MARITIME TRANSPORT IN TIME OF PEACE
WHILE FOR most people in the past and many today the sea is a line of demarcation, the frontier of the known world, others view the sea as a productive terrain that they compete to monopolize, and some as a road that unites the farthest and most diverse regions. This is the true conception, the only one that permits an exact understanding of the role of the liquid element in human affairs. As Mahan has already said, “The fundamental truth about the sea—perhaps we ought to say water—is that it is nature’s great means of communication.”2
Such is the value of seaborne communications in peacetime that those able to exploit them have often achieved wealth belying the mediocrity of their political power or territorial extent. The Phoenicians, Genoa, Venice, the Hanseatic League, Holland, and Portugal are characteristic examples from various epochs. The sea’s economic importance also explains the pressure to pursue maritime activities among peoples whose situation and political destiny does not drive them towards the ocean. Richelieu3 in France, Peter the Great4 in Russia, Cavour5 in Italy, and Germany under Wilhelm II6 all created navies and developed their nations’ relationships with the sea. All were more or less inspired by the famous aphorism of Walter Raleigh that “Who commands the sea commands commerce, who commands commerce disposes of the riches of the world and thereby dominates the world itself.”
Maritime commerce did not, however, have the same character in each historical period. The national products of the Phoenicians, the Genoese, the Pisans, the Venetians, and the Hanseatic cities comprised only a tiny part of the goods that they transported. Carters rather than manufacturers, they maintained the flow of international trade in merchandise that was precious, expensive, and rare. The first change occurred in the seventeenth century, when the rise of industry stimulated states to build ships in order to transport their new domestic production. Maritime traffic linked itself to traffic on land and supported itself from the hinterland. The commerce of the Hanseatic League, Genoa, and Venice declined and disappeared. The newcomers—Holland, Britain, and France—were not international traders in the old manner but tended, through policies like the British Navigation Act7 and Colbert’s customs rights, to reserve both their exports and their imports for their own national flag. Until the French Revolution, however, transoceanic commerce remained a luxury trade, and the high cost of transportation forced nations to be virtually self-sufficient in the essential commodities.
It took the great industrial revolution of the nineteenth century to upset these old principles, and Britain was the first to profit from the new economic phenomenon. Her foreign trade rose from 1.682 million pounds sterling in 1800 to 4.225 million in 1850, from 13.685 million in 1870 to 17.100 million in 1873, and to 33.750 million pounds in 1913. To a lesser degree, the other European countries and certain countries of America and Asia have had parallel success. With industrial growth came increases in population; Europe’s rose from 175 million in 1801 to almost 400 million in 1900.
But this transformation created a new problem. Vast productive agglomerations demanded, on the one hand, food and raw materials and, on the other, markets for their products. States no longer able to live on their own resources required a strong flow of trade with the outside world, generally overseas. Survival meant not only foreign trade but colonial expansion. . . . Hence, there was a corresponding development of maritime traffic, and the European commercial fleet, though smaller in numbers of ships, became much larger in tonnage than it had been in the seventeenth century.8
Several characteristics of modern maritime commerce explain its important in the world economy. First, the nature of the merchandise has changed. No longer limited to rare items of great cost and little weight, ships now transport heavy materials: fuel, minerals, grains, fertilizers, and foodstuffs. The increase in ship dimensions and the improvement of nautical engines has led to a continuous and considerable decrease in transport costs. In consequence, the relative cost of maritime and terrestrial transportation has come strongly to favor the former. Finally, the price advantages, the new conditions of maritime transport, and industries’ demands for transport of primary materials and finished products have rendered the world’s ever-growing population increasingly and more strictly dependent on sea communications.9
Parallel to this economic and colonial revolution has come another, political and social, which, by bringing self-government to peoples, has increased the influence of material concerns on the thinking of their elected leaders and, consequently, the repercussions of such concerns on the foreign policies of nations. Thus, commercial, industrial, and colonial rivalries have profoundly influenced the conflicts that have occurred between nations. . . . Since the sea supports the economies of the majority of nations, “in a general sense, all of the great modern wars are naval wars.”10
MARITIME TRANSPORT IN TIMES OF WAR
An important cause of conflict, the sea also greatly influences the course of the war, although the exact nature of the maritime communications available to the antagonists has changed considerably over time. Generally, maritime communications have a threefold duty in warfare: they sustain the economy, allow the movement of military forces, and, where geography requires, form part of the nation’s internal communications. . . .11
Maritime communications retain their great economic value in war because it is extremely important to maintain the nation’s commercial and industrial activity at the highest level that its diminished facilities permit so as to eliminate the need for expensive intermediaries. . . . Exacerbating the problem of maintaining the economic activity so vital to modern warfare was the appearance, also during this period of great commercial and industrial development, of the nation in arms.12 Thus, even as a nation’s economic requirements increased, its production was half-paralyzed by the incorporation of a large part of the available manpower into the armed forces. The result has been an even greater recourse to foreign sources for needs ranging from war material to foodstuffs. Finally, the last stage in this evolution, the advent of “total war” caused questions that had seemed both economic and military to take on an entirely military form because the privations of the civilian population were now understood to diminish its capacity to fight. Attacks on the rear threaten the front as well. The transformations of the economic and military organizations of the state had rendered society more vulnerable. . . .
