Abstract
Julian Corbett's Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, published in 1911, is the single most important contribution to strategic thought in the English language. It introduced the idea of grand strategy (although Corbett's book called it ‘major strategy’); it described how a sea power could fight a limited war in a continental conflict; in defining command of the sea, it prioritised economic pressure over ‘decisive’ battle; and it acknowledged that, in wars waged by developed states, their citizens played a vital role – both as political participants and as potential targets of the blockade. Just as significantly, Corbett recognised the practical contribution made by strategic thought. For a body like the Royal Navy, to whose education Corbett dedicated much of his life, strategic thought established principles that in aiding understanding could shape doctrine. For the nation, it provided the common vocabulary which enabled ‘conference’ between those in uniform and their political masters. Corbett was writing for the pre-1914 British empire but much of what he said remains instructive in a post-Brexit ‘global’ Britain passing through one of its recurrent returns to maritime power and guided since 2010 by a National Security Council.
Despite his originality and despite his intellectual indebtedness to Clausewitz, Corbett has struggled to enter a canon shaped less by theorists of sea power and more by land power. As a spokesman of sea power, Mahan had got in first and had acquired too many acolytes for Corbett to have a clear run, even in Britain. Within three years of the publication of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, the First World War confirmed Corbett's critics in their doubts about the idea of limited war. Amphibious operations failed at Gallipoli in 1915 and naval battle proved ‘indecisive’ at Jutland in 1916. Unwisely, Corbett used his role as the official historian to hypothesise counter-factual outcomes for both and then died before he could complete his work. The argument that maritime economic pressure had proved effective was left not to the official historians (A. C. Bell's history was not published until 1961), but to Basil Liddell Hart, who asserted rather than demonstrated it. Worse, in 1931 Liddell Hart then re-clothed Corbett's ideas as ‘the British way in warfare’ without ever acknowledging their author. In Liddell Hart's hands, not least as mediated by Michael Howard and Paul Kennedy, Britain's maritime strategy became an argument about the role of the army more than the navy.
The guardians of Corbett's flame became, first, his son-in-law, Brian Tunstall, and then the Canadian academic, Donald Schurman. The latter's 1981 biography focused on Corbett as a naval historian and put Some Principles of Maritime Strategy to one side. It was an unfortunate decision. Like Mahan, and indeed like Clausewitz and Jomini, Corbett wrote more history than theory, but like them too his genius lay in his capacity to distil strategic principles from the history of war. They all used the past to contextualise the present and so sought pointers to the future. Corbett in particular recognised how contingent all this might be: after all, history is about change as much as continuity.
Andrew Lambert has now written the definitive biography that Corbett has long deserved. He has re-assembled papers which had become scattered and he has produced a much fuller bibliography of Corbett's own published work than did Schurman. At one point (p. 408), he even suggests that Archibald Colbeck, an otherwise-unidentified writer of Corbettian views, who wrote a positive review of Corbett's official history of Naval Operations in the Journal of the Royal United Service Institute in 1922, was himself Corbett. It seems incredible that Corbett should have stooped so low as to puff his own work pseudonymously or that the RUSI should have colluded in such action.
The British Way of War is stuffed full of aperçus and insights. It is indispensable but it is also infuriating. It repeats points and evidence, not only between chapters but also within them, and on some occasions on consecutive pages. Despite the piling on of arguments, much will remain obscure or only partially revealed for those unfamiliar with the current state of pre-1914 British naval history, the context in which Corbett was operating. Take two examples, the declaration of London in 1909 and the Anglo-French naval agreement of 1912.
In 1909 the Royal Navy accepted the terms of the declaration of London, which restricted the use of economic warfare by establishing a tight definition of contraband and a broad one of neutral rights. The principle of freedom of the seas would suit British maritime and economic power if it was not a belligerent: as a neutral cross-trader, Britain profited from others’ conflicts. However, if Britain was belligerent, it would require a wider application of both contraband and belligerent rights in order to be able to enforce an effective blockade. Lambert rightly stresses the importance of Corbett's own background as a lawyer to his understanding of strategy and analyses Corbett's 1907 article on the capture of private property at sea to make the point. But he does not directly address the terms of the 1909 declaration of London or Corbett's response to the challenge they posed to the exercise of British sea power.
By 1914 Britain had not ratified the declaration of London. When war broke out, despite committing itself to its principles, it soon ceased in practice to observe them. This tension between neutral and belligerent rights at sea was a fault line in Anglo-American relations which reached back to the American Civil War and even to the War of 1812, and it ran throughout the First World War. For Lambert, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, was an ‘Anglophobe’ who was hell-bent on destroying Britain's maritime power. His ‘Fourteen Points’ set out in January 1918 (although, bizarrely, on p. 344 Lambert dates them to December 1916), included the freedom of the seas. There is no light or shade here: no reference to the Princeton professor of politics who had stressed the shared constitutional inheritance of the two countries or to the president who used an Anglophile emissary as his peace broker or who kept in post a Secretary of State and an ambassador in London who favoured US entry to the war. Moreover, for all the tensions between Washington and London, the financial foundations of British maritime strategy and its contribution to the allied war effort during the years of American neutrality depended on Britain's continuing ability to borrow from Wall Street.
