School of War - Ep 96: Vincent O’Hara and Trent Hone on Naval Combat at Night

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Vincent O’Hara and Trent Hone, naval historians and co-editors of Fighting in the Dark: Naval Combat at Night, 1904-1944, join the show to talk about how naval warfare was transformed by technology that made possible night combat at sea. ▪️ Times      •    02:01 Introduction      •    03:35 Night combat pre-19th century     •    06:02 Why do we fight at night?     •    09:30 Getting close in     •   13:47 Different approaches      •    19:28 German naval thinking pre-WWI     •    22:05 Jutland and after     •    27:09 Theory vs. experience      •   32:04 Japanese success at night     •    37:59 The Italian navy     •    40:52 Long range torpedoes     •   45:27 Changes in command expectations     •    49:44 Dealing with technological changes today     •    52:36 Is the U.S. Navy the “best”? Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today, we are going to return to regularly scheduled programming here on School of War, even though the war in the Middle East very much continues. We did the same thing following the onset of hostilities in Ukraine in the winter of 2022, and as we have with Ukraine, we'll return to the war in Israel from time to time, especially as major developments occur. As ever, we are less interested in current events. You've got lots of ways to get the news out there, as we are in discussions that help us understand what war is and how war works,

at every level, from the tactical up to the political, generally using history, though sometimes the headlines, as our guide. Today, we've got a discussion recorded before the start of hostilities in the Middle East on the development of night naval warfare, really a story of military organizations struggling to get innovation right. Let's go. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who not see these buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thank you for joining School of War. delighted to be joined today by Vincent O'Hara and Trent Hone. They are naval historians. Vince is the author most recently of Innovating Victory, Naval Technology in Three Wars. Trent is the author most recently of mastering the Art of Command, Admiral Chester, W. Nimitz, and Victory in the Pacific. They are both the co-editors of a volume that we'll be discussing today, Fighting in the Dark, Naval Combat at Night, 1904 to 1944. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the show.

Our pleasure. Thank you for asking us to be here. Yeah, thank you for having us. So I want to start really big picture here and sort of start before 1904, if you like. Because what you gentlemen are doing to this volume that you've edited, and I have to say, it was genuinely fascinating.

And for the purposes of School of War, for the show, this actually occurs to me, the first episode we are recording that deals with naval combat. We've dealt with strategy in a naval context, context, you know, Mahan, things like that. But this is the first time we're really talking about fighting at sea. And it's in a way, an unusual way to get into it because we're going to zoom into this particular question of fighting at night and technological change in a particular

period. But I think your book does a really interesting job of using this question of night combat at sea as a way of illustrating all of the broad and important trends of the evolution of combat at sea in the first part of the 20th century, and it obviously has in at least a thematic way, applicability to today. So my first question for both of you is, if we go back before the period that night combat was common or even more common than not in naval warfare,

characterize, if you will, what it meant to fight at sea prior to the age of technological revolution that you're really focused on in this book. What did it mean to have, you know, big fleets and battleships and how do people think about war at sea and then how do things start to change in the 19th century? Okay. Can I start with that, Trent? I think the one word characterization for how night combat played out at sea before some of the technological innovations we discussed is confusion. And if there was a battle at sea, odds are it was accidental.

So you have something that's happening without plan by accident. and you can see that it's a very, very, very problematic event. I think what's important about our book, what's interesting about our book, is that we demonstrate how something which was unwanted became something desired because we talk about combat as being a tactical event, but actually combat drives strategy very often.

And I think one of the things this book shows is how that combat changed naval strategy and brought a whole new area of concern to navies and a very important play. So confusion is my one word answer. Trent, do you want to expand? Yeah, that's a good summary, Vince. We try to touch on this in the introduction

and explain, as Vince just did, that it was undesirable or happenstance. I mean, obviously, there are certain circumstances where it makes sense, and we can see examples of fire ships and other things being used in the age of sail to try to gain certain advantages at night. But it's just so difficult to,

bring any level of cohesion because the darkness adds an extra dimension onto what is already a very challenging environment to cooperate across ships, particularly if there's a substantial number of them trying to operate in a formation. And so what I think is really interesting about the book, as you alluded to, Aaron, as we talk about the introduction of these technologies and how the circumstances change and how night combat can move from something that is, sort of foreign and undesirable to something that becomes, at least for certain navies, advantageous. So you cite this statistic in the book, and I'll sort of fudge the numbers here a bit,

but something like 10% of naval warfare for the Royal Navy in the 18th century occurs at night, and then something like 80% of warfare for the United States Navy World War II in the Pacific occurs at night. And that sort of really throws into sharp relief your point. that we are going from something that is accidental to something that is desirable. Broadly speaking, why does that happen? Why do we start to fight at night? Okay, I'll give a couple one-word answers, and I'll let Trent expand upon that. I think the first reason is intention. You have to have the intention to do something before it can happen.

And in order to have the intention, you have to have the need. So I think the perceived need is one thing which really drove the spread of night combat. Take an easy example like the Italians. The Italians did not want to fight at night, so they did not develop the tools or the techniques of the doctrine in order to do it. Other nations like Britain and Japan, which saw that was new technology like searchlights,

they might have an advantage fighting at night. They cultivated that capability and ended up on the plus side of the equation when it came to actually night combat. You know, I think, we're, to be precise, we're talking about like surface naval actions. I'm sure a lot of listeners will think what 80% U.S. Navy actions and they're thinking of like big things, like Midway, Coral Sea, Philippine Sea, you know, those aren't night actions, but we're talking about surface combat.

