Salt Spray

There’s​ no ‘s’ at the end of ‘rule’, and there’s a comma before it. As every schoolboy pedant knows, it’s ‘Britannia, rule the waves!’ – an imperative or exhortation, not a statement of fact. An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile; its reputation can be won or lost in an afternoon. The worst of the winds and tides it has to face is the storm of public opinion, which can blow through the House of Commons and flatten a government.

Just such a hurricane was blowing when ‘Rule, Britannia!’ was first sung, in the Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed to be basking in the long peace of which Robert Walpole boasted to the queen in 1734: ‘Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman.’ Yet the insult somehow festered in the public memory and offered an opportunity for Walpole’s enemies to incite indignation at the government’s feeble response to this treatment of an honest British tar – though Captain Jenkins might not seem quite so innocent to us, as the dispute about whether he was carrying contraband also involved the Asiento de Negros, Britain’s exclusive contract to sell thousands of African slaves to Spanish America (the Spanish call the war the Guerra del Asiento). But nobody seems to have thought it odd to avenge the insult so much later, with a war that was to cost thousands of British lives, mainly through disease, and gain nothing. It was the public rejoicing on the declaration of this war that prompted Walpole’s other famous wisecrack: ‘They now ring the bells, but they will soon wring their hands.’

It is one of the great virtues of N.A.M. Rodger’s majestic three-decker ‘naval history of Britain’, as he calls it, that he gives himself room to chronicle the repeated cycles of pride, umbrage, panic, despair and retaliation that make up so much of the story. There’s plenty of tacking and luffing and close-hauling here (plus a substantial glossary of nautical terms for the landlubber). Rum, sodomy and the lash get proper attention, as does the press gang, for centuries as unpopular as it was indispensable to manning the ships. But the real fascination is the way the Royal Navy emerges as a quasi-independent power in British life and comes to dictate terms to the political world.

At the same time, its future is never quite assured. Again and again, chroniclers have abandoned hope and looked back to an age of lost naval greatness, ‘when no fleet was ever heard of except of our own people who held this land’. That was Aelfric in about 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its discipline for ever.’ Only eight years later came Trafalgar, the most thumping victory ever at sea. The movement from neglect and despair to rebirth and rebuilding often seems to happen overnight. Arms races start off at a gallop.

Rodger shows in gripping detail the ingenuity and assiduity that eventually made the navy into such a formidable fighting force, able to operate all over the world and embark on long and gruelling tours of duty. His first volume, The Safeguard of the Sea (1997), covered its discernible beginnings from 660 ad to the rise of the Commonwealth Navy in 1649. The second, The Command of the Ocean (2004), takes us on to Waterloo.* This third volume, delayed by serious illness, brings us up to date and completes an achievement that is unlikely to be repeated, certainly not with such breadth, scholarship and wit. If I quarrel with anything in the overall design, it is with the boilerplate blandness of the three titles, which might have escaped from the pen of Sir Arthur Bryant and fail to convey the impish iconoclasm and acid acuity that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Kennedy starts, in fact, by telling us that he won’t concern himself much with famous admirals and battles, ‘and even less with the finer points of tactics, ship design, gunnery, navigation and social life in the navy’. These are precisely the intricacies through which Rodger tells us the story of the navy’s long rise and eventual decline. This is history lashed to the mast with the salt spray in your face.

The first illusion that Rodger dispels is that this isle set in a silver sea has remained inviolate from all her foes since 1066. The reality is that English and British governments have been ‘overthrown by seaborne invasion at least nine times since the Norman Conquest, in 1139, 1153, 1326, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688’. There were also plenty of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.

Even the fiasco of the last significant French landing, at Fishguard in 1797, had momentous consequences. The fifteen hundred French troops, a motley crew of freed convicts, were rounded up by the Pembrokeshire Yeomanry within 24 hours without a shot being fired. But the news that French troops had landed on the British mainland caused a run on the banks and the Bank of England was forced to suspend convertibility of its notes. The ongoing costs of the war forced Pitt to introduce the first income tax in 1799, and although the Commons voted to abolish it after Waterloo, Peel revived it in 1842, and it has remained a bulwark of naval finance ever since.

