William Sowden Sims
U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY
ADMIRAL WILLIAM SOWDEN SIMS OUGHT TO HAVE COMMANDED A battle fleet. An aggressive personality in the Nelsonian tradition, he should have become a swashbuckling seafighter, but he never gained the opportunity to do so. He missed the War with Spain in 1898 because he was serving in Paris as a naval attaché, and during World War I he commanded a desk in London. Sims exercised only one responsibility at sea of special significance, the leadership of a destroyer flotilla (1913–1915). He captained two battleships—the Minnesota (from 1909 to 1911) and the Nevada (from 1915 to 1916)—before the United States intervened in World War I. In January 1917, he became the president of the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island.
Sims suffered from an unfortunate accident of birth: he was born while his American parents, Alfred William and Adelaide Sowden Sims, were living in Port Hope, Canada, in 1858. His pro-British bias was often ascribed to this circumstance, certainly an unfair accusation. He spent most of his childhood in Pennsylvania and often lived in Washington, D.C., thereafter.
A domineering presence who was forthright to a fault, Sims left no doubt about his views, although he was reticent in at least one respect; he postponed marriage until he reached his forty-eighth year. His bride, Ann Hitchcock, was the daughter of a prominent politician, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a former diplomat who had served as Secretary of the Interior.
After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1880, Sims grew up with the “New Navy” that came into existence during the next decade. Although the United States built a modest steel fleet powered by steam, and later enlarged it somewhat, the frustrations of life in the U.S. Navy were certainly considerable. Promotions came slowly and challenging assignments were rare. To escape sea duty in old wooden vessels, Sims spent a year (1888–1889) on leave in Paris to study French, developing a facility for the language that would serve him well later in his career. The “free security” that the United States enjoyed across the nineteenth century after the War of 1812 made construction of a great navy unnecessary and inhibited the professional development of the naval service as a warfighting institution. The Navy concentrated on peacetime missions, notably protection of the nation’s limited overseas commerce and defense of unchallenged coastlines. The activist Sims more than once contemplated resignation from the Navy in order to pursue more challenging civilian opportunities.
During the 1890s, however, Sims recaptured his commitment to the naval profession, especially while serving in the Pacific in some of the new steel ships. When assigned to the cruiser Charleston, he developed a strong interest in the application of modern technology to naval warfare. He soon identified himself as one of the so-called reformers in the naval officer corps who advocated increases in the size and efficiency of the Navy to meet changing responsibilities in an era of revolutionary scientific and political change.
When the brief War with Spain took place in 1898, Sims was again in Paris, serving as the naval attaché at the American Embassy. The Navy Department’s need for information about Spanish naval movements led to the development of a network of American espionage agents in Europe. Sims proved energetic in this respect and received valuable information from a number of agents whom he employed to spy in Madrid and elsewhere. The Naval War Board in Washington, whose leading member was the influential naval writer Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, made good use of the information that Sims and other attachés in Europe sent to the Navy Department about the movements of two naval squadrons deployed from Spanish ports during the war: that of Admiral Pascual Cervera, who steamed to a disastrous defeat at Santiago de Cuba, and that of Admiral Manuel de la Câmara, who progressed no farther than the Suez Canal in an abortive effort to challenge Admiral George Dewey at Manila Bay.1
The War with Spain led to the acquisition of a little American empire in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, notably Puerto Rico and the Philippines, along with the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and the creation of a protectorate over Cuba. This short-lived burst of expansion was part of a stimulus to a measurable enlargement of the U.S. Navy, the other influence, more significant, being a great naval armaments race between Great Britain and Germany that reflected a dangerous destabilization in western Eurasia.
These circumstances encouraged the reformers within the naval officer corps, of whom Sims was one of the most vocal, to advocate an improved naval force—fully professionalized and equipped—that could rival those of such nations as Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. Sims agreed with the officers, including Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske, who urged extensive naval building programs and favored creation of a naval general staff to guide the Navy. The latter step would diminish civilian interference with those measures required to build a great fleet of the kind that Captain Mahan advocated: one prepared to defeat any opponent and able to achieve general and lasting command of the sea.