And Vince is right. There are a number of different things that drive it. I think the technology is very important, but it also folds into strategy or at least conceptually, you know, how to be most effective with naval forces. Certainly in the Imperial Japanese Navy, you know, they are seeking night combat. They're honing their skills in that regard, and they think it is a way to offset numerical and productive advantages that their main opponent, the United States, is expected to have in a war. So they're preparing for it. The British Royal Navy is thinking a little similarly in that, hey, you know, we, the experience in Jutland in World War I, they did not, in their assessment after the fact, do as well as they might have at night. They sort of issued the idea of

fighting at night. So, well, let's take that what was a disadvantage. Let's turn that into a potential advantage, especially if we are going to be forced to have a Navy of relatively limited size due to the arms limitation treaties that are in force in the war period and yet have to fight potentially in multiple environments, you know, the North Sea against the resurgent Germany, the Mediterranean against Italy, and in the Pacific, or at least the Indo-Pacific region, potentially an empire of Japan. So here's a way based on the distribution that we're going to have to have of our naval forces

to offset some of the numerical disadvantages that we may that we might face. The other big factor, of course, is airplanes. As some of these nations get very effective, and as the range and striking power of airplanes increases, surface action becomes something that becomes more common at night because you can hide from the airplanes, or at least not endure a strike of the same

kind of size and intensity, at least, you know, in the 1940s during World War II when a lot of these actions are fought. So it seems like the increasing frequency of naval combat at night has to do with this intersection of countries that are seeking for asymmetric an asymmetric advantage, like France or Germany with respect to Britain or Japan with respect to, you know, Russia at first, you know, the United States in the longer run. what are the technologies that start to make this possible? You folks talk about torpedoes at some length in the book.

I mean, obviously people were looking for asymmetric advantage long before this kind of thing, this fighting at night was feasible. What are the things that actually start to make it feasible? Yeah, torpedoes are one of the most important examples, but especially early in the 20th century, torpedoes are relatively slow and relatively short-range, so you have to get close. And so that drives a preference for night attack because a lot of the platforms that are carrying torpedoes are these torpedo boats or these early destroyers that are small. And so they're very vulnerable. And if you can get close because you're under the cover of darkness with a platform like that, then you gain a greater chance of scoring a hit with these early torpedoes.

So it drives that kind of tactic. That's very important. Radio is also extremely important because now we have a means to begin to coordinate that doesn't rely on line of sight or visualizing. So signal flies aren't very visible at night. Some of the Navy's experiment with lights for signaling, sort of hanging off the back of a ship in the lead, but they're not very reliable and they work at very short ranges.

So radio is an enabler of this kind of approach. And then what it builds to, radar later in the 20th century is also instrumental to making this effective. Tret, you're forgetting the most important thing. Searchlights. I was going to get there? I just thought I'd go from radio to radio to radar because they operate on similar technologies. But yes, searchlights are extremely important as well. because then if you are one of these potential targets of an approaching torpedo boat,

you can illuminate the torpedo boat with searchlights, or you can eliminate an enemy battleship with searchlights. It's a progress because we start by saying that at night, you're deaf, dumb, and blind. You can't see what's happening. You know, your audio range is very limited. And you have to hail people through a loudspeaker, through a horn. And so first of all, it's the ability to communicate at night.

And radio is very important in that, and that first comes in the Russia-Japanese War. But I think people are most secure in seeing. That's our primary sense. And I think the fact that searchlights, when they were first developed, were considered to be revolutionary. This was like electromagnetic technology that first hit before radio, before radar, before any of that, even before torpedoes, really. And so that gave you a way to aim your guns.

It seems obvious to us today that if you turn on your light, you know, people are going to see them. I see all these cop shows with the police holding their guns out and your flashlights right next to them. I think, wow, these guys are dead. And that's what happened with searchlights. You turn on your searchlights, you're a target. But people didn't realize that at first.

You need experience in order to know that. So you said earlier in our conversation that there's a way in which tactics can drive strategy. Obviously, strategy can have an effect on tactics and there's this kind of interplay between the two. And a theme in your book is the way in which night warfare broadly, but the sort of whole evolution of technology and tactics that are part of that drives naval warfare in the direction of lighter forces being used towards decisive ends. I think I'm phrasing that in a way that's defensible, though you gentlemen are the expert. And I am I am an infantryman by background and trade.