In addition to their economic role, maritime communications must in wartime also meet abnormal demands stemming from the army’s transportation requirements. First, there is the matter of moving the armies, or the personnel destined for the armies, between different parts of the same nation, for example, between the mainland France and her colonies. This is pure transportation, differing from trade only in that its cargo is more precious. Armies must also, however, move to new theaters of war accessible by sea and, finally, be transported for seaborne assault against enemy territory.
With this kind of transport, we move into that very important domain that certain writers, the Italians in particular (Sechi, Bernotti, etc.), call the “corrélation maritime et continentale” in order to express the enormous influence of maritime communications on terrestrial operations. History furnishes a vast and convincing set of examples of this correlation going all the way back to the campaigns marked by the battles of Salamis13 and Actium.14 The impact of maritime communications on the outcome of the Punic Wars is well known. Only possession of the sea, finally acquired after huge efforts including the battles of Mount Ecnomus and the Aegate Islands, allowed the Romans to conquer Sicily, to force Hannibal on his long detour, and to crush Carthage definitively at Zama.15 Sea power also served Rome against Philip of Macedon16 and Mithridates17 and aided Caesar in wars against the Gauls and against Gaius Pompeius.18
The progress of the barbarians—that, for example, of the Genseric’s19 Vandals to North Africa and Rome—depended on their possessing sea routes. The sea also aided Belisarius’s20 Byzantine counter-offensives in Africa and Italy. Sea power determined the rise and decline of Arab power in the islands of the western Mediterranean and the outcome of the war between Sicily and Aragon. Losing sea control after Lepanto spelled the end of Arab progress on land.21
Modern events confirm the “corrélation maritime et continentale” The Mediterranean campaigns against Spain under Louis XIII22 and Louis XIV,23 in particular the Sicilian campaign in the course of the Dutch War, are examples.24 French efforts to land in Ireland and Britain during the War of the League of Augsburg depended on mastery of the Channel.25 Similarly, under Louis XV,26 the conquest of Minorca and the invasion of Britain succeeded or failed in response to naval fortunes.27 The attack and defense of the colonies under the ancient monarchy, the Republic, and the Empire were governed by the need for communications. The United States achieved its independence because the operations of d’Estaing, Ternay, and de Grasse gave them the control of maritime communications from which Yorktown was the prize.28
British control of the sea made possible their operations against our coasts and their landings in Holland, the Dardanelles, Egypt, Copenhagen, the Escaut, and Spain during the Wars of the Revolution and Empire. What is the story of the Boulogne Flotilla but a vain and futile wait for the freedom of a tiny piece of sea?29
More recently, Navarino30 solved the question of Turko-Egyptian possession of the Greek Peleponnesus, while the Crimean War and the Turko-Russian Wars of 1828 and 1878 demonstrated the possibilities implied by possession of sea routes; Federal strategy in the American Civil War illustrated the exploitation of maritime superiority to aid land armies. There would have been no Sino-Japanese or Russo-Japanese land wars had the Japanese not acquired mastery of the routes to the Asian continent. Cuba would still be Spanish if the route leading there had been barred to the Americans.
It is almost superfluous to mention the sea’s importance for land armies in the 1914 war. The Dardanelles, Salonica, Mesopotamia, Palestine, the German seizure of the islands in the Gulf of Riga, the rescue of the Serbian army, the transport of American troops to France, the conquest of the German colonies all demonstrate the military value of maritime communications in that war. France alone transported 2,365,000 soldiers during the war, while 1,142 ship loads bearing 2,079,880 troops crossed from the United States to Europe. . . .
