Sea Control - Sea Control 585: Imperial Germany and China’s Basing Ambitions with Chuck Ridgway

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

Links1. "What Imperial Germany Teaches About China’s Naval Basing Ambitions," by Chuck Ridgway, Proceedings, May 2025.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, shipmates, and welcome back for Sea Control. I'm your host, Jonathan Selling, and today we have Commander Chuck Ridgingshway of the United States Navy on to discuss his article, What Imperial Germany Teaches About China's Naval Basing Ambitions, published in the May issue of Proceedings. Chuck, welcome. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Thanks, Jonathan.

Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, as you mentioned, I'm a retired U.S. Navy commander. I did 29 years, 10 of them active duty as a surface warfare officer, and then went on, kind of got in on the ground floor of U.S. Naval Forces Africa, coming up on, strangely, almost 20 years ago now, and ended up becoming an Africa foreign area officer. So doing a lot of stuff with with NAVAP. And then my my final tour was with as a reservist was with AFRICOM in the J5. And so I spent a lot of time down on the continent engaging with our with our partners working on maritime security issues down there and a couple deployments at sea in the Gulf of Guinea.

So that's kind of where I kind of got in on the on the Africa stuff. thanks and uh as a reminder the views expressed here are our own and not the views of any institutions that we may otherwise be affiliated with so uh let's get started and um first off like what caused you to write this essay and what was the research like right well i was working as i said my final uh reserve tour was with an africom j5 unit and i spent several months out in Stuttgart, working in the J5 shop out there. And it was while I was there that some of the initial sort of worries about Chinese ambitions to get a base in West Africa were kind of coming to the fore. And so, you know, I was in there listening to kind of some of the conversations.

But what really set it off was General Townsend's testimony to the Senate that year, where he expressed the deep concerns that the U.S. has for a base like that. And honestly, you know, I'm a bit of a naval historian of, you know, certainly very familiar with World War I and World War II and particularly the German Navy. I did my final active duty tour as a exchange officer on a German Navy frigate. And I just was immediately like struck with the parallels to Germany's East Asia squadron in the years before World War I and what had happened to it, that it truly hadn't presented much of a threat and was dealt with fairly decently. And I just looked at The geography of West Africa and the claims that a Chinese squadron there would be a direct threat to the United States, to the homeland, to shipping lanes in the North Atlantic, they just didn't add up.

And I was reminded of Massey's book, Robert Massey's book, Castles of Steel, which is probably the best naval history I've read. Certainly the best for making you feel like you're standing on the bridge of a ship in World War I of a battle cruiser chasing down some enemy squadron. And he had the quote in there that I opened the article with from Admiral von Spee, the German commander of the East Asia Squadron, after he'd won a big victory at Cornell, where he said, you know, I have no chance of getting home. The best I can do is cause as much havoc on the way there until I'm caught by a superior foe and sunk. And I just felt like those sorts of aspects of what a Chinese base in West Africa would be were not being considered in the conversations I was hearing inside Africa, that it would actually be extremely vulnerable, and it would be like a big risk for the Chinese Navy to station valuable assets in West Africa if there were to be a war. But you certainly see some peacetime stuff about that. And what I discovered as I started reading into this was that really no one had ever written about the peacetime activities of the German East Asia Squadron. You know, Massey's book glances right over it.

I think he called it, von Spee's, he was in command for almost two years before the war started, like an endless series of lawn parties, receptions, and balls. And I said, well, it had to be more than that. And what I discovered was I had to do some primary source research to go and get the answers to what the squadron did from the time the base was established in Tsingtao in 1897 until World War I started in the summer of 1914. And so that caught me on a – fortunately, I was able to do a trip to Germany. I was there for other purposes, but managed to spend a couple days down in Freiburg, which is the home of the German Federal Military Archives. The main German archives are in Berlin. But all the military stuff is down in Freiburg near the Black Forest. And I was able to spend a couple days there and start digging into some of the primary sources that are available on what the squadron did from 1898 until 1914.

That was very, very interesting. A lot of their stuff is online. But to be honest, I wouldn't have figured out how to use it online unless I'd actually visited and the staff there was unbelievably helpful. And then the other cool thing is a lot of stuff isn't online. And the ship's logbooks, which I was able to pull off the shelves and take a look through, and particularly some of the most interesting stuff I found that's just not available online, were various memoirs and particularly photo albums of squadron sailors that I was able to go through. And those were just amazing. It was really quite magic.