Sims was certain that senior officers, wedded to the status quo, were the bane for those junior officers who, like himself, advocated enlightened progress. To a fellow officer, William S. Benson, also interested in naval efficiency, he wrote in 1908: “If you can imagine a service in which all of the upper officers would carefully study and easily comprehend all criticism, and cheerfully and openly acknowledge all defects for which they were either actively or passively responsible, then there could be no such condition as that which we deplore.” His naval heroes, courageous senior commanders with vision such as Commodore Robert F. Stockton and Admiral Richard Wainwright, were “always a small minority.”2
Sims first came to the attention of the nation as a persuasive advocate of improved gunnery in the fleet. During the War with Spain, despite the successes of Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay and Admiral William T. Sampson at Santiago de Cuba, the Navy’s gunnery had proved woefully deficient. For example, Dewey’s ships fired 5, 859 shells but made only 142 hits, a success rate of 2.42 percent. While serving in the Pacific after the war, Sims became acquainted with the gunnery reforms that Sir Percy Scott had initiated in the Royal Navy. Forceful, even overbearing in manner, Sims fought effectively for the adoption of Scott’s methods in the U.S. Navy as inspector of target practice from 1902 to 1909. More an advocate than a creative intellect, Sims did not add much to Scott’s techniques; his energies went toward breaking resistance to changes in the fleet. In 1916, when he was asked to guide the gunnery of the fleet once again, he declined, noting: “I did not initiate any part of it [gunnery training]. It was taken bodily from Sir Percy Scott. . . . I was never anything of an expert in the development of the details of gunnery training.”3
Sims’s naval career received a distinct boost when President Theodore Roosevelt, a patron of naval expansion, assigned him to additional duties as his naval aide in November 1907, although Sims was disappointed when Roosevelt failed to support the more radical elements in the program of the naval reformers.
However progressive his outlook, Sims’s advocacy of reform carried a sharp edge, reflecting inner turmoil that led him on occasion to immoderate and unprofessional behavior. A most notable example of this tendency to excess was an unguarded and unauthorized endorsement of Anglo-American solidarity during a speech delivered in London in 1910, an indiscretion that earned him a reprimand from President William Howard Taft. Sims had the knack of engaging the loyalty of younger officers, among them Dudley Knox, later to become a leading naval historian, and William V. Pratt, who eventually served as Chief of Naval Operations, but he demanded total fidelity, a requirement that sometimes alienated him from close associates who presumed to differ on one or another professional matter. In any event, Sims’s behavior did not prevent his promotion to rear admiral on the eve of the American intervention in World War I, an event that gave him an opportunity to contribute importantly to American naval history.
After President Woodrow Wilson decided to declare war on the Central Powers but before Congress acted, Sims was called to Washington and asked to represent the U.S. Navy in Great Britain. Early Anglo-American naval cooperation was imperative. Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against noncombatant and neutral commerce with no concern about the prospect of American belligerency because German leaders assumed that undersea warfare would knock the Allies out of the war before the United States, largely unprepared, could hope to influence the outcome.
When Admiral William Shepherd Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, gave Sims this assignment, he took note of Sims’s reputation as an Anglophile by cautioning against undue pro-British behavior. “Don’t let the British pull the wool over your eyes. It is none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans.” These were representative views then, especially in the Navy, that reflected the sturdy, bumptious nationalism of the era, frequent suspicions of British motives, and concern about the possibility that Germany might defeat the Allies, which would leave the United States to fight on alone; but they conflicted with Sims’s conception of sound inter-Allied relations.
Proceeding to London, Sims immediately discovered the extent of the submarine crisis. About 540,000 tons of shipping had gone to the bottom in February, the first month of unrestricted submarine operations. In March the figure rose to more than 600,000 tons, and in April to 875,000 tons. German naval leaders predicted that losses of this magnitude would force a decision on the Allies within six months.
Sims soon began a series of dramatic reports to the Navy Department in which he described the danger of Germany’s successes against Allied merchant ships and endorsed various naval measures advocated by the British Admiralty, some of which did not conform to inclinations in Washington. He agreed with the Admiralty’s view that the United States should make an early entry into the naval war by supporting British antisubmarine operations to protect sea lines of communication between the Allied nations, especially naval escort of merchant ships gathered in convoys. This course would require the United States to postpone construction of a balanced battle fleet and concentrate instead on building antisubmarine craft, especially destroyers, and merchant ships. Moreover, to all intents and purposes it would commit American ships and crews to service under the command of British senior officers.
