The Royal Navy and the Capital Ship in the Interwar Period: An Operational Perspective - Book Review

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2002 by Christopher Bell

Moretz, Joseph, The Royal Navy and the Capital Ship in the Interwar Period: An Operational Perspective. London: Frank Cass, 2002. 292pp. $57.50

The Royal Navy is often held up as an example of a military organization that failed to innovate in peacetime. Its critics maintain that naval officers spent the interwar years preparing to refight the Battle of Jutland when they should have been thinking about the new operational challenges presented by aircraft carriers and U-boats. At the root of the problem, these critics argue, was an increasingly irrational devotion to the capital ship (a term that encompasses both the battleship and the battle cruiser). In recent years, however, historians have challenged the image of an intellectually stilted and hopelessly reactionary officer corps. The Royal Navy and the Capital Ship in the Interwar Period builds on such work to present a more sympathetic picture of a service struggling with inadequate budgets, global responsibilities, and rapid technological change.

The Royal Navy emerged from the First World War with its faith in the supremacy of the capital ship largely undiminished. Battleships were clearly vulnerable to attack by aircraft and submarines, but as Joseph Moretz demonstrates, the naval profession believed that the risks to these ships would be manageable, a view that was confirmed by the experiences of the Spanish Civil War. With naval aviation still in a formative stage of development, there was as yet no reliable and tested alternative to the capital ship. Nevertheless, aircraft carriers were regarded as an essential and integral part of any British battle fleet, valuable not just for spotting and reconnaissance but also as a striking force. The main impediment to the development of naval aviation in the interwar era was less a lack of imagination than a constant shortage of funds, as well as the control by the Royal Air Force (until 1937) of the Fleet Air Arm. By the beginning of the Second World War, the Royal Navy's initial commanding lead in naval aviation had vanished.

Challenging the traditional view, Moretz argues that in this period the Royal Navy strove to overcome known deficiencies and meet future challenges through a sustained process of fleet exercises and experimentation. Its accomplishments in this area were mixed. As the author notes, the gunnery proficiency of British capital ships actually decreased through much of the interwar period, due in large part to budgetary restrictions and the problems of assimilating new technology. The service was willing, however, to consider such measures as night fighting and new divisional tactics in its effort to retain a qualitative edge over its increasingly numerous prospective enemies.

Capital ships were also employed in such peacetime tasks as "showing the flag," providing aid to civil authorities, and deterrence. Moretz maintains that the capital ship's utility across the entire spectrum of operational activity bolstered the Royal Navy's case for their retention. The evidence produced to support this claim is unconvincing, however. Peacetime tasks were usually undertaken by smaller warships that were better suited to them. It was only in demonstrations of British power to deter aggressors in crisis situations that heavy ships were essential, but even here, Moretz suggests, their record was notably weak, given their failure to deter Japan in 1941.

Other chapters attempt to provide context for the Navy's capital ship policies, but the results are uneven. Moretz often seems out of his depth when he strays into broad questions of naval policy. For example, he attributes Britain's willingness to enter into a series of arms control agreements almost entirely to financial considerations, though other factors were often of equal or greater importance. This propensity to oversimplify complex issues is also obvious in the chapter on interwar naval strategy, which ascribes Britain's difficulties to the maintenance of the "one power standard" (which was not replaced by a two-power standard in 1938, as the author claims) and the Navy's unwillingness to divide its fleet between two distant theaters (which is precisely what it did plan to do for most of this period). Moreover, while Moretz correctly notes that the Navy developed different strategies for Europe and the Far East, he is not clear on what those strategies were. This problem stems from insufficient resea rch and a tendency to conflate fleet exercises with strategic planning.

Nonetheless, and while the background material that makes up a significant portion of this study is not always reliable, the book is of value to the specialist for the fresh perspective it offers on the Royal Navy's response to the operational challenges of the interwar period.