Sea Control - Sea Control 516 - US Navy Alliances in the Cold War with Dr. Corbin Williamson

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Links1. The US Navy and its Cold War Alliances, 1945-1953, by Corbin Williamson, University of Kansas Press, 2020. 

Hey, it's Jared. Today's guest is Dr. Corbin Williamson. We're going to be discussing his new book on the U.S. Navy and its alliances in the immediate post-war period. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Corbin Williamson, and we're going to discuss his book, The U.S. Navy and its Cold War Alliances, 1945 to 1953. So, Corbin, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your background, please? Well, thanks for having me. I was trained as a naval historian at Ohio State, and then I worked for two years in the historical office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon before coming down to Air War College, which is where I now work as a professor in the Department of Strategy.

I should say at the outset that the views I'm presenting today are my own and not those of the U.S. government. I've always been interested in naval history. And so this was a topic I wanted to pursue in grad school and one that I was able to research and to investigate, which I really enjoyed doing. How does a naval historian wind up at Air War College? You're part of like a little cohort down there that would include Heather Venables. She's done a lot of research on the Marine Corps. And then, of course, Casey Baker is down there as an exchange officer, if you will.

So how did you get down there? Well, thankfully, the Air Force takes a very broad view of the types of historians they're looking to hire. And so our school, you know, we're a joint. We provide joint professional military education. So we, by design, want to have folks who come from a variety of perspectives. our faculty is about a third U.S. Air Force civilians, a third U.S. Air Force uniformed, and then a third other. And our third other is primarily Army, Navy, and Marines. So we've got folks who do, we've got a couple of folks who do air power history, but also folks who do other

types of history. Well, thank you again for coming on. As you mentioned, as a reminder to listeners, all opinions expressed stay our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So let's start. It's about Cold War alliances, but you focus very specifically on a smaller grouping of countries here, foremost among them probably the British and the Royal Navy. So what had happened to the U.S. Navy's relationship with the Royal Navy after World War I, and why did it happen?

So although the two navies had worked closely together during the war, A series of events led those wartime links to steadily decay in the post-war period. And probably first and foremost are national tensions. There's disagreements about the nature and the implementation of the World War I peace settlement, in particular how should war debts be handled. And then there's also economic rivalry between the two nations, in particular as the United States is trying to gain access to commercial markets within the British Empire. At the same time, there's also tensions between the two navies as institutions. There's, in particular, debates about what limitations should be placed on ship construction as a part of the naval limitations treaties, both at Washington and later at London.

And in those debates and discussions, the different priorities and preferences of these two navies come into conflict with one another. As one example, the Royal Navy tends to prefer to have a larger number of lighter cruisers for trade protection purposes, while the U.S. Navy wants a smaller number of slightly larger heavy cruisers that have long range that are better suited for operations in the vast reaches of the Pacific. So there's those naval tensions in combination with the national tensions. Within the United States, there's also a political context in which big chunks of American society have become dissatisfied with the outcome and the results of World War I, which had been labeled as the war to make the world safer democracy. That turned out not to be the case. And so the political context is poorly suited for the U.S. Navy to cooperate with anybody, much less the Royal Navy. Now, at the same time, the U.S. Navy did benefit from its close relationship and observations of the Royal Navy during World War I.

In particular, a lot of the early ideas about American naval aircraft development come from observing what the British do with the Grand Fleet in the last year of the war, where they're putting aviation to sea in a significant way. In the late 1930s, this starts to change some. There's some limited contacts between the two navies at kind of a staff level. For example, Captain Royal Ingersoll, who at the time is the head of the War Plans Division in 1938, goes to the UK and has discussions with British officers about how the two navies might cooperate in the event of a war. And then obviously, once World War II begins, those links begin to grow. So who is Admiral Somerville and what did he do to ensure that the relationship didn't atrophy after World War II? So James Somerville is a signal specialist who entered the Royal Navy in the late 19th century, early 20th century. He primarily served in battleships in World War I, and he will rise up through the ranks after the First World War. He goes on to command the Mediterranean Fleet's destroyers, and then he's the commander-in-chief of the East Indies Station in the 1930s. He's clearly somebody who's moving in the right direction.