I got to feel like I knew some of the sailors who'd served on the China Station in 1910, 1911, 1912. And it was really very interesting. Some of the photos will blow your mind. They didn't make it into the final article, but they were just incredible. And so that gave me like this window. In particular, the squadron commander submitted a bimonthly report to Berlin. It was addressed to the Kaiser, went through the admiralty staff. And those reports every two months, somewhere between six to 10 pages plus annexes and special reports from ship commanders that he wanted to include, really tell you what the squadron was doing. And what they were doing was naval diplomacy, just like, you know, the deployments I did in the U.S. Navy in the 1990s, port visits, exercises, responding to this, tensions arise there, so you move to this part of the world. And that's exactly what the German Navy was doing in East Asia prior to World War I. To that point, really, what was Germany's main interest in East Asia? You mentioned naval diplomacy. At the time, Germany was a rising naval power, you know, with Tirpitz coming in, Bismarck going out, the Kaiser with his little love affair of ships were trying to build a navy.

But at the same time, Germany is like the main industrial country of continental Europe, was also a major shipping company. You know, I think most Germans today would be surprised to find out that Germany is a maritime nation. But Germany, by 1900, had the second largest merchant fleet in the world, had outposts and warehouses and mercantile interests all over the world, quite a bit of the German colonies in Africa. And I guess you could make the same argument for some of the South Seas Islands, Samoa and Truk and the Carolines that became German, was because Germans were trading there by sea. And so I think one of the main things that the Kaiser's government wanted to do was protect those shipping interests. But they also, other nations were having, especially in China, as China got carved up by the European nations with different concessions, Germany just wanted to have a piece of it. This was a rising power. The Kaiser wanted to be seen as an equal to Britain, equal to his cousin, you know, Edward over on the throne over there. And one of the ways you do that is to have a navy. And the other way to have that is an empire.

then there was a large number especially in China and the Far East a large number of just German citizens living there working doing their work whether it was missionaries or merchant traders or ships captains port operators and he wanted like a concrete way to protect them so I would boil it down to German prestige international and global prestige and then the very practical aspect of protecting a merchant fleet and the global trade the Germany was benefiting from at the time. Obviously,

Germany was preparing for the possibility of war. What were their plans for the East Asia Squadron and the Tzingo base? This is one of the more interesting parts. I went into writing the essay with two main theses in mind. The first was that a wartime

scenario for the German East Asia Squadron was not positive. They realized not only that the squadron was fairly quickly destroyed. It took a couple months to find them, and hunt them down but they didn't do much in the meantime but so the first thesis was that the squadron was not much use in wartime and the germany kind of knew it and if you read like the published histories the masses or the or the um uh you know kreutzer kree from uh edwin p hoyt

that's fairly obvious the other thesis was that the squadron served really useful peacetime uh purposes in the naval diplomacy so those were the two theses i was i was going after. The one I was actually able to prove in a way that kind of blew my mind going through the squadron reports I mentioned in some other documents is one I found the whole file of pre-war planning for Germany, what their naval planning was. It was an operations order. The operations order was sent to Spee in the summer of 1913 for his comments, what he thought the squadron could do in various cases of war. And I described this in the article that there were four cases that Germany looked at, A, B, C, and D. A was against the United States. B was against

Great Britain. C was against France or Russia. And D was against Japan. And Spey was then invited to comment on these. And I found his 10-page comments on the draft operational orders that the Admiralty wanted to send him. And he basically said, my squadron is not going to be able to do open water defensive of our base in Tsingtao or even really do successful commerce raiding on the Far East Station if we're up against either the Royal Navy or the Japanese Navy or if the U.S. reinforces its Pacific fleet. So it was obvious to him when he, a year before the war broke out, that his main option would be to run for home and do whatever he could on the way and his chances of making it were slim. The German Navy knew that going in, which reinforces

the idea that it was there for peacetime purposes. The other document that really cracked that case wide open. And this one was, because I guarantee you it's been filed in the wrong box, and then the whole box was scanned. It's actually available online, but it's kind of in the middle of some other pre-war planning documents. I think it's missing its first page, so there's no date on it, but it was clearly written towards the end of 1915. So it was written before Jutland. But it's an assessment of German surface raiders through about the first year of the war, by which point all of them were gone. The last one was Königsberg, which holed up in the Refugee River in what is today Tanzania and kind of stuck there until some German commanders came and managed to