The myth of inviolateness was underpinned by the equally mythical ‘sovereignty of the seas’. Ever since the Middle Ages, it was declared that the kings of England ‘time out of mind had been in peaceable possession of the sovereign lordship of the English sea and the islands therein’. This comforting fiction survived every humiliation at sea and emboldened English skippers to demand that foreign vessels strike their colours in deference. This demand was frequently met with defiance, if not derision. After bumping into a returning Hansa salt convoy in 1449, Robert Winnington reported with some surprise: ‘I came aboard the admiral and bade them strike in the name of the king of England, and they bade me shit in the name of the king of England.’ Pepys records that even the hyperaggressive Captain Robert Holmes (later to be celebrated as the hero of ‘Holmes’s Bonfire’) was sent, briefly, to the Tower for failing to force the Swedish ambassador to strike his colours at the mouth of the Thames. This English obsession occupies over eight hundred pages of the standard work on the subject, Thomas Wemyss Fulton’s The Sovereignty of the Sea (1911).

Charles I named his great battleship Sovereign of the Seas and in 1635 commissioned John Selden to write the treatise Mare Clausum defending the doctrine of territorial waters against Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (Pepys bought a copy of Mare Clausum in St Paul’s Churchyard, but didn’t think much of it), as well as to justify Charles’s levying of a further tranche of ship money. Like Kevin Sharpe in The Personal Rule of Charles I, Rodger points out the remarkable success of ship money, glossed over by Parliamentary propagandists then and since. Between 1634 and 1640, it raised a total of £800,000, compared to a total of only £600,000 from parliamentary taxation in the whole of Charles’s reign. Ship money prepared the way for the huge increases in tax under the Commonwealth when the navy enjoyed a following Protestant wind.

Rodger emphasises at the conclusion of his second volume that ‘parliamentary control made possible the astonishing rise in the level of real taxation in Britain after 1688.’ Between the Glorious Revolution and Waterloo, Britain’s GNP rose threefold, but tax receipts rose fifteenfold. And it was the navy which, for most of that period, was the largest single consumer of public revenue. Not many people thought this odd. By now, it was accepted that British sea power was the ideal expression of the nation in arms and the prime defender of the Protestant faith against the devildom of Spain. Folk memories of the Elizabethan age were entrenched. Spanish historians might continue to regard the defeat in 1588 of their armada as a series of scrappy skirmishes along the Narrow Seas, eventually broken up by unseasonable gales. Rodger will have no truck with this revisionism. The campaign might have been a disappointment for the English, who had hoped for more from their galleons, but

it is absurd to suggest … that Spain did not really need and had not really meant to win, that merely to parade down the Channel was sufficient to frighten the English into conceding Spain’s war aims, and that in some sense this would have been a drawn battle or even a Spanish triumph but for some unlucky bad weather.

Nobody at the time thought anything like this. All Spain was in mourning. The Spanish are on stronger ground in pointing out the abysmal failure of the Drake-Norris expedition to the Azores a year later, which cost the lives of around ten thousand men for nothing, but which a furious Queen Elizabeth ensured was hushed up.

What is incontestable is that over the years the British navy really did achieve the mastery of the seas of which it had so long boasted. With new financial resilience, it began to grasp the techniques that made it possible to keep ships at sea with healthy crews for long periods, to plot their course accurately and to fire their guns in the right direction at great ranges. As Rodger says, these are the most crucial developments in the period covered by his middle volume.

Navigation is perhaps the best known of the advances. Sailing by latitude alone, captains had trusted to recognise their landfall by eye, but they were often mistaken. In 1704, an inbound convoy mistook the Scilly Isles for Guernsey and reached Lundy before they realised they were on the wrong side of Cornwall. As late as 1776, Admiral Howe’s invasion squadron nearly ran on Nantucket Shoal when they thought they were off Long Island. The charts were often dodgy too. The Scillies were placed fifteen miles too far north, which contributed to the wreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s squadron. I fear that The Coasting Pilot, published by Mount and Page of Tower Hill throughout the 18th century, probably deserves some of the blame, although my ancestors may have partially redeemed themselves (and added to their profits) by publishing pamphlets on both sides of the longitude controversy, both pro and anti John Harrison’s chronometer. Even in the 19th century, there were still merchant ships crossing the Atlantic without charts, chronometers or sextants.

