Royal Naval College Greenwich Centenary 1873 - 1973
The Early Years
Naval plans existed only in the head
of the First Sea Lord or were locked in his safe only to be opened after an
emergency occurred. However, in 1900, a War Course College was established at
Greenwich by Captain H J May on his own initiative, but it was moved to
Portsmouth in 1905 to become more 'practical'. Though renamed the Royal Naval
War College in 1907 it became primarily a tactical school toying with cruisers
and destroyers not thinking, which is hard and difficult. 'It did little to
prepare the Navy for the realities of the coming war. However, lectures on
history and strategy were given by Sir Julian Corbett which were to form the
basis of his famous book 'Some Principles of Maritime Strategy' (1911). Corbett
taught that war involved more than fighting. He stressed the importance of
command of the seas and control of communications, and he was a great advocate
of the combination of flexibility and concentration of force which he saw as
one of the unique characteristics of navies. He also propounded a new theory of
limited war in which carefully planned combined operations played a prominent
part. He was a friend of Fisher and historical adviser to the Admiralty but
some of his ideas, especially that the great battle was not the be-all and
end-all of naval operations, was to make him unpopular with some
Admirals.
It was the education of the Acting Sub-Lieutenant, however,
which posed the most awkward problems at early Greenwich. These young men, bred
in Britannia and back from 5 years at sea, did not always find academic work
congenial. Indeed the new College, like all reforming innovations, faced the
criticism both of traditionalists (who thought it too theoretical and
technical, with a 'pathetic faith in mathematics as an instrument of culture')
and of progressives (who thought it too superficial). Fisher himself, though a
zealot for modernisation, viewed Greenwich with suspicion. No doubt in the
field of general education success varied, but in scientific education,
Greenwich's main purpose, a vital naval need was met. The 'material' revolution
- in ships, guns, submarines, torpedoes and other weaponry - demanded no less.
The need for the 'mental' revolution, recognised by some, was made
patent by the chaos of the Agadir crisis (1911). A shocked government backed a
new First Lord, Churchill, in his insistence on the inauguration of staff
courses at the War College at Portsmouth (1912) though these mostly dealt with
strategy and fleet tactics. As he was later to write 'When I went to the
Admiralty I found that there was no moment in the career and training of a
naval officer when he was obliged to read a single book about naval war, or
even pass a rudimentary examination in naval history.
|