Some historians erroneously maintain that Sims pressed the adoption of the convoy system on the Admiralty, but modern scholarship has demonstrated that this measure came about when advocates of this tactic convinced Prime Minister David Lloyd George of its practicality, in April 1917. In this case, as in most others, Sims adjusted his views to conform with those of British naval authorities.4
As Sims conducted his initial investigations in London, a series of missions from the Allied nations, most importantly from Britain and France, visited Washington to arrange wartime cooperation, including naval coordination, with the United States. British naval representatives reinforced the recommendations that came from Sims. The Royal Navy believed that the Grand Fleet, maintaining a distant blockade in the North Sea, could contain the German high sea fleet in port, thus commanding the surface of the sea. This effort, however, limited the number of naval vessels available for antisubmarine operations. To augment the antisubmarine force, the head of the British mission, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour, urged the immediate dispatch of American destroyers to European waters.5
Admiral Benson, and others who opposed so much subservience to British desires, worried about larger British motive, and they were concerned about the consequences should the Germans force the Allies out of the war. Benson was anxious about protecting the long-term naval interests of the United States, which might well diverge from those of Great Britain at some future time. Sims discounted views of this type; he was convinced that British and American interests were complementary and would remain so indefinitely.
Sims’s ideas prevailed, if only because President Wilson had no choice. The grave threat of the German U-boats limited his freedom of action; America must do what it could as soon as possible to help keep Germany from achieving victory through sea power before the U.S. Army could deploy to Europe and make a significant contribution to Germany’s defeat.6
In many respects, Sims’s position in London was unique in the nation’s naval experience. Given the decision to place American antisubmarine craft under European commanders, he did not exercise direct operational command over ships at sea. Instead, he transferred his authority to such British officers as Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, who commanded the naval base at Queenstown, Ireland, whence destroyers sortied to protect convoys entering the submarine danger zone. Sims devoted his energies during 1917 almost entirely to urging the Navy Department to deploy all available antisubmarine reinforcements to Europe and to ensuring their effective use against the German U-boats. In constant contact with the Admiralty in London, which he considered the center of inter-Allied coordination, he generally supported British initiatives, a course that aroused growing irritation in Washington. Sims tried to allay such suspicions, on one occasion telling Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels that he realized his opinions might be considered suspect but that “It should be unnecessary to state that I have done everything within my ability to maintain a broad viewpoint.” Such protestations proved useless.7
However equivocal his standing in Washington, Sims gained unrivaled prestige in Europe. Enjoying the full confidence of his British associates, he established the closest possible day-to-day contacts. At the same time, he built an efficient staff that provided effective support for expanding American naval activity, not only in the waters surrounding Great Britain but increasingly in other regions of the Atlantic Ocean and in the Mediterranean Sea where merchant ships and troop transports were exposed to enemy attacks. Sims’s personal qualities and his professional skills served him well during 1917–1918. He was the right man in the right place at a supreme moment in the naval history of his country.
