Microbes Against the Giant: The Maritime Strategy of the Jeune École, Part IV

The Russian torpedo boat Poti, circa 1883. Poti was an export version of the principal French torpedo boat design of the early 1880s. (Scientific American, courtesy of Project Gutenberg)

For previous installments, see Parts I, II, and III

The Admiralty’s Views

Despite their high profile, the Jeune École remained a minority of French naval officers. The vast majority of the officer corps remained in the traditionalist camp. Unlike the Jeune École, the Admiralty possessed no spokespersons in its ranks comparable to Aube and lacked any external advocate equivalent to Charmes. It also lacked influence within the National Assembly on procurement matters.[i] Arguably, the polarization of 1880s French domestic politics deprived the Admiralty of credibility in the Assembly as well.

Most traditionalists did not disapprove of torpedo boats or cruisers. Rather, they disapproved of the Jeune École’s prescriptions for how those warships should (and could) be used. The Admiralty largely believed torpedo boats were ideally suited for coastal defense, particularly in narrow channels and the approaches to ports. They also noted coal-fueled cruisers could not remain at sea as long as the equivalent warships of sail. Coal-fueled cruisers needed to replenish at least every 5,000 to 7,000 nautical miles, and the Admirals feared that large enemy combatants could easily blockade coaling stations to starve the commerce raiders of fuel. More coaling stations and cruisers were needed, argued the traditionalists, in order for Aube’s vision to stand a chance in reality.[ii]

Admiral Bourgois, President of the commission that originally recommended French Navy adoption of the Whitehead, contended that Charmes’s dream of torpedo boats devastating enemy merchant ships at night was a fallacy. No nighttime means of identifying friend from foe existed, so unrestricted Guerre de Course would inevitably sink neutrals, enrage their governments, and risk additional belligerents piling upon France. Admiral Ernest du Pin de Saint-Andre, the developer of the port of Toulon’s torpedo defenses, further noted that merchant ships could be armed with light rapid-firing guns for defending against unsupported torpedo boats. Merchant ships, Saint-Andre argued, could also institute zigzag maneuvers for torpedo avoidance.[iii]

Nevertheless, these arguments largely fell on deaf ears during the early-to-mid 1880s. It did not practically matter that the traditionalists stood on strong experience-based and technical ground. Without influential external advocates or effective internal spokespersons, the Admiralty simply could not communicate its positions in ways that counteracted the Jeune École’s ideological attractiveness and apparent modernity in the eyes of the center-left majority in the National Assembly or the general public. Nor is it clear the Admiralty even understood the political importance of the battle for public opinion. In contrast, Jeune École members went out of their way to help journalists and politicians seeking economic naval budgetary and procurement policy reforms refine arguments against the Admiralty.[iv]

French Naval Acquisition During the 1880s

Poor public relations and lack of political influence were not the Admiralty’s only intractable problems. Much like the rest of the then-developed world, the French economy had been suffering since 1873 from a protracted recession. The near-collapse of the Paris Bourse in 1882 exacerbated this by strangling the availability of credit within the French economy. This was disastrous for French Navy procurement plans as the Admiralty relied heavily on private loans to sustain the annual naval budget. Whereas the budget was 217.2 million Francs in 1883, two years later it had contracted by 45.6 million Francs.[v]  

Part of the Admiralty’s reason for resorting to private loans was its difficulty in obtaining the National Assembly’s concurrence on shipbuilding programs. From the early 1870s through the turn of the 20^th Century, French shipbuilding program proposals often stalled in the polarized legislature or received inadequate budgetary support. By the early 1880s, the Admiralty rarely consulted with the National Assembly when drafting proposals. The financial crisis and the Jeune École’s rising political clout made this situation worse. Legislators latched on to Charmes’s arguments that building a 20 million Franc battleship was an exercise in waste compared to the frugality of scores of high-performance 300 thousand Franc torpedo boats.[vi] Between 1872 and 1890, the French Navy received only fourteen new battleships and fourteen new armored coastal defense vessels. In contrast, it received 165 torpedo boats during this period.[vii] This bias towards torpedo boat procurement largely resulted from Aube’s influence, which grew further after his 1886 installation as Minister of the Marine by political allies. Upon entering office, Aube froze battleship construction and focused procurement efforts on torpedo boat and light cruiser development.[viii]

French torpedo boats of the 1880s were mostly built by the Normand shipyard in Havre.[ix] Normand’s boats, as exemplified by the Poti design sold to Russia, featured all-steel hulls, a 92’ length, 11.8’ beam at its widest point, displacement of 66 tons, a top speed of about 18 knots, and a 1,000 nautical mile endurance at 11 knots. Poti carried four Whitehead torpedoes and two Hotchkiss 40-millimeter rapid-firing guns.[x] In addition to these torpilleurs d’ attaque, Aube directed the construction of a prototype bateau-cannon named after his ally Charmes.[xi]

