Blood Is Thicker than Water
(See page 91, January, 1925, Proceedings)
H. C. Palmer.—It is not often that articles appearing in the Proceedings may be criticized as to accuracy but some of the statements made by Willard C. Tyler, in his contribution “Blood is Thicker than Water” in the January number, are at such variance with the usually accepted version that the two cannot be reconciled. If the article is simply meant to give the recollections of Admiral Keppel, that is one thing. If it is supposed to be history, as the author seems to assume, that is quite another. In “Reminiscences of the Old Navy” is a detailed account of the Pei-ho episode that the author, E. S. Maclay, says is taken from the journal of Rear Admiral S. D. Trenchard, who served with Tattnall at that time. No account that I can find differs materially from Trenchard’s except Tyler’s, and here the difference is great. As Trenchard wrote on the spot, and Tyler gives a recollection of a conversation he had twenty-five years ago with a man who was relating his recollections of what had happened forty years before that, Trenchard’s journal is more likely to be correct.
In regard to the northwest boundary, it is recorded that the “Fifty-four forty or fight” matter was settled in 1844, long before the Pei-ho incident. As the emperor of Germany was engaged in war in 1870 and 1871, he was hardly a person to be chosen as the arbitrator on a boundary dispute or to have the time to give to such a matter.
Editor’s Note: The above was referred to Mr. Tyler, who comments as follows:
I have before me yours of the twenty-first, enclosing Mr. Palmer’s comments on my article entitled, “Blood is Thicker than Water,” as published in the January issue of the Proceedings.
In reply, I can only say that I had no intention of either attempting to make or mar history, but only to relate the story of the origin of the famous saying exactly as related to me by Admiral Keppel who was there, bearing the rank of commodore at that time.
Mr. Maclay, in his very able naval history, gives the account of the same incident as set forth by Admiral Trenchard, who was also there, probably bearing the rank of lieutenant at that time. Their respective rank does not matter, but the stories differ widely.
I have heard the Keppel version of the origin from a number of people, including another British naval officer, mostly in England, so it is evidently current in some places. There were no less than four distinct rows and fights between the British and Chinese in the Pei-ho region in 1857, 1858, 1859 and 1860. Only in the last one did the French come in, on account of the murder of one of their missionaries.
In re the Northwest Boundary dispute, I never stated whether it occurred before or after the Chinese incident; but I do find that I un-conciously made a partial error of statement which Mr. Palmer did not discover, although making one himself. He states that the “Fifty-four forty dispute was settled in 1844.“ This is not correct. It was the slogan that year of the party which elected President Polk. He was pledged to “Fifty-four forty or fight,” but dared not live up to it because it meant war with the British. At that period the somewhat hazy northern boundary of Oregon (Washington Territory was not then set off from Oregon) was supposed to be at that degree of latitude. A convention existed between Russia and the United States that the former, which was believed to control the region north of that line, should make no settlement south of it and that we should allow none north of it. A precisely similar agreement existed between Russia and Great Britain.
In 1845 or 1846, being threatened with war if we persisted, Mr. Polk appointed James Buchanan as our commissioner, in conjunction with Richard Pakenham for the British, to settle the matter. They finally agreed that the northern land boundary should be fixed at Latitude 49 and it was ratified by our Senate on July 17, 1846 (not 1844). Thus we were deprived of some 450,000 miles of additional wilderness. At this conference the water boundary was fixed as described in my article, only it did not stay fixed for many years afterward and was finally left to arbitration.
Shortly after 1846, another dispute broke out between Great Britain and the United States as to whether, in the agreement of 1846, the water boundary was actually established in the Haro Channel, or the Rosario Strait. If the former, it gave us the San Juan group of islands (Haro Archipelago). If the latter, they went to Great Britain. This contention continued until about 1859 when another step was taken in an agreement for the joint occupation of San Juan Island, the largest of the group, by the troops of both countries until the matter could be settled.
Impossible as it may seem, the dispute still dragged along until 1871 when both sides agreed to leave it to the German Emperor, and this was done. As the Emperor William’s war with France began on July 29, 1870, and Paris surrendered on January 28, 1871 (six months), it is difficult to believe that he was then too much occupied to take on this arbitration as Mr. Palmer seems to think, because he did accept it and gave his decision on October 21, 1872, in our favor, awarding us the San Juan islands.
