Maritime Nation, N.A.M. Rodger Interview

For N.A.M. Rodger the third book in his epic trilogy, The Price of Victory, is the culmination of a lifetime’s work. He has charted Britain’s naval history – not a history of the navy, there is a difference, from 660AD to the Second World War. The achievement is now complete as the latest starts at the end of the Napoleonic Wars through to VJ Day. These are books that will be read one hundred years from now as our imperial past becomes more distant.

Rodger is quick to point out that his trilogy is very much a maritime history of Britain.

“This is not a history of the Navy. This is a naval history of Britain and people say, ‘your history of the Navy…’, so they never listen. It is nevertheless a rather important distinction to draw. It means that it’s a very much broader approach to the subject. It means that I regard naval warfare as something which obviously involves the Navy, but involves government, society, the other services, allies, foreign countries, or everything you can think of practically. All are linked together, and if you really want to understand what’s happening, you’ve got to be alert to all the various connections and the backstory is as important as the headline events.”

The book begins after Waterloo in 1815 as Britain, which had already defeated the navies of France and Spain at Trafalgar in 1805, embarks on the 19th century with no serious competitor. That was not the mindset in the Admiralty, as they thought they were competing, first with France, then the United States and finally Germany as the two navies increased in size, each one vying for supremacy. Only in the 1870s did the British believe the waves were theirs. So as the century progresses, a complacency develops which proves dangerous.

“Most of the time, actually, they were running a naval policy with a remarkably small navy and remarkably little support or understanding from successive governments. It’s really only at the very end of the century that they begin to get seriously worried about potential threats and actually start building up a big navy. By the time of the First World War, they had built up quite a big navy. That’s not typical in the 19th century, most of which was being run very much on a shoestring. When the public begin to notice, they start getting quite worried. Though for most of the 19th century, the public didn’t know the sea existed.

“In 1815, what everybody was thinking was the Navy’s a bit old hat. The Navy won its war, we don’t need to worry about that any longer, and now we’ve won a real victory. That is to say, the army has fought and won. The British Army did not on the whole have the reputation as an organisation which fought and won. For most of its previous history it had been much smaller than its continental rivals and rather cut off from continental warfare, not entirely but to a significant extent. And then 1815 the generals finally get their chance and really win a real uncontestable victory. Admittedly, not unassisted by the Prussian army, but still, the generals really came away at the end of the Napoleonic Wars on the top of the world. And the Navy was just a tiny bit disappointed as though everybody had forgotten what they’d done which wasn’t totally true, but there’s an element of truth in it.”

The Royal Navy did not have to wait too long before winning another great victory over imperial rivals in the Mediterranean, and this was under Admiral Codrington at Navarino in 1827 during the Greek War of Independence. The battle, which took place on the west coast of the Peloponnese, a place that had seen war since antiquity, was a stunning win over the Ottomans. Reading in The Price of Victory, Rodger shows how the Admiralty was not happy at all and then spends the next thirty years pretending it never happened. There is a humour to Rodger’s book, though very dry, that is detectable throughout, and he is an engaging speaker and amusing too.

“For all sorts of reasons. It wasn’t supposed to have happened. The short term tactical objective, which had to do with protecting shipping (which was either British or under British protection i.e. the Greeks, Maltese, and so on) against piracy. That short-term tactical objective was the exact opposite of the long-term policy objective of the British government, which had to do with keeping the Russians out of the Mediterranean.

“This victory was of course an allied victory. It was Russian, Austrian and British. The British contributed the largest single function, but the Russians substantially were the major political victors of the whole thing. And this was not what the government had intended. Mind you, the incompetence and chaos of the British government was as much or more to blame. The unfortunate British commander-in-chief had to fight this campaign with no communication with Whitehall at all because the government wasn’t in the least interested and in any case communications were slow to the Balkans.

“He had only a rather general idea of what the political priorities of the government were, and he knew enough to be aware that the political priorities and the practicalities were grossly disconnected. So it was, tactically speaking, a very successful victory. But a lot of people, including the British government, came away from it deeply dissatisfied. And there was another complication because there was no Admiralty and the substitute Admiralty was the Duke Clarence. He dishes out an enormous number of promotions for all his friends, which essentially meant all the Whigs in the Navy.

“So everybody who has been anywhere near the victory and was in the same political party as the Duke, gets massive promotions, far more than anybody had got at Trafalgar. The promotions were on entirely political grounds, didn’t correspond to who had contributed most to the victory. It was rather an embarrassment for everybody who realised what was going on and a motive for not talking too much about it for the rest, for a lot of the admirals of that generation. But it’s like everybody has this conception of the 19th century as being an era of British supremacy at the time, but what it looked like was a complete shambles.”