like kind of blow her up. And that was the last German surface ship outside of North Sea waters. And that was March of 1915. And this document really said it was, you know, impossible to protect Tsingtao. And without a base, it was impossible to operate our ships. And what that led to is this notion that these overseas bases, these bases on distant stations that aren't part of a network of defensible bases, if they're out there on their own, they're extremely vulnerable. And any naval forces based there are going to be have their freedom of action severely limited. And this is this is what you saw with with how it played out for the for the German Navy. And it's very different to say, what, you know, Japan and the US were fighting for in World War Two,

where each had a network of self-defensible bases. And you kind of, you know, at the beginning of the war, Japan pushed out and picked off bases around the Pacific, expanding its reach until it kind of maybe reached too far with Eastern New Guinea and the Solomons. And then the U.S. had to very carefully build back a network of defensible bases going the other direction, back towards Japan with the island hopping campaign.

And that's the key. If a base that's just, you know, Germany's base in Tsingtao, where their next closest base is in Dar es Salaam, is not going to be very helpful for operating naval forces. And I kind of see in with China, a very similar situation, even their base in Djibouti, and they're working on some other stuff. They have certainly have access to ports along the Indian Ocean coast. I don't know if they've got one in Bangladesh yet, but certainly there's one in Burma that they can use. But they're still not in a position really to defend their Djibouti

base, and I suspect that's a big reason why they haven't actually stationed any ships there. You know, you read in various articles, like, oh, they can now like, they have a pier there that can accommodate an aircraft carrier, but they haven't based an aircraft carrier there, and I'd be very surprised if they did, given that they only

have three, and it's right across the street from our own base there where we operate all sorts of aircraft, and so yeah, they could pull a carrier in there, and the crews could go have a lovely port visit in Djibouti, But I don't think that's necessarily a huge, huge threat in case of like a Taiwan crisis. How is the East Asia Squadron composed, considering that was not intended to remain in the area?

So it's interesting that you put it like that. The more I read into this, and particularly if you look at it from the point of view of the German East Asia Squadron and Germany's colonial ambitions more broadly, their naval activities around the globe, I don't think they thought war was coming. They certainly didn't think it was coming in 1914. There were things they could have done if they had said, oh, yes, we're on the brink of war. This is what we should do. One would have been to pull the squadron back. The other would have been to significantly reinforce this with, I think a hypothetical would be if they'd sent two of their battlecruisers out there, which would then have been a match for kind of the main units of the Japanese fleet, and certainly better than anything that the British had in the Pacific at the time. You know, the real thing that made the squadron unuseful in warfare was the fact that Britain had just got the first of the Congo-class battlecruisers, which were just so vastly superior to Scharnhorst and Neisnau.

Also, HMAS Australia was an invincible class battlecruiser operating in the Pacific. And I do think it would be interesting to kind of consider what would have happened if Germany had used their battlecruisers, which was what made the armored cruiser obsolete. If they'd sent them to the Far East and say, that would have been a sign, we're here to stay. We don't care if war is coming. You know, give us your best crack. We've got ships here that can take on your best ships, Japan, America, Britain. They didn't do that. That tells me they weren't thinking along those lines.

There's also the argument, too, that even though battlecruisers were conceived to operate overseas and defeat any armored cruiser that came about, they ended up being seen as an addition to the battle line, one more number in the main battle line. And that also would explain maybe why that didn't happen. But the peacetime operations, that's where I think it was really at. And so they had the ships over there they needed to do the things they needed to do to protect their peacetime interests. the merchant traffic, to influence actions ashore. I write in the articles about the four sort of conflicts that broke out in the region, only one of which Germany was directly involved in, and that was the Boxer Rebellion. The other three, you know, the Spanish-American War, the Russia-Japanese War, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which involved a lot of