Benson and others were concerned about the defense of home waters, but Sims discounted this problem. He argued correctly that submarines would not operate frequently in waters so distant from bases. The long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean would keep U-boats that undertook it out of action for an extended time; they could spend only a short time on station. Moreover, Sims believed that “the most effective defence which can be afforded to our home waters is an offensive campaign against the enemy which threatens these waters . . . the place for protection of home waters is . . . where the enemy is operating and must continue to operate in force.”8
President Wilson and Admiral Benson disdained what they believed to be undue British preferences for defensive measures. They both pressed for offensive action against bases that harbored the German submarines, such as those on the Belgian coast; but Sims supported British naval opinion, which during 1917 was decidedly resistant to such operations because they were deemed impractical and liable to disturb some of the Allies. Belgium, for example, opposed raids on German bases at occupied places such as Ostend because they might do extensive damage. These arguments caused much irritation in Washington, but Wilson and others lacked sufficient leverage to coerce the Admiralty to U.S. views.9
Like Admiral Benson, the General Board of the Navy was especially concerned about preserving the great naval building program of 1916, which envisioned a battle fleet capable of operating along Mahanian lines—one that could gain general and lasting command of the sea. Opposition to this course appeared to contradict Mahan’s views, but Sims argued for the need to consider that the naval forces of the entire Allied coalition constituted an inter-Allied battle fleet, to which the United States was making an important contribution. Moreover, in sending antisubmarine craft to European waters, the American fleet was merely maneuvering its screen to a position at a considerable distance in advance of its capital ships. If necessary, the heavy vessels could close up later.10
Sims was eager to build a staff in London prepared to cope with the many administrative responsibilities that developed there. Seeking officers with whom he had developed close relations in the past, especially the “band of brothers” who had served in his torpedo flotilla, Sims found his desires frequently set aside. The Navy Department had good reasons for its reluctance. Experienced officers were in great demand; their assignments were intended to provide some leaven of experience in the much expanded Navy. Sims, however, characteristically chose to interpret his difficulties as the result of personal animosity or incompetence. Disputes over personnel were among the many incidents that fueled his growing alienation from officials in the Navy Department, especially Secretary Daniels and, to a considerable degree, Chief of Naval Operations Benson. Fortunately, Benson’s assistant, Captain William V. Pratt, was one of Sims’s most valued associates in the Navy. Pratt managed to mediate effectively, explaining the ways of each admiral to the other and providing Sims with information about the basis of the Navy Department’s views on disputatious issues.11
Although the President and the Navy Department accepted Sims’s arguments about the need to concentrate on antisubmarine operations, there was a considerable difference of opinion about their character. Sims believed that the prime consideration was protection of commerce supplying the Allies, whereas the Navy Department interpreted its first responsibility as the escort of transports ferrying the American expeditionary force to Europe. During 1917, this difference did not create tensions because few troops were as yet ready to go to France. When the American reinforcement began in earnest during the early months of 1918, however, it became a serious bone of contention. The Allies’ need for manpower proved so extensive that eventually Great Britain was forced to accede not only to the American desire for strong escorts to guard troop convoys but also to a demand that Britain provide vessels for use as transports.12 To cover the arrival of American troops in 1918, Admiral Benson sought to develop a great base at Brest, France, adjacent to the route of American transports, an action that would inhibit the expansion of submarine operations out of Queenstown intended to guard convoys of merchant ships bound for British ports.
By the outset of 1918, it had become clear that the Allies had succeeded in containing the undersea offensive sufficiently to maintain effective maritime communications, thus frustrating the German attempt to achieve a decision at sea. About 300,000 tons of merchant shipping were destroyed per month during 1918, but new construction, averaging about 500,000 tons per month, more than offset this loss. The failure of the maritime gambit forced Germany’s high command to seek a decision on land before American help could flow to Europe in large quantities. A great German offensive materialized on the Western Front and lasted about four months, from March to mid-July 1918. Although the Germans gained a great deal of ground, the assault fell short of decisive objectives. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch then launched an inter-Allied counteroffensive that finally forced Germany to accept an armistice on 11 November. These land battles in France obscured the growing success of the Allied navies during the final year of the war.13
During 1918, Admiral Sims gave much of his attention to the frustrating question of naval warfare in the Mediterranean Sea. He shared the British view that the Italians were entirely too inactive in dealing with the Austro-Hungarian fleet, and with naval bases at Pola and Cattaro in the Adriatic Sea that harbored German submarines. After the western coalition formed an Allied Naval Council in December 1917, Sims represented the United States during its sessions. The council dedicated much of its energy to Mediterranean affairs. Making use of an American planning section that he had managed to establish in London, Sims busied himself with all manner of schemes to wage an effective antisubmarine campaign in the Mediterranean Sea where maritime losses remained at a high level. He came to appreciate the political tensions among the French, the Italians, and the British that precluded action. Sims’s failure to achieve much in the Mediterranean was perhaps the principal setback that he encountered during his wartime service in Europe, although he and others largely ignored the subject in postwar writings.14
