Sea Control - Sea Control 378 - Victory at Sea with Dr. Paul Kennedy

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Links1. "Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II," by Paul Kennedy, Yale University Press, 2022.2.Paul Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University.3. "The Navy Made America a Superpower Once. Can It Again?,"  by Alexander Wooley, Foreign Policy, May 20, 2022.4. "A marriage of the geopolitical, the military and the material — Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II by Paul Kennedy review," by Lincoln Paine, Englesberg Ideas, June 17, 2022.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Ed Salo is back as your host this week, and he's got Dr. Paul Kennedy here to discuss his new book, Victory at Sea, Naval Power, and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II. This episode was edited and produced by Nathan Miller. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on the website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the

SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Good day. This is Sea Control, and today we have a very special guest. Dr. Paul Kennedy is currently the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Director of the International Security Studies at Yale, and Distinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. He has numerous awards and Dr. Kennedy was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000 for his service in history and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in June 2003. Dr. Kennedy

he specializes in the history of international relations, economic power, and grand strategy. He has published numerous prominent books on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggle, including his most well-known book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which assesses the interaction between economics and strategy over the past five centuries. And I have to admit that it was one of the books that set me on the course to being the historian. In his work, Dr. Kennedy emphasizes the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight. Dr. Kennedy has been gracious to spend some time today to discuss his new book, Victory at Sea, Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II. Welcome, Dr. Kennedy.

Thank you so much. Nice to be on your program. Before we get started, I want to talk about the paintings in the book. The book is illustrated not with photos, but with 53, I believe it was, watercolors by the late marine artist Ian Marshall depicting events and warships of the war. Why did you decide to use the paintings when photographs of the events exist? And do you think it changed the tone of the book any? Ian Marshall, who is a gentle Scotsman, nationalized in this country, a great marine artist, president of the American Marine Artists Association for some time, had been working on a lovely book of paintings on American aircraft carriers in the Second World War and the rise of the aircraft carrier. And I'd agreed to do an introduction to this book of his, not mine.

But when he passed away, we were already in the plan for doing a text of warships at sea in the Second World War, using his paintings rather than anybody's black and white or other photographs. He captured in a very Turner-esque or Constable-like way the background of sea, sky, waves, almost wind he captured in stormy weather, and in a way was giving us a more real view of the war at sea, Ed, than any just straightforward black and white photograph could. so with the support of Yale University Press which is a great publisher for marine art and country art and paintings of natural life we went ahead and did this and as readers of this can see it works very well you it's very graphic you feel looking at the paintings of Ian Marshall But you're almost there with this warship coming in and out of Malta, Grand Harbor, or anchored off Gibraltar, or coming down, you know, out of the Hudson. So it works in a way because this is a great marine artist who knew how to paint his ships, as well as how to paint the background. Do you have a favorite painting in the book?

I think my favorite was the one which showed the classic and famous Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal being gently towed into or out of Malta Grand Harbor, maybe around 1940 or something like that. It captures the battlements of the Knights of St. John in the background. It's a great painting of the warship itself. I should say that the production team on Yale University Press pooh-poohed the notion that that would be the painting on the front of the book because they wanted a painting, if you can show it up to anybody or remind people of it, the painting itself on the front of this book is of the great German battleship at sea being harassed by swordfish torpedo bombers in May of 1941. that itself is a great painting either action paintings at sea or more benign paintings of warships and harbors but i like the malta one and and the ark royal yeah i have the copy right here and those are great so many of these i think that the tone and the colors of maritime the ocean and the sea and everything really work well together I really like the one of the Missouri and Tokyo

Bay near the end it's a different way of seeing that as opposed to the famous pictures so several of your books including the one before Victory at Sea dealt with World War II so why another book on World War II? Well bear in mind that I actually hadn't been planning this one it was my encounter with the artist Ian Marshall, offering to write the forward to a collection of paintings of his on fighting warships of the Second World War, and after a while agreeing to write a kind of basic, simple text for that collection of his paintings.