The Condor-class torpedo cruiser Vautour, circa 1890 (Courtesy Navypedia.org)

The other major component of Aube’s shipbuilding vision, commerce-raiding cruisers, faired similarly well in the 1880s budget battles. Thirteen protected cruisers were laid down between 1885 and 1887. These cruisers ranged in displacement between 1,705 tons and 7,470 tons. Four 1,270 ton Condor torpedo cruisers were also built.[xii] During sea trials, Condor achieved a speed of 17.7 knots.[xiii] Calling these ships cruisers, however, was somewhat inaccurate. Some of the French protected cruisers lacked medium-caliber guns, and most relied on torpedoes and light-caliber self-defense guns for armament. Both the protected cruisers and the Condors were essentially torpedo boats scaled up in size for oceanic operations.[xiv]

The cruisers also lacked sufficient endurance to support Aube’s Guerre de Course strategy. Just as the traditionalists had observed, France lacked a global network of naval coaling stations. Replenishing shipboard coal stocks meant calling in neutral ports, and nothing could prevent news of French commerce raiders’ arrival from being telegraphed by agents or others to France’s adversaries. This issue should have resulted in cruiser design requirements for coal storage space comparable to that of a ship of the line, but no such requirements change was made. Of the thirty-three French light cruisers built for Guerre de Course between 1880 and 1904, only two possessed adequate coal storage for a prolonged campaign of attacking merchant ships and evading enemy hunters.[xv] 

There were other problems with the Jeune École’s procurement approach. Aube delegated significant design authority to the shipyards without oversight, and lack of government-directed coordination between yards resulted in construction of multiple designs for each type of ship. This denied the French Navy efficiencies of procurement scale as well as the opportunity to standardize training, maintenance, and other aspects of lifecycle support for each ship type. The French Navy of the late 1880s through the turn of the century consequently became a credibility-deficient “Fleet of Samples” that would have been hard-pressed to perform its core wartime missions.[xvi]

Tomorrow, the French Navy tests the Jeune École’s theories in fleet experiments, plus the Royal Navy's moves to offset the Jeune École threat.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

 

---

[i] Walser, 21.

[ii] Ibid, 23.

[iii] Ropp, 168-169.

[iv] See 1. Walser, 15; 2. Ropp, 256.

[v] Ibid,  140.

[vi] Ibid, 4-5, 241.

[vii] Walser, 21.

[viii] Halpern, 40.

[ix] Soundhaus, 143.

[x] “The New Russian Topedo Boat, the Poti.” Scientific American Supplement Vol. XVI, No. 415 ( 15 December 2024), accessed 6/15/15, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11344/11344-h/11344-h.htm#7

[xi] Halpern, 40-41.

[xii] Sondhaus, 142.

[xiii] “Small Boats Needed Now.” New York Times, 14 September 1891: Pg. 2. Accessed 6/15/15 at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D05E4DB153AE533A25757C1A96F9C94609ED7CF

[xiv] Ropp, 129-130.

[xv] Halpern, 41-42.

[xvi] Ibid, 41.

Microbes Against the Giant: The Maritime Strategy of the Jeune École, Part III

The French bateau-cannon fast gunboat Gabriel Charmes (Courtesy of Hazegrey.org)

For previous installments, see Parts I and II

Strategic Theories of the Jeune École

Aube’s motivations, as previously noted, were not solely ideological. Building upon his embrace of Guerre de Course and coastal warfare, Aube argued French maritime strategy should be aimed at triggering the adversary’s socio-political collapse vice seeking conventional battle with the adversary’s fleet. In a war with Italy, he asserted, coercive naval bombardment of coastal towns and cities should be France’s objective. Against Britain, a commerce-raiding offensive backed by coastal defense of the French homeland should shape campaign plans. Aube’s ideas were reinforced by his observations of the social effects of the European economic depression of the early 1880s, particularly the labor strikes and anarchist terrorism in Britain. He became convinced that a series of sudden blows directed against an enemy’s economy at the start of a war, whether by shelling coastal commercial infrastructure or disrupting maritime trade, could shock the enemy population and incite economic paralysis. As jobs disappeared in the enemy’s economy, popular discontent against the adversary’s government might compel war settlement on terms favorable to France.[i]

Needless to say, Aube did not subscribe to (and might very well have not been aware of) Clausewitz’s political theory of war. In his 1882 book “La Guerre Maritime et les ports Francais,” Aube argued:

The highest objective of war [is] to do the most possible harm to the enemy… [since] wealth is the sinew of war, everything that strikes the enemy’s wealth…becomes not only legitimate but obligatory. We can expect to see the…masters of the sea turn their powers of attack and destruction…against all the cities of the coast, fortified or not, pacific or warlike; burn them, ruin them, or at least ransom them mercilessly.[ii]   

For Aube, future wars would—and should—automatically trend towards “totality” regardless of the political objectives at stake and without any concern for the possibilities of reciprocal escalation.

