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Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy

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Technically flawed
bad history at its worst -- the long version
Good History at Its Best!
Faith in Capital Ships
American Faith in Capital Ships

Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy
Robert L. O'Connell
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Naval | Military | History | Subjects | Books

Book Description

From a broad, historical perspective, the dreadnought represents an archetype, and its history a kind of moral tale. Its awesome size, its formidable presence, and its immense power have gained it tremendous respect, loyalty, and, as Robert O'Connell shows in this myth-shattering book, unwarranted longevity as well. With provocative insight and wit he offers us an irreverent history of the modern battleship and its place in American history, from the sinking of the coal-fueled Maine in 1898 to the deployment of the cruise missile-armed Missouri in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The modern navies were the first of the armed services faced with fundamental and abrupt technological change. The wooden sailing ships that had fought sea battles for nearly two centuries were, in only a few years, rendered obsolete by a veritable tidal wave of innovation. With the deployment of the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought in 1903, the new technology reached its full fruition: the gigantic sleek, steel-clad, many-gunned vessel that would rule the seas (or at least the minds of Naval commanders) for years to come. O'Connell shows how other nations raced to emulate this new prototype (much in the fashion of the nuclear arms race of later decades), usually at the expense of much more effective forms of naval force. He also demonstrates compellingly the dashed expectations for the battleship occasioned by the outbreak of war in 1914. While many anticipated a massive twentieth-century Trafalgar, in actuality dreadnoughts everywhere avoided battle, and when they did fight, the results were most often inconclusive or even irrelevant. With the Battle of Jutland in 1916--the only real naval showdown of the war--the ineffectiveness of the battleship as the pre-eminent weapon of war was made abundantly clear: the German navy scored on only 120 hits out of 3,597 heavy shells fired while the British had an even more dismal showing--100 out of 4,598, or a hit ratio of 2.17%. Yet, in spite of this display of impotence, the world's great naval yards continued to turn out the huge vessels. O'Connell observes that even after the heart of the American fleet was sunk by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, the almost superstitious faith in the battleship insured its survival. While they have never played a decisive role in the outcome of any modern war, they have continued to be resurrected and refurbished--even equipped with cruise missles--right up to the present day. Sacred Vessels is more than the unmasking of a false idol of naval history. It is a cautionary tale about the often unacknowledged influence of human faith, culture, and tradition on the exceedingly important, costly, and suppossedly rational process of national defense. Not only is it a gripping tale well-told, it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the dynamics involved in the arming of nations.

Customer Reviews:

Technically flawed.......2002-05-07

On my initial reading I was fairly impressed by this book. However as I read more detailed, technical accounts of the time period O'Connell covers I began to see large holes in his theory. His biggest failing is treating the battleship's rivals (torpedeos and aircraft) as technological constants. In actuality both required extensive development before they had any chance of rivaling the battleship as potentially decisive weapons. To look at one example, O'Connell condemns the US Navy for failing to pursue the concept of a torpedo armed capital ship. He neglects to mention the fact that the torpedo of the time was short ranged and that the fear of the Navy was that a faster enemy could simply stay out of torpedo range and sink the torpedo battleship with long range gunfire. In addition, the torpedoes would have weakened the hull structure of the ship making it easier to destroy.

bad history at its worst -- the long version.......2002-03-11

This book is one of the best examples I have yet seen as to why simply reading (and citing) a lot of sources, including primary sources, is not sufficient to guarantee good analysis, for Sacred Vessels has a LOT of citations and a LOT of bad analysis. Indeed, at the conclusion of the book, I was left wondering whether the author had any understanding of the subject at all.

What could possible have led me to such an extreme conclusion? The executive summary is as follows:

1. O'Connell is sloppy. For example:
* He makes claims about battleship vulnerability vis-a-vis aircraft that extend back to the days before the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk.