Finally, maritime communications in wartime sometimes have a military and political importance as internal communications between the political center and overseas territories that are not colonies but true parts of the national soil. Such was the case in the past with Genoa and Corsica, Aragon and its Neapolitan and Sicilian dominions, Venice and its foreign dependencies, and Piedmont and Sardinia.31 It is now the position of France towards North Africa, which one can no longer consider as a colony, of Greece with the islands, and of the Japanese archipelago with Formosa, Sakhalin,32 and Korea.33 Maritime communications are the framework of that modern economic and political edifice that one calls the British “Empire” and that unites the enormous agglomerations of population and territories of Canada, the Indies, Australia, and Southern Africa. . . .34
THE MISSION OF MARITIME FORCES35
In general, maritime communications have played an important role during war and to have control over them is a priceless advantage. . . . This control has offensive and defensive aspects. Defensively, whoever controls communications preserves his overseas relations and virtually all of his peacetime trade routes while his coast is protected against major enemy action. Offensively, the master of the sea can paralyze or at least restrict enemy relations with foreign countries. He can attack enemy coasts, exploit the advantages offered by combined operations, and dictate the enemy’s intercourse with seagoing neutrals.
The mission of maritime forces is simply to dominate lines of communications, and the achievement of that situation is normally described as having sea mastery.36 This inexact and inappropriate phrase engenders erroneous ideas, but, for the sake of simplicity, we will employ it until we have time to improve upon it. . . .37
FREEDOM OF THE SEAS
Those who reject the doctrine of domination of maritime communications advance the theory of “freedom of the seas,” an old phrase exhumed from past polemics and implying a new and unsettling idea on which it is impossible not to comment here.
Certain people in the past have claimed to have monopolies of navigation and commerce—even on seas not touching their coast and in peace as well as war. Genoa, for example, had at one time exclusive commercial rights on the coasts of Provence and Naples, and Venice exercised them in the Adriatic. Spain and Portugal disputed each other’s claims for mastery and were separated geographically by Pope Alexander VI’s Bull of 1493.38 Later, the British claimed sovereignty over the “British seas” from Cape Finisterre (Portugal) to Norway in a case defended by Seldon’s Mare Clausum and opposed by Grotius in his Mare Liberum of 1609.39 Criticized by later legal experts like Mably and Beccaria,40 archaic ideas of sea dominance fell into disuse, and the principle of freedom of the seas received common acceptance in the nineteenth century.
Except for territorial waters, over which states maintain certain rights, and ignoring certain limitations imposed by international regulation, the peacetime sea is at present free and open to the commerce of all.
In our day, during the 1914 war, the old formula of freedom of the seas reappeared but with an entirely new sense. Some now claimed freedom of the seas to be valid in wartime, that commercial navigation should be free both to belligerents and to neutrals and that adversaries could make war only against armed forces; enemy merchants and neutrals were to be respected, regardless of destination, origin, or the nature of the cargo. In short, all private property being sacrosanct, contraband of war no longer existed and blockade ceased to be legitimate.
The United States was always strongly attached to this thesis, which it promoted in 1812, under Monroe in 1823, and in refusing to adhere to the Declaration of Paris of 1856.41 At the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 the United States continued to advocate freedom of the sea with modifications to allow the notions of contraband and blockade. During the 1914 war, President Wilson aligned himself with the neutrals in demanding freedom of the seas in this extended sense.42 Dropping the subject for a time after the United States entered the war, Wilson revived it in the famous Fourteen Points of 8 January 1918.43 In the hopes of stirring up a quarrel between the United States and Britain, Germany became a last-minute convert to the new interpretation.