Two petty but highly irritating developments contributed to Sims’s growing disgust with the Navy Department. The British government sought to make him and Benson honorary members of the Board of Admiralty, an unprecedented honor to foreigners, but Secretary Daniels and Admiral Benson were definitively opposed to it, and they decided the matter. When Sims, seeking to boost the morale of his command, proposed that European governments be allowed to present decorations to American sailors, Daniels objected.15
When the war suddenly approached a most unexpected end late in 1918, Sims went to Paris for meetings of the Allied Naval Council that were called to determine the naval terms of armistice. Unfortunately for Sims, Benson had journeyed to Paris with Edward M. House, the President’s principal representative at pre-armistice discussions concerning inter-Allied policy. At House’s insistence, Benson displaced Sims as the American representative on the Allied Naval Council, and Sims returned to London. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Benson remained in Paris as the naval adviser to the American peace commissioners, thereby preventing Sims from taking part in important naval negotiations that occurred during the postwar peace conference. Sims privately betrayed his disappointment. After noting that General John J. Pershing also had not been appointed a plenipotentiary, he confided snidely to a close friend: “As for our naval advisor [Benson] with the peace delegates he is exactly the kind of man they want; of course you know why!” Sims here adverted to the conviction of his circle that Benson, lacking independent views and special talents of his own, was a yes-man who kowtowed to civilians.16
Sims’s accumulating frustration with the Navy Department continued to surface during the war and shortly afterward. On 13 August 1918, he commented portentously to Captain Pratt: “When the history of this war comes to be written there will be a number of features that will not be very creditable to the United States Navy. If hearings are held on the conduct of the war, a number of rather disagreeable facts must inevitably be brought out.” He mentioned especially the Navy Department’s failure to bring the most experienced naval officers to Europe. Much more devastating was his reaction to a report, which Captain Pratt drafted shortly after the Armistice, detailing the Navy’s accomplishments during wartime. To Sims, this report indicated that the Navy Department claimed “to have always foreseen everything, planned everything and supported us up to the handle,” thereby depreciating the accomplishments of the Navy overseas. To the contrary, he concluded that “the cablegrams exchanged between the Department and me during the first four months of our participation in the war will be, I think, pretty damaging testimony to the game played by the Department, and will make this Departmental letter . . . look pretty sick.”17
Sims returned to the United States in high dudgeon. Maneuvering successfully for reappointment as president of the Naval War College, he resettled in Newport to write a memoir of his wartime service. Negotiating a lucrative contract with Doubleday, Page & Company, and arranging for the collaboration of the talented Burton J. Hendrick, an editor with that publisher, Sims prepared a detailed report of his activities that appeared initially as a series of articles in World’s Work, a well-known magazine of the day, and later as a book titled The Victory at Sea. Hendrick drafted the entire text of this cogent account, which faithfully reflected Sims’s criticisms to the degree that he cared to express them. Naval regulations prevented Sims from venting his spleen extensively in this publication; he dealt with his tormentors by ignoring them, and he hardly mentioned Daniels and Benson. The Victory at Sea did not sell as well as Sims and his publishers had hoped, but it achieved a succès d’estime, the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, and it became the accepted comment on the Navy’s participation in the war, however unfair it was in its failure to give due credit to the Navy Department.18
Meanwhile, Sims took advantage of opportunities to provoke a congressional investigation of naval policy during the war. In so doing he redeemed a pledge to Admiral William Fullam, another naval reformer of the day: “You may be sure . . . that at the proper time I will tell the whole truth as I understand it.” In another communication, he added, “You know I entirely agree with you that the country has got to be informed as to the condition of the Navy in the immediate past and its condition now.” Those responsible who had “camouflaged the subject cannot escape very long.” The basis for a public controversy developed when Sims angrily refused to accept a postwar decoration, the Distinguished Service Medal, in December 1919 because he felt that the list of those honored did not fairly reflect the contributions of various officers during the war. On 7 January 1920, after the Senate decided to examine the list of decorations, Sims wrote to Secretary Daniels and outlined his indictment of the Navy Department. He stressed the department’s failure to respond immediately to his recommendations from London during 1917, when the crisis over the U-boat campaign was at its height. Thus, Sims fulfilled a vow he made to his collaborator, Hendrick: “You may be sure that if in the course of these hearings I can pry the lid off I will do so. I am prepared to go to the limit.”19
When he appeared before the Senate subcommittee that conducted the naval investigation, Sims provided a detailed exposition of the complaints that he had made in 1917 and of the Navy Department’s alleged failure to respond appropriately. Daniels, Benson, and others, Sims charged, had not prepared for the war properly, and the Navy had not been able to meet its responsibilities. “We pursued a policy of vacillation, or in simpler words, a hand to mouth policy, attempting to formulate our plans from day to day, based upon an incorrect appreciation of the situation,” he complained. Sims maintained that the Navy Department had cost the Allies half a million lives, two and a half million tons of shipping, and fifteen billion dollars in expenditures. His testimony included extensive reference to the cable exchanges that he had conducted with the Navy Department during 1917 over the nature of the American naval contribution.20
In response, the Navy Department offered a spirited defense of its actions, as Daniels, Benson, Pratt, and others testified at length. They admitted that the Navy had been less than fully prepared at the beginning of hostilities in 1917, but they offered explanations of the reasons why the Navy Department had responded as it did to Sims’s requests.