So this is all fairly alien to me. Though I do know to turn off my flashlight, that much we did cover. So just talk about that, and you have a sort of fascinating riff early in the book about Mahan and his embrace of decisive battle as a centerpiece of the way he thought about naval combat and Corbett's modifications to that, and the Junichols sort of take on asymmetry. There's a lot here, but what I'm trying to get at is how does the evolution of this technology pull naval warfare into the direction of, you know, for example, the destroyer, which I did not know. This was new for me in the book because I know very little about surface combat, that the destroyer

is actually something that comes out of this whole technological process. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we tried to do with that introduction, talking about Mahan, Corbett, the Junicol, which is sort of a French theory of how best to deal with the British who have a much larger and more dominant Navy through commerce destruction is to begin to put the naval theories of these different nations into context. And so look at the tactics or strategy or force structure as emerging from the context of each of these different nations, position them appropriately. This is something that Vince has been very good at throughout his career as a naval historian,

is trying to position the work of different navies, not just in their historical context, but also in the context of the nation that they're emerging from. And what we're trying to do without to say, you know, there's no one type. There's no one size of it's all here in terms of what is the approach to naval combat and what is best. It is contextually dependent.

Now, getting to some of the evolution of these technologies and these tactics and so on, I alluded to torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers, which is what they were originally called, later shortened to destroyers, earlier on, right? They are a vehicle for this new weapon system, the torpedo, which, again, has short range, isn't very fast, at least at first. But, you know, a torpedo boat can be really small. It can be relatively inexpensive. It is not too dissimilar, if we think about analogies to, you know, the UABs. Or anyway, the unmanned boats that the Ukrainians are using in their fight against the Russians. If you can't afford it, if you can't afford an F-35, then buy a drone.

Yeah, in effect, they're small, they're relatively disposable, they're quick to build. And now a torpedo is technologically sophisticated. The torpedo boats were technologically sophisticated as well. So there's skill that goes into producing them and to crewing them. But they're a way to counter some of these larger fleets. and that's some of the French perspective. It's like, oh, we expect the British to blockade our ports. If we have a fleet of torpedo boats that they don't have to be very large,

they just have to be able to reach this close blockade that the British are expected to impose upon us, damage enough of their battleships to force them to retreat, then we can take to sea with a fleet of relatively independent commerce-rating ships, large armored cruisers with range that can prowl the sea lanes, destroy British shipping, and try to provoke this panic among British commerce. So not necessarily destroy all the British commerce to starve England, but enough of it to cause a financial panic, disrupt their system, and force them to think about coming to terms, forcing a peace that would be acceptable to us as France. If I can expand upon that just a little bit, I think what's really interesting to me, at least, in the process of putting this book together and research in the various aspects is that every Navy, every nation had its own unique set of needs, its own requirements, but also its own limitations.

A country like Italy, for example, or France, even for that matter, cannot afford to take the German route of trying to outdo the Royal Navy by building battleships of the Ying Yang. They have to come up with some sort of different method for achieving, if not naval superiority, at least naval viability. They have to be able to dispute the seas if nothing else. And so every nation brings something different to that equation. That's one of the reasons why we didn't focus on the Japanese, for example, or on the British, but we tried to include people like the Russians, the Italians, and we tried to cover the spectrum of naval warfare throughout the first half of the 20th century. in order to highlight the different ways that nations respond to these problems and different problems that they have.

You know, one size like Trent says does not fit all. And for me, that's the true fascination in something like this. We're trying to deal with threats these days. The Iranians have much different skill set and capabilities than the Chinese do. But they're both threats at sea. And we have to deal with the different natures of those threats in order to be effective at sea. And I think this is like a hotbed that early 20th century was just a breeding ground of ideas, of technologies, of methodologies.

It's really not all that well understood or even examined. And I think highlighting little dark corners of naval history like surface combat at night, which to an infantry guy like he was pretty alien, I imagine, really brings out some interesting possibilities, at least discussion points. Yeah, it was a decided shortage of discussion of crayons in the book for my usual tastes. But I did manage to take some things away from it. Purple is the color. Yeah.

So, well, on this theme of different approaches, so this question will skip over the Russo-Japanese War, which I want to come back to. But just skipping from French thinking about how to one-day fight Great Britain to the German reality of it in the First World War, Germans are also anticipating a blockade, right? But how does their thinking, because they're the ones who actually end up having to test themselves against the Brits, how does their thinking in preparation differ from French thinking? And then how does it, in broad terms, how does it actually go? How do the French differ from the Germans? Let's think about that one. Well, the Germans are also wedded to this idea that the British are going to impose a close blockade. This is, this, there were legal reasons for this. you know, a distant block, there was some question as to whether a distant blockade could really be a blockade could be enforceable prior to World War I. And so a lot of the German planning is based around that idea that the British fleet will come in relatively close. That will give us an opportunity to sort you

forth. We will seek battle. And, you know, part of their thinking, evidently, was that we'll produce so much of a threat. You know, we'll have a fleet sizable enough that if the British have to fight us in this way, they will be so crippled that they won't, they won't go to war. It becomes a deterrent mechanism, you know, the risk fleet, so-called that they strove to use. And destroyers are an important part of this, but, or at least torpedo votes. They, they were fairly precise in their, in their definition of them. Often they're called destroyers in, in texts and other things. But Len Hines, who wrote that particular chapter emphasizes, you know, these are torpedo votes. These are relatively small ships. And they, they don't need.

terribly great range because again, the assumption is that the British fleet will be relatively close, and so the battle is going to be fought somewhere in the North Sea in between the coasts of Germany and England. But it doesn't work out that way because the British imposed this more distant blockade. Their logic is, well, the North Sea has become too dangerous. There are too many lethal systems that play here, torpedoes, torpedo boats, submarines, mines. And so risking the modern battleships of the Grand Fleet in those waters is something that they don't want to do, at least not on a regular basis, not without a clear sense that there's going to be some kind of profit from it, like the potential to actually defeat the Germans in a battle at sea.