And then after he suddenly passed away, he died of a heart attack stroke in his kitchen just about six years ago, I realized that you could write this history and write this text accompanying his paintings, but that you could put in something that I've always been fascinated about, Ed, which is how do wars shift the balance of world power? many many years ago famous political scientists and students of the early modern period said wars make the state and state makes wars ships and warships fight the war and yet the war itself

transforms the states and the position of the states who fight them and i've always been intrigued or i never got down to it properly of looking at the way in which before the second world war in naval terms at least there were six large competing navies the u.s royal navy japan the japanese italian the rising german navy and just you know seven years later 1946 there's just one big navy in the world with a fast shrinking royal navy that's never happened before and yet his paintings in a way

though he didn't realize this showing the desperate fights of the allied ships in the early years of a war when things were not going well with them through until the transformation of naval and world affairs that painting of the Anglo-American ships in Tokyo Harbor is just so symptomatic

of the new world order. Something happens underneath to produce that victory. And I'd like to write about the underneath part as well as the war at sea. And that was one thing I really liked about the book. You know, you write it, it's a story of several navies, but really it's, you know, almost a story of one navy rising and the others in decline.

But one of the things that seems to be a theme running through your works is maritime superiority is connected to economic power and industrial capacity, which explains the United States' rise to superpower status during and after the war. But it's not just the numbers that win a war, right? Or would you say that's a fair statement? Look, I've always been interested in this, in this problematic of economic productive factors, which assist or decline and reduce the power of competing nations, and the fight, whether it's on land, air or sea, in this case, it's sea. going back to my book on British naval mastery many many years ago so I do I am interested in this and a number of my people readers and critics might say Kennedy beats the drum too much on this issue of you know the economic determinants as it were of the outcome of wars but I I'm really not

like that. I really do. In this book, I got the chance to focus in and tell the story of some rather extraordinary Atlantic convoys, which turned the tide of a war in May 1943, to tell the story of the way in which Nimitz unfolds a plan of action and advance in the Pacific after 1943, to tell the story of the way in which the British Admiralty persisted on in keeping the convoys to Malta in 41-42, when the losses of merchant ships and Royal Navy ships were so severe. There was some direction to this story. There was a lot of gallantry in the story. There was a lot of combat effectiveness, and behind the combat effectiveness, as some very smart people figuring out how to win a war.

That's what I'm really interested in. That takes me to one of the questions I had for later, but this is a good time to talk about it. 2022 is the anniversary of the Battle of Midway. One of our earlier podcasts a few months ago, we were interviewing some of the authors of a book about Midway. And one can read several excellent books about the importance of the battle, But it seems that 1942 is not the important year for you in the Pacific.

Well, I'd like listeners to think about this and if they want to toss it around among themselves. There's a great literature on the significance of that battle in early June 1942 between the American carriers and the Japanese carriers, in which, because of a great stroke of luck in the fighting, the American dive bombers are able to obliterate four Japanese carriers just in the space of 20 minutes or so. And that causes the Japanese to be intimidated. It causes many writers to argue that Midway's all-decisive victory of the Second World War in the Pacific

and the victory for the Allies is assured by it. Now, with all respect to these books on Midway and recognizing the blow that Midway dealt to the Japanese Navy, the fact is that the U.S. Navy is not ready in 1942 to advance. It's losing its own carriers in many ways in various other engagements, smaller engagements in 1942 into 1943. By May or June 1943, we only have one carrier left in the Pacific, and we don't have the amphibious forces for anything. So Midway halted the Japanese advance, that's for sure. It gave us a chance to focus our attention and our Marine Corps in the

fighting at Guadalcanal that helps but it's not really until the middle of 1943 that there's this remarkable flow of new Essex class carriers light carriers and new heavy cruisers destroyers and everything which starts to turn the tide so that by the end of 43 with the attack upon the Gilbert and Ellis Islands and then the Marshalls, you have the transformation of the war in the Pacific. Yes, I really enjoyed the part about the Essex carrier and I didn't really realize, I guess I've seen the numbers before

of how many we produced and how quickly, but for some reason it didn't click and I thought that you really did show the importance of the Essex carrier in that. So let's go over to the role of geography for naval powers in terms of bases, ports, factories, and the access to natural resources. Logistics are all through the book. And I really appreciated the part about the Seabees. Do you think that the, well, especially for the United States, it's, I guess, unique geographical position helped it, its navy to rise? yeah well ed think about it if if listeners here if they have in their room one of those you know old-fashioned globes of the world and just keep spinning it round and looking at that globe you see that on the one hand geographically the united states is so well positioned so strategically