To interpret freedom of the seas to include the invulnerability of private property in wartime remains unacceptable on general principles. To eschew the possibility of capturing, seizing, or stopping (for those who prefer not to speak of “destroying”) the enemy ships or merchandise, to respect the property of neutrals even when composed of contraband destined for the enemy, is to reject all of the benefits expected from the control of maritime communications. Such restrictions would strip that control of its double purpose—economic and military—whose redoubtable efficacy we have already seen. Freedom of the seas would leave fleets no function but to joust with enemy warships in a sterile battle whose outcome would affect only coastal operations. One might as well disarm, as is, in fact, the intention of some proponents of this interpretation of freedom of the seas. Such denial of all means of effective maritime pressure against the enemy can never be welcome in our epoch of total war.44
As practiced in earlier naval conflicts, commerce war was often stimulated by greed and, degenerating into piracy, was accompanied by inhuman acts parallel to the ravaging, pillaging, and endless destruction characteristic of contemporary land warfare. If both realms of warfare have seen the end of such excesses, however, at least in theory and law, land armies, however, retain effective methods of forcing a settlement upon the enemy. Occupation of territory or cities, seizure of wealth and resources, and forced contributions and requisition are all perfectly legal fruits of victory obtained from the clash of arms. Since nothing similar exists at sea, naval powers must be allowed to seize or to choke the enemy’s private trade. Such actions are logical and less barbarous than the bombardment of coastal cities and ports, to which one would have to turn were there no other means of exploiting naval superiority. One can reasonably claim that the prospect of property losses will encourage the leading citizens of states to prefer peaceful actions since, otherwise, they could look with favor upon the prospect of hostilities without diminishing their profits. In short, naval war has no point if enemy property can travel without hindrance and if neutrals can supply the enemy or conduct his trade. Therefore, the notions of seizure of private property, contraband, and blockade must remain intact, though modified to meet contemporary sensibilities.45
These lessons must not be separated, however, from the circumstances of particular cases; the behavior of the belligerents towards neutrals must reflect the latter’s importance. In wars during which there are many powerful neutrals, one cannot proceed in the same manner. Still, belligerents have always tended and will always tend to violate the sanctity of private property at sea and cannot do otherwise without losing sight of their own interest in controlling communications.
I admit that I never understood the point of the great debate some years ago on the subject of freedom of the sea. The phrase evoked nothing in me, and I still attribute to it no practical value. In peacetime, the sea is free for everyone. In war, it belongs to the strongest, who will chase both his enemy and any unfriendly neutrals from it as far as he is militarily and politically able. Such is the purpose of the navy, and that is the end of the argument. We can conclude with Richelieu’s observation that “of all the sovereigns’ domains, it is the sea on which they make the greatest claims, but the place which the rights of each are least clear. The true title to naval domination is force, not reason.”46
1. Raoul Castex, Théories stratégiques, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1937): 65–85.
2. Le salut de la race blanche, trans. Izoulet, 102 (author’s note). The provocative title of Izoulet’s translation of Mahan’s The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston, 1898), admitted by Castex to be “un peu approximatif” (Castex, Théories, vol. 3, 178, and chapter 13, 286), disguises the book’s true purpose but not the author’s underlying assumptions. The better-known formulation of Mahan’s thesis is “the first and most obvious light in which the sea presents itself from the political and social point of view is that of a great highway; or better, perhaps, a wide common over which men may pass in all directions . . .” Influence, 22.
3. Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal and Due du Richelieu (1585–1642) was Louis XIII’s chief minister and the architect of French foreign policy during the Thirty Years War.
4. The first Russian tsar to promote naval expansion, Peter (1672–1725) led his country through the eighteen-year Great Northern War against Sweden.
5. Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour (1810–1861). Premier of Sardinia and architect of Italian unification under King Victor Emmanuel.
6. (1859–1941), emperor of Germany 1888–1918.
7. A direct attack upon trading states like the Netherlands, the Navigation Acts were a series of British regulations from 1381 to 1854 designed to bar third parties from participating in Britain’s trade with her colonies.
8. The larger size of steel hulls allowed tonnage to increase even as ship numbers declined.
9. A compression of a much longer presentation.
10. Tramond et Reussner, Eléments d’histoire maritime et coloniale contemporaine, 277 (author’s note).
11. Compression.
12. First proclaimed by the Constituent Assembly in France on 23 August 1793.
13. Greek naval victory over Xerxes’ Persians in 480 B.C.
14. At Actium in 31 B.C. Octavianus (later Emperor Augustus) secured his Principate by defeating the fleet of Marcus Antonius and his Egyptian ally Cleopatra.
15. Castex leaps from Roman naval victories over Carthage at Mount Ecnomus (256 B.C.) and the Aegate Islands (241 B.C.) in the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.) to the conclusion of the Second Punic War in 202 B.C.
16. Carthaginian ally Philip V lost to Rome in the First (214–205 B.C.) and Second (200–197 B.C.) Macedonian Wars.
17. Rome fought three wars against Mithridates of Pontus in 89–84 B.C., 83–79 B.C., and 75–65 B.C.
18. The struggle has been better described as one between the strengths of Caesar on land and of Pompeius at sea, Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea (London, 1976): 66–67.
19. King of the Vandals 428–477.
20. Emperor Justinian’s General Belisarius’s (c. 505–565) campaigns against the Vandals and Ostrogoths gained breathing space for the Eastern Roman empire.
21. Lepanto (1571), the last galley battle, saw the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish fleet under Ali Paşa a Christian alliance of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy commanded by Don John of Austria.