The medical profession was as usual slow to pick up new remedies for the diseases prevalent on board. Captains often took it on their own initiative to buy fresh fruit and vegetables and to insist on the decks being swabbed and the seamen’s slops washed regularly. Nelson exploited the British protection of Sicily to set up a contract to buy thirty thousand gallons of lemons at a shilling a gallon – as compared to eight shillings for the inferior lemons shipped from England. Eventually the Sicilian lemon groves supplied the whole navy. ‘The great thing in all military service is health,’ Nelson wrote, ‘and you will agree with me that it is easier for an officer to keep men healthy than for a physician to cure them.’ By the mid-18th century, typhus and scurvy were gradually being eliminated. Vaccination virtually wiped out smallpox in the fleet.

Nobody did more to improve life at sea than the Victualling Board. Officially established in 1683, it had dodgy beginnings under the Commonwealth, with a syndicate of wealthy victuallers led by Colonel Thomas Pride of Pride’s Purge, who owned several breweries. The navy complained repeatedly about the provisions, and £1600 worth of Pride’s own beer had to be dumped overboard as undrinkable. Even so, costs gradually came down and the quality improved. The board built depots and mills and breweries at Portsmouth and Plymouth and later on at colonial stations. It was the largest purchaser of agricultural products on the London market, encouraged larger firms and promoted competition. Standards of catering rose so fast that soldiers and other passengers remarked on the quality of the food. This unglamorous bureaucracy helped to revolutionise the possible length of a sea voyage. Admiral Edward Boscawen wrote to his wife in 1756 that ‘this ship has now been at sea twelve weeks, which is longer than I ever knew any first-rate at sea … At the beginning of the Spanish War our cruisers would not keep the sea above a fortnight, till one or two of them were broken for it, now three months is but a common cruise.’

Technical problems in ship design were overcome, one by one, with new solutions often giving rise to new problems. The insidious shipworm was defeated for a time by sheathing the underwater hull in lead, but the iron pins bolting the lead were vulnerable to corrosion, and the bottoms were lined with copper instead. When steam came along, it was initially supplied by paddle wheels, but the paddle boxes blocked the view from the quarterdeck, so officers had to climb up on top of them, from which it was only a short step to throw a bridge across the boxes, from which every ship is still navigated, although the paddle boxes are long gone.

The huge developments in the range, destructive power and accuracy of guns and shells made the old tactics of ramming and boarding obsolete, though Howe on the Glorious First of June was still reckoning on a firing range of no more than twenty feet and Nelson himself led one of the boarding parties that seized the San Nicolas, probably the first flag officer to do so since Sir Edward Howard in 1513.

Just as he will have no truck with those who seek to diminish Drake, so Rodger deplores those modern British (though, oddly, not French) historians who try to write off Nelson’s greatest victory as ‘essentially marginal’. True, he concedes, Trafalgar did not win the war. Two months later, Napoleon’s sun rose again over Austerlitz. For the poor bloody infantry, there were ten more years of footslogging ahead. But Rodger asserts, with reason, that at the end of this campaign, ‘Britain had an unchallenged command of the sea, in quantity and quality, materially and psychologically, over all her actual or potential enemies, which she had never known before.’ A month before Trafalgar, Napoleon had already abandoned his plan to invade Britain and sent the vast, though ill-suited fleet that he had assembled at Boulogne into warmer waters, where so many of the ships met their end.

This British supremacy at sea is the crucial factor that sets the scene for Rodger’s concluding volume. The sovereignty so long vaunted was now an intimidating reality. And as we follow the naval adventures of the succeeding century, we cannot ignore the self-righteousness, the sheer blind arrogance that went with it. Again and again British flag officers, often acting without orders or way beyond them, steamed into faraway rivers to bombard inoffensive foreign capitals. For the greater part of the century, they were in the intoxicating position of drone operators today, able to inflict terrible damage from miles away, with little or no risk to themselves or their ships. Until telecommunications caught up, they also enjoyed a delicious freedom from further instructions from home base.

The year after Trafalgar, Sir Home Riggs Popham insouciantly scooped up the Cape of Good Hope, before convincing himself that Pitt (who had in fact just died) would be delighted if he sailed up the River Plate and captured Buenos Aires, which again he managed with little difficulty. The Ministry of All the Talents, now in power in London, was indeed delighted at the prospect of all the silver and gold that would be coming Britain’s way after it took control of the whole Spanish Viceroyalty. Yet after seven weeks, the citizens rose, recaptured the city and banged up Popham and his crew. An expeditionary force was sent to rescue him, but half of these troops were killed or captured. It is hard to think of a more immoral or ill-conceived venture.

