accuracy to allow longer-range firing that culminated in the development of the all-big-gun, Dreadnought battleship, and battle cruiser. The rapid deployment of these capital ships from 1905 made existing surface fleets obsolete, especially as it went together with the development of new types of light cruisers and larger destroyers better able to accompany fleets at sea.

During the First World War (1914–18) the strategic situation discouraged major fleet action. The British Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow, commanded the world's oceans by its very existence, as it barred the path of the inferior German High Seas Fleet to the open sea. Risking its superiority to underwater attack did not seem to offer commensurate strategic return. Equally, the weaker Germans had to avoid the annihilation that a full-scale battle would bring. In 1916, when the Germans began a systematic policy of wearing down British strength, they were lucky, in what turned into a favourable battle of attrition, to escape off Jutland. Their next attempt at attrition also almost ended in disaster and the German high command began to look for a different approach to naval victory over the British.

The combination of the diesel engine and the gyroscope torpedo made the submarine practical at the beginning of the 20th century. At first considered as weapons to deny the narrow seas to warships, they began to be used by the Germans as commerce raiders. American pressure limited the activities of the ‘U-boats’, but in 1917 the Germans made a supreme effort. Hundreds of thousands of tons of Allied and neutral shipping were sunk. Yet attacks on, and the defence of, merchant ships had played little part in pre-war naval thinking. Privateering had been abolished and the coming of steam and growth in merchant navies had, it was thought, created an insuperable escort problem. Only belatedly was the historic strategy of convoy adopted which neutralized the new raiders as effectively as it had the guerre de course of old.

Aircraft made vital contributions to the war at sea in the convoy escort role and the period 1919–39 saw aircraft carriers develop as a vital adjunct to the surface fleet. The major maritime powers also built bigger and better fast capital ships that combined speed and armour protection, but the Second World War (1939–45) confirmed the superiority of air power over battleships. In the Mediterranean a British carrier strike on Taranto helped neutralize the Italian fleet, a Japanese one crippled the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and Japanese land-based naval torpedo bombers destroyed the British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse, the first capital ships sunk at sea by aircraft.

The US carriers had been at sea during the Pearl Harbor attack and, beginning with the Pacific battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, the Americans and Japanese developed a new kind of fleet warfare in which the primary striking weapons were carrier-based aircraft and long-range fleet submarines. Battleship rarely fought battleship, the last occasion being in the Surigao Strait action in the battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. The disproportionate manpower demands of battleships led to their almost complete demise after the war. Only the United States could afford to continue to use them, primarily for shore bombardment.

US submarines carried out one of the most successful commerce raiding campaigns in history, destroying much of Japan's mercantile marine which did not use a proper convoy system. Convoys were again successful in a renewed U-boat offensive in the Atlantic. However, they were threatened by the new ‘wolfpack’ surface attack as this tactic neutralized the new sonar systems that many in the inter-war period had thought had compromised the submarine. Nevertheless, most ships sunk were those caught sailing alone. Air cover, either land based or from small escort carriers, proved crucial to victory and new generations of escort vessels, corvettes and frigates, were added to the escort groups that finally defeated the U-boats in 1943. New technology, fast battery-driven submarines, schnorkels that allowed boats to use diesel power underwater, and heavier anti-aircraft armaments, could do little against the mature Allied escort system that was the foundation of victory in the West.

The Missile Age.

After 1945, the western Allies prepared to fight a new battle of the Atlantic against a Soviet submarine force supported by an increasingly powerful surface fleet. The coming of nuclear-powered submarines revolutionized submarine potential and made such boats rivals to carriers for the title of capital ship. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles became the foundation of mutual nuclear deterrence, while anti-ship and anti-aircraft guided missiles also became important weapons.

By the end of the Cold War in 1989 a sophisticated forward maritime strategy had been developed in which western nuclear-powered submarines planned to attack Soviet ballistic-missile-armed submarines in their ‘bastions’ defended by the Soviet Navy, so holding down assets that might otherwise be used in the open ocean. At the same time, carriers would take on and defeat the Soviet land-based naval air arm.

The Cold War ended before the practicality of such concepts could be tested. It was an era that saw much sparring but relatively little actual fighting at sea. The loss of an Israeli destroyer in 1967 to Soviet-made Egyptian anti-ship missiles dramatically demonstrated the effectiveness of these weapons—though German aircraft had been the first to do so when, in 1943, a guided bomb sank the Italian battleship Roma on its way to surrender to the British. The Israelis developed their own missiles, which they used effectively against Arab craft in 1973. Two years earlier, Indian missile craft had attacked ships in harbour to some effect, while a Pakistani submarine torpedoed and sank an Indian frigate.

In the 1980s the Iran–Iraq War saw a guerre de course with missiles and small boats against merchant shipping, plus engagements in which the Americans attacked Iranian warships with bombs and missiles. In the same area in 1991, British ship-based missile-firing helicopters and US aircraft easily sank Iraqi missile craft captured from Kuwait, undermining the reputation such vessels had gained since 1967. Events in the Gulf also reinforced the lessons of the Korean War about the vital role of mines and mine countermeasures.

During the Falklands conflict of 1982 the sinking of its cruiser by a British nuclear submarine drove the Argentine Navy into port, allowing the carrier task group to concentrate its resources on defeating the Argentine air attacks. Nevertheless, Argentine aircraft sank two British frigates, a destroyer, and a landing ship with bombs, and another destroyer and a vital supply ship with Exocet missiles.

Naval strategy since the Cold War has swung even more to amphibious operations and land attack, but with sea control a necessary prerequisite. This requires a robust mix of anti-air, anti-submarine, and anti-surface capabilities. Just as in the earliest days, a desire to use the sea requires an ability to fight to ensure such use and, just as in previous centuries, the pendulum will no doubt swing back to fighting at sea as well as from it.

See also admiralty; articles of war; bomb ketch; carcass; carous; cartel; cinque ports; ‘crossing the t’; ‘david’; depth charge; explosion vessel; fireship; fireworks; floating battery; flotilla; gage; gas-turbine engines; general chase; line of battle; q-ship; rate; squadron; turret.

Bibliography

Harding, R. , Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650–1830 (2001).
Ireland, B., and and Grove, E. , Jane's War at Sea 1897–1997 (1997).
Lambert, A. , War at Sea in the Age of Sail (2000).
Sondhaus, L. , Naval Warfare 1815–1914 (2000).
—— Navies in Modern World History (2004).

Eric Grove