In january, 1991, he reported to the vikings. He was deployed around the world, overseeing training and combat ready status of reserve aircrew. He also took part in the. Peration deliberate force he also deployed to the arabian of and gulf in support Operation Iraqi freedom and enduring freedom. 2008, he was selected to into the Permanent MilitaryProfessor Program and is currently the associate chair of the history the department of history at the u. S. Naval academy. He earned his phd from the university of maryland at college park. Please join me in welcoming professor rentfrow. [applause] professor rentfrow great. Things very much, ruth. Can everybody hear me . Am i on . Great. Tfrow. Ren more funises to be than convincing a class of sleepy midshipman that the rise of nationalism in the 20th century is important. About forward to talking one of my favorite subjects, which is naval history. The lawyers tell me that i must point out that i am i in fact on leave and i am civilian i am in civilian clothes and my views do not represent the views of the government, the navy, anyone else he would like to associate me with. What i thought we would do this evening, i see three parts to the talk i would like to give. I think it is important to spend some time talking about how a modern fleet developed as opposed to squadrons or teams. Ual we will talk a little bit about examples of fleet warfare, something new at the turn of the 20 century and then we will turn our attention to the United States navy itself after the spanishamerican war until the First World War. What was the geopolitical situation . The great white fleet. Theres lots and lots to talk about, and finally, the First World War itself, where we will find most of the important things we had to do dealt with convoy escort and also integrating battleships. I will tell you, it is a shame en only getdshipm about a day on the First World War. When we are moving them through the American Naval history class, we are moving at such a clip and have so many important things to talk about, and of course i have to get to midway and iwo jima and vietnam and some of these things are it so, frankly the First World War for the americans does not have any good sea battles, does not have any memorable catchphrases, things like that, so we tend to run through it quickly with them, but it is a very rich history and theres a lot there and a lot of things that can help us understand the development of the u. S. Navy as a modern war fighting organization. A little bit about me. As ruth said, i graduated from in 1989. Academy you would be surprised how often i get asked i did not realize you could go to the Naval Academy and become a college professor. The answer to that is, no, you cant. The first 18 years of my career, i was a fairly normal aviator kind of guy. Right about now, my classmates are commending aircraft carriers. That is where the class of 1989 is in our development and i then have been more happy to do that, but the navy had other ideas. So i got sent off to school to give lectures instead. As ruth said, i graduated in 2012 got assigned to the Naval Academy as a permanent professor. Once we stopped moving, and my family moved 11 times while i was an operational officer. My girls. Normal people moved every cheat years. My wife said my girls thought that normal people moved every two years. My wife said we should get more involved in the community. I thought she meant volunteer at a soup kitchen. No, she met the come Foster Parent spirit which we did. If you want to smithsonian lecture on the Opioid Crisis in anne arundel county, i can give that one, to you will, but i like to tell people that we are the worlds worst Foster Parents. The idea is to love them and let them go. We love them and adopt them. Which is not a sustainable model. [laughter] we have a few more kids. It either keeps me young or will put me in an early grave. I do have a fiveyearold editor 22yearold. In the middle of all that, i wrote a book. Do have a fiveyearold and a 22yearold. The subject of the book is the development of fleet tactics and organization and strategy in the period between the civil war and the spanishamerican war. How do we go to having ships that fought in the spanishamerican war and specifically, how did those guys learn to fight together as a squadron rather than just, single ship action question mark a couple of shifts . My interestreally in the area of naval history. I sort of hope that the next project is going to sound a little bit like the specter we have tonight. Continues. We go from having a squadron which is what my book is about to building a fleets. How do we have a fleet organization, fleet tactics . That sort of thing. That is the question for us. How does the relative limited Regional Navy become a worldclass navy capable of Great Britains grand fleet in less than 20 years . Lets talk about tactics and materiel first. Heres a nice picture of not be great white fleet, but our very first steel ships, the socalled abcd ships. Which were in interesting collection. You can see if you look at these guys they have a full sail rig. These are not emergency sales like you can deploy the sales if we need to. They are an actual sail rig. But they had premodern engines. They had fairly modern freefloating rifle weapons, but they were slow and they were not armored. So, they were not really designed to fight other ships. What they were really designed to do was go out and pray on Merchant Shipping and that sort of thing. However, they were too slow to be good cruisers. What we did with these ships is we form some think of the squadron of evolution and we drove them around together and this is the first time the u. S. Navy this is an 1889, the this is in 1889, this is the first time the u. S. Navy worked on how to we fight together as a squadron . Opposed to single ships. This is one of the reasons i find this time fascinating. Things are changing very, very quickly. Combat in the age of sail largely involved being at either pointblank range, or at