Aube’s theories on war and economic coercion led him to the deterministic conclusion that only a few British merchant vessels needed to be sunk before insurance rates would soar, shipowners would hold their ships in port or sell them to neutrals, the British economy would stall, and the British government would sue for peace. Charmes endorsed Aube’s ideas as heralding a brighter future for mankind: “others may protest; for ourselves, we accept in these new methods of destruction the development of a new law of progress in which we have a firm faith and the final result will be to put an end to war altogether.”[iii]

Aube and Charmes’ strategic theories accurately assessed the dangers commerce-raiding posed to a nation dependent on maritime trade. They also recognized, albeit narrowly, the possibility of combining commerce-raiding with traditional force-on-force operations to complicate an adversary’s strategic situation. However, their belief that the effects of one’s combat actions on an adversary could be accurately predicted—and therefore ‘surgically’ tailored to achieve specific outcomes—hubristically foreshadowed the worst excesses of 20^th Century compellence theories centered on conventional strategic bombardment, not to mention early 21^st Century effects-based operations theories. Nor did Aube and Charmes account for the possibility an adversary might successfully adapt its war plans and marshal its national resources despite absorbing severe blows.

More damningly, Aube and Charmes saw the connection between French military means employed and an adversary country’s civilian morale as a one-way street; they did not recognize that the adversary’s citizens might demand escalation rather than conciliation from their political leaders. Their thinking reflects the general ignorance of Clausewitz’s Trinitarian theory and gross misinterpretations of the Prussian Master’s dialectical contrasting of theoretical ‘maximum’ war with actual war that were prevalent in European militaries prior to the First World War.[iv] Nevertheless, this does not absolve Aube and Charmes of their ill-disciplined reasoning and falsifiable conclusions.

Most importantly, Aube and Charmes ignored the possibility that the rapidly evolving technologies that provided France with revolutionary tools of naval war could also be adopted by an adversary in ways that eviscerated the Jeune École’s strategic concepts. Their foundational assumption that the adversary was a static rather than intelligently-adaptive system was one of the key factors that ultimately brought down their movement.

Doctrinal Theories of the Jeune École

Aube, Charmes, and their followers noted the Royal Navy’s long history of dominance over the French Navy, which they considered particularly relevant in the aftermath of British hostility to France’s Tunisian colonization in 1881 and Britain’s unilateral occupation of Egypt in 1882. Additionally, while the Jeune École downplayed naval warfare against Germany as they evaluated the German naval threat as insignificant, they did note Italy’s opposition to the French presence in Tunisia as well as the expanding Italian fleet. Fleet doctrinal concepts advocated by the Jeune École accordingly centered on using small surface combatants to negate the Royal Navy’s conventional superiority and the Italian Navy’s peer-level capabilities.[v] 

In 1882’s “La Guerre Maritime et les ports Francais,” Aube argued torpedo boats could defend the French coast by threatening the enemy ships of the line performing a close blockade. Once torpedo boats disrupted the enemy’s blockade, the French Navy’s heavier forces could sortie from port and engage the enemy line at locations and times of its choosing. Similarly, torpedo boat disruptions of the blockade could enable cruiser breakouts into the open ocean for their Guerre de Course campaign. The French battleship fleet, Aube asserted, should be concentrated in the Mediterranean in order to maintain local sea control over France’s lines of communication with its North African colonies, while the torpedo boat flotilla should be primarily distributed throughout France’s ports along the Bay of Biscay and English Channel for coastal defense. Aube additionally noted that France’s telegraph network could be used by higher echelon commanders to rapidly sortie torpedo boat squadrons from their homeports against enemy fleet concentrations offshore.[vi] The more ports hosting torpedo boat squadrons, felt Aube, the greater the threat these ‘maritime sharpshooters’ could pose against an enemy’s blockade.[vii]

There were several problems with this approach. Aube’s doctrinal concepts ignored Grivel’s arguments in favor of a balanced fleet, particularly the need for small warships to be closely supported by heavier ones and vice versa in battle. Torpedo boats also lacked the height of eye possessed by larger warships, so combat coordination between torpedo boat squadrons demanded either preplanned tactics or closing to extremely short range for direct communications. Torpedo boats’ small sizes additionally rendered them more vulnerable to having their operations hamstrung by weather; strong winds and higher sea states could delay or prevent boats from getting underway, drastically reduce their speed of advance towards their destinations or their less-affected prey, and drain their crews during longer transits. Most significantly, the telegraph could support some degree of torpedo boat distribution between multiple ports, but a time-sensitive rendezvous location needed to be within the boats’ speed capabilities. If sea or weather conditions were poor, the telegraph could not compensate for the boats’ decreased speed of advance—or their inability to get underway in the first place. Nor could it support communications with underway boat squadrons, so the final orders or enemy location information transmitted prior to a sortie would be all a given boat had to work with. Information timeliness, accuracy, and detail telegraphed to a squadron before sortie would be critical determinants of that squadron’s mission success.

