Abstract
This collection of essays, articles, and addresses is intended ‘to reintroduce the writing and thinking of [Admiral] William Sims (1858–1936) and help us learn many of the lessons he drew from his own experience some one hundred years ago’ (p. 11). According to the editor, Benjamin F. Armstrong, the current American military, as in the 1920s, is filled with personnel who held great levels of responsibility during their wartime service but now bristle at the ‘perceived micromanagement and bureaucracy’ of their non-combat duties. Armstrong believes there is a ‘movement among some in uniform to embrace the ideals of innovation and creativity from both the world of Silicon Valley and the culture of business entrepreneurship’ (p. 10). Faced with the decline of resources in the post-Iraq American military, these service members realize ‘new ways of doing things will be needed’ and ‘as has been typical throughout naval history, they look toward the future and technology to guide their way’ (p. 10). Armstrong believes the movement to embrace ‘innovation culture’ must also look to the past, and he sees Sims as a guiding light.
Admiral William S. Sims was an iconic officer during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He continuously challenged the American naval status quo officially and publicly, often through surrogates in the media. As a lieutenant in 1901, he criticized the design of the Navy’s newest battleships and went on to counter Alfred Thayer Mahan’s opposition to the all-big-gun battleship. Sims became inspector of target practice after writing directly to President Theodore Roosevelt complaining about poor naval gunnery and what he perceived as the lethargy within the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington to adopt Sir Percy Scott’s method of continuous-aim firing. Sims considered the navy to be too much under the influence of engineers and the Washington-based technical bureaus. His attacks on that influence and the system which supported it threatened Roosevelt’s naval build-up and resulted in a congressional hearing. Sims went on to command the nascent submarine-destroyer force, and left his post as president of the Naval War College to command American naval forces in Europe during the First World War. After the Armistice, he refused his Distinguished Service Medal and accused President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, of failing to prepare the service for war which resulted in more congressional hearings. Sims then returned to the Naval War College where he orchestrated war games between fleets equipped solely with aircraft carriers at a time when the Navy’s only carrier was a converted collier. After his retirement, he supported the aviation visionary, Colonel Billy Mitchell, at his 1925 court-martial.
This book is intended for naval personnel and ploughs no new historical ground. Undefined, insider terms such as ‘Red Team’ (p. 5) reinforce its focus on a contemporary naval audience. Historians familiar with this period will find nothing new in this volume. The historiographical framework is thin and some of the editor’s observations, such as that quoted above, that naval innovators have always ‘looked toward the future and technology to guide their way’ are sweeping and perfunctory.
Sims was an important person in the U.S. Navy and always seemed to be pushing the envelope. The uncritical portrayal of him in this book mirrors that in historian Elting Morison’s biography, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy. Morison’s account of his father-in-law’s naval career is a morality play in which the issues were always black and white, Sims was never wrong, and always fighting the good fight against the forces of lethargy and conservatism. In reality, Sims the insurgent, for all his intellectual breadth, was like a dog with a bone regarding naval engineers. Despite his self-confidence, Sims also was often wrong on technical matters. This was the case in his internal criticism of the design of the Connecticut-class battleships. Later, his errors came to light during the 1908 Senate hearings over the armor-belt controversy Sims had created. The commander of the Great White Fleet, Rear Admiral Robley Evans, supported the Bureau of Construction and Repair’s design and placement of the belt armor and refuted Sims’s claims. This was based in empirical evidence garnered by Evans during the Fleet’s cruise around South America, and Sims considered his testimony a betrayal. There was little gray area for Sims; one was either with him or against him, and to be against him made one a reactionary in his eyes.
Sims was an ideas man, and while sometimes incorrect, he contributed a great deal to the intellectual maturation of the U.S. Navy. Armstrong claims that ‘from the writing of William Sims . . . readers will see some of what has worked in the past and be better able to ask the right questions and frame solutions for the future’ (p. 11). Historians might look askance at such a claim, which is based on Morison’s hagiography and ignores other historical assessments of Sims. Relying on Sims, or his son-in-law’s biography of him, to be the voice of the past and its history of innovation and reform is problematic. For example, Armstrong’s statement that, as the result of Sims’s actions, the ‘U.S. Navy arguably overtook the Royal Navy as the best gunners in the world’ (p. 7) ignores the U.S. Navy’s shockingly dismal gunnery performance when it joined the Grand Fleet, which was documented thoroughly in Jerry W. Jones’s U.S. Battleship Operations in World War I.
While the rise of the U.S. Navy after 1890 is often attributed to the historical writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, there seems little appreciation of historical thinking in the modern U.S. Navy. Modern navies are technology-based but the myopic, American focus on technical education of its naval officers has created a largely ahistorical culture. In such an environment, any attempt to engender historical thought is welcome. This glimpse into William Sims’s professional life may stimulate some readers to learn more about Sims and the process of innovation and change in a technological society, both of which are much more nuanced and complicated than Sims, and Armstrong, present.