European naval powers basically just protecting their own citizens. And the politics of it are extremely complicated, but that's where you had like SMS Emden sailing up the river and engaging forts that were occupied by different warlords just to say, hey, this is the Kaiser's flag. We can sail up and down this river without getting shot at. And if you shoot at us, we're going to shoot at you. But that wasn't wartime. I look at some of the capabilities that they had that we don't have today in naval forces. One was the landings troop. If you read the logbooks of the german ships almost every day they practiced landing operations if they were in port and that was you know ships in those days had a had a contingent of marines on board but certain members

of the crew like when you go ashore like when the landing troops go ashore like marines are leading you but there's like you know a couple hundred sailors whose job it is to grab a rifle grab a machine gun they even had small mobile field pieces like three pounder guns that they could roll ashore and kind of set up like a little mini infantry. And that's a capability that naval forces today just don't have. You know, your average Aegis cruiser does not, cannot land a hundred guys armed with weapons who know what they're doing to like conduct some infantry operations. And yeah, I think that, that kind of like looks at the difference between what Germany was seeing from a peacetime perspective to a wartime perspective.

so let's shift over at this point to uh the china and their bases what is china's current interest in africa and what do the uli's bases serve so i've not seen this anywhere else but this is kind of you know i've been down there for a bit i've seen some of the chinese infrastructure that's being built in africa you know you talk to the locals and you know they're not like i I remember I was in Pemba, Mozambique a couple of years ago for Cutlass Express. Taxi driver picked us up when he passed some Chinese business because, you know, it's got Chinese lettering on the side. I was like, oh, are there a lot of Chinese here? It's like this city is full of Chinese. Well, Pemba is now like on a no-go list thanks to the al-Shabaab, not to be confused with the al-Shabaab group in Somalia,

but there's an al-Shabaab terrorist group operating in northern Mozambique. And Pemba is a no-go there. But you don't hear about Chinese being worried about that. Maybe they are, I don't know. But so they're kind of everywhere doing things, and I think what they're doing is extracting the resources they need to fuel their growing economy. You know, I heard Admiral Paparo say a few months ago, you know, there are 900 million Chinese who need to be pulled out of abject poverty, and part of that is having the resources. And those resources range from everything from the rare earth metals that you read about getting hauled out of mines by 10-year-old Congolese children in Eastern DRC to, I think, the big one and the one that I've

seen sailing around in the Gulf of Guinea is fish. The Chinese are increasingly dependent on fishing African waters, sending that fish back to China, whether it's eaten domestically or processed. I understand a lot of it gets processed and sold as fish sticks for export, and then they eat different fish for their protein. That end of the economy, I'm not too sure, but they've become extremely dependent. You know, recent estimates have seen that there are up to 2,000 Chinese flagged, owned, operated, or subsidized fishing vessels operating in African waters at any given time. And that's a lot. And that's something that's worth protecting. You know, the Chinese government subsidizes those. They invest in them. Those are things that they want to protect. And

whether it's protecting them from rebels or terrorists, which is something that we also want to do when we have, you know, commercial interests at sea or even just our own people the shore, being able to do a NEO operation. But I think they also, the fishing in particular has raised a lot of red flags around the world. It gets the U.S. Navy involved. We're down there conducting what we call the African Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership with various partner nations in the Gulf of Guinea, where we're embarking joint boarding teams, U.S. Coast Guard attacklets operating off a US, usually a USNS ship, but sometimes a USS ship, and partnering with a partner nation under some sort of bilateral agreement to board and inspect fishing vessels

found in the EZs of those waters. The specific incident I'm thinking of was in Sierra Leone a couple of years ago. And the Chinese crews who were like boarded and kind of held at gunpoint by U.S. Coast Guard and Sierra Leone maritime enforcement personnel were not very happy about it and filed a complaint with their embassy, who in turn filed a diplomatic complaint with the U.S. embassy. I think China would like to be in a position to protect those vessels and those assets, the fishing vessels in particular, but also their shore-based infrastructure in a much more comprehensive way, and that way would possibly involve a frigate or a destroyer

being on scene any time sort of law enforcement operations were going on. And I think that would be a rather interesting dilemma if, say, the USS Hershey Woody Williams, which is the ship that's been most recently used for those kind of operations, suddenly had a Chinese destroyer coming in between them, maybe with some South China Sea fire hose tactics or who knows, saying, hey, don't mess with our Chinese fishing boats. They're all perfectly legal and you have no business here. And I think that would be quite an interesting thing. And I think China would like to be in a position to be able to do that. But of course, with their once a year or once every other year deployments of two frigates and an oiler around the world, they're not yet there with that. In that regard, what would China's plan be if there was a conflict? Like you've mentioned that they don't have any ships stationed there permanently, but would it just be to evacuate quickly?