advantaged because it has three to three thousand miles of of distance over in the atlantic eastern seaboard onwards and has six or seven thousand miles between it and the asian mainland or japan itself so that very well protects it but once once you begin to ask well the u.s has weathered the first initial storms of the attacks of the Axis power and now we begin both in the Atlantic and supporting Great Britain and in the Pacific in plans to try to to defeat Japan my word geography is such an important factor and it's some very very smart people in Washington and San Diego and elsewhere who work out you're going to need not just those long-range aircraft carriers with their long-range aircraft to do the damage to the enemy fleet you're going to need a supply system

which we didn't have at the beginning of the war you're going to need those remarkable naval engineers you mentioned the word the cbs the construction battalions of the u.s navy Once the Marines or the Army has seized a particular point on an island in the Pacific, the Seabees go in and in a remarkable shortness of time, they're going to build at least a temporary airbase there so aircraft can operate off it. So supply, logistics, construction, communications are all part of this story, especially in the Battle of the Pacific. uh yes let's get to the book though and talk about it you organized the book chronologically with subsections related to the different geographic theaters of operation was it difficult to blend the narrative and the overall analysis together you know a lot of times we have a book that's just the narrative of the battles and everything or we have a book that's the analysis

talking about big picture items but you seem to be able to blend the two together well look this is a real challenge for historians and and also i think social scientists in general who want to tell a story but they want to explain they want to slow the picture and try to look at how things are working how things are happening the tension between the unfolding narrative story on the one hand and the need to stop and do an analysis of the of the structures is always there and many of us scratch our heads ed about how best to do it uh you can tell a wonderful narrative story i like you know barbara tuchman's the guns of august or some things like that which are just just mesmerizing in their narrative but then you want to look at some other things which

just do an analysis of the war plans of the great powers before 1914, which is not narrative, but is analysis. So in this story of the war at sea, the victory at sea, how exactly do you blend or marry the two? There's no perfect answer to that. I thought of what I would do is to, after some initial explanatory chapters, Let the narrative unfold through the first three or four years of the war, the early battles of the Atlantic and off Europe, Norway, the coming of the war in the Mediterranean, the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Let Things Unfold, a chapter on 1942, which I call the fighting most year in all of naval history,

because we're fighting in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. And then stop that story and do a chapter on the underlying productive shifts, which are most to be detected and described as the rise in American power and output occurs between 1942 and 1943. And then, having explained why it is that the American nation could send a new aircraft carrier every month to Pearl Harbor, then get on with the narrative itself in the chapters of 1944 and 1945. I'd be interested to know if listeners can find a better way of both telling the story of the war at sea and doing an explanation of the background underlying shifts, which allow victory to go to one side, not the other side. That'd be interesting if someone can come up with a different way. It was very engaging. I sat there, actually read most of it on a weekend where we were with my wife's family and everyone was outside at the pool playing and I was inside in the air conditioning reading and enjoying myself.

Was there one theater conflict that you found more difficult to deal with than the others for whatever reason? what a good question i haven't had that question posed to me before but my initial response would be to say yes there was and that was the conflict in the battle of the mediterranean the naval and air clash between june 1940 when france falls and italy comes into the war, and shall we say September 1943, when the Allies land on the Italian peninsula after they've taken Sicily two months earlier. Why do I say that? The Great Battle of the Atlantic goes backwards and forwards across that giant ocean for all the years of the war, but you can actually see where the transformation begins to occur in May, June 1943, when the Western navies have the

detective systems, the long-range aircraft, the more superior escorts, in order to beat off the U-boats, because that's what the Battle of the Atlantic is about. The Battle of the Pacific is also one in which my old boss Liddell Hart said was a bit like a story of a great tidal warfare. The Japanese tide moves out very rapidly in the first six months in 1942. It gets stabilized by a number of American victories at sea, such as the Coral Sea and Midway and Guadalcanal. And then it begins slowly to turn, the tides turn in the Pacific from late 42 through 43, 44. But this other third theater, a one which is so constricted by geography, a one in which is very important for the Allies, for Winston Churchill's Britain in particular, to keep supplying Egypt and the Middle East. and to keep control of their part of North Africa,

hinging on a battle to supply that central small point in the Mediterranean, Malta. And so often it looks as if Malta will be defeated and go down, especially when the German Afrika Korps and the Luftwaffe come in on the Italian side. I think I learned a lot from that, And I learned that this was a story that was tip and go, tip and go. And it does involve a lot of gallantry, a lot of losses, and a lot of willingness to, like, keep the fight up again and again.