Such raids were becoming so commonplace that neither Kennedy nor Wilson find space for this one, nor for the British raid on Washington in the summer of 1814, in which Cochrane and Cockburn sailed up the Potomac, dined in the White House on the banquet that the fleeing President Madison had left behind, then burned the city’s public buildings. Fifty years later, while protesting neutrality, Britain effectively sided with the South in the Civil War. Is it any wonder that in 1914 the average American admiral was gearing up for a war against Britain, or that in the Second World War Roosevelt had the greatest difficulty in persuading his naval commanders, especially the appalling Admiral Ernest King, to collaborate with the Brits?

In the First Opium War of 1839-42 – so called, though many other trades were in dispute – Captain Charles Elliot pushed up the Pearl River, storming forts, menacing Canton and forcing the Chinese into a humiliating surrender. ‘All this bore no relation to the government’s instructions.’ Palmerston wrote to Elliot: ‘Throughout the whole course of your proceedings, you seem to have considered that my instructions were waste paper, which you might treat with entire disregard, and that you were at full liberty to deal with the interests of the country according to your own fancy.’ Enter Sir William Parker, who proved equally headstrong, pushed up the Yangtse to capture Nanking and compelled the Chinese to more humiliating terms, including the permanent surrender of Hong Kong. In the Second Opium (or Arrow) War, the British bombarded and captured Canton and eventually battered their way into Peking and burned the Summer Palace in October 1860. Again, a certain lingering Chinese froideur is not surprising.

By now, Palmerston was as gung-ho for gunboat diplomacy as any of his admirals and won smashing election victories as a result. ‘Diplomats and protocols are very good things, but there are no better peacekeepers than well-appointed three-deckers.’ His attitude rested not simply on the security needs of the nation but on Britain’s moral superiority: ‘We stand at the head of moral, social and political civilisation,’ he declared in 1848. ‘Our task is to lead the way and direct the march of other nations.’

His commanders were only too anxious to follow his lead. In 1882, a row about Egypt’s debts to British and French bondholders provoked riots. Gladstone’s ministers were uncertain as to how to respond. Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour decided for them and bombarded the forts of Alexandria, then set fire to the city and occupied it before launching a full-scale invasion of Egypt, destroying the Khedive’s government and leaving the British in effective control of a country they never wanted. This entrenched the belief that the Suez Canal actually belonged to Britain (rather than being operated on a commercial franchise), a delusion that was to come back to haunt Downing Street seventy years later.

Similarly shaky presumptions intoxicated Palmerston in the notorious case of Don Pacifico, which Rodger only mentions in passing. David Pacifico was a merchant of Portuguese-Jewish descent, who enjoyed British citizenship by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. He had various dodgy claims against the Greek government, which Pam decided to uphold by instructing Parker (again) to blockade Athens on his way back from the Dardanelles, forcing the Greek government to compensate Pacifico and provoking a huge debate in the Commons, during which Palmerston uttered his famous pledge: ‘As the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.’

With this breathtaking global presumption came breathsapping paranoia. There was soon a fearful naval arms race in progress that continued until the non-naval Franco-Prussian War diverted attention. The fear of a French invasion was never far away, as witness the ‘Palmerston forts’ of 1859 that still ring the southern coastline. There was a brief interlude of calm: according to Lord Salisbury, Lord Derby’s foreign policy was ‘to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions’.

But​ patriotic panic kept on bubbling up. It is hard today to imagine what a furore W.T. Stead’s article in the Pall Mall Gazette in September 1884 created, even more than he did with his celebrated campaigns against slum housing and child prostitution. ‘What Is the Truth about the Navy?’ simply asked whether the Royal Navy was ready to meet the challenges of potential aggressors, and whether it had enough ironclads, ocean cruisers, torpedo boats and fully trained sailors and gunners. Yet it was enough to pressurise the government into building a whole new generation of ironclads. The campaign was fuelled in Parliament by W.H. Smith, the former first sea lord, who had made his fortune in railway bookstalls and was immortalised by Gilbert and Sullivan as Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore: ‘Stick close to your desks and never go to sea/And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee!’

