Telecommunications came late to naval operations. Telegraphy began to play a part in land warfare as early as the Crimean War, but it was obviously useless in communicating with ships at sea. Vessels could come into port to send and receive messages, and Admirals often sent dispatch boats to the nearest cable station, but that could be several days away, leaving them in a situation not too different from Nelson's time. The delays inherent in this communication loop could frustrate commanders, but it was still a massive improvement over the days when the mail only moved at the speed of ships. And in the 1890s, a new invention appeared on the horizon that would allow ships to talk to each other beyond it.

Battlecruiser Inflexible showing her high masts and radio antennas.

That invention was radio. As early as 1895, Captain Henry Jackson of the Royal Navy met with Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, to discuss naval applications. Two years later, a demonstration was made of communication between two vessels at sea over a distance of three miles. In 1898, Jackson managed to push his range to 14 miles, and on maneuvers the next year, ships 74 miles apart exchanged messages. Over the next five or so years, most of the major navies quickly installed sets on their larger ships, and the British made a concerted effort to put wireless telegraph (WT) sets on every ship larger than a destroyer. Jackie Fisher used it as a key component of his new doctrine of centrally-controlled forces for trade protection, and fitted his battlecruisers with high masts specifically to improve radio performance. Read more...

Gentlemen, your policy has guided us to victory over Italy. Although we fought no decisive fleet battle, good strategic choices lead to Italy's defeat in only four months. We have assumed control of the former Italian territories of Rhodes and Sardinia, and can now look forward to improved respect in the eyes of the world.

However, this leaves us with serious choices to make. The budget has been slashed to below its prewar level, and we will have to suspend some construction. Germany and Austria still threaten us, although tensions there have fallen somewhat, too. Read more...

Communication between ships at sea has always been difficult. Unlike on land, sending a messenger is not usually very practical, so navies from the very earliest days have had to come up with other methods of passing messages.

The Battle of Salamis

The first recorded naval signal came during the Battle of Salamis, when an oar with a red flag attached was raised from the Greek flagship as a signal to stop luring the Persians deeper and instead launch the attack, which ultimately scattered the Persians and turned back Xerxes' invasion of Greece.¹ And this set the pattern for operational signals for most of the next two millennia. The commander of a fleet would set up specific signals to support his plan, maybe declaring that a blue flag meant "attack the enemy" while a red flag meant "withdraw". Over time, some of these signals became traditional, and certain banners would be flown when a ship sighted the enemy, or when an admiral wanted his captains to come to the flagship for a conference. Sails were often used for signals, too, with the flagship letting fly the fore topsail being the traditional signal for the fleet to prepare to get underway. Read more...

For Memorial Day Weekend, Lord Nelson and I went to Kansas City, and while we were there, we visited the National WWI Museum, which is in Missouri for some reason. As you probably would expect, this wasn’t the best time to visit, because the crowds were much larger than the museum could gracefully handle.

Me with the dedication, including an admiral I'm not particularly fond of²

website

Overall, I was disappointed in the museum. It wasn’t that it was an awful museum. On the surface, they did a great job. The displays looked cool, everything was well-presented, and there were some neat interactive exhibits. But it seemed like every time they were presented with a choice between the easy route of going more in-depth on the pop-culture understanding of the war or actually challenging that narrative, they took the easy route. Lots of cases of uniforms, weapons, and other personal kit, which are easy to source and easy to explain. But something complicated and difficult, like the importance of sea power in the war? Shoved off to a tiny section. Very little coverage of Jutland. Nothing on the blockade, or the Turnip Winter that did so much to bring Germany to its knees. The USN got half a display case, with a single uniform and a pistol, and a brief mention of the presence of the Sixth Battle Squadron with the Grand Fleet. Not even a photograph. And one of the signs, examined in detail, had serious factual errors. Read more...

I'm going to step well outside of my normal remit, and talk about an issue from the age of sail, because I think it's interesting, and because it's something that many accounts get wrong.

Impressment is something that most people interested in history have heard of. The usual version involves roving press gangs⁴ of sailors and Marines, grabbing unsuspecting men off the street, beating them up, and taking them to sea. One minute, you're a farmer, in town for a day. The next, you're a sailor, headed for the East Indies. As you probably suspect, this isn't really true. British law restricted the pressing of men for naval service to seamen, and while mistakes happened frequently, it was easy for men taken by mistake to secure their release. Captains wanted seamen, whose skills took years to develop, and not landsmen who didn't "know the ropes".⁵ Read more...