It wasn't so straightforward or so smooth, as it were, as the Pacific story. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's, I'm, as a historian, I'm always interested in the aspect of the writing and what people find easy to write, what part is difficult to write. You start the book out basically with the discussion of the Washington Naval Treaty and how it sets out the navies that are going to meet during the war. How do you feel that the stage for the naval aspects of the war were created by the treaty and the various other agreements. The Washington Naval Treaties of 1921-22 are regarded with great importance by historians

because they come about in the consequence of the Great War at sea between 1914 and 1918. The determination of the politicians to head off arms races, in this particular case, arms races at sea, by compelling their admiralties to agree to locked-in ratios of the size of their fleets, especially the battle fleets, from then on, and to take a 10-year, later 15-year building holiday. And that establishes the navies as being essentially battleship navies, but with particular ratios of strength between them. There are later arrangements about the cruiser numbers and size as controls on submarines. It does give the great naval powers governments a chance to take a breather. It's frustrating for the naval admirals and for the planners because it's not until 1935, Ed, that the end of the London Treaty allows navies now in a much more tense and anxious international period to begin rebuilding. So the navies which go to war in 1939 in Europe and in 1941 in the Pacific and Asia are very much determined by what's happened at Washington. Most of them have an older battleship navy and are hastily building new battleships, but they're not yet there at the time.

Most of them have had the wisdom to develop increasingly a number of aircraft carriers, but nothing like the great aircraft carrier fleets of 1943 or 44. Most of them have quite an array of smaller light cruisers, destroyers, frigates for both fighting with the fleet and for escort duties. so when the war comes there it's a sort of hybrid navies they're not quite sure of what air power means i have to figure that out in the early battles that you know norway and in crete and other places like that and so the war unfolds with by 41 42 the newer craft the newer battleships the newer aircraft carriers by 43 coming in. But the navies which fight in the Second World War are the Washington Treaty navies

with some modern updates mingled within them. That was one thing that I was really always amazed with about the military in general, but especially the Navy during World War II, was the fact that this shift from the pre-war navy what was important the battleships and how even though there was some carriers and everything it was such a dramatic shift in the matter of a few years um you know really i think that showed the flexibility like donald rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have not the army you might want or wish to have

a later time. But it seems like the US Navy went to war with one Navy and ended up a few years later with a totally different Navy. So this is what readers need to ponder on the difference in the story of sea power in the Pacific compared with the story of sea power off the coast of Europe and in the Mediterranean, you're right to say that because of the stunning obliteration of the American battle fleet at Pearl Harbor, leaving the Japanese with a battle fleet but no battle fleet opponent, there was this swift transformation in the nature of warfare to be long-range carrier warfare now this is where midway demonstrates itself clearly but that isn't the story uh in europe and in the mediterranean each of those fighting navies there the british the german

the italian france before it goes down each of them keeps a battle fleet because the other guys have a battle fleet and so you have to have as the admiralty would tell you you have to have a great core of residual battleships at the base at Scapa Flow off northern Scotland, because in the Norwegian fjords, there are these large German raiding surface ships, the Scharnhausen, and later on the Bismarck, later on the Tirpitz. You cannot give up battleships because somebody says aircraft carriers are the future. In the same way, when you're trying to escort the Malta The convoys, you kind of just rely upon aircraft carriers, and you never have enough of them in Europe, to escort the convoys because there's this big modern Italian battle fleet there at Rome and Genoa. So it's a slower transition from a battle fleet surface navy to a carrier navy in the European struggle than it is in the Battle of the Pacific, where by 1942, it's very clear that it's an aircraft carrier war.

and i think that that's illustrated really well in the section on the normandy landings where you mentioned that the fleet brought together didn't have any carriers because basically england was the carriers there were i want to say it was 20 or more airfields that were within the distance to normandy so it's not always the most ships or in this case the most carriers it's having the right ship for the right support of the military operation. Yes, and just think of that story of Normandy and the way the pieces are put together. Normandy is on the other side of the English Channel, therefore not too far from a great plethora of British and American air bases, light bomber bases, heavy bomber bases, a fighty escort, you know, Thunderbolt and Spitfire

squadrons over the Normandy beaches. One statistic claims, Ed, that on D-Day itself, the Allies put 11,500 aircraft into the air, but they all came off the giant aircraft carrier of the English air bases. You didn't even need escort carriers. So the ships which are useful for the Normandy landings of a different sorts of ships from a battle fleet it's an amphibious warfare fleet the largest that ever there was because you're landing on five beaches with five separate armies a lot of escort support behind it a lot of mine detection equipment behind it the cbs building their construction areas there. The bombardment, pounding bombardment of the heavy cruisers and the battleships, battleships there, American and British battleships that normally are used

not to defeat enemy ships, but to pound enemy installations on land. But it all fits together successfully. And yet in that same month of the Normandy landings and the sort of navy which I've described you need to have to support the landings in that same month you have in the Pacific these giant conflicts across hundreds of miles of ocean

in say the Battle of the Philippine Seas the move on the Mariana Islands, the beginnings of the advance towards Lady Gulf where you have long range carriers and you have supporting battleships