The Mediterranean Fleet was one of the most prestigious commands to be a part of in the interwar Royal Navy. He's medically retired, though, in 1939 as a vice admiral, right before the war breaks out. But then he's recalled in 1940, he's put in command of Force H. which is a formation of usually one capital ship, one carrier, cruiser, and a couple escorts. It's based in Gibraltar, and it's a swing force that can operate both in the western Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, both to counter Italian operations as well as German operations. And while he's in command of Force H in 1940 and 1941, he invites and has several American observers come be a part of his staff and clearly enjoys interacting with them and shares a lot of his thinking and information with them.

If you look at the reports coming back, they're getting a lot of good access as a part of his command structure. He is then sent in 1942 to go serve as the commander-in-chief of the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean, which the Royal Navy significantly reinforces after the Japanese attack in the Pacific. And during his time commanding the Eastern Fleet, he also will press for closer cooperation with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. He has limited success. There's less coordination between naval operations in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean than I think Somerville would have liked, and also less sharing on the signals intelligence level. He then goes on to serve as the head of the British Admiralty Delegation,

which is a big British naval staff in Washington in October 1944. And he gets along actually well with Ernest King, in part because he's willing to be blunt and direct with Admiral King. Before World War II ends, as the head of the British Admiralty delegation, Somerville takes a couple steps that clearly indicate he's trying to cement wartime relations into the post-war period. And so he'll do two things in particular. One, he'll set up a comparative ship design committee in which he is going to get his folks to compare notes with the Americans about how British and American ships are designed. He clearly sees that as a vehicle for continued information exchange. And then he also is going to propose to the U.S. Navy that they write British American combined signal and tactical books so that they can have similar operating instructions. At this time, that's a little too fast for the U.S. Navy. And so American officers are not interested and don't accept his proposal. Some of those committee actually completes their report and then the admiralty sits on it for a couple of years and ultimately shells it, doesn't take a lot of significant action. So his initiatives don't have a lot of impact in the immediate timeframe that he's talking about. He goes home in late 1945, and that's the end of his active service. But he came to realize two things that he shared with the British Chiefs of Staff when he goes back to the UK.

The first is that there are a number of folks in senior positions in the U.S. military who want to continue cooperation with us after World War II, and they're not willing to do it to play favorites publicly. The United States public sentiment at the time was very much in favor of multilateral solutions. So anything that smacked of one-to-one bilateral relations had to be kept quiet. And those are both themes that would continue throughout this period into the early 1950s. so how did the post-war perception of the soviet threat particularly submarines affect the planning and cooperation efforts so the concerns about soviet subs are an important part of how these navies develop relationships at the end of world war ii the soviets gained access to advanced german submarine technology especially

type 21 designs as well as some engineers and so the type 21 was designed for sustained underwater operations, unlike most German wartime submarines. They had higher speed, they had a teardrop hull, you had a snorkel to recharge the batteries without fully surfacing. And so trials in the US and the UK in the immediate aftermath of World War II show that the Type 21 could really overcome the majority of the capabilities of existing anti-submarine platforms, which are built for wartime service. And so post-war demobilization means that neither Navy has sufficient escorts or personnel to protect convoys in the Atlantic in the event of a war with the Soviets. And so that leads both navies to want to work with one another to make the most use of

the limited anti-submarine resources that they have. Admiral Nimitz, who has by now become the chief of naval operations, is going to make anti-submarine warfare the U.S. Navy's top priority, along with supporting the Avon test in June 1946. So it's clearly a big concern for the U.S. Navy. And there's one American admiral, Gerald Wright, who tells an anti-submarine warfare conference in 1946 that, quote, the British are much more anti-submarine conscious than we are, end quote. And so we need to benefit from learning from them and talking to them and working with them. And so in 1946, that same year, they'll actually set up an information exchange program that is initially centered on anti-submarine warfare. It grows over time in

its scope, and its scale, which is just, it's ironic because this is literally one year after Admiral Somerville had tried and failed to get this program established. But by 1946, the context is right. So what were the various lines of effort to further cooperation? Because you went in some depth into those in the remainder of the book. Yeah, so there's, I kind of have chapters on four different areas, and I'm going to touch on each of those briefly. Planning, personnel, standardization, and then the last is training and education. So in the planning realm, the place in which the two navies come into the closest and the most sustained contact is really in the Mediterranean, as the U.S. Navy, beginning in 1946, begins to steadily increase its naval presence in