And so the Germans struggle to really understand how best now, you know, they're one of the key assumptions about how to fight a naval war is invalidated from the very beginning. And then a lot of the, a lot of the war is them sort of working through and adapting to that fact and trying to figure out how to alter their, their strategy effectively. And I like the way that Lenz chapter touches on that. And so the engagements at night that happened then are, there's sort of the final phase of the Battle of Jetland, right, which carries on into the night. And then you have a lot of these sort of harassment or raiding actions in the channel. Like, how does it actually play out? Yeah, yeah. So the Germans do invest in larger and more powerful torpedo boats or torpedo

boat destroyers that are going to be able to sort you forth more effectively. There is the battle or the continuation of the battle of Jutland. The British don't acquit themselves terribly well in that they have some close-range encounters with German ships. They do manage to sink one of the old pre-dreadnought battleships of the Germans. But there is, as the fleet sort of cross paths, there was potential opportunity to at least be more aware of what the Germans were doing. And the communication and messages didn't find their way to the key decision makers within the grand fleet. So there's a missed opportunity there. And the Germans proved themselves to be fairly adept at handling their ships at night.

And they then capitalize on this. As you alluded to, they try to interdict coastal traffic. or cross-channel traffic in the channel later in the war. And there's a nice description of how they have some successes of this that to my mind really highlights some of the challenges that exist in this time frame late in World War I with making sense of what's going on in a night action. The British are often caught by surprise. They misidentified the German ships, you know,

mistake them these enemy ships for friendly ships. and sort of are hard-pressed to respond effectively to the disruption that the Germans caused and the initiative that they're able to seize because they're the ones invading sort of not exactly enemy held because it's the sea but they which feel fairly comfortable with what they've been able to establish there in the channel and so they have to be a little bit more uncertain is this ship that is approaching is that friendly or an enemy the Germans have divided their forces up in such a way that more or less consistently, if they encounter anyone, they can assume it's an enemy,

and so they can start shooting first prior to making a... That's part of the advantage that you have at fighting at night is that you can dictate the area where you're going to fight, you can dictate the forces involved, you can dictate the time involved, you can dictate all the variables or most of the variables, and hopefully by being in control of the variables, you can achieve a better outcome.

And I think the Germans were experimenting in different ways of doing that. I mean, if you look at World War I, in the first half of the war, most of the night encounters were accidental. There were two groups of ships blundering into each other, and suddenly you have explosions of light

and detonations and this, that, and the other, and then it's all over, and what happened, who knows? And so the Germans were trying to put some sort of Teutonic method of control into the situation by some of these attacks that Trent was talking about, you're penetrating a line of British patrol ships and buoys

and going through and shooting up merchantmen. But, you know, when you look at it, ultimately, all this stuff really didn't have that much of an impact on the naval war. It was kind of like, we have these navies, we have to use them. You know, what are we going to do? Oh, let's raid the British mine barriers. You know, maybe that can help some suburbies. Marines get through, maybe not. But it's more of a question of, none of this is a war-winning

stuff, is what I'm trying to say. Well, there's a, there's a theme that you, you touch on in the book, or that numerous authors in the book and your introductory material touches on, which is this, the way in which as the pace of innovation picks up, you have officers having to rely on theory as opposed to experience. You find yourself in these situations where there's some new technology, say torpedo and torpedo votes, for example. And it's so exciting. And so interesting and so so potentially game changing that the theory of the case becomes, well, it will be game changing. Like this is going to change the face of naval, you know, of surface combat forever. We're going to sneak up in these guys at night or sink them and, you know, game over.

And of course, the reality, and we can talk about this with respect to World War I or we can go back to the Russo-Japanese board, the reality is much messier and more complicated in the pace of actual change and actual impact on the problem is slow. So if you talk a bit about that phenomenon and how it plays out. And then this is one of the things in your book that seems to me to be obviously relevant to the present day. We are still in a period of rapid technological change. We have new technologies that are being used here and there. You know, we talk about, you know, using drones in a variety of creative respects in Ukraine

or before that in, you know, Azerbaijan and Armenia. So we're seeing stuff start to play out in limited scale, but we don't really know. how all these fancy new toys. You talk about the cyber realm as well are going to work in a great power encounter of some kind. So it's obviously how to think about these things is important. Help us think about it. Can I tell a little story?

Of course. The first time a torpedo was ever used in combat was in 1868 or 69. It was off the coast of Peru. You had a Peruvian worship, which was in revolt and a British warship launched a torpedo at it. And some of the officers on the British ship were against the idea because they say, oh, this is a very dreadful weapon to deploy. So they launched a torpedo, the Peruvian ship saw it,

turned around, and outran it at 10 knots. The expectations that the British had about this weapon was much different than the reality of the weapon. You don't know what's going to happen if you deploy this weapon until you deploy it in warfare. And I think the same is true with a lot of the weapons that our ships are carrying today. It was certainly true in 1904, when the Japanese and Russians went to war.