So there's two types of war at sea going on by June 1944, and the challenge for the historian is to kind of explain to the reader that this war of sea in the Pacific is very different, greatly different from the war at sea as it is in June 1944 in Western Europe and in the southern coast of France. and that brings up in regards to the battle of atlantic i had never thought about the importance of air power and winning the battle you know there's plenty of good books out about there about how air power was critical in winning world war ii you can debate that but you know you also credit the victory in the atlantic partly to the development of the miniaturized radar that could locate U-boats that pretty much sealed the fate of the German Navy there and fielding the longer range bomber aircraft that could go out there and find these. How did the development of technology and its deployment happen? So, Ed, this is a challenge for the historian of the Battle of

the Atlantic, wanting to explain when the tide turns, when the victory comes, because it seems to me that by the middle months of 1943, you have a kind of concatenation of newer technologies, newer weapon systems, all beginning to come and be deployed by the Allied escorting navies and air forces, and to obviously inflict enormous damage upon the U-boats. And some of our historians would point to the coming of the ultra-long-range Liberator bombers, the B-24s, with detection systems now in their noses, with homing torpedoes, with a range of being able to be up in the air for as many as 19 hours to sort of patrol that former gap in the coverage of the convoys from air power. Others are going to point to the coming of new escort vessels, especially

faster, more powerful, better equipped frigates and corvettes and sloops. Others will point to the coming of the aggressive hedgehog forward firing weapon systems, in particular the use of radar, so you can pick up, a small frigate can pick up at night, two miles away in the dark or in the midst, the advance of a German U-boat on the surface. All of this comes together in a number of rather epic convoy battles. And after May and June 1943, it's fair to say that air power does begin to be more and more of a factor of both defeating and sinking U-boats and assuring the security of the convoys right across the Atlantic. They're still going to have those most important hunter-killer escort groups and close-in convoy groups. Statisticians would tell

you that it's after the middle of 1943 through 1944-45 that you notice that there's more U-boats sunk by Allied air than there are U-boats sunk by Allied surface warships. From the viewpoint of Dönitz, it doesn't really matter. He's getting more and more U-boats produced by wonderful German industry, despite being under heavy bombing pressure, they're producing about 16 to 20 U-boats a month, getting them ready to send out in the Atlantic, but they're not able to do anything anymore because of our detective systems and our control of the air, as well as close control of the convoys. That brings something else that I found interesting that I had never seen before. In 1945, the Allies had such control of the seas that American battleships were shelling targets along the Japanese coast during the summer.

You know, it seems most things I read talk, of course, about how the bombers had pretty much free reign over the skies of Japan. But I had never seen a discussion that we were shelling sea targets in Japan. So here's a it's a kind of a funny remark, but not so funny because to the contenders, it was important by the closing stages of the war when it is clear that Japan kind of lash out backwards, but it won't give up fighting. Every one of the main services in the U.S. Navy and Air Force had wanted to demonstrate that it had, you know, great offensive power, that it was important. And please bear that in mind when the end of a war comes. So the U.S. Submarine Service, which had had a poor story of the first two years of a war because of really ineffective and really poor quality torpedoes and torpedo mechanisms for explosion, the U.S. Submarine Service had now almost destroyed the Japanese Merchant Navy and was patrolling all over close. The heavy bombers were pounding the Japanese cities, going there to hit them, and low-level fire raids by that time. The army was preparing for the ingradiant amphibious invasion, which would come in November or so.