It's our usual Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want.

The highlight of this thread is the RTW2 game, which saw war break out between France (us) and Italy in March of 1902. I've put up an edit to the original post in the RTW2 thread.

Posts overhauled since last time include Second-generation battlecruisers, Auxiliaries Part 2, Rangefinding, The Great White Fleet Part 1, Did Iowa Move Sideways During a Broadside? and So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 2.

By 1906, the British had developed a system that solved the basic problems of fire control. It would take ranges from the ship's rangefinders and then compute basic corrections for the movement of the target ship, a process known as rangekeeping. The problem was that the central instruments of this system, the Dumaresq and Vickers Clock, were only really suitable for situations where the range rate was low and not changing quickly. Maneuvering targets could throw them off.

Destroyer HMS Salamander at Malta, 1900

The first serious solution came from a man completely lacking in obvious qualifications for the job. Arthur Pollen was neither a naval officer nor an engineer, but when he was invited by his cousin William Goodenough⁶ to witness gunnery practice at Malta in 1900, he was appalled at what he saw. The maximum range the ships fired at was 1,500 yards, a far cry from the 8,000 yards or more that the same guns were being used at on land in South Africa. When he asked for an explanation, he was told that the problem was the lack of an adequate rangefinder. Pollen was managing director of the Linotype Company and set his engineers working on the problem, initially by analyzing the change of range between two ships steaming on opposite courses. Read more...

Proofreader and general friend of the blog dndnrsn was in Bavaria for a few months recently, and spent some time visiting museums. He's reviewed several that have military/history interest for us.⁷

Bavarian Army Museum/WWI Museum/Bavarian Police Museum

There are three linked museums built into historically significant old castle/fort buildings. Entrance is €1 to enter each on Sundays - otherwise it’s €3.50, or 7 to see all 3, with reduced entry for some. Therefore, best visited on a Sunday.

Look, the 2nd ed AD&D weapons section.⁸

When I went, the main exhibition of the Bavarian Army Museum was closed due to renovation work. There’s an exhibition of medieval weaponry and photography thereof, with German and English text. There was also an exhibit about the Austro-Prussian war. Some interesting stuff, and my German was enough to piece most of it together. Read more...

While learning where the enemy is and what he's doing before he does the same to you has been a part of warfare since one tribe first went out to ambush another, it's only comparatively recently that efforts have been made to integrate and disseminate it on a large scale. Jackie Fisher first came up with the concept while in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, and the RN developed it into to a key weapon in WWI. Later, the British and Americans used similar techniques to plot incoming air raids, multiplying the effectiveness of their defenses. However, these systems were entirely manual, which meant that they could be overwhelmed by an opponent that launched large numbers of separate raids, or whose aircraft were fast enough to stay ahead of the plotters. To make matters worse, nuclear and standoff weapons meant that attackers had to be intercepted further out than ever before. During exercises in the early 50s, jet raids on US carrier groups had maybe a 1 in 3 chance of being successfully intercepted. Incremental improvements could help this some, but radical solutions would be needed to solve the problem properly.

Two solutions immediately presented themselves: decentralization and automation. Decentralization could take any number of forms. Broadcast control abandoned any attempt to have controllers vector fighters in and instead simply gave the position and course of incoming raids, letting fighters plot their own intercepts. In other cases, it involved assigning sectors and CAP⁹ sections to specific ships, with a central control ship to coordinate when raids crossed sector boundaries. Maybe one ship would be in charge of tracking friendlies, so that the CAP wasn't wasted chasing down the ASW patrol. However, decentralized control demanded good communications, which was a problem in an era limited to voice radio and teletype, and even decentralized control only helped to resolve the problems of moving information from one plot to another. Read more...

Gentlemen, our first two years at the Ministère de la Marine have gone almost exactly as we had wished. We remain on good terms with the Anglophone nations and Japan, while we stand on the brink of war with Italy. Four capital ships, two light cruisers, and a brace of destroyers all are under construction in our yards. This means that only limited funds are available for new construction right now, and we need to make good use of them to ready ourselves for war.

The world situation

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