It was certainly true in 1914. And it was in 1914, they still didn't know what torpedoes were really good for. It turns out they're really good for submarines, sinking unprotected merchant ship. That's what torpedoes are good for. But nobody knew that at the time. So, yeah, it all has to do with use in warfare. That's one of the big points in the book that Len and I wrote about it. invading victory, is that until it's used in war, you really don't know what this technology,

what this weapon, what this platform is really good for and how it's going to perform. You might have a really good idea, but you have no certain knowledge. Yeah, it's the wartime feedback loop is important, and we try to talk about that in various areas throughout the book. But also there has to be, you know, the technology doesn't sit alone. So with the torpedo, you need ships that can carry it, submarines, torpedo boats, sometimes. you know, even battleships carry torpedoes. So there's that. And then there's also all the system that is around it. And in system here, I'm not just talking about like the fire control systems,

but how does that Navy that now has that piece of technology change its operations or its command structures or its tactics to integrate that technology in a way that harnesses it, but also makes that technology effective and makes the ends that they're trying to achieve easier or or allows them to accomplish those ends more effectively. So the technology has to get integrated into this broader system. And that's one of the things that I think is very interesting about this period, is you see different navies taking different approaches to create that system, that broader system that now brings, you know, the people,

their ships and their technologies together to accomplish the ends that they're set upon. And that's why the context is important because the context defines those ends. But one of my favorite examples of this kind of thing is the introduction of the combat information center. And I'm jumping ahead quite a bit, but to the U.S. chapter that I wrote, the United States enters, the United States Navy enters the World War II with radar. And a lot of people say, well, radar gives them lies at night. And it does create an ability to probe the darkness and to get a sense of what may be out there. But what the Navy learns relatively quickly within the first year of war is without some system to process the information that radar provides and makes sense of it and then provide it in an actionable format to ship or formation commander, we can't take a full advantage of it. It's just sort of happenstance.

It's not reliable. So there's a whole new system to process information that wasn't available before because radar didn't exist before that has to be created and integrated. into the command function or that take advantage of the technology. Well, let's talk about the interwar period a bit then, the introduction of radar. You're talking about the sort of the American innovations in the war, but going back, there's a fair amount of emphasis in the book about Japanese innovation between the wars. And, I mean, it's interesting. There's sort of the Japanese embrace of night warfare is a theme.

They seem to be among the navies that you're citing more forward-leaning, perhaps, than the average in this regard. I was struck by it was one detail in the description of Japanese interwar innovation that struck me as incredibly relevant, which is the way in which they're essentially licensing, which is to say ripping off Western technology and then creating it at home, which of course is happening today in the context of the U.S.-China competition. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Not just ripping it off and making it better. I mean, nobody knew about oxygen torpedoes.

The British tried to develop them, but they couldn't. The Japanese thought, oh, the British are doing this. Let's do it. They did it, so. Fair enough. And indeed, World War II kicks off in the Pacific, and the Japanese actually have tactically, at least a pretty good run at it for what, a year or so. The chapter in question makes a good case that it's not ultimately strategically successful,

but nevertheless, they are winning a lot at night. What is it that they are doing that allows them to do that? Well, I'll take that. They're doing a lot of things. I mean, one of the things that I really like is there is the Russar Japanese War chapter, But then there is also, you know, this chapter on the Japanese that deals with their inner war period and early World War II period. And there's linkages between them. So the Imperial Japanese Navy has this lineage that they can trace themselves back of these aggressive torpedo tactics that they embrace in the basically meaning, you know, get close to make sure that you can secure a hit, be relatively daring.

and they take that forward into the interwar period. Now, that mix is driven in some respects in the interwar period because there's the naval arms limitation treaties that are agreed to, the first of which, you know, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, these impose upon Imperial Japan a Navy that is smaller in size and power by what is, you know, the common measure of naval force at that period, battleships. So they have three-fifths of the size of what the British Royal Navy is allowed to have and what the United States Navy is allowed to have.

And although in a fight against the United States Navy, for example, the U.S. fleet will have to sail across the Pacific and lose some strength along the way by virtue of the calculations that the U.S. and Imperial Japanese navies were using, that the U.S. fleet would still be powerful enough to win a large, decisive clash of battle fleets. So the Japanese have to explore, well, how do we offset this? How do we offset this advantage that has been imposed by international agreement? And they look at technology and their tactics as a way to do that. And so rather than sort of allowing the U.S. fleet to sail across the Pacific and just sort of a trit itself based on maintenance difficulties or anything else, they think, well, no, we will take the fight to them. We will atrit it through a series of attacks.

