Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917-1919

Description

This collection of documents, some half of which are from American sources, traces the relationship between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, the British Admiralty and the US Department of the Navy and the British and United States governments on naval matters from before America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 until the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The ‘pacific’ President Wilson’s decision to declare war on Germany on 6 April 1917 became inevitable once Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on all neutral and Allied shipping. That gamble was based on the belief that Britain would be starved into surrender before America’s vast resources could be mobilised. It very nearly succeeded. When America entered the war, U-boats were sinking one in every four ocean-going vessels clearing British ports and in April 1917 alone almost 900,000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping was lost. Britain was down to just a few weeks supply of grain and the Grand Fleet was reduced to steaming at half speed for want of fuel oil. Clearly the priority was to counter the U-boats but, despite ample evidence of its effectiveness in specific cases, introduction of a convoy system was opposed by both navies on the grounds that it was a defensive policy which would not result in increased U-boat sinkings. Once introduced in May 1917, it proved an immediate success, both dramatically reducing losses and increasing U-boat losses. However, despite preliminary discussions prior to the US declaration of war, driven notably by the then Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Anglophile Ambassador to Britain Walter Hines Page, the US Navy was woefully unprepared for war and, at least initially, more of a drain on allied resources than an asset. Moreover, while the Admiralty made desperate pleas for the smaller craft needed to counter U-boats in the Western Approaches, Washington continued to pursue a capital ship building programme and to retain submarine counter measure vessels on America’s Eastern seaboard, despite little or no evidence of U-boat activity in those waters. And while a close and successful partnership developed at sea from the outset, suspicion and rivalry underlay the wider relationship and rapidly resurfaced once the guns fell silent, due in no small part to pronounced Anglophobia at higher levels in the US Navy. The papers are divided into nine sections, each with its own introduction, and cover preliminary discussions before America’s declaration of war; integration of the two navies’ activities while staving off defeat by the U-boats; the gradual development of a harmonious working relationship as America’s commitment to the war increased; and the last year of the war in which the relationship came to fruition. Subsequent sections then deal with more specific topics: the submarine war; US battleships in European waters; the North Sea mine barrier; the Mediterranean; the Western Atlantic and the Caribbean; and finally the naval armistice and the Peace Treaty.