Editor’s Note: Although the Institute is not responsible for the contents of articles appearing in the Proceedings, the following note is added in the interest of historical accuracy. Both the accounts of Rear Admiral Trenchard, U. S. N., who was executive officer in the Powhattan at the time (see Maclay's Reminiscences of the Old Navy), and Clowes’ History of the Royal Navy (Vol. VII, p. 130 ff.) are in agreement as to the main facts of the British attack on the Chinese forts at the mouth of the Pei-ho River. This took place on June 25, 1859. Although both French and British forces were present, only the British gunboats, under the command of Rear Admiral Sir James Hope, crossed the bar at the river mouth and took part in the action. At this time Commodore Tattnall, U. S. N., was off the mouth of the river in U. S. S. Powhattan, with the American envoy to China, Mr. Ward, on board, and went inside the bar in the small chartered Chinese steamboat Toey-whan, in an effort to take the envoy to Peking. In the heat of the action, Tattnall, in response to a message from the British commander (probably referring to transportation of wounded), visited the Plover, the British flagship, and his boat’s crew, without authorization, operated one of the Plover’s guns for upwards of an hour.
In regard to subsequent assistance given by the Toey-whan, Clowes states: “A landing force, chiefly made up of about 350 marines and bluejackets, was brought from the vessels below the bar. There is strong evidence that Tattnall’s steamboat, the Toey-whan, was allowed to assist in towing part of it up the river, though, no doubt, the nominal mission of the little craft was to fetch wounded from the gunboats below the barrier.”
Regarding Tattnall’s famous remark, Trenchard says it was made to him personally just before the visit to the Plover. Clowes gives the following account: “‘After the retirement,’ writes a distinguished officer who was present, ‘the Coromandel received as many wounded as she could stow, and the rest were sent down by boats towed by the U. S. steamer Toey-whan, obligingly placed at our disposal by Flag Officer Tattnall, in, as he put it, “the cause of humanity.” This is when the expression “Blood is thicker than water,” was used by him to my chief, Sir James Hope. It was on the day after the action.’
“As the officer from whom I quote this was the rear admiral’s secretary, there can be no doubt that Tattnall used the expression on the occasion referred to; but there is some evidence that he also used it on the day of the action, and also that his men used it when on board the Plover. I think, therefore, that, in all probability, it was an habitual expression with Tattnall at that time, and that it was imitated by his people.”
Tattnall’s remark could not have been made to Admiral (then Commodore) Sir Henry Keppel, for Keppel was in England in 1859, although previously, on June 1, 1857, he had commanded a division of gunboats in an attack at Fatshan Creek, near Canton. Furthermore, Keppel makes no mention of the incident in his book A Sailor’s Life. Although there is thus some confusion in Keppel’s story as given by Mr. Tyler, it nevertheless has considerable interest as an account by a prominent officer contemporary with the episode. The Keppel story appears to refer to the Pei-ho attack, and is considerably more detailed than those by either Clowes or Trenchard, but it errs in stating that the Pei-ho forts were captured.
As for Tattnall’s attitude during the whole affair, it should be remembered that, although the United States was nominally neutral, American naval forces had previously been in conflict with the Chinese, and that the activities of foreign naval forces at the time were more or less in the nature of joint operations to open China to commercial intercourse.
Regarding the northwest boundary dispute, the facts are substantially as stated by Mr. Tyler in the letter above.
“Our System of Fleet Training”
(See page 572, April, 1925, Proceedings)
Commander E. G. Allen, U.S.N.—It is appropriate that Commander Russell Willson, who has pioneered in the Navy, among other things for signals and communications, signal books, fleet tactics, and the formation of the office of fleet training, should in his article of this number on “Our System of Fleet Training,” point the way to a solution of the problem of a balanced and thorough training schedule for the fleet.
To portray the facts, disclose the weaknesses, bring out and discuss the skeleton of the family closet without offense is always a difficult task, especially if one feels keenly or is interested in a subject. The writer is to be congratulated on his presentation of the subject matter, on the logical manner of its arrangement, and on the soundness of his conclusions. His story of the growth of a gunnery consciousness, an engineering consciousness, the dawning of a tactical and strategical consciousness in the Navy is well and impartially told. It would seem that the Navy bids fair to arrive at the point where we should have started; at the point of development of a schedule of fleet training which would train officers capable of fighting a modern fleet. In other words, we are arriving at a conception of fleet readiness for preparing to fight and for fighting: namely, readiness in strategy and in tactics—basic and rightly elemental ideas from which all training schedules, all idea of operating a navy, must start.
There are so many bugaboos perpetuated in any service which is built around custom and tradition that one must always poke about gently so as not to break the gilt that covers the decay of the idols of yesterday, but having been given the privilege, I am going to take advantage of the opportunity at the expense of the Institute and the author of the article of fleet training.
