PART IX - Britannia, Columbia and the Struggle for Neptune’s Trident April 1917 to May 1919

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1890’s British naval policy had been based on a two-power standard, a navy equal to the two next largest fleets, though the scale of the German challenge had reduced the standard to a sixty per cent superiority in capital ships over the High Seas Fleet. The United States Navy, in third place in 1914, was not seen as a threat by the Royal Navy, as its strength was in seas only lightly tenanted by British sea power, and since 1895 there had been a developing rapprochement between the two powers which led to a British policy decision, arrived at around 1900, that war with the United States was unthinkable. Under the Roosevelt and Taft administrations (1901–13), the Americans seemed content with local supremacy in the Western Pacific, Caribbean and Western Atlantic; they offered no challenge to the Royal Navy’s global predominance. That supremacy was an article of faith among British statesmen, seamen and citizens. The imperative needs of Imperial defence, the security of the home base, the flow of trade, the blockade of enemies and distant water operations on their flanks, as well as deeply-ingrained national tradition and pride, seemed to dictate resolute adherence to British naval supremacy, however small the margin.

When Woodrow Wilson came to power in 1913, the Panama Canal was about to open. American naval strategy centred round this artery, now firmly under Washington’s control, for it permitted the United States to maintain a single powerful battlefleet which could be switched from one ocean to another almost overnight. In normal peacetime conditions, the American public would not sanction a naval budget for mighty fleets in both oceans. Wilson, essentially a domestic reformer, was ‘Uninterested in military matters’ and his nomination of Daniels as Secretary of the Navy underlined the fact, as ‘the Right Hon. Josephus’, as his critics delighted in calling him, was at least as pacifically inclined as the President. For two years the Wilson administration’s naval policy permitted only modest appropriations for new ships and Daniels offered immediate support for Winston Churchill’s call in 1913 for a naval holiday. The outbreak of World War I produced no significant increase in the naval budget.

Other Americans, however, were disturbed by the outbreak of global warfare and America’s comparative defencelessness. Well-todo business, professional and rentier groups on the eastern seaboard formed America’s ‘Establishment’.