Benson made the most explicit rejoinder to the burden of Sims’s charges. As to prewar unpreparedness, he noted that he had desired readiness, but “this was not the attitude of the people of the United States and not the attitude of the Administration.” Political decisions, to which he was subject, accounted for naval unpreparedness in April 1917. During the war, he had acted in terms of the national interest and he emphasized his duty “to safeguard American interests regardless of any duty to humanity or anything else.” Nevertheless, the United States had responded handsomely to the desires of the Allies and in some ways had urged more ambitious measures than had been recommended from Europe.21
In a sweeping conclusion, Benson left no doubt of his views: The Navy Department met its obligations “with efficiency and success; . . . the policies we adopted and our plans in accordance therewith were thoroughly justified by events.” He, his colleagues, and the entire Navy had “performed well a difficult task; cooperating from beginning to end with the Allies and rendering them every assistance in our power, and contributing very materially to the general result.” This rosy evaluation surely overstated a generally reasonable case, thereby further obscuring the whole truth about the Navy’s wartime record.22
Sims hoped that the hearings would catch the imagination of the American public, but the outcome proved a great disappointment to him. The Republican majority on the Senate subcommittee supported Sims, but the Democratic minority defended the Navy Department. No action was taken against Daniels or Benson, and the investigation was soon forgotten, although it caused a long-term rift within the Navy between Sims’s advocates and his enemies. Instead of reviewing wartime events, during 1921 the nation engaged in a discussion about future security in the Pacific Ocean that led to naval disarmament, one aspect of the treaty system that emerged from the Washington Naval Conference.
Various circumstances account for Sims’s discomfiture. Above all, the naval war had ended in a great victory, whatever problems might have emerged along the way. Sims’s charges appeared to many as simply a quarrel among admirals, reminiscent of the Sampson-Schley controversy that followed the War with Spain. Second, the public had already tired of the war. Postwar exhaustion and disillusionment, reflected in the failure of the Senate to accept the Treaty of Versailles, certainly worked against Sims’s efforts to arouse the American people.
Finally, Sims overplayed his hand. His proclivity to overpersonalize issues and to tendentiousness caught up with him in this climactic episode. After all, Sims’s general views about the centrality of the inter-Allied antisubmarine effort and the need to postpone the American naval building programs had prevailed over those of Benson; and good reasons existed for the delays and modifications that the Navy Department made in response to Sims’s strident demands in 1917. Sims fell victim to a common error: theater commanders, insufficiently mindful of the larger considerations that motivate higher authority, all too often view their activities from the narrow perspective of their own situations.
Perhaps Sims’s admiration of Great Britain and the Royal Navy affected his judgment in some respects too; surely he erred in identifying too closely with the Republicans during the hearings, thus allowing his critics to accuse him of partisanship. During the presidential campaign of 1920 he sought an audience with the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, to press his views on naval matters, but he was unsuccessful. Any interest that he might have had in becoming Secretary of the Navy went glimmering when President Harding appointed a loyal Republican rather than a naval expert.