The administration of the navy descends into farce, and as anyone witnessing the British state over the last few years will recognise, a malaise sets in along with a scepticism of experts.

“They get rid of the Navy Board partly because it’s nothing but experts. We don’t need experts. We want gentlemen. Gentlemen are incorruptible. Gentlemen know what matters. Gentlemen are the obvious people to take charge, take serious responsibility, because a gentleman always knows what to do. It doesn’t need to be told what to do by some oik who claims to have some specialised expertise.

“It’s really only slowly, as a result of some strikingly unsuccessful things that towards the end of the 19th century, they start slowly and reluctantly buying into the idea of the Admiralty having expertise available. And in particular, the expertise which the Whigs most disliked was having naval officers in the Admiralty. It took a long time before there were more than a very small number of them. If you looked at the Admiralty in 1880, there were probably 30 or 40 naval officers in the Admiralty, mostly in what we might think of as rather marginal activities. The hydrographers were often used as unofficial naval staff in a period where there are no naval staff at all. But if you want somebody to do something, and you need somebody who actually could tell the sharp end from the blunt end, they’re in serious trouble actually to find any naval man within reach.”

This surprised me since, during the mid-19th century, the Royal Navy was bent on exploration as newly built ships, constructed with the latest designs and supplied with the recent invention of tinned food, began to search for the Northwest Passage as well as expeditions to the Antarctic. The recent TV show The Terror dramatised the story of two highly advanced ships, HMS Terror & HMS Erebus and their crews. This does suggest a scientific element to the Admiralty, bent on expanding our knowledge, as opposed to the ‘Good Chap’ theory that indicates amateurism?

“You’re quite right that there is a period, roughly speaking, from the 1830s up to the 1850s and 60s, where there’s quite a lot of Arctic exploration. Then in the mid-19th century, one of many big naval catastrophes in the 19th century, they lose the great Arctic expedition. You count the expedition and the relief expeditions, lost, it’s well into two figures. And they also lost a large number of people. They lost everyone. They don’t really go back to exploration at all, though they do revive the hydrography, which is, of course, an absolutely fundamental science for using the sea in any way at all.

“It’s also an example of something where they’re genuinely philanthropic because the hydrographers are essentially spending an enormous amount of the British taxpayers’ money doing surveys of the whole world, which they then sell to the whole world very cheaply. And without asking any questions about whether these people are friends, are they going to use them in ways which will be convenient to us, on the contrary, they sell the charts to everyone!

“Behind this is the great age of free trade, which from the 1840s is identified as the national foreign policy of Britain. Free trade is fundamentally philanthropic because it’s the way in which poor foreign countries can grow to become rich foreign countries. They [the government] is absolutely clear that it is in Britain’s interest to make friends with all nations of the world by being helpful to them. If Britain uses its power abusively, it will make enemies and we are only a small country with a small population in the end. If we make enemies with everybody, the result will be fatal.”

We are speaking as new threats emerge, with an increasingly assertive China which has a navy increasing in strength every year whilst challenging its neighbours in the South China Sea. The Chinese have developed a weapon, known as the ‘carrier buster’, a missile that can destroy very expensive aircraft carriers. Are we now at a stage where relatively inexpensive weaponry can sink our precious vessels?

“Well, maybe. But it’s always been the case ever since modern weapons started coming in, certainly ever since the 19th century, that somebody comes along with a new exciting weapon, which is going to win every battle and solve every problem. The historical commonplace has been that they tend never to work quite as well as their manufacturers claim. These Chinese anti-carrier missiles may work, but there are some quite considerable problems. They are basically ballistic missiles. Ballistic missiles go 200, 250 miles up. They come down vertically and they go bang.

“Having struck the target, if the target is stationary as cities are, this is a plausible line. If the target is moving, it’s all a bit trickier. In fact, it’s extremely tricky because the target, a moving target, mean, carriers look awfully big, but from the perspective of a missile traveling at immensely high speed from up in the upper atmosphere, where is the carrier? How do you know where the carrier is? If you’ve got the carrier under actual real-time surveillance by a reconnaissance aircraft, and if you’ve got really good communications with a missile which is travelling at prodigiously high speed, then it might work. But there are quite a lot of ifs. And we will never know until we engage in a war of this kind, which I rather hope we won’t have to do.

“It may be true, the carrier killers may work, and the carriers, of course, are not numerous. Wonderful new weapons are two a penny, and sometimes they work, but not necessarily as well as their proponents claim.”

In this increasingly more dangerous world, I take that as an optimistic note on which to end.

N.A.M. Rodger is a renowned naval historian and the author of The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815 – 1945.