The naval arms race brought around previous sceptics such as Lord Salisbury and, later, the young Winston Churchill, to spending even more on battleships. In fact, anyone in the know was well aware that the supposed British inferiority in naval armament was just as fictitious as the ‘missile gap’ that helped JFK to win in 1960. Admiral Jackie Fisher, who had been the principal cheerleader for more Dreadnoughts, admitted to Edward VII in October 1907 that ‘the English Navy is now four times stronger than the German Navy … we don’t want to lay down any new ships at all – we are so strong.’

In his calm but deadly narrative, Rodger shows how the philosophy of the navy evolved from its essentially defensive role – the protection of trade, the defence of the Narrow Seas from invasion – to an offensive means to global power; ‘the gradual displacement of a rational power strategy by the ideology of sea power’, as Rolf Hobson puts it in his study of Admiral Tirpitz and the High Seas Fleet, Imperialism at Sea (2002), which refines and improves on his namesake J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism exactly a century earlier. For Hobson senior, imperialism was an extension of capitalism by other means; for Hobson junior, it was a projection at sea of obsessive nationalism, a rephrasing in modern terms of what was once called ‘the sovereignty of the seas’, or by Tirpitz, Seegeltung. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783 (1890), the American naval captain, later admiral, Alfred T. Mahan made hugely fashionable the idea that command of the sea always had been, and always would be, the vital driver of national power. A nation no longer needed to seek out and conciliate allies. It simply had to show who was top dog by winning the decisive sea battle, the Entscheidungsschlacht.

This braggadocio was never better demonstrated than by Fisher’s sending the Channel fleet into the German navy’s home ground of the Baltic shoals in the summer of 1905. Sir Arthur Wilson, the fleet commander, took his ships in heavy fog through the treacherous sounds at Swinemünde, where crowds had gathered to watch the Kaiser review his fleet, ‘but when the fog lifted, the wrong fleet lay at anchor.’ Wilson’s ships had got in first and taken the inshore berth. The effect on the Kaiser’s paranoia, never far from the surface, can only be imagined. The insult, like the burning of the White House and the burning of the Summer Palace, wasn’t forgotten. The insensitivity of the British had reached Olympic class. British ministers were shocked to discover how much the Germans hated them. Arthur Balfour told a cabinet colleague in 1902: ‘I find it extremely difficult to believe that we have, as you seem to suppose, much to fear from Germany – in the immediate future at all events.’ Eight years after his famous declaration, Balfour was startled to be mobbed by a hostile Arab crowd in Damascus, after being cheered to the echo by Jewish settlers in Jerusalem. Reading the room was never his forte.

Rodger doesn’t offer a cut-and-dried explanation for the Great War breaking out when it did. But the whole tenor of his narrative suggests that the huge build-up of armaments and the intensification of national pride on both sides generated an unstoppable momentum, driven by public opinion rather than by wicked monopoly capitalists or even by press barons such as Northcliffe. When their newspapers howled for more Dreadnoughts, they were, as usual, only giving their readers what they wanted to hear. After reading Rodger’s remorseless account of the years between 1800 and 1914, I suddenly felt that the endless search for the Great Cause of the Great War was superfluous. It would have been harder to explain if it hadn’t all ended in an appalling major conflict.

But then comes the hideous irony. The naval rivalry that had propelled the build-up to war played only a secondary role in the war itself. What Mahan had taken to be a permanent reality of power turned out to be only a phase, passing even as he identified it. In the new age of huge land armies carried by railways, aeroplanes and motor transport as well as ships, sea power was no longer the decisive factor. Besides, the Entscheidungsschlacht simply refused to happen. Reinhard Scheer, the feisty new commander-in-chief of the High Seas Fleet, admitted in his postwar memoir that he tried to isolate a large chunk of the Grand Fleet off the coast of Denmark, not in the hope of victory so much as to justify his fleet’s ‘existence and the vast sums exacted from the resources of our people for its maintenance’. The Battle of Jutland was the result, a costly botch that both sides scurried to claim as a victory, before retreating to their respective lairs in Scapa Flow and the Baltic.

The real naval battles were fought between the convoys and the U-boats. Incredible courage was displayed all round, but naval officers found it dismal work, preferring ‘offensive measures’ as more manly, which, as Rodger says, ‘often meant high-speed steaming to nowhere’. Plenty of capital ships were sunk, but the convoys usually got through, and the people were fed.

