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William H. Thiesen, Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The Transformation of Ship
Design and Construction, 1820-1920, University
Press of
Florida, 2006.
302pp.
Review
by
Howard
J. Fuller
University
of
Wolverhampton
Department
of War Studies
__________________________________________________________________________
On
November 12, 2002, the Dean of the Virginia Military Institute,
Brigadier General Charles ‘Casey’ Brower, spoke at the Franklin
D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in
New York
of ‘British brains’ and ‘American brawn’ at work in the grand
strategy of the Second World War.
This has been a recognized theme for some time; Churchill himself
supposedly commenting on the need for British brains and American brawn
to counteract the post-war Soviet menace—while Stalin at the Tehran
Conference in November 1943 dryly remarked on ‘Russian blood’ as the
final ingredient of Allied victory.
In William H. Thiesen’s impressive book, Industrializing
American Shipbuilding, it is again
Great Britain
which finally provides the intellectual impetus to unlock
America
’s long-held ambitions at sea. Shipbuilding
itself went from the ‘practical to the theoretical’, from a craft to
a science. Yet, as Thiesen
rightly points out, “the flow of technology is never one way.”
By the dawn of the twentieth century, British experts began to
adopt uniquely American shipbuilding practices which reflected those
changes occurring in mass-production industry as well.
Among
other things, this work is a highly skilled synthesis of a relatively
neglected tier of source material, namely contemporary professional
journals and treatises on (iron) shipbuilding.
These sources are of course themselves not definitive; one
century’s ‘science’ is another’s record of documented
trial-and-error only. Many
of them (like British Chief Constructor Edward Reed’s Naval
Science) were intensely self-serving and political.
But Thiesen has succeeded in bringing a very complicated,
international phenomenon to light under one cover.
While it may lack in broader analyses which help explain the
decision-making processes (or not) of British and American shipbuilders,
commercial and naval, it also avoids overly technical discussions which
tend to lose the plot altogether.
Could
the
United States
have built first-rate battleships of its own accord?
That is a central, implicit question of Industrializing
American Shipbuilding. Thiesen
suggests it could not without first tapping into (often costly) British
experiences ultimately yielding a “scientific movement [that]
rationalized the process of designing ships.”
One problem that emerges is a clear timeline of
developments—precisely because of the nature of ‘technological
evolution’, nevermind the role of various (sometimes crucial)
influences which constantly seeped over the Atlantic and back and which
are by their nature impossible to trace definitively.
Both American and British shipbuilding practices can be said to
have been largely ‘ad hoc’ until several acute disasters in
design—Brunel’s Great Eastern,
for example, and especially the sail-and-turret HMS Captain—exposed
the shortcomings of this approach in shipbuilding, when the pressure was
on like never before to keep up with a rival’s carrying trade or daily
advances in steam engineering, gun-making and metallurgy.
By the early 1870s this seems to have finally dovetailed with a
public, published dialogue and professionalism which was closely
followed on both sides of the
Atlantic
. (It was not a British
monopoly; it never was.) Necessity
being the mother of invention, it was the British who had more to gain
from standardizing iron shipbuilding in the private sector on a more
measured, scientific basis, and more to lose in terms of global,
imperial security if this was neglected professionally.
Nevertheless,
during the American Civil War years it was the U.S. Navy that
‘spiked’ the limits of shipbuilding innovation and production;
nothing approached the technological prowess of the USS Monitor.
Around 1866, this mastless, entirely steam-operated form of
warship, with concentrated low freeboard armor protection and heavy
turret-mounted armament, inspired Reed and the British Admiralty to
invest in monitor-ironclads; first for overseas imperial bases (
Bombay
,
Melbourne
) and then as oceanic battleships (HMS Devastation,
launched in 1871). In other
words the critical ‘gap’ between British and American
professionalism in shipbuilding was not necessarily imbedded socially.
Thiesen suggests, though without specific evidence, an American
contempt for ‘undemocratic’ practices which might exclude popular
participation in shipbuilding, while British designers evolved into an
increasingly specialized elite. Instead
this was more the product of historical circumstances, perhaps a decade
off technologically-speaking, but not much more.
When the Americans began to reach for overseas markets and naval
bases in the 1880s they were likewise able to draw upon international
practices and apply them to national resources as it suited them.
Neither the British nor the Americans were singularly brainy or
brawny…
Closely
linked to the establishment of naval schools and architectural
associations, of course, was not only rising Anglo-American industrial
capacity, but even population. Paul
Kennedy’s numbers still add up; by the 20th-century the
British Empire had good cause to wonder if it could keep it going
against Europe, particularly Germany.
Thus the ‘flow of technology’ was itself determined by grand
strategic parameters.
Britain
’s Naval Defence Act of 1889 signalled a new naval arms race between
major industrialized powers. “We
have got to keep the situation in hand with regard to our capacity to
build,” noted Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1909.
There was no guarantee that brains or brawn could counterbalance
blood—the will of a people—even in an age of science.
Industrializing American
Shipbuilding is a valuable step in understanding this modern dynamic
of power.
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