* O'Connell uses "dreadnought" as a term to describe both battleships and battlecruisers. While that isn't necessarily inaccurate, there were some severe differences in design philosophy between the two, and between the British and German approach to battlecruisers as well. This doesn't stop him from lumping them together and attributing the faults of either one to the "dreadnought" as a whole.

* O'Connell gets his facts wrong. For example, he refers to four US battleship classes (North Carolina, South Dakota, Iowa and Montana) with the claim that each class was "progessively larger than the previous one." This is simply wrong and illustrates that, AT BEST, O'Connell lack of rigor in approaching the subject.

2. O'Connell engages in selective interpretation of quotes. For example, in a section arguing that Naval Academy graduates instinctively wanted bigger ships, O'Connell quotes Captain (later Chief of Naval Operations) Ernest J. King:

"...the sole disadvantage...resulting from increases of size of a battleship...is that it costs more; on the other hand, the larger ship is more powerful, has greater resisting qualities, is faster under all circumstances, and has a greater steaming radius and cruising life. As the greater cost results in better naval return for the money invested...this seeming disadvantage is not one in reality." [p. 82, ellipses in original]

O'Connell says in the very next line: "Size was a virtue in and of itself -- it connoted strength in a way nothing else could." Excuse me?! Didn't King point to several SPECIFIC reasons as to why larger battleships were better? Since these points don't support his thesis, O'Connell ignores them.

3. O'Connell engages in selective interpretation of events, and ignores counter-examples. For example, he enthusiastically discusses examples where airpower was successful against dreadnoughts, such as Pearl Harbor (a surprise attack on obsolete, stationary, undermanned ships on a peacetime holiday footing) or the earlier Mitchell tests (a test against a stationary, crewless dreadnought). He ignores the literally dozens of dive bomber and torpedo hits necessary to sink the YAMATO or the failure of air power to hold off the Japanese in the Philippines. There is no attempt to systematically analyze these examples; interpretations which support his thesis are presented, interpretations which do not are ignored or asserted to be irrelevant.

4. O'Connell's conclusions are not unique to battleships. He neglects to mention that EVERY single surface warship -- including aircraft carriers -- built in the same timeperiod suffered from the same vulnerabilities as battleships, and many (due to smaller size and lesser armor) were much more vulnerable. In fact, as historian Al Nofi commented to me when discussing this subject, "Even battleships sunk by air power took more damage, ton-per-ton, than any other type of warship. It was not the vulnerability of the battlewagon that made it obsolete, but rather the ability of the much more vulnerable aircraft carrier to deliver death and destruction at much greater distances."

5. O'Connell doesn't understand that weapons design and development is a process of measure and countermeasure. O'Connell is quick to point out instances when gunnery failed at extreme range; he ignores the fact that gunnery and fire control did improve significantly, and as a result what was considered extreme range constantly expanded.

6. O'Connell's "what-if" scenarios are one-sided. O'Connell is quick to point out the successes of the German U-boat fleet in the two world wars, but neglects that the U-boats had been largely swept from the seas by the end of each conflict. O'Connell's assertion that the Kaiser could have starved Britain by starting unrestricted submarine warfare six months earlier than he did, while probably true, is irrelevant; it is equally valid to say that if Britain and/or the US had spent the time, effort, and resources on ASW that the topic warranted -- instead of handing the Germans the initiative -- the German U-boats wouldn't have been as serious a threat as they were. (Or, as Al Nofi pointed out to me, "The Germans could have started unrestricted submarine warfare earlier in WW1 than was the case, but they didn't have that many subs, and it only would have sparked the more rapid development of ASW.")