And who else wanted to show that they had a role in all of this, in defeating Japan? Well, it was the two main branches of the U.S. Navy. So there were attacks, significant attacks, by mass aircraft carrier flights against the Japanese mainland, trying to hit various remaining cities and industries of production. The symbol of all of this, it seems to me, of the inability of Japan to fight back was the fact that by June and July 1945, American and British battleships were in close in waters, escorted, of course, by their own aircraft and by their destroyers. But they were actually hammering away at shoreline Japanese industrial establishments, power plants, iron plants, and other stuff like that, in order to get the message to the Japanese, you should surrender, and we have big guns to tell you that message. Yeah, that's definitely, I would say, the psychological warfare aspects of that were probably a lot more important than what they were actually destroying. Near the end of the book, you discuss changes in the aspects of the post-war Navy, specifically the demise of the escort carrier, and I wouldn't say the demise, but the decline of the Corvette. if this is a question that you may or may not want to answer but with the new f-35 and its

vertical takeoff and landing capability and the fear of carrier killer missiles could you see the rebirth of a smaller escort carrier so there's two points here let's let's do the historical one back in 45 onwards i'm struck uh added how ruthless the admiralty is with british and the American Admiralty are at the end of a war and saying, well, we've won this war with certain weapon systems, but now we don't think they have a role in the future or very limited roles. So we're going to scrap them very quickly and in large numbers. So what do we essentially scrap? We're getting rid of all big gun battleship. We keep a few in the U.S. Navy to be useful in smaller conflicts in the future, but the battleship era is over. The heavy cruiser era,

that is the eight-inch gun cruiser era, is over. It goes away of the battleship. We have used hundreds, really hundreds of small escort carriers to escort the convoys and to be around when amphibious landings occur, but we're going to get rid of a large number of those, and we're very much going to get rid of a small escort craft like sloops and small corvettes. We scrapped them in hundreds and hundreds because we're going for a different sort of navy there. Technology has got rid of certain ship types, and we are going to recognize that. Coming up to today, I'd like listeners to kind of consider this. I'm sure many of them are part of a debate about it. In the future, with the possibility of conflicts to come, are there newer technologies which are going to render redundant some of the weapons platforms we have today?

Is the large aircraft carrier going to be very vulnerable to a whole host of long range drones, hypersonic missiles, sophisticated, much more sophisticated types of torpedoes than existed 30 or 40 or 50 years ago? Will our new F-35 sort of multitask wonder weapon, will it be around to take on, in its limited numbers that we can afford, the hundreds and hundreds of drones and missiles which might be thrown at our fleets by an enemy in Asia? We don't know the answer to that. But we have to just hope that our planners are thinking of a plan B. What if you go to war with a weapon system that you regard as war winning, and it turns out not to be so war winning? Isn't this the story of the Admiralty's in 1914, when they discover that the big battleships can hardly get to sea

because of submarines and minefields? Isn't it the case that it's true in 1941 when you assume a great battleship encounter in the Pacific and your American battle fleet is wiped out and you have to think of an alternative? So what sort of plan B do we have for fighting a naval air battle in the future? What a question. Yeah, I think that that's definitely a question that I'm sure is being debated everywhere and by people a lot smarter than me. I think the escort carrier and the smaller platforms, I think, are a great idea. And when I was seeing that, I was like, well, they can stick some F-35s on so many ships now. I have to preface this next question with the fact that I'm from East Tennessee.

And my grandfather was one of the original powerhouse operators for TVA, didn't go to World War II because he was working for TVA. And I was brought up with stories of how the power that TVA produced was critical in winning the war because of supplying Oak Ridge and Alcoa, Tennessee with the aluminum plants there. That being said, I love the appendices in this book, especially the one on the Hellcats fighters chain of production that took it from mining the bauxite to the production of aluminum in Alcoa refineries in Tennessee, up to East Hartford, Connecticut to manufacturing the parts

to finally out to Long Island to the factories. Why did you include this in the book? And why did you include it as an appendice as opposed to integrating it into the text? So, you know, once again, there is this challenge for the historian. You've got some significant background factor, which if you stop and tell that story, your narrative indeed has to stop. So one device that authors have is to beg your editor and your publisher to allow you to put in a number of appendices which can be read more slowly. And when you go for your second coffee and pull back from reading the narrative of this book, then go and look at, say, the appendices. And I put in, I chose three stories there. One is a story looking at a report of a convoy commander in the critical ONS-5 convoy going across the Atlantic in late May 1945, where they sink so many German U-boats because at last they have radar detection systems in their small ships.

