Nelson changed matters by what amounted to assertiveness training for the British navy. His captains were expected to close with the enemy and board if necessary, instead of staying at a reasonable range and letting noise and smoke stand in the place of doing real damage. Nelson’s opponents never beat him. In the end, they were able to kill him; but even dead he led his forces to victory.
The appearance of steam and armored warships in the nineteenth century gave rise to an amazing number of theories and some of the most outlandish warships ever built. What didn’t emerge were major battles between the new vessels.
At Lissa in 1866, an Austrian fleet humiliated an Italian fleet of more modern and powerful ships, proving that competence and leadership had more to do with victory than equipment alone. (Nelson must have smiled from his grave.) Lissa proved little or nothing about the new hardware (theorists of the time thought otherwise; they were wrong), but it was as good a test as the century provided.
Ships generally mounted mixed armaments of large and mid-sized weapons, though there was a brief fad of equipping battleships with small numbers of very heavy guns. This was partly in the hope that a single huge shell could smash opposing armor (in the unlikely instance that such a shell hit its target); and partly because the planners wanted an easily quantifiable marker for their arms race. (The dangerous buffoons in the Pentagon and Kremlin with their “My throw weight is bigger than your throw weight” arguments had nineteenth century predecessors.)
Incidentally, as soon as steam removed the necessity for masts and rigging, rams returned as well. There were few successful examples of ramming in war. but in peacetime, rams sank almost as many friendly naval units as decomposing smokeless powder did.
The only real test of nineteenth century warships came in the twentieth century—1905—at the Strait of Tsu Shima, where a Russian fleet that did nothing whatsoever right met a Japanese fleet that did nothing important wrong. The Russians were massacred, and it was heavy gunfire alone that did the butchers’ work.
An idiosyncratic genius named Jackie Cooper was running the British admiralty at the time. He came up with the first good idea in warship construction since Ericsson put a turret and screw propeller on the Monitor: Cooper built the Dreadnought.
The Dreadnought was big and fast and carried ten of the most powerful naval guns available, with none of the mid-sized weapons that had proved almost useless at Tsu Shima. Every battleship built after the Dreadnought is more similar to her than the Dreadnought was similar to anything that came before her.
Having had a brilliant idea. Cooper went on to have a lethally bad one: the battle cruiser. The battle cruiser was a dreadnought (the name became generic for all-big-gun warships) which had lighter armor and more powerful engines than a battleship, and was therefore faster. The theory was that “speed is armor.” The reality was quite different, and thousands of sailors (mostly British) died in the two World Wars (the Hood was a battle cruiser) because a clever slogan can’t repeal the laws of physics.
The dreadnought brought back the concept of the line of battle. It didn’t work any better in the twentieth century than it had in the eighteenth, because both sides had to agree to play the game and the weaker side—the Germans, in this case—would inevitably lose. The German admirals of the World Wars were less than brilliant, but they weren’t stupid. Besides, the fleets of World War II were dominated by aircraft. The one major battleship-to-battleship fleet action of the war occurred at night in the Surigao Strait. It was a close copy of Tsu Shima, with the Japanese playing the part the Russians had forty years earlier.
There is enough in actual maritime history to provide models for almost any form of space warfare a writer wants to postulate. Because there are so many possibilities, writers can find a solidly-grounded situation that suits their story, rather than forcing the story into a narrow matrix.
And that, I think, makes for some very good stories.
Dave Drake,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The Only Thing We Learn
Cyril M. Kornbluth
The professor, though he did not know the actor’s phrase for it, was counting the house—peering through a spyhole in the door through which he would in a moment appear before the class. He was pleased with what he saw. Tier after tier of young people, ready with notebooks and styli, chattering tentatively, glancing at the door against which his nose was flattened, waiting for the pleasant interlude known as “Archaeo-Literature 203” to begin.
The professor stepped back, smoothed his tunic, crooked four books on his left elbow, and made his entrance. Four swift strides brought him to the lectern and, for the thousandth-odd time, he impassively swept the lecture hall with his gaze. Then he gave a wry little smile. Inside, for the thousandth-odd time, he was nagged by the irritable little thought that the lectern really ought to be a foot or so higher.
The irritation did not show. He was out to win the audience, and he did. A dead silence, the supreme tribute, gratified him. Imperceptibly, the lights of the lecture hall began to dim and the light on the lectern to brighten.
He spoke.
“Young gentlemen of the Empire, I ought to warn you that this and the succeeding lectures will be most subversive.”
There was a little rustle of incomprehension from the audience—but by then the lectern light was strong enough to show the twinkling smile about his eyes that belied his stern mouth, and agreeable chuckles sounded in the gathering darkness of the tiered seats. Glow lights grew bright gradually at the students’ tables, and they adjusted their notebooks in the narrow ribbons of illumination. He waited for the small commotion to subside.
“Subversive—” He gave them a link to cling to. “Subversive because I shall make every effort to tell both sides of our ancient beginnings with every resource of archaeology and with every clue my diligence has discovered in our epic literature.
“There were two sides, you know—difficult though, it may be to believe that if we judge by the Old Epic alone—such epics as the noble and tempestuous Chant of Remd, the remaining fragments of Krall’s Voyage, or the gory and rather out-of-date Battle For the Ten Suns.” He paused while styli scribbled across the notebook pages.
“The Middle Epic is marked, however, by what I might call the rediscovered ethos.” From his voice, every student knew that that phrase, surer than death and taxes, would appear on an examination paper. The styli scribbled. “By this I mean an awakening of fellow-feeling with the Home Suns People, which had once been filial loyalty to them when our ancestors were few and pioneers, but which turned into contempt when their numbers grew.
“The Middle Epic writers did not despise the Home Suns People, as did the bards of the Old Epic. Perhaps this was because they did not have to—since their long war against the Home Suns was drawing to a victorious close.
“Of the New Epic I shall have little to say. It was a literary fad, a pose, and a silly one. Written within historic times, the some two score pseudo-epics now moulder in their cylinders, where they belong. Our ripening civilization could not with integrity work in the epic form, and the artistic failures produced so indicate. Our genius turned to the lyric and to the unabashedly romantic novel.