7. O'Connell doesn't understand the strategic picture. He contends, for example, that the relative inactivity of the British battlefleet during World War I was a signal of its strategic irrelevance. This begs the question of what the Germans would have done if the Royal Navy had NOT had a commanding superiority in dreadnoughts. I would suggest that under those conditions the High Seas Fleet would have been very active; with a sufficiently great inferiority, Britain might have lost the war in 1914. O'Connell doesn't seem to understand that the fleet was a counter to a specific threat; that the threat never manifested itself is an indication that the policy *worked*, not that the threat didn't exist. Based on O'Connell's reasoning, the US should have simply decommissioned its strategic nuclear forces by the mid-1970s; after all, we never used them, so they must have been worthless, right?

This book is a cautionary tale, alright -- it's a shining example of how NOT to study history.

Good History at Its Best!.......2001-02-12

Few images are as evocative of the "romance" of naval warfare as that of the wooden, square-rigged, line-of-battle ship. Combining soul-stirring beauty with a underlying sense of power, these ponderous vessels dominated maritime strategy and professional thinking for more than two hundred years. Generations of sea-going officers passed from callow youth to old age on their rolling decks, and it is not therefore surprising that the tradition of "fighting sail" became the dogma that was most deeply entrenched in naval sociologic values. When the metal, steam-powered, heavily-gunned battleship of the late 1800's finally replaced the obsolete wooden man-of-war, the naval officer corps transferred to the former the emotional attachment and affection previously invested in the latter. And the modern battleship (particularly the massive, all-big-gun Dreadnought's that began coming down the slipways in the early 1900's) was a worthy successor: while lacking the innate charm of the earlier ships, they conveyed by their size, speed, and massive armament a manifestly obvious power that was commensurate with the self-perceived seriousnous and importance of those that sailed in them. Just as the naval community was loathe at one time to accept the demise of sail-power, it too was subsequently extremely reluctant to see technological change overtake the battlewagons from which so much of their self-image was derived. Consequently, such ships continued to be built at great national expense long after submarines and aircraft (both land- and carrier-based) had displaced them as the prime agents of naval warfare.

Robert L. O'Connell ducuments the above with great skill and insight. He writes from the self-admitted perspective of one who has always been fascinated with modern battleships. His ambivalence is all the more telling since he effectively shows how tradition, ingrained and self-serving sociologic factors, and other human elements combine to cloud professional judgement and stiffle technological innovation. It is not just lack of imagination, or bureaucratic inertia, or maladroit management that results in navies preparing inappropriately for the last-- and not the next--war; it is also the near religious, personal attachment to a particularly beloved weapon that is sometimes even more important. As a paradigm for (to use an overworked expression) present day selection of weapon systems, this represents and important and cautionary tale.

Faith in Capital Ships.......2000-04-09

Deserving five stars for courage, this book presents the heretical fact about battleships: their only successful mission was to enrich their makers. Although the author avoids stating the obvious about big aircraft carriers as well, this book should be read, along with Ritchie's CAPTAIN KIDD and Hagan's THIS PEOPLE'S NAVY, by every American taxpayer who is curious about our trillion-dollar "defense" industry.

American Faith in Capital Ships.......2000-03-30

Sure to enrage most Naval Academy graduates, all participants in our vastly profitable Big Navy military-industrial complex, and otherwise well meaning citizens sold on its pervasive propaganda [see the accompanying review.] This book presents the heretical facts that the only mission of great big ships is to enrich their makers. For every American who is interested in the realities of our "national defense" budget, it belongs on the select shelf with Hagan's THIS PEOPLE'S NAVY' and Ritchie's CAPTAIN KIDD'. Thanks to amazon for making it available to us.

Sacred Vessel of the Mysteries: The Great Invocation, Word of Power, Gift of Love

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Sacred Vessel of the Mysteries: The Great Invocation, Word of Power, Gift of Love
John Berges
Manufacturer: Planetwork Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

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The Sacred Vessel
Mona Rolfe
Manufacturer: The C.W. Daniel Company Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 0854353240
Release Date: 2004-12-03

Book Description

Answers with deep understanding questions of crucial importance to man's comprehension of his place on earth.

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Sacred Vessels
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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