Another appendix there is just the sheer shift in the numbers of overall tonnages of the six great naval powers in the war. But the one you're referring to is an appendix. It's a device, this appendix. What it does in a series of 11 balloons, or my family would say 11 fat sausages, is to link a story of going back from what we know as the great Marianas turkey shoot, the great defeat of the Japanese naval air in the summer of 1940 for saying, where does this super-duper Hellcat fighter come from? And the story of that starts off, I'm arguing, in the bauxite ore mines in Dutch Suriname and British Guyana,

which produced the aluminum that is needed so much by American industry, your industry down, transferred across the Caribbean, brought up the Mississippi and turned into the say the Alcoa plant to produce the slabs of aluminum, the aluminum propellers, the aluminum parts for aircraft, which would then be put together and turned into the aircraft, which are the fighter aircraft of Grumman, which then go back to the Pacific to win the war. And I like the idea of challenging people, Ed, to say, could you do a supply chain for some other important weapon systems of the war? We're all now very interested and focused on supply chains because we're worried about the security of our supply chains of products, of microchips, of other supply things coming across the Pacific from Taiwan and Korea and China. But supply chains were the key to understanding the Allied victory in the Second World War. And this particular appendix shows the supply chain

from aluminum, bauxite, or going all the way through to the construction of the aircraft which win the battle in the air. It's worth thinking about that a great deal. I think this is a great example for future military studies, especially, like you were saying, with the recent supply chain problems, seeing where something can fall out and where something can really cause problems. We have a few minutes left, and I have one question here that I'd save to the end, and it's sort of the big question is, in your opinion, is naval power still important to the global order, even in the recent conflict in Ukraine? And this is being recorded in July 15, 2022. So in case something changes dramatically by the time it's published, there's still, even though it's kind of, you would think, a land war, there's still a lot of aspects

of naval issues there. So is naval power still important in the global order? Yes, indeed. We're still on a planet that revolves around every day. But that planet is, you know, about five-eighths water and three-eighths land on which seven and a half billion people live. We use in the interchange of goods 92 to 94 percent of all traded visible goods are traded by the sea, across the sea, including, of course, much vital oil and gas supplies. Otherwise, we have nations in the world which believe in navies and sea power and are investing in navies at a rapid clip all across Asia, even if they're not investing much in Europe itself. We know that there's going to be great land conflicts as well. Ukraine is one of them. But at the end of the day, we are still a society, we're still a world society in which navies count because there's a possibility of conflict across the sea.

It's hard to get that over, Ed. I would end with this remark. We have the United States, which is still the number one naval power in the world, despite some signs of its navy being somewhat eroded in its strength and getting long in the tooth. We have a great dependence upon supply systems across the globe for many of our goods. Navies and sea power can't count. And yet, think on this. None of the great Ivy universities and the big research universities in this country,

from Stanford to Georgetown to Chicago to Harvard and Yale, nobody is teaching the history of sea power. Nobody is teaching naval affairs. Nobody's interested in maritime affairs. If we're going to end this nice podcast with you, this nice intercourse of our ideas and our discourse this morning, why is it that since sea power still is important, the academy does not want to study it? Well, I will definitely use that clip when I'm talking to my chair about a proposed CPower class. So I'll be like, I've got it from an expert here that we need this. Would you like to tell the listeners about what you're currently working on and how they can find

you on social media, the internet or others? Look, I still have to spend a bit of time on describing and interacting with interested, you know, program interviewers and the rest about my new book, Victory at Sea. It's only just come out at the end of April. And so that's going to take me most of this summer. And then I'm trying to create a small Naval and Maritime Studies Project at Yale University, which I hope we'll be developing with some fundraising in the next year. And then at last, Ed, I'm going to go back to think about how I could do an update of my book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, when I get some study leave time, some sabbatical time in January. Without abandoning the large central text, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,

How might you describe the origins of that book, which comes out after all as long ago as 1988? And how would you describe the changing world pattern and the possible future changes in the world when you take up the story of the rise and fall of the great powers into the middle of the 21st century? Well, that sounds exciting. Listeners can get Victory at Sea at any bookstore, brick and mortar, or online, and I highly recommend it. If you're interested in World War II, maritime in general, transformation of the global order, and I urge everyone, of course, to look at the paintings. They're beautiful. They're really worth looking at the book just for that. That is all the time we have for this episode of Sea Control. I want to thank Dr. Kennedy for his time, the staff of Yale University Press for their support, and the producers of Sea Control. Until next time, thank you for listening. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Oh, I'm putting it out, putting out the show now.