The first of these is that the Fleet Training schedule is primarily for training of the men. Having spent many years on the tread mill of a strenuous yearly schedule, the idea of which is to train groups of enlisted men whose average first enlistment has been running about eighteen months, I have by slow degrees arrived at the conclusion that, since the only part of the Navy that might be called permanent is the group composed of officers, chief petty officers, and first class petty officers, any training schedule whose object is merely to give the eighteen months’ men a basic training, and leaves the permanent personnel always teaching and learning the routine of the kindergarten is bound to produce a kindergarten navy. It seems to me that whenever I have heard a proposed fleet operation discussed I have always had to listen to a chorus of unbelievers bemoaning the fact that we need drill in the fundamentals. Since the chorus is usually composed of men with whom I have spent twenty-one years picking at the fundamentals of the naval game, my blood always runs cold wondering at what age I am to stop falling on the ball and running through signal practice, and perhaps get to play a practice game or two with a scrub team. Whence are to come the fleet handlers from the groups who have spent a lifetime learning and teaching the school of the squad? I leave you, gentle reader, the idea to ponder on.
The second idea, paralleling the first, that I have never been able to reconcile with the eighteen-month average enlistment, is what particular good results to the Navy from the successful conclusion of a strenuous year of elementary routine target practices to secure prizes and letters for individuals, or in an engineering competition conducted largely to show fuel economy if the training stops yearly and starts over when this remarkable result has been attained.
If this process were continued for ten or twelve years would there not result a hardening of the brain cells of the professional personnel around the thought of performing a routine whose only justification is its successful yearly conclusion? What can the Navy have learned about fighting the fleet at the end of any performance year if this were its sole routine? Is this to be the climax of the naval training endeavor?
If at the end of any training cycle we have not increased the strategical and tactical readiness of its permanent personnel, what merit is attached to the material or gunnery readiness as of any one date? Strategical and tactical readiness properly are inclusive of material and gunnery readiness. If the gunnery schedule has not risen from elementals to their tactical application, if the material readiness is a port inspection readiness and not a readiness proved by a demonstration of its ability to be maintained during an extended fleet operation, I see nothing proved yearly—only suppositions masquerading as facts, illusions nourished and held as truths. Whenever I think this over, there comes to my mind always the picture of the American fleet huddled into the river of Yorktown in the early months of 1917.
Perhaps these comprise some of the reasons why Commander Russell Willson advocates a two-year training period. Perhaps he hopes we might sometime spend but one year in the kindergarten, and then a second on some advanced grammar school subjects, before we start over on the kindergarten class again. What evil would result from a second year whose gunnery was devoted entirely to force and fleet gunnery-tactical exercises, and on strategical and tactical games carried to the point that one felt in them that surety and skill that comes from the experience of experts? Why not prove sometime practically over twelve months the elementary skill we are always presumed to have attained after a twelve months’ training? Why not sign on the captains and heads of departments sometime to stay a two-year training period, and then shift the personnel to start over with green men in the school of the squad? There is no need to worry about the enlisted men as with the turnover and enlistment contract we work under they will always be with us as green hands.
I once read a criticism of our Navy by a British naval officer of rank, the substance of which was that we were efficient on the bright work and routine but deficient in the art of command and operation. While the point seemed to me to be well taken at the time, I became convinced later that he was mistaken and that the art of shining bright work had long been lost in the Navy, and that the time of the professional personnel was devoted exclusively to the task of insuring that they cleaned up the year’s routine elementary gunnery practice and engineering exercises so that the requisite volume of statistics could be issued promptly to the reading public yearly by one March or April, or whatever the mystic date is.
Not wishing to leave in a state of depression such hardy readers as browse about in the rear pages of the Institute, I might say that since the late war, with the expansion of the Navy, and from what we learned from our allies, we are developing in our service what has been termed a Fleet Consciousness. Such things as the task organization of the fleet for training, better fleet administration and staff work, the tactical application in many forms of the target practices, the force practice of the battle fleet, the yearly fleet maneuvers, the applied war college work, the new office of fleet training, are indications of a healthy mental growth.
Commander Willson in his article on “Our System of Fleet Training” gives voice to an opinion held by the bulk of operating personnel, that “The Navy is trying to do too much in one year of twelve months and is therefore slurring the fundamentals and curtailing or neglecting proper advanced fleet work.” How long should it take the administrative machine to digest and assimilate the idea, and make the necessary changes? If the proposed system were tried for two years and the experiment did not succeed, the Navy could always face without loss and with equanimity the resumption of the one-year schedule, and profit, I think, by the breathing spell.
It is essential, if we are to breed commanders who will know how to operate a fleet and a fleet that can operate under them, that for a period of three to six months every one or two years there be operated under one command in conjunction, cruising and working at sea, as many or more ships of all types than would be operated under one command in time of war; because only by practicing with the full team can the material, the methods, and skill be produced that stand up in an emergency. A fleet is a fleet only in name, if in all weathers, in maneuvers, on the range, under all conditions day and night, it has not rehearsed, mastered and met all the eventualities and learned by experience all of its limitations. Most of the lost naval battles of the late war revolved around, first, the prior assumptions of the valor, the carelessness, or the fears of Ignorance, and later the paralysis of Ignorance when actually confronted by unforeseen facts or imagined dangers. In conclusion, let us pray for less ignorance, for wiser and better fleet operation and a lengthened fleet training schedule, that strategical and tactical Peter be no longer robbed to pay his servant gunnery and engineering Paul.