the Mediterranean, ultimately leading to what we know as the Sixth Fleet. That naval presence necessarily is in close proximity to the Royal Navy's Mediterranean fleet. And so the two formations will do a number of joint exercises. They'll share facilities. The U.S. Navy initially doesn't have an extensive base network in the Mediterranean, so they use Malta and Gibraltar. Those links at the fleet level are growing. What the two navies will find is that once NATO is created in April 1949, as they're

setting up a command structure for the Atlantic, it turns out to be difficult to establish who's exactly going to be in charge of that, especially for the British. There's domestic political concerns about eventually the solution, which is to let an American admiral be Sackland. But that takes some time to work out. In the Pacific, there's a lesser known, but I think still important, connection that's made between the U.S. Navy and the Australian Navy. And so the head of the Australian Navy, a guy named Vice Admiral Collins,

will eventually go to Pearl Harbor and meet with Arco Radford, U.S. Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet. And in March 1951, they'll set up what's called the Radford-Collins Agreement, which divides the Pacific out for purposes of anti-submarine warfare and convoy defense and search and rescue. And so it's not as extensive as the links that are being formed in the Mediterranean, but it's an ongoing relationship between the Pacific Fleet and the Royal Australian Navy that provides an avenue for further exchanges.

So that's planning. In terms of personnel, there's a number of liaison officers and attachés that are exchanged and make day-to-day relations between these navies work. And I think what I discovered was that these people, these folks, if they were the right person at the right time, could have a really beneficial impact. And if they were the wrong person at the wrong time, could have quite detrimental impact. On the negative side, there's a commander, later Captain Stephen Eureka, who had served honorably and with distinction in World War II and then goes on to be the naval attache in Australia. And Stephen Eureka's view of what was in the bounds of normal democratic governments was at odds with what was going on in Australia. He thought the Australian government was too left wing, that it was overly influenced by communist unions. And so while he was a fan of the Royal Australian Navy and thought that they were doing things right, his reports back to the US eventually lead the US to cut off Australian access for two years to classify American information, which obviously causes a kerfuffle in Australian circles. And it's eventually resolved, but it's a resolve because the Australians elected a government and Stephen Eureka moves on to bigger and better things.

And so the so that's an example of one person who had probably more of a detrimental impact. On the flip side, the U.S. Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy develop an extensive exchange program where they have personnel who are working with one another at various levels. There's one great story where a Canadian naval officer is working in Pennsylvania. I think it's at Mechanicsburg at the Navy Supply Center. He's having a hard time making connections with American officers and the personnel there because he's trying to learn about U.S. Navy supply methods as the Royal Canadian Navy is trying to benefit from that knowledge until the Americans find out that he's really great at baseball. And then he finds out that he has all the access that he would want.

So he's got a personal connection. He finds a way to get in. And I think that's an enduring theme throughout this period. In terms of standardization, the Navy's tried to standardize both equipment and doctrine. And what they find is that it makes more sense to standardize doctrine before equipment and that their equipment standardization efforts mostly falter initially. initially. They try and standardize depth charges. Well, they have different ideas for how to employ depth charges. And so they need to standardize those first. And what they ultimately will do is to write common signal books, tactical books, which those become the basis for Allied Tactical Publication Number One, which becomes a NATO document. But it's really written by these three navies, the British, Canadians, the Americans, and then given to NATO. And so standardization

Standardization broadly proceeds along the line of concepts before working on calibers and specific equipment. There's also, of course, when you talk about standardization, a desire to maintain national production capabilities. There's one Canadian officer who says, standardization is great so long as everything's built in Toronto. So there's a concern about if we standardize along a single design, that means only one country is benefiting from producing that design.