Sims retired from the U.S. Navy in 1922 in the rank of rear admiral. After retirement, he resided in Newport, from where he occasionally attempted to influence naval policy until his death in 1936. Noteworthy was his strong support of naval aviation, which led to a brief recall to active duty in 1925. Advancing age did not moderate the inveterate intemperance that had dogged Sims through most of his naval career and, in the end, compromised his success. Perhaps this failing was consistent with his performance as a naval reformer before the war. He failed to weigh his views carefully against those of his antagonists or to give them due consideration, and, in the process, he alienated many who otherwise might have rallied to him.23
In evaluating Sims’s naval career it is important neither to underestimate nor to exaggerate its significance. Sims’s reputation benefited greatly from his own The Victory at Sea and especially from an excellent biography, written by his son-in-law Elting E. Morison, that glorified the admiral as the exemplar par excellence of the modern U.S. Navy and fixed him in the minds of naval historians and others as the leading prophet of the naval future after World War I.24
A modern finding must deplore Sims’s intolerance of those who disagreed with him, an unlovely trait that eventually compromised his advocacy of naval reform. It must also identify some significant negative characteristics of his outlook, especially his unwillingness to give sufficient recognition to the principle of civilian supremacy over the military establishment. Like many other officers of his day, Sims failed to come to terms with the constraints that a democracy necessarily places on its naval officers. Perhaps, finally, an accounting must recognize that Sims was often more a publicist than an originator of the reforms that he pressed so energetically.
In the end, however, Sims stands in the foremost ranks of those who led the U.S. Navy during the transitional years from the age of free security in the nineteenth century to an era of great international destabilization, a shift that forced the nation to create a powerful steel fleet that met Wilson’s criterion—a navy second to none. More than most others, Sims discerned the basic security requirements of the new age. Most important, whatever his failing, he served with the greatest distinction in London during 1917–1918, steadfast in attention to duty and remarkably successful in the conduct of his enormous responsibilities as executor of the American naval contribution to the victory at sea in European waters. No other officer in the Navy of his time could have matched his performance in the crucible of total war.
For general accounts of the naval war, the most informative works are Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 5 vols. (New York, 1961–1970), especially the last two volumes, which cover 1917 to 1918; Thomas G. Frothingham, The Naval History of the World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1924–1926); Paul G. Halpern, The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914–1918 (Annapolis, Md., 1987); Robert M. Grant’s two volumes, U-Boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-submarine Warfare, 1914–1918 (London, 1964) and U-Boat Intelligence, 1914–1918 (London, 1969); and Holger H. Herwig and David F. Trask, “The Failure of Imperial Germany’s Undersea Offensive against World Shipping, February 1917–October 1918,” Historian 33 (1971): 611–36.
Articles on the role of the U.S. Navy include Dean C. Allard, “Anglo-American Naval Differences during World War I,” Military Affairs 44 (1980): 75–81, and David F. Trask, “The American Navy in a World at War, 1914–1919,” in In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775–1978, edited by Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport, Conn., 1978), 204–20.
For the views of Admiral William S. Sims, see his The Victory at Sea, edited by David F. Trask, in the Classics of Naval Literature series (Annapolis, Md., 1984), a reprint of the original 1920 edition. Also, see the magisterial biography by Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Boston, 1942); Dean C. Allard, “Admiral William S. Sims and United States Naval Policy in World War I,” American Neptune 35 (1975): 97–110; and David F. Trask, Captains and Cabinets: Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917–1918 (Columbia, Mo., 1972).
For other personalities, see Gerald E. Wheeler, Admiral William Veazie Pratt, U.S. Navy: A Sailor’s Life (Washington, D.C., 1974); Mary Klachko, with David F. Trask, Admiral William Shepherd Benson: First Chief of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md., 1987); Paolo E. Coletta, “Josephus Daniels: 5 March 1913–5 March 1921,” in Coletta, American Secretaries of the Navy, 2 vols. (Annapolis, Md., 1980); and E. David Cronon, ed., The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921 (Lincoln, Neb., 1963).
For the record of the congressional inquiry into the Navy after World War I, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Naval Investigations: Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Naval Affairs; United States Senate, 2 vols., 66th Cong., 2d sess., 1920.
1. For biograpical information, see Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Boston, 1942). A striking short sketch by Jeffery M. Dorwart is in Dictionary of American Military Biography, edited by Roger J. Spiller, Joseph G. Dawson, and T. Harry Williams, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1984), 3:1003–6. Dorwart measurably modifies Morison’s highly favorable evaluation of Sims, an approach that is extended in this essay. For naval intelligence during 1898, see David F. Trask, The War with Spain (New York, 1981), 87–89, 143.
