The most influential naval publicist of the Ironclad Age, and probably of all time, Alfred Thayer Mahan made his name with The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) and followed with other impressive historical analysis. He believed in the necessity of eliminating an opposing fleet in decisive battle so that sea power could subsequently be exercised. Commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1861, Mahan served the Union in the American Civil War as an officer on USS Worcester, Congress, Pocahontas, and James Adger, and as an instructor at the Naval Academy.

 

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, intellects were stirring. The foundation of the US Naval War College under Captain (subsequently Admiral) Stephen B. Luce in the mid-1880s was, in retrospect, a seminal event. The United States had had twenty years to recover from its civil war, years when it had been preoccupied not only with reconciliation and reconstitution of the Union ...

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Kokyo, “Engagement at Port Arthur, 14 February 1904.” Japanese woodblock print. Caption: “A picture of our destroyer advancing quickly like a bird in morning fog, venturing in the turbulent snowstorm, shooting and wrecking the enemy’s ship at Lushun (Port Arthur).”

Even though Russia and Japan committed vast reserves of manpower and materiel to the battlefields of the Manchuria, the central feature around which the war turned was the battle fought for command of the sea. Both sides understood this proposition, which explains why the war commenced with Admiral Togo Heihachiro’s surprise attack against the Russian Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur on the night of 8–9 February 1904. The ability to command the sea was key to winning the conflict largely because of logistics. With the desperately long and not quite completed Trans-Siberian railway as Russia’s only timely and secure means of transit and supply to the ...

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H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (April 2008)

 

Jan Rüger. _The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire_. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xv + 337 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $101.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0521853532; £18.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0521723435.

 

Reviewed for H-Albion by Antoine Capet, Department of British Studies, University of Rouen, France

 

The Navy as Cultural Symbol

 

 

In the introduction to _The Great Naval Game_, Jan Rüger indicates that his book "is as much influenced by cultural, social and political history as it is by naval and maritime history" (p. 5).[1] Indeed, this book must not be read as just another "war book" reexamining the line-up in 1914 in terms of tonnage, gun ranges, cannon bore, etc.-- what Rüger calls "technology" (p. 209). Instead ...

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