22. Louis XIII (1601–1678) was king of France throughout most of the Thirty Years War.
23. In addition to inheriting the struggle against Spain that ended in the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, Louis XIV (1638–1715) led France in four conflicts of his own making: the War of Devolution against Spain (1667–1668), the Dutch War (1672–1678), the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697), and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714).
24. Engaged alone against Spain and Holland after Britain withdrew from the Dutch War, France supported Sicily’s rebellion against Spain, E. H. Jenkins, A History of the French Navy (London, 1973): 55–59.
25. Although Louis XIV’s best strategy was to use his superior fleet to reinforce James II’s efforts in Ireland, his exclusive concentration on the continent led to the decay of French naval power, Mahan, Influence, 159, and Geoffrey Symcox, The Crisis of French Seapower (The Hague, 1974).
26. (1710–1774).
27. In the Seven Years War (1756–1763).
28. In 1778 Comte d’Estaing brought the first naval help to the rebellious American colonists, but his hesitant operations proved disappointing to his allies. Charles Louis Chevalier de Ternay convoyed Rochambeau’s French troops to Rhode Island in the late spring of 1780, where they remained for a year before marching to Virginia. Later, a second French admiral, the Comte de Grasse, brought more French troops from Santo Domingo to Virginia in August 1781 and cooperated with George Washington in transporting his troops and those of Rochambeau to besiege Yorktown. After this notably successful exercise in combined and coalition operations, de Grasse returned to the West Indies where he was outmaneuvered by Admiral Hood in a series of actions around St. Kitts and defeated by Admiral Rodney at the Battle of the Saints on 12 April 1782, Mahan, Influence, 417ff., and Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence (Boston, 1983): 241–251, 379.
29. Commonly called the “Boulogne Flotilla” after its principal base, the Flottille Nationale was the huge fleet of armed transports prepared by Napoleon for an invasion of Britain in 1801 and in 1803–1805; John Elting, Swords Around a Throne (New York, 1988): 304.
30. The Battle of Navarino Bay (Pylos) on 20 October 1827 pitted British, French, and Russian against Egyptian and Turkish fleets.
31. Mediterranean communications played a very important role in the internal liaison of Charles V’s empire (author’s note).
32. Japan ceded the island of Sakhalin in the Sea of Okhotsk to Russia in 1875 but recovered the southern half in the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
33. Japan moved troops into Korea in 1894 and governed the peninsula from 1910 to 1945
34. See M. Jean Brunhes: La structure nouvelle de l’Empire brittanique. Illustration, 26 November 1927 (author’s note).
35. By the very general title “maritime forces” we refer to the totality of forces participating in war at sea, that is, not only surface and submarine naval forces but also air forces and even land units assigned to coastal defense (author’s note).
36. This deserves a nod to Corbett, who defines command of the sea as “control of the communications in which the belligerents are adversely concerned,” Corbett, “Green Pamphlet,” in Principles, 317.
37. See chapter 3.
38. A series of bulls promulgated in 1493 granted all lands discovered by Columbus to Spain and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the New World between Spain and Portugal along a line running north-south in the mid-Atlantic.
39. Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’s (1583–1645) book first proposed the principle of freedom of the high seas that John Seldon (1584–1654) attacked in his Mare Clausum Seu Dominum Maris of 1635.
40. The contributions of French philosopher Abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785) and of Cesare Beccaria (1735–1794), a Milanese utilitarian criminologist and economist, to maritime law are obscure.
41. The United States went to war against Britain in 1812 in part over neutral rights to trade with a blockaded France. The Declaration of Paris signed by representatives of Great Britain, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, and Turkey abolished privateering and protected neutral goods, except contraband of war, even when carried under the enemy’s flag. The United States could not sign the Declaration of Paris without first amending the Constitution, which granted to Congress the right to arm privateers. In practice, however, the U.S. has recognized the Declaration as part of international law.
42. Freedom of the seas found a passionate advocate in the person of Colonel House, President Wilson’s eminence grise. . . . One finds in every line of House’s papers a specifically American imperialism. . . . (author’s note).
43. The second point was “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or part by international action for the enforcement of international agreements.”
44. The argument reappears in chapter 17.
45. Théories omits pages 82–84.
46. And can we be sure that, in the next war, the Americans, ready to fight to defend the freedom of their own commerce when they are neutral, will brutally uphold the other point of view when they are belligerents. Humanitarian imperialism is always problematic (author’s note).