the very most, perhaps at 300 yards. Contrary to what you might see in the movies, wooden ships dont really sink your it being, you know, made of wood. Era navalf premodern warfare was to disable the other ship, which they would do very effectively by shooting at the rigging and kill everybody you could on the decks, right question mark so you could board them, kill everybody else, and capture the ship. Sinking the ship was not really what these folks were out to do and thats not really what the weapons were designed for. Now, occasionally, you get a spark down into a powder magazine or something, and the ship might blow up. The generally, you captured these things. Industrialization is going to change that. Couple things are going to happen simultaneously. The first two here are the ones that are important. Rifling, of course extends the range. Now instead of 200, 300 yards, we could be talking three miles, 3000 yards. And the guns are going to start to get larger. And at the same time, we are. Oing to develop armor not only are we moving further away from our targets, but our targets are armored, so therefore, we better have a bigger gun, because we are trying to penetrate this armor, but we can get further away from it. You see how this gets into a dual very quickly, right . We have a problem in the late 19th century. I will talk about this when i talk briefly about the lessons from the spanishamerican war. The defense has the advantage. Weve got the ships. Theyve got armor on them. Our guns really are not good enough to hit the armor very accurately because we have not developed fire control yet. That is going to come later. The 20thrning point of century you still left folks looking down the gun barrel saying, we will shoot over there. And the hit rate is abysmal, something on the order of 3 of shipsells fired hit other. Until we have better fire control computers, as we roll into the 19th century, we have to come up with some other form of ships. Some bright individual thought, what if we put a hole where there isnt any armor . Underneath the ship. Of course, im talking about a torpedo. , perfectedad torpedo in the 1860s, the navy glamis on to that same design, and sounds the naval torpedo station in newport in 1869, and we begin to experiment with these things. That navy gloms on to same design. What if a little boat built very, very cheaply with a couple of torpedoes on it, because quite frankly, they will not cost that much to build, what if multimillion dollar warship with a couple torpedoes . This is the kind of stuff that kept planners up late at night. This means all sorts of things for tactics. We have decided we need to flight as a fight as a fleet or a squadron. Everybody is being together and we need to concentrate our firepower. That is important. That is how we prevail at sea. If someone shoots a torpedo spread at this closely concentrated formation, that causes problems. You need to be able to send signals to communicate to say, hey, we all need to turn left now or turn right now or do something to get away from these torpedoes. When i talk about the battle of jutland in a few slides, you will see how this becomes important. It does one other thing. Notbig battleships could really participate they have these egg guns firing at ranges of three miles. Underneath the fire of the big guns. What you going to do . Well, the answer would be you send out a torpedo boat and destroyer. Then, of course, eventually, we quit calling them torpedo. Oat destroyers eventually they will get a very Important Mission and that is a big part of our story this evening. The navy purchased its First Submarine in 1900. We thought that submarines would be useful for harbor defense. They were really seaworthy. The idea was you could park a couple of these outside of our someonet harbors and if tried to shell these harbors, they could start lobbing torpedoes into them and that would be an effective way to defend the harbors. He is riding about how we need to have a big fleet, he needs to because and traded together writing about how need of a big and boy, the submarine just sort of passed him. He was very down on commerce raiding. Thisurse, he experienced in the civil war. It did not work in the civil war. The submarine is going to change the game there for sure. Back to our great big rifle guns that cant hit anything. What are we going to do about that . Here is a guy named william s. Sims. I dont have a picture of him as a lieutenant. At this point in our lecture, he is a lieutenant. He has his admiral stars. We will see him later. But right now, he is over in the asiatic squadron in the far east, and he is hobnobbing with all of the british officers in officersast as naval were want to do. And they would talk about fire control methods. In particular, there was the naval officers got, officer scott. And he had developed something called continuous aim firing. I dont want to bore you with. He details it would involve positioning the gun and yanking on the lanyard, which is what Naval Warfare would look like in the 1700s and 1800s and that was essentially what we were still doing. Point the gun where you want it to go. The gun operators were pointing a gun. The british operators were using it with some success. Sims took this back to the United States navy and said, weve been talking to these guys out in the far east and we think that you ought to give this a shot. With my colleagues aversion to any change, they said, no, thanks. We will pass on that. This is an interesting story because this could never happen now, but 1902, you could get away with a sort of thing. Sims wrote Theodore Roosevelt and said, hey, mr. President. Mr. President , i know how much you love the navy, and i have this great idea for how we could be more combat effective. The folks in washington are not listening to it. So Theodore Roosevelt promptly made him director of target practice for the United States navy and within three years the navy had instituted this system of continuous aim firing all through the fleet