And how would this affect their onshore economic interests? Yeah, no, I think that I think that's a very interesting thing. And it's definitely something that like the AFRICOM staff and the NAVAP staff should be should be thinking about. let's say that there is a base and the base is in you know gabon or equatorial guinea where where most of the talk has has centered on that base eventually being and i think a lot of would depend on what they actually stationed there like i was saying with germany they stationed the kind of ships in the in east asia that they needed to do the uh peacetime you know protection of their shipping protection of their colonies uh protection of the german diaspora and sort of

just carrying the Kaiser's flag around. When she got out there, the flagship, Scharnhorst, in 1909, and her sister ship, Gneisenau, were already made obsolete by the existence of battlecruisers. But that didn't seem to bother Germany. So I think it would depend very much what kind of ships China decided to station in a base in Africa. And then that becomes a sustainment issue. Can you station three or four frigates and an oiler? Probably. Can you station a nuclear submarine. That's a completely different thing that requires a whole much bigger sort of maintenance and support infrastructure to go with it that may or may not be even possible in some of the African ports that we're talking about here. Three or four frigates with an oiler, maybe some

DDGs with some land attack cruise missiles, they still have 5,000 miles to go before they can shoot at anything that really would bother us. And in the meantime, we have the whole Atlantic fleet plus our allies in Europe. And it's worth remembering that if they shot at something north of, you know, 23 North, that invokes Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, that they would be up against, you know, vastly superior naval forces. Even Brazil is not an ally, but a close partner with the United States, and they're the dominant naval power in the Gulf of Guinea. So they would have a challenge. And I write in the article both about ammunition and fuel. As it stands right now, you cannot, we still cannot reload large missiles at sea. Working on it, I think the U.S. is getting

close, but it doesn't look like a terribly practical process from what I've seen. And really, that's just in the last couple months. So you shoot your cruise missiles, you shoot down a couple drones, and all of a sudden you're down to like five long-range air defense missiles in your batteries and like, what are you going to do? And the other thing is fuel. And as we've seen from the large amount of merchant ships rerouting around Africa because of the Houthi threat in the Red Sea, bunkering in Africa, there's not always good diesel fuel available at a reasonable price. And the second you pull in to refuel in port, everyone knows where you're at. You have neutrality obligations that you have to adhere to, including getting out again within the time

frame specified by the neutral nation, to what extent African countries would help China in that situation. You know, I know they work very hard at their diplomacy there, but so do we. And I would say that's one reason why it's worth continuing to build our partnerships with African countries is so that if it came to a situation like that, we'd have some diplomatic leverage to say, no, no, that ship's got to get out. That ship's got to sail. Or, you know, I suspect, I would hope than in some of the diplomatic talks between the U.S. and African countries, particularly the ones who are in question for hosting a Chinese base. You know, those countries are, you know, Gabon is currently run by a military junta

that took over in a coup about a year and a half ago, if I'm remembering the dates right. And, you know, Gabon by the family that has run it for 45 years now. And I think it's very easy to say, hey, you know, it's fine if China wants to operate up here in peacetime. If we go to war with China, either the space closes or we'll make sure it closes. And guess who won't be running your country anymore? So I think those sorts of I would hope that that sort of discussion is going on in the background. But I have no notion if it is or not. Well, that's all the time we have for today.

So, Chuck, where can all this find you and what are you working on now? I've been writing some pieces for the Center for Maritime Strategy. I have one that's going to appear there next week on including sea power in the strategy of denial, which is for an undersecretary of defense for policies approach to dealing with the China threat to Taiwan. And that article should appear next week. And, you know, they can find the article that we just discussed in the May issue of Proceedings. And I've got an article that appeared in German this month in the German Navy Officers Association. So kind of the equivalent proceedings called Marina Forum. And so there's an article in there that listeners who read German might be interested in.

The English version is also on the Center for Maritime Strategy. Listeners, by the time this has been edited and recorded, that article should be out. So we'll link it below. But I'd like to thank my guest, Chuck Ridgway, and to the listeners. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Oh, no!