And we need to look at night combat in sort of a mix as part of one of multiple facets that they were going to employ here. One would be submarines, another would be long-range land-based naval aircraft. But night combat is the one that often receives a lot of the visibility and attention. And so they explore how best to not only win a big action with very long-ranged and powerful torpedoes. This is the type 93, the famous Longlance, which has the range of battleship guns. So now in the interwar period, the Japanese are developing torpedoes, which can reach extremely far. But also to conduct increasingly sophisticated and complex night actions that would use heavy ships, sometimes even up to the converted battle cruisers, converted into fast battleships of the Congo class,

to help penetrate an enemy formation as to break up the light forces of the screen and allow destroyers led by like cruisers to penetrate that enemy formation and then attack battleships or others with torpedoes from closer range which you need to be able to fire things at relatively close range usually at night to be able to to hit it these torpedoes anyway but at that if those distances you know these japanese torpedoes are moving with such rain or such speed that they will increase their chances of a hit and be more difficult to avoid. So it's looked at as a way to offset an advantage that through diplomatic and international agreement, the United States Navy and the British World Navy have secured. And if you look at the various things that the Japanese

invested in to try to offset this advantage, they have a great deal of success. Yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to expand upon it just a little bit. Everything Trent said is completely true, as it always is. But there was another Another aspect to that is that it was agreeable to the Japanese way of doing war. If you've ever seen the last scenes in Jymbo, for example, where the samurai comes in, and he's slashing away and he's killing his enemies left and right with his sudden, fast attacks, that's kind of how they envisioned naval warfare. And, you know, that's a simplification, of course, but it was agreeable to their way of doing things. And the Italian way of doing things was different, or the German way of doing things was different.

So they all brought their different experiences or different cultures to the equation, and they did things differently. And I think that's really important, too. Part of it is perceiving how your enemy is going to fight, and you usually don't learn that until you're actually fighting them. And then dealing with those specific aspects of the problem, the way the Americans did with CIC, Combat Information Centers, for example. So I think that's an important element, too. Vince, let's talk about the Italians for a minute then. And I confess, you know, I don't know a great deal about the modern Italian way of war. Though my father fought in the Italian campaign in World War II, though, I think mostly against Germans.

And for the most part, when I think about Italy and the war, I can get out of my mind. Somewhere Dave Barry has a write-up, has an essay about the Second World War in which he characterizes the Italian invasion of France as preceding the Italian army's invasion. proceeds relatively well until their truck breaks down. So that's sort of my starting point. I apologize to the great Italian naval and military tradition, the fact that that is my starting point. But nevertheless, we've been talking a bit about Japan, talk about Italy and its approach to night combat. That's the famous joke. How does an Italian admiral review his fleet? You've heard that, haven't you? No, tell me. Tell me the punchline. In a glass bottom boat.

I've heard that joke told in the Russians inspecting the Black Sea fleet at various points where things have gone well for the Ukrainians in the last year. Yeah, the Italians had a completely different approach to warfare. It was very, it was very logical, very reason, very, you know, why risk our big ships if there's no military gain to be, to be achieved. And, you know, that's, that's very logical and it's really true. But there are times when you need to risk. There are times when you need to take chances. The Italian approach to night combat was that we don't want to have anything to do with it. There's nothing to be gained by it. We have no, no, it's very unlikely it's going to happen. You know, finding people at night is almost impossible.

Why should we invest the time and effort to come up with systems of combat where it's not going to be relevant to our needs? And so that was their position in the 1930s at the same time the British were busily developing the ability to fight at night. And you saw the results in some very disastrous actions for the Italians. I think that we talked about the Duesenberg Convoy Action in the book where you have an entire convoy wiped out by a inferior force of British Troopers and destroyers. And that was all due not to weapons, not to the number of guns you had,

not to pre-planning, not even to alter because the British stumbled upon the convoy by accident as it happened. And so you fight what the battles you're prepared for. And if you're not prepared to fight at night, you get to defeat it very handily. And I think the Italians kind of woke up like, oh, my God, you know, the British have radar. Well, the Germans have radar too. They never told us. Well, there you go. Be careful of your allies. So they tried to develop those skills as fast as they could in the middle of warfare. And there's a lesson to be learned there as well is how do you develop a skill set during war? And frankly, they were pretty effective, but the only problem was the British were not standing still.

And they were working on their radar. They were working on their combat information centers as well. And they were able to maintain the British, their relative superiority, even after all the improvements the Italians made, which are detailed in that book. So I think it has to do with, if you caught short-sighted as the Italians were, it's not that easy to make up the lost ground. I think that's one of the big lessons there as well. You can be smart, you can be creative, but you know, you've got to count on your enemy being the same way. Something that Trent said talking about Japanese fighting in the Pacific and long-range torpedoes

just inspires me to ask kind of a dumb sort of micro question for which the answer is probably obvious, but it's not occurred to me, which is using long-range torpedoes, long-range gunnery in the period makes sense to me because the shell's going pretty quickly through the air. So you're pretty confident you know where the target's going to be or the shell hits. How on earth do you get a long-range torpedo to hit its target? It was too early for sort of wire guidance systems, right? Or just how does that work? How does this any of this actually practical?

Oh, yeah, it is far too early for wire guidance systems. I mean, later in the war, you have torpedoes that have some acoustical homing capability. You had wire guided torpedoes in the 1860s, Trent. Yes, but how effective are they? They almost say the ship that fired one. Well, there you go. Right. Not as we think of them today.