Charmes’s beliefs further departed from Grivel’s concept of operations. Lacking any naval experience of his own, Charmes argued that the multi-mission battleship was a jack of all trades and a master of none. As a result, he asserted, a French battleship should be decomposed into specialized small boats. The first type of boat he advocated, the torpilleurs d’ attaque, was equivalent to existing Whitehead-armed torpedo boats. In order to defend these boats during their attack runs from enemy small boats, a second type armed with rapid-fire guns and spar-torpedoes called torpilleurs de défence would be needed. A third type armed with a 5.5” gun, the bateau-cannon, could replace large surface combatants in performing the shore bombardment mission. Charmes called for the torpilleurs de défence and bateau-cannon to distract the enemy while the torpilleurs d’ attaque conducted their anti-ship raiding runs. Boat squadrons as envisioned by Charmes would consist of two bateau-cannon and four each of the other two torpedo boat types. This flotilla’s logistical support would be provided by Ravitailleur tenders, which could supply up to four gunboats and sixteen torpedo boats with coal, weapons, and stores.[viii]

Charmes believed torpedo boats’ low profiles and high relative speeds rendered ships of the line obsolete. Based upon his knowledge of 1870s-vintage British gunnery technology, Charmes believed that battleships’ slow-firing heavy guns posed little risk to maneuvering torpedo boats. Even if a large combatant managed to hit a torpedo boat, the loss of the inexpensive boat would impact France far less than the loss of a capital ship at the hands of the surviving boats would impact France’s adversary.[ix] Charmes’s recollection of how the two torpedo boats participating in the 1883 Mediterranean exercises endured heavy seas fed his assertions regarding torpedo boats’ suitability for open ocean operations. He wrote passionately of French torpedo boats stalking and sinking unescorted British oceanic commerce at night in a foreshadowing of the German First and Second World War submarine campaigns.[x]

Charmes’s extreme assertions reflected his technical ignorance and operational inexperience. His faith in the torpedo’s ‘revolutionary nature’ was so dogmatic that he declared its incontrovertible supremacy over all possible defenses. Frenchmen must “bring to bear immediately all of our genius for invention and all of our budgetary resources on the side whose future is certain and inevitable,” Charmes pronounced.[xi] Although statements like this had the effect of clouding and distorting Aube’s actual views, the Vice Admiral continued to make no evident efforts to walk back his politically influential partner.[xii]

Tactics proposed by the Jeune École were little more complicated than surrounding a solitary target with torpedo boats and using the chaos and gunsmoke of battle as cover for opportunistic attack runs.[xiii] Jeune École writers simply assumed that an enemy would sit still and adapt neither its plans nor its armaments to exploit French operational, doctrinal, or technological weaknesses.

Most glaringly, the movement’s activists allowed themselves to fall into scientism’s intellectual trap. They believed logic derived from the era’s scientific discoveries, such as a large organism’s susceptibility to bacterial infection, was universally applicable to humanity’s endeavors as opposed to being descriptive only within the narrow contexts of specific actors and circumstances in nature. In this view, they deterministically reasoned, torpedo boat ‘microbes’ would unquestionably be fatal to ‘giant’ warships.[xiv]

Tomorrow, the French Admiralty's counterarguments, plus the Jeune École's effects on French Navy acquisition in the 1880s.


The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

---

[i] See 1. Ropp, 162-163; 2. Arne Røksund. The Jeune École: The Strategy of the Weak. (Boston: Brill, 2007), 8-12.

[ii] Ropp, 158.

[iii] Ibid, 13.

[iv] Michael Howard. “The Influence of Clausewitz” in Carl Von Clausewitz. On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 32-33.

[v] Ropp, 12.

[vi] See 1. Ropp, 157; 2. Halpern, 38.

[vii] Ropp, 160.

[viii] Halpern, 39.

[ix] Walser, 11-12.

[x] Halpern, 39.

[xi] Ropp, 165.

[xii] Ibid, 167.

[xiii] Ibid, 136.

[xiv] Walser, 17.