2. Quoted in Mary Klachko, with David F. Trask, Admiral William Shepherd Benson: First Chief of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md., 1987), 18.
3. Quoted in ibid., 43.
4. See David F. Trask, Captains and Cabinets: Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917–1918 (Columbia, Mo., 1972), 72, 79–80, an interpretation first advanced by Arthur Marder.
5. For information about the Allied missions, see ibid., 62–64, 74–77.
6. A convenient collection of Sims’s messages to the Navy Department during this critical period is found in the admiral’s memoir of the war, The Victory at Sea, edited with an introduction by David F. Trask and reprinted in the Naval Institute’s Classics of Naval Literature series (Annapolis, Md., 1984), 374–99. For accounts of the discussion between Sims and the Navy Department, see Trask, Captains and Cabinets, 61–101; and Klachko, Benson, 70–81.
7. Sims to Daniels, 16 July 1917, reprinted in Sims, Victory at Sea, 398.
8. Ibid., 396.
9. Trask, Captains and Cabinets, 131–32.
10. David F. Trask, “The American Navy in a World at War, 1914–1919,” in In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775–1978, edited by Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport, Conn., 1978), 209–10.
11. For information about Captain Pratt and his dealings with Benson and Sims, see Gerald E. Wheeler, Admiral William Veazie Pratt, U.S. Navy: A Sailors Life (Washington, D.C., 1974), especially 71–126.
12. For this subject, see two articles by Dean C. Allard, “Admiral William S. Sims and United States Naval Policy in World War I,” American Neptune 35 (1975): 97–110; and “Anglo-American Naval Differences during World War I,” Military Affairs 44 (1980): 75–81.
13. For information on the course of the submarine war, see Holger H. Herwig and David F. Trask, “The Failure of Imperial Germany’s Undersea Offensive against World Shipping, February 1917–October 1918,” Historian 33 (1971): 611–36.
14. For an up-to-date study of the tangled naval situation in the Mediterranean area during World War I, see Paul G. Halpern, The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914–1918 (Annapolis, Md., 1987).
15. Trask, Captain and Cabinets, 193–96.
16. Sims to William Fullam, 15 January 1919, as quoted in Klachko, Benson, 121, 131–32.
17. For the quotations and information concerning Sims’s irritation, see Wheeler, Pratt, 147–48. Sims, of course, had complained regularly. Wheeler notes one such comment made to Pratt on 21 November 1917: “My great fear is that this war may be lost or that the Allies may be forced into a very unsatisfactory peace and that the subsequent examinations as to the causes of this condition may reveal the fact that we have not done our utmost to prevent it and that our military decisions in many cases have been unsound.” Sims here reflected the plenary fears that emerged in the Allied nations as the Germans began preparations for their great offensive of March 1918, but it may be of some significance that already he was thinking about the possibility of a postwar investigation of the American naval effort. Ibid., 147.
18. For the story of the writing of The Victory at Sea, see Trask, “Introduction,” Victory at Sea, xx–xxvii.
19. For the preliminaries to the hearings of 1920, see Klachko, Benson, 170–71. Sims’s comment to Hendrick is quoted in Trask, “Introduction,” Victory at Sea, xxiii.
20. Klachko, Benson, 172–73. For the hearings, see U.S. Congress, Naval Investigation: Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Naval Affairs, United States Senate, 2 vols., 66th Cong., 2d sess., 1920. A spirited redefinition of Sims’s views is in Tracy B. Kittredge, Naval Lessons of the Great War: A Review of the Senate Naval Investigation of the Criticisms of Admiral Sims of the Policies and Methods of josephus Daniels (Garden City, N.Y., 1921).
21. U.S. Congress, Naval Investigation, 1920, as quoted in Klachko, Benson, 176.
22. Benson to Senator Frederick R. Hole, 28 May 1920, as quoted in Klachko, Benson, 178–79.
23. Sims, along with a number of other officers, including Admiral Benson, was restored to his wartime rank of full admiral in 1930.
24. Morison, Admiral Sims.