I'll let me say that. Well, yeah, so there's sort of two paradigms that the Japanese are thinking about torpedo combat in. Night combat, relatively close range, penetrate the enemy screen, launch them at, you know, because torpedoes have different speed and range settings, right? So you can go very fast for a shorter distance, or you could go farther, but more slowly because you're burning the fuel at a slower rate. And so if I remember, right, the long lens says three of those settings, and the high-speed short-range setting is what you would use,

typically in night combat, particularly from destroyers. But the Japanese are also thinking that after that night action, or sometime after, at a time of their choosing, once they have sufficiently crippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet, they seem to assume the United States is going to do what they need to do in order to be destroyed. So there's a little bit of optimistic assumptions in their planning. But anyway, they believe there's going to be a night or a daylight action,

you know, long-range naval gunfire. This is where the Yamato-type battleship comes to the fore. But also, there is going to be a possibility because most likely the battle lines will be steaming either on parallel courses or potentially on opposite courses. Either way, maintaining a fairly steady course so that they can shoot accurately. And that circumstance is going to allow the Japanese

to fire torpedoes at relatively long range, much farther than the U.S. ships would assume that they are in danger of being hit by torpedoes. And among the large cruisers that the Japanese have, they installed some very sophisticated torpedo fire control devices that would anticipate a potential turn of the target and try to, you know, secure hits in some way, they're at least comparable in terms of sophistication of their gunnery fire control devices and in some ways even more sophisticated, these torpedo fire. control systems. So they've invested an awful lot in the system. So there's the engineering and the torpedo, there's these fire control systems. And then there is, okay, how does this,

how does this fit tactically? That's all based on theory. It's all based upon pre-war expectations. If you look at the reality of the situation, the Japanese did manage to hit targets in excess of 20,000 yards with torpedoes at least two times that I can think of, maybe three. And the secret of the Japanese in achieving this kind of questionable accomplishment was to use hundreds and hundreds of torpedoes. In the case of Java Sea, they fire, I can't remember the exact number, 96 or 104 torpedoes from 20,000 yards. They achieve one hit. Now, that's more torpedoes than the Italians fired during the entire war. I assume these are expensive systems relative to people, so you can shoot 100 of them and you're going to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Japanese did not stint. If they had a weapon, they used

it. And you can't say that for every nation. So, yeah, they... A bigger go home. It applies to the Japanese war effort kind of across the board. The predictable consequences. They get one hit for 100 torpedoes fired. Well, the Italians got one hit for 100 torpedoes fired, too. But that was through the course of a war, not through the course of one action.

So I think what Trent brings up is part of the value of this book is that people develop weapons, they develop procedures, they develop systems, they develop complicated fire control systems, order to meet these theoretical needs. But once you get in combat, those theories kind of tend to fall apart and it's just throwing stuff into the water and hopefully you get something done. I don't really know which nation, which national context in which to ask this question, but maybe it sort of applies across the board. But over the period that you are covering here, how did demands of officership, naval officership, change? What are the new demands?

And how do they stay the same? How is being in command at sea or in a position of responsibility at sea the same, you know, in the Second World War as it was at the end of the 19th century? There are some important changes. And you get an allusion to this in the chapter on the U.S. Navy. Also the following chapter that Michael Whitby wrote, on the fighting in the English Channel in World War II, the development of the Combat Information Center

in the US Navy and the Action Information Organization, the British equivalent in the Royal Navy, forces a different relationship between information processing and the command function. So essentially, these organizations offload interpretation of incoming information and its synthesis. And historically, that had been something that would committing officers or formation commanders would do.

Like, they expected to be able to do this. This is part of how they approach their role in their job. Certainly, they have staffs. Certainly, they have plots. They have other things, but there was an expectation that they would have the information available to them. And then in battle, they make the decisions. And this becomes more of a shared or more of a distributed function. So they may be in a combat information center, but there is an evaluator within that center who is basically saying, look, this is what the information presents.

You know, if we take the assortment of radars available to us and other sources, this is the picture that you should base your decisions upon. So there's a shift in the relationship between commanders and this information. And those who are able to make the shifts do a very good job. You know, Arlie Burke is a good example of that, and we put a quote of his in the conclusion about the difference between a good officer and a poor one being like three seconds, 10 seconds. Yeah. Whatever. But that alludes to this fact that, you don't spend time in what was then a modern World War II environment.

You don't spend time questioning the information coming to you. You have to rely upon expertise. Everything Trent says is very true. But you can be a navigation expert, you can be a gunnery expert, but you can't be an expert in everything simultaneously. I think there's a greater need for naval officers, first of all, to recognize the fact that they can't know it all, and second of all, to be able to rely upon expertise.

My example for that is the famous Admiral Cunningham in the Mediterranean, losing his first aircraft carrier to German bombers because he handled inappropriately against the advice of his aviation experts. because, God damn it, he's the admiral, he knows best. And you have to get away from that point, that mindset. And I think it was very difficult for some naval experts to our officers to accomplish that. There's also a shift that we allude to this may have been somewhat less obvious, but I think it's important to state.

Some of the navies are more focused on success in battle, victory in combat. And a lot of the actions that we describe have more of an implication on how how how well is a Navy controlling or not the the sea lanes basically what you can do with the sea how well are you controlling it and I think some some navies some institutions were better prepared for that concepts come World War II and others others not so much so final question for you both we've covered a lot of water I I would say, actually. We've got a lot of water here.

And some of the lessons or some of the themes we've been talking through are obviously applicable, you know, national specialization, making sure you understand how a particular fighting force is responding to technological change and how it might be different from others, these demands on leadership that you just talked about, a few others. You know, among what we've already talked about, what's most important, or are there things that we haven't mentioned that you think in 2023 is relevant? When you look back at the lessons of the period you're covering in the way in which navies responded to technological change and took to sea to fight at night sort of in response to the advantages that new technology made it made possible, you know, what today should officers and leaders be thinking about when they think about dealing with technological change, sort of thematically? I'll give a quick response.

