MAHAN AND SEA-POWER TODAY
By ADMIRAL SIR HERBERT RICHMOND
A MONG the great changes that have taken place in the AL world in the hundred years since Alfred Thayer Mahan was born, on September 27th, 1840, two, both important, are the outcome of Mahan's work: a recognition of the part which sea-power has played in the history of the world and a better understanding of each other by the United States and Great Britain. It would be an exaggeration to say that the import- ance of sea-power was unknown before he wrote his first two classics, but it is an undoubted fact that, aware as some states- men and historians were of what British sea-power had meant to the British people, the great mass of the folk were far from recognising its part in their national life. In the study which produced those books Mahan's own eyes were opened to the debt owed to Britain for her work in upholding liberty.
Though he had been a great reader of military matters since his boyhood it was not until he was nearing forty that Mahan began his historical study and writing. The inspiration came to him through reading an article by Sir John Laughton on the value of the study of naval history. He took it up, and it brought home to him how much exposed his country was to injury owing to its weakness at sea. So his first books bad he definite aim of making his countrymen realise their position; but though they had this object they were not written in any spirit of what today we call propaganda. They were historical in the true sense, presenting facts and drawing conclusions from them. There was a complete absence of that bias and mis- representation that has been so marked and deplorable a feature in the naval literature of Germany and Italy. Mahan became imbued with admiration for the great naval figures of England, and it is true to say, as Mr. Duff Cooper has said in his introduction to Captain Puleston's recent excellent Life of the Admiral, that he came to love Great Britain only less than his own country, and was able to realise, long before most of his contemporaries in both countries, how closely their true interests coincided. In 1906 he was able, therefore, to foresee what has only lately become an accepted fact in the United States, and to write: "Germany's ambitions threaten the United States, as well as Great Britain." He realised, after the support given by Germany to the Austrian aggression against Bosnia in 1908, that "Middle Europe" was threatening the peace of the world; and forecast that the decisive factor in the war that was looming ahead would be the stoppage of Germany's com- merce. Hence, and because he could clearly see the danger to the world of a supreme Germany in Europe, he never cast a doubtful or jealous eye upon the British naval programmes, larg: as they were, for he was convinced that "the navy of Great Britain could act as a deterrent from war more effectively than any other force in _Europe."
None, not even any English writer, recognised more clearly than he the indispensability of the Navy to Britain. It was not Without anxiety that he saw, in the middle 'eighties, what seemed to be "a tendency in Britain to neglect the Navy," and he v.as doubtful whether "a democratic government would have the foresight, the keen sensitiveness to national position and credit, the willingness to ensure its prosperity by adequate out- Pouring of money in times of peace." He thought there were sIgns that Britain was dropping behind, and it made him un- eas7. The danger he feared was removed, however, by the aval Defence Act and the declaration of the Two- Power standard of policy. In the existence and the expression of those anxieties he showed clearly where his afftion lay.
Some years earlier he had made his attitude towards Anglo- American relations even plainer. Although he was as fully impressed as he had been in the 'eighties with the need of a strong American navy, he showed in 1900 that the expansion of the British Navy caused him no fears. Rather, indeed, he welcomed it. Both countries needed sea-power, but the British needs were the greater, for there were demands upon it for national security and the integrity of the Empire that greatly exceeded any in the United States, who had no distant possession vital to her interests to defend. He took the far- seeing view that each nation was, in reality, interested to see the other strong at sea in consequence of the community of their interests. Nor should there be any complaint on the part of Britain if the burdens were shared unequally, for each must provide for its own needs and no more. "There need," he then wrote, "be no captiousness on the part of Great Britain, nor any mortification on our part, if the proportion which we could contribute to the common end be modest com- pared to hers." (The Problem of Asia, 1900.) His natural fairness, his power of seeing both sides, is pro- minent ha all his books. It occurs very notably in his history of that unhappy and unnecessary war of 1812. While he said —and few today will disagree—that much of Great Britain's action in taking seamen from American ships was "un- justifiable and at times even monstrous," he pointed out at the same time that England was then fighting for her life. She was in deadly peril, and a people in such a situation are not to be judged by ordinary standards. Moreover, the British people were convinced of the rightness of compelling the ser- vice of their seamen wherever they might be found on the high seas. In brief, he puts both sides of the question, and does not omit to remind his readers that the Napoleonic threat to freedom was defeated by those seamen to whom Britain attached such importance.
Although so much opposition to capture at sea had existed in the United States, it found no support from Mahan. The intrinsic common sense of the old doctrines of sea-warfare, and the part they had played in the preservation of liberty, were clear to him. While he admitted the "beneficent influence of the mass of conventions known as International Law," he could not be blind to the fact that all the innovations intro- duced by agreements and declarations since 1856 had blunted the weapon of sea-power. Though capture at sea might react unfavourably on his own country when she was weak at sea (a condition very different from that of today) he was able to write, in the course of the controversy concerning it: "To the author, though an American, the belligerent argument seems the stronger." A faint touch of sarcasm may perhaps be found in his observation that "he could not regard the laudable desire of the neutral for gain as a more noble motive than the solicitude of men who rightly believed themselves engaged in a struggle for national existence."
Whether we think of Mahan as the expounder of the doctrine of sea-power, the recorder of the great doings of the British Navy, the interpreter of the British outlook on the sea, or the historian who has shown the part played by the fleet in the preservation of the liberties of the world, we see him as a great literary ambassador. No one, one may feel sure, would have rejoiced more than he at the conclusion of the recent Destroyer-Base exchange which has more than replaced the British losses in small craft in this desperate struggle, has increased American security, and has metaphori- cally extended the unprotected continental frontier to the sea, from Newfoundland f5 British Guianz
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