The admirals were bored stiff during the war, and depressed after it. Admiral David Beatty wrote to his wife in June 1915, contrasting the hardship of the trenches with the comfort of life at sea: ‘The greatest war of all time is proceeding, the finest deeds of heroism are being performed daily … and yet we are doomed to do nothing, achieve nothing and sit day after day working out schemes that will never be carried out.’ In 1933, Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond was still lamenting the whole prolonged fiasco: ‘No one, today even, realises how gravely the navy failed in the war.’ But that was true only if you succumbed to the Fisher-Tirpitz-Mahan illusion that the navy was going to win the war.

Rodger gives the navy higher marks in the Second World War; commanders on the whole showed much greater flexibility and strategic intelligence. But once again, the most significant contributions to victory came from the heroic protection of convoys and the ferrying of troops over long distances. These involved terrible losses, such as the Arctic convoy PQ 17, which lost 22 out of 35 ships; the losses of submarine crew on both sides were even worse. But when effective air cover became available, convoys were increasingly unscathed. The great naval battle was still expected, but over the next four years the great ships were hounded down, crippled and sunk – singly. One by one, down they went: the Bismarck, the Ark Royal, the Tirpitz, the Scharnhorst, the Prince of Wales, the Repulse. The brilliant decoding work at Bletchley made these great beasts something close to white elephants. Alan Turing, Dillwyn Knox and Gordon Welchman were worth a couple of destroyers each.

The Americans, new to this game, were just as obsessed by great capital ships. At one time, a third of their fleet were battleships. To begin with, they refused to bother with convoys to escort their merchant ships along their own Atlantic coast, until mounting losses made them change their minds. In both world wars, the navy resumed, unwillingly, almost unconsciously, its historic defensive role.

And come D-Day, where was the Kriegsmarine? I hunted through Rodger’s account of the greatest amphibious operation in history and could find not a word about the German navy, and only a single mention of its commander, Admiral Theodor Krancke. A quote from his war diary for a month or so later, 25 July, merely records an Allied signal decrypt that listed the amount of men and supplies unloaded on the beaches, which represented ‘many times the reserves of material and men moved up to the front by us and present a clear picture of the enemy’s superiority, and of the advantages of seaborne supplies, given sea and air superiority’.

In other words, we couldn’t have stopped them if we’d tried. And they didn’t really try. On the morning of D-Day, the shrunken German Channel fleet and their crews were all tucked up in dock and bed after the storms of the past four days, and the first inkling they had that there were paratroopers ashore came when the Allied armada was already off the Normandy coast. The Kriegsmarine loosed off a couple of torpedoes and sank one Norwegian destroyer, but otherwise failed to fluff a feather. The whole momentous operation was, in a naval sense, unopposed.

This was the ultimate catastrophic failure of the Tirpitz doctrine. Had the Germans tried to keep their fleet in being and maintained a steady but vigilant defensive posture, the Allied landings might have had a fearful reception. Admiral Dönitz was Tirpitz’s ideological successor, and as Hitler’s he became the ultimate defender of fascism. In both roles, he was a disaster.

After the war, navies fell out of fashion. Louis A. Johnson, Truman’s incoming secretary of defence, told one of his admirals in 1949 that ‘the navy is on its way out … We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the air force can do anything that the navy can do nowadays, so that does away with the navy.’ He would have agreed with Thomas Jefferson’s verdict a century earlier that ‘gun boats are the only water defence that can be useful to us, and protect us from the ruinous folly of a navy.’

But the navy clung on. Even though Britain announced its withdrawal from east of Suez in 1968 (though not yet from Hong Kong), the following year the Royal Navy took over responsibility for Britain’s nuclear deterrent from the RAF. Huge ships went on being built. The two 65,000-ton fleet carriers laid down in the 21st century – the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales – are the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy. The difference is that, now as never in the 1880s or 1930s, defence experts openly question what these big beasts are for. Retired admirals still write letters to the Times pleading for more money to be spent on the navy. Ships remain indispensable for the protection of our coasts and the huge tanker fleets that sustain global trade. But the glory days are gone. Rodger doesn’t quite sum it up like this, but it is hard to escape the sense that after two centuries of creeping megalomania, the Royal Navy has recovered its modesty.