with good results. And he held that post for seven years. Inspector of target practice. All right, so all of this means what. Flotilla tactics. Your fleet is not only going to have a line of dreadnoughts or big battleships we will talk about what a dreadnought is. There will be a line of destroyers trying to protect you from the enemys destroyers. Have three or four you getor 10 how do a hold of all of these things. This is really the question as we roll into the 20th century. I think this is a subject that has not been written enough about. How did these guys work these things out . One of the things i know that they did was use destroyers up in narragansett bay to practice fleet tactics during the turn of the century. I will come back to the story later. Only think about the Naval War College, we always think of them in terms of studying strategy ideas about seapower and naval lewis, thed stephen admiral who founded the Naval War College always envisioned college to be a laboratory of practice. You would be thinking about this strategy, but also figuring out ways to enact it, right . They really were at the turn of the century in they were working on this stuff. Which brings us to the japanese. My be saying to yourself, the japanese . I thought this was about the United States navy in the First World War. Yeah, but if we are going to learn lessons about how fleets fight, we need to look at these early actions. There were a couple battles between modern battleships. Tsushima is the first major fleet battle between predraw ships anddreadnought it helps us understand what is going on as we rolled toward the First World War. Out of all of the stuff ive been talking about for the last were nots, planners really certain what a battle between armored ships was going to look like. They did not have many examples. Of course, everybody has heard of the monitor and the merrimack, right . That,ssons learned from the cannon balls bounced off each others armor. A draw. Le was they did not learn much from it. Maybe a torpedo was the answer. Maybe ramming the other ships. And ramming the other ships, maybe that might be the answer. That, incidentally, is why if if yout pictures look at what a modern ships all , the warships from this area is kind of backwards. The idea was you had a bunch of holes with this thing. That brings us to the battle of tsushima. In case you are not familiar with the story and i do not want to spend a lot of time here here is my laser pointer this is the russo japanese war, fighting5, a lot of taking place. In manchuria, a lot taking place. Things are not going well for the russians. The decision is made that the theirns need to reinforce positions and the idea is to fleet over toc meet them. So the admiral is told to take his baltic fleet and join it and bloody bus stop. Did not give them permission to sail through the suez canal. That meant they had to go the around africa. The russians are in poor materiel condition. Of course, the men have been at for months. Anyone in the navy will tell you if you are trying to make good , you have time to train. All you are doing is sailing at full speed. I cant tell you how many times the commander has gripes about sailing into the wind and they leave the room and leave us officers to fight it out. But all right what was i talking about . Into frenchto indochina. Vladivostok. Ed for it is a peer. He has two choices. He can go around the japanese islands or take the streak root through the straight route through tsushima. Going to meet the japanese anyway. He heads for the straits of tsushima. He is met their by admiral togo. Togo. Emperore confused by tojo. They still get it wrong on tests. Go have a lot of advantages, write . Number one, he had not been at sea for seven months. His base was right here. All he had to do with zip and was sick and crossed the tea or cut off the advancing columns of the russian fleet and as a matter of fact, that is precisely what he does. This is important. He lies is the superior speed of the japanese ships to put himself in a position where he is ahead of the columns. Annihilate is not the right word. But he destroys several of their ships. Incidentally, tsushima, the last time a capital warship has surrendered on the high seas. In general, they sink or are abandoned. He cuts off the advance and effectively decimates the russian fleet. Spent enoughly time on the battle portion of this. Naval tacticians learned three things. Big guns to work if they are shot directly. We will talk more about that in a minute. But the decisive weapon and planners were not sure if the ramming would be the decisive weapon or torpedoes. There were several torpedoes fired during tsushima. Or maybe something else. What was the decisive weapon . Gunsushima, definitely big are the decisive weapon. Speed is a big deal. Togo wins because of speed. Ahead of themself russian advance. And guys were practicing working on wedge shaped formation and all kinds of echelon formations, all kinds of wacky things, trying to figure out how to best use the guns. The good oldfashioned line ahead formation, the same thing that nelson used is the thing that works really well. I make my students learn about tsushima, because these are the big lessons of 1905 we carry forward. A ship gave its name to an entire type of battleships and that is the hms dreadnought. She was ordered, built, launched, and commissioned in 14 months. Its interesting. We will have another picture in a minute. She was ordered earlier because they were all getting the idea at the same time, right . The british decided they wanted this was to the royal navys detriment. The launch of the dreadnought in 1906 made all of the other ships in the grand fleet obsolete that same day. So, they were victims of their own success in that they have to turn around and start a very Ambitious Program very quickly. They talk about why do we call this class of ship dreadnoughts, right . Warshipso are building , they are sort of the big trifecta. There is armor, speed, and big guns to read in