And then the fourth area that I look at is training and education. And so as one example, the British have a joint anti-submarine school, which is RAF and Royal Navy run in Northern Ireland. American naval units that are on rotation in Europe, especially in Northern Europe, will rotate through there, whether aircraft, privateers, maritime patrol planes, or destroyers or frigates. And they find that there's a lot of value in going to this anti-submarine school, And they get a lot of benefit from participating in exercise with the British, being a part of their training program. So that's the training side. In terms of education, the U.S. Navy has British as well as Canadian officers who attend the Naval War College immediately after World War II up until the summer of 1951.

and the reason that they stop them attending that point is because in 1950 the french say hey we'd like to send our officers to be a part of the naval war college and the u.s navy is not willing to say no to the french they're concerned about french security and yes to the british um again they're not willing to make those public distinctions if it's done quietly they're fine with doing it and so their solution is we're going to kick everybody out no foreigners at the naval war college that'll eventually change when they create the naval command course later which is specifically designed for international officers. That obviously does not go down well with the Royal Navy. The British response, if you look at their papers, is we've given the Americans

everything. We let them come to our schools and now they're kicking us out. It's really quite frustrating from their perspective. And at the same time, some of the training exercises could prove to be quite valuable in an operational sense. So in the spring of 1950, there are a series of exercises between the U.S. 7th Fleet and the British Far Eastern Squadron in the South China Sea. And it turns out that a number of the units involved in those exercises a couple months later will be called to operate together off Korea. All right, so good transition. I will tell you that it was very fortuitous. At the same time I got your book, I also got Ian Bower's edited volume, Coalition Navies During the Korean War, which I was delighted to find your chapter in

there as well. So what did the various navies learn then from their experience working together during the Korean conflict? One of the things that helps the navies in terms of their relationships with the Korean War is the benefit of World War II experience. And so a lot of the personnel on both sides, well, on both sides, in the U.S. Navy, the Royal Navy, the Canadians, and the Australians have a lot of World War II experience working with each other. So they know broadly how each other operates. That's of value. In general, Navy to Navy relations are good, but there certainly are some areas of tension. One of those areas of tension is the turnover in command positions. So for the entire Korean War, there are three British rear admirals when it becomes a vice

admiral, but for most of the period, the rear admirals who serve as the overall British commander in Korea, the naval commander in Korea. At the same time, there are over, I can't remember the exact number, I want to say it's 13, but there are 13 different U.S. Navy admirals who serve as the commander of Task Force 77, which is a carrier task force, mostly operates on the east coast off Korea. So they're just not there as long, and they're changing out more frequently. The U.S. Navy does that consciously, they're trying to rotate folks in to get combat experience, but that also has an impact on your familiarity with how things are done in the theater uh the naval gunfire support in particular spotting procedure was an area of kind

of hit or miss relations sometimes and the agreed procedure wasn't known or the pilot the spotter wasn't well trained on it and so that proved to be an area where more work needed to be done to standardize communications also proved to be challenging again they get they put together workarounds and they're able to solve problems. But in particular, the volume of American naval communications was far higher than what British and Commonwealth units were equipped or designed to accommodate. They also run into issues, and this is a problem that goes on today, of finding an encryption that everyone is authorized to use. And so there's too often, there's an encryption that authorized maybe for British and American use, but maybe the Dutch aren't authorized to

use it. And so when the Dutch ship receives a message with that code, they say, I can't do anything with this. And so it has to be recent, which again, doesn't add to the volume of communications problem. The place in Korea where there's the closest relations, I'd say on the West Coast. So there's a smaller formation that operates off the West Coast, which normally consists of a small escort carrier and a couple escorts. That's the most multinational formation in Korea. There's times where there's an Australian carrier being escorted by a British Canadian American and a Dutch escort. So it was a really multinational formation. The East Coast operations are more USA only with a smaller multinational mix in. But broadly, the Korean experience

validates that the efforts that the U.S. Navy and its British and Commonwealth partners had made to retain wartime interoperability had largely been successful. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Corbin Williamson. Corbin, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So I've got a faculty bio on the Air War College faculty page. And I'm right now working on a book on the Seventh Fleet in the Korean War, a short history of that, as well as I've got another book project where I'm looking at the wartime experience, the World War II experience, particularly the early war experience of the U.S. Navy working with its allies.

So kind of the back story to this period that I've been looking at more recently. Thank you again for joining us. To the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. I put it in the alley, put it on the shimbo now.