The Independent Air Force
(See page 381, March, 1925, Proceedings)
Lieutenant Commander E. E. Wilson, U.S.N.—My purpose in discussing this paper is not to criticize but to help focus attention upon it. This subject deserves the earnest consideration of very officer with the interests of the service and the country at heart. In a brief, concise and logical paper, the author has put his finger upon a vital point. This Independent Air Force is of paramount importance to the Navy because it may, if, in fact, it has not already done so, deliver the Navy a staggering blow. It is even more important to the country because it contains the germ of a mistake in organization fraught with the utmost danger to the nation.
Briefly, the general public in the United States today feels that both the Army and Navy are too conservative and too reactionary in their attitude toward aviation to permit its proper development. This public opinion has resulted from the false position which the Navy was forced to take when combating the claims of the Assistant Chief of the Army Air Service. No matter what the circumstances are, the fact remains that the general public feels that aviation will not be given the chance it deserves as long as it is controlled by the Army and the Navy. The best answer to this is, of course, the developments which have taken place in naval aviation since the organization of the Bureau of Aeronautics.
Even those who have been most active in this development are not satisfied with this progress. The truth of the matter is that aeronautics is one of the most complex engineering problems that the country has ever confronted. The wonder is that development has been as rapid as it has. The Bureau of Aeronautics has endeavored to bring aviation to the fleet. It has developed five new types of aircraft and has put them in production. None of these types is entirely satisfactory and the history of all development indicates that no type ever will be. The Bureau of Aeronautics has developed catapults, placed them on board ship, and operated them. It has built and operated rigid airships. It has fostered the building and operation with the fleet of tenders for heavier-than-air craft. It has fostered the building of an experimental carrier and, on the basis of the experimental work, is now assisting in the design of the Lexington and Saratoga. It has brought out new types of aircraft engines without superior anywhere. This is a record of achievement of four years, and four years is a short time for any development. These developments are naval developments and represent a technical progress more rapid and more complete than that of any other country. The public does not know this, however, and persists in the opinion that aeronautic development has been retarded rather than advanced, by the Army and Navy.
The personnel side of the situation brought out in this paper is of vital importance. To those of us who fought and bled in the early days of destroyers and submarines, the problems of the naval aviator today seem to be minor ones. Every destroyer or submarine captain of the old school can recite stories of ill-treatment on the part of larger ships. These hard knocks are part and parcel of the development of anything new. In the long-run, they help the new development to take its proper place in the general scheme of things. In view of the public interest in aviation at the present time, however, they cannot be allowed to persist. As the author points out so ably in this paper, the Navy’s first duty is to eliminate the annoyances under which aviation sometimes has to work. It must get behind aviation and push it to the extreme, if necessary, in order to speed up its development. Aeronautics, in good faith, has attempted to go to sea with the fleet. The fleet should meet it halfway and more than halfway.
To many people with the best interests of the country at heart, a perplexing situation arose in the aircraft controversy. On one hand was the desire to kill the unified air force idea as strategically, tactically and economically unsound from the broad viewpoint of national defense. They feared that in the desire of the country to develop aviation to the utmost by concentrating the authority and responsibility for aviation in one department, it might so divide the responsibility for the conduct of a war among three departments as to bring about a loss of the war. At the same time, they feared that the reaction to the death of the unified air force idea would so retard aviation development, in personnel and material, as to again hamper national defense. The unified air force idea has been dealt a severe blow in the last Congress. The battle is just beginning, however, and the Navy’s only reply to public criticism of its conservatism is to go out for more men, more money and more development in aeronautics, with every energy at its command.
It is interesting to note in this regard that control of naval aviation in Great Britain has been, for all intents and purposes, transferred back to the Royal Navy. Apparently, Great Britain has made the unified air force mistake, and has learned its lesson. We can avoid this mistake only through developing aeronautics. This development, insofar as material is concerned, is a function of the Bureau of Aeronautics and it can be depended upon to do its part. Operating developments are a function of the fleet and the fundamental requirement on the part of the fleet is a sympathetic attitude toward aeronautics. Aeronautics needs the helping hand of the fleet, and if this is not forthcoming, the Navy will suffer a staggering setback. It must be remembered that no matter what individual members of the administration may think, public opinion is the all-compelling force in this country and at present public opinion is adverse to naval control of aviation.
I do not agree with the last paragraph of the article that it is “our duty to the man of Main Street and to the man of shore habitations, neither of whom has time for the study of these problems, to prevent air power from displacing sea power.” Our real duty is to develop aeronautics to the highest degree in the shortest possible length of time with a view to utilizing it to full advantage with our sea power.