At least the declaration of London receives glancing reference; the 1912 Anglo-French naval agreement does not even merit that. Under its terms, the Royal Navy left the security of the western Mediterranean to the French navy while it took on responsibility for that of the French Atlantic coast. When the July crisis broke in 1914, this – not the informal staff talks between the two armies – drove the diplomatic dealings between the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the French ambassador, Paul Cambon. When Grey spoke to Parliament on 3 August, he described British strategy in Corbett's terms: maritime and limited. Not until 5 August, after the war broke out, was the army's plan to send the British Expeditionary Force to France confirmed – and only after the navy had revealed that it could not support it if it went directly to Belgium, because it could not, if required, extract it from Antwerp.
Lambert prefers not to address the actual commitments of the navy, preferring instead to blame the problems in implementing Britain's maritime strategy on the creeping continentalism of the army's general staff, which he insists was driven by its pre-war desire that Britain adopt conscription. He dismisses the Anglo-French entente of 1904, arguing that British maritime strategy depended only on the neutrality of the Low Countries and therefore did not require a commitment to France. For all this, the Anglo-French staff talks, which were never formalised, unlike the naval agreement, provide the evidence (interpreted largely through J. E. Tyler's The British Army and the Continent 1904–1914 (1938), and not John Gooch's The Plans of War: The General Staff and British Military Strategy c.1900–1916 (1974) or Samuel R. Williamson's The Politics of Grand Strategy (1968)). Three points are left out of this account. First, the Entente of 1904 was in the first instance driven by the needs of imperial security, as Corbett himself recognised when he visited Quebec in 1909. Secondly, the general staff prepared plans for imperial defence as well as for European warfare. Thirdly, attempts by some soldiers (most obviously Henry Wilson as Director of Military Operations after 1910) to prioritise continental warfare over other commitments were continuously challenged from within the army itself. In 1909, Field Service Regulations: Part I (Operations) specifically rejected the assumption proposed by Douglas Haig (who, incidentally, distrusted Wilson) that they should be predicated solely on the contingency of European war. They included chapters on movements by land and sea, and warfare against ‘an uncivilized enemy’, supplementing them with an appendix on ‘naval terms and orders’. Pace Lambert, there was no ‘military caste’: as the Curragh mutiny showed, the army was as internally divided as the navy.
With the outbreak of war itself, Lambert's life of Corbett moves from biography to advocacy. He presents British strategy in the First World War as a choice between maritime and continental options, and between limited and unlimited war. Britain, he argues, had won this way between 1793 and 1815 when fighting France in what he calls (anachronistically) a total war, and it could and should have done the same again in 1914–1918. By 1914, however, Britain's imperial defence – on which Corbett was focused – and Europe's balance of power could not be so easily separated. Those Liberal statesmen whom Lambert lambasts for failing to stick exclusively to the maritime model recognised this truth. Grey was pre-eminent among them, but crucially so was David Lloyd George. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and former First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, opposed conscription in order to conserve manpower for war production and to balance British trade, but Lloyd George, when he became prime minister in December 1916, knew that the debate between a maritime and economic option and a continental and military one was a false dichotomy. By then Britain had introduced conscription, not just to meet military needs, but because the public now demanded equality of sacrifice. It was also a response to the requirement for a rational allocation of manpower: by 1918 the top priority for national service was shipbuilding. The army peaked in size in 1917 and from that year the maritime war was fought with renewed ferocity. The United States’ entry ended the debate on neutral rights, so tightening the blockade. American warships helped protect the sea lines of communication against U-boats long before American soldiers arrived in France. In short, Britain embraced both continental and maritime strategies, and it did so because it had little choice. Even Corbett's ally at the heart of government, Maurice Hankey, although convinced that maritime strength would win the war in the end, knew that Britain might lose it in the short term if it did not also fight on land in support of its allies.
There is, therefore, an unexpressed tragedy at the heart of Lambert's book. Corbett's influence depended on his relationship with Jackie Fisher as First Sea Lord, but Fisher himself undermined the maritime strategy which Corbett advocated. Despite Corbett's wishes, he stoked the factionalism which divided the navy's senior ranks. Corbett realised that the navy required its own staff but Fisher was determined to thwart its creation. Both before the war and, more importantly during it, Fisher refused to be sufficiently explicit about the Baltic plan which Lambert argues he and Corbett saw as the best option for a British maritime strategy. Fisher defended himself by saying that he did not trust the politicians not to talk to their wives. By not engaging in ‘conference’ as Corbett urged, the navy limited its own ability to shape strategy.
Just as Corbett recognised the need to talk to statesmen, so he also acknowledged the need to talk to soldiers – including (as Lambert stresses) G.F.R Henderson, who taught the generals of the Great War at Camberley, where Corbett himself went to lecture. Fisher did not. Like Corbett, Fisher may have wanted to use the army as a projectile of the navy, but only after Fisher had left the Admiralty – and at the very last moment – did the navy begin to consider what vessels might be required for the conduct of amphibious operations. Both Lord Kitchener and Sir John French, the two most powerful army officers in August 1914, were as persuaded of the priority of army-navy cooperation and of the importance of long-term imperial security as Corbett was. If Fisher was so convinced of the rightness of what Corbett propounded, he did a bad job of selling it.
Lambert describes Corbett's final writings, the Naval Operations volumes of the official history, as the preliminary work for a new edition of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. If, as he argues, Corbett realised that strategy is contingent, not constant, the First World War left him with a lot of rethinking to do. By 1919 many of his fellow Liberal Imperialists had abandoned their faith in the British empire in favour of the United States as the main building block of a future global order. There is little sign that Corbett had done so – or that he appreciated how much maritime strategy had in fact contributed to the war's final outcome.