I'll let Trent give a, a reasoned and complete response. I think, first of all, everything you know is wrong. Take that as a given. Keep an open mind. Be prepared to accept new information, new ideas. I think complacency is the true enemy of success when it comes to sudden warfare. I think adaptability, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think so many good men died due to dear ideas that their commanders held.

I think you have to be able to trash everything you know and be prepared to be adaptive and open to new ideas. I think that's the single most important thing. I was going to say adaptability too, but Vince has covered that. So I'll expand on that a little bit. One of the things that in my writing about the U.S. Navy, I try to emphasize, is there were feedback loops. And this happens in the war. So there's a capacity for adaptability. that is built. And it starts prior to World War II where the U.S. Navy and its officers are

learning from exercises that are conducted on an annual basis, and they're gathering lessons from those. And so there's this habit of, we'll test something and we'll see what happens. And based on information we can evolve. Now, the exercises are artificial. So some of the lessons that they learned before the war aren't right. They don't channel the appropriate kind of behavior for actual combat. But what that meant was there was this conditioning of we will test something and we will see what happens and we will then learn. And so it's a fairly natural and rapid shift to a wartime situation where, okay, we're doing the same thing, but now the test is not an exercise. Now the test is, you know, combat. We're going to go fight the Japanese off Guadalcanal at night. And, you know,

the lessons aren't always correct the, you know, the first time around, but there's this pattern of learning quickly and then adapting tactics and technique from that. So there's an underlying assumption that we can get better, that what we have is wrong, we're not the best, and so we have to constantly be seeking out how to do this better, how to find new ways, how to better integrate the technologies. As long as we tell as we tell ourselves the truth. Yes, yes. And that's where a lot of nations really stumble. And I think that's one of the areas where the U.S. Navy proved to be superior to its opponents. In all humility, I say that.

I know I said that the last question was the last question, but you're compelling me to ask a follow-up, Vince. Where are you most concerned that we, the United States, are not telling ourselves the truth right now? I think we have this mindset where we are the best. And there's nothing wrong with that. but you always have to keep it in the back of your mind that you're not the best at all times in all situations. And I think you have to allow for the fact that, well, I'm not an expert in this. I speak much more confidently when it comes to the experiences of the past.

But I have this uncomfortable feeling that there's a sense of complacency that will not serve us if the balloon does go up. I'll modify that slightly. I don't think there is enough of a willingness to, to, to screw up. Like to learn you need to make mistakes. And I think we have created an environment, if we look at the U.S. military today, where there are expectations that once you are, you know, an officer above a certain rank,

you are not going to screw it up. And I don't think that's realistic. I think people will screw it up. Now, maybe they're not going to screw it up so much that lives are lost, at least not in a combat situation, but they are going to screw it up. And they need to be able to admit that they screwed it up. And their peers need to be able to say, yeah, you screwed that up. they still then need, provided this grow up is not of large enough size, to have an avenue

to continue to advance and learn from that experience. You know, embrace what happened from that outcome and figure out what it means for changing their behavior going forward. And if you're not able to do that, then you aren't able to be honest with yourself. Like Vince pointed out, and you're not able to do this kind of learning and adaptation that is required. In World War II, some very famous, before World War II, some very famous British naval officers screwed up and ran their ships of ground or whatever,

but they continued to serve and they did very good service in the war. Every U.S. Navy officer I know who's touched the ground loses command, for example. Yeah, well, you end up, I mean, just based on my own observations, this is not a Navy-specific comment. I think I agree with your broad characterization of a lack of risk tolerance and a lack of, you know, tolerance for mistakes as learning experiences. And so what you end up with is a senior officer corps or flag officer corps of folks who are good at not screwing up. On the one hand, okay, nobody wants to screw up.

On the other hand, the person who's not good at scurrying up is a particular kind of person. Yes. I'll take that one step further. If you look at the performance of navies in the first months of war, taking World War II as an example, you will see that a lot of officers in command were not in command six months later. You're risk-converse guys. Most navies do very poorly in the beginning of a war, and I think part of the reason is because of the risk-conversion factor.

Yeah, well, and you end up, I mean, in the wars we've just fought in the Middle East, my own experience being in Afghanistan, where the stakes are not necessarily existential. You can actually end up in a situation where, you know, where were the mistakes, if you like, in Afghanistan, you know, deployment after deployed, but the battalions got there. They did their thing. they came back. You know, you woke up in the morning, the Marine Corps was still there,

the Army was still there, most of the planes were still there. So there, you know, everything's proceeding without noticeable mistakes much of the time. And yet you get to the end of the exercise. And it's, you lost. You lost. It's been for not. Well, in any event, gentlemen, this has been a fascinating conversation. Trent Hone, Vince O'Hara, co-editors and contributors to fighting in the dark naval combat at night 1904 to 1944. I really appreciate you both take the time and for giving us this volume to think about. Thank you very much. It's enjoyable talking about these subjects, and so pleasure has been all mine. Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it.