“The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy”. Andrew Lambert. Yale University Press, London 2021
Reviewed by Darin MacDonald (Twitter @dmacdonald77)
On the surface, Professor Lambert’s recent book is a wonderfully detailed and thoroughly researched biography of the man he esteems to be Britain’s greatest strategist, Sir Julian Corbett. Undoubtedly, this book clearly fits into the biographical genre in that it outlines the trajectory of Corbett’s life from his childhood and education, to his early years as a rather unsuccessful novelist, and the various decisions, fate and fortune that eventually landed Corbett inside the highest decision-making bodies of the Empire.
In so doing, Lambert’s book illuminates the mind and motives of the man, his personal connections, professional conflicts and private thoughts, and the manner in which these elements conjoined in the pursuit of what came to be his professional legacy; the articulation of a unique British Way of War.
Those not familiar with Corbett’s extensive works on history and strategy need not fear; a very basic understanding of the contemporary strategists of the 19th and early 20th centuries is all that is required in order to follow the narrative and central thesis of The British Way of War. Chapter by chapter, Lambert outlines the key events that were critical in the development of Corbett’s thinking and analysis. Extensively researched, the book takes the reader on a literary journey through Corbett’s life.
Following a short-lived career as a novelist and travelling war correspondent, Corbett’s initial non-fiction works included short, populist biographies of English military heroes; Monk – a General during the English Civil War under Cromwell – and Sir Francis Drake. Corbett’s fascination with Drake led him to conduct more extensive research on the great Elizabethan sea-lord, culminating in a two-volume publication, Drake and the Tudor Navy in 1898. It received excellent reviews and caught the eye of many key naval historians and naval thinkers of the day, none more important than the future First Sea Lord himself, Admiral Sir ‘Jackie’ Fisher. The lifelong partnership formed by these two men became a symbiotic relationship between civil scholar and uniformed strategist and innovator.
Fisher and Corbett would work together on many projects over the next twenty years that largely shaped the Royal Navy that entered the Great War. Corbett articulated the logic, precedent and vision for most of Fisher’s reforms through pamphlets, books, newspapers and periodicals. Corbett was also central in the establishment of the Naval War Course, an extension of his writing in support of Fisher’s reforms to naval education, and was one of the key lecturers over the first decades of its existence. In this endeavour, he would become influential in the strategic education of many of the future Admiralty figures of the Great War; no less than Jellicoe and Beatty for example. Lambert nonetheless highlights how despite the best efforts of Corbett and Fisher, these two formidable thinkers were ultimately unsuccessful in correcting the continentalist ‘drift’ of British strategy that they both judged exceedingly dangerous for the British Empire.
Prodded by Fisher, Corbett would publish works of monumental importance to the strategic debates of his times. Two further historical studies concerning the strategic culture and history of the British Empire followed in 1904 and 1907. Respectively, England in the Mediterranean and England in the Seven Years War left no doubt as to the strategic insight garnered by Corbett’s inductive method of deep historical analysis. Together, these works began to reveal unique strategic principles applicable to the British empire in the early 20th century. Not to be misunderstood as purely backward-looking histories, Corbett was building the case for a limited maritime strategy for Britain vis-a-vis developments on the continent. Despite the soundness of his analysis and logic, however, Corbett’s ideas remained controversial.
The previous epoch of relative peace and unchallenged naval supremacy, combined with the fallout from the German wars of unification had led many in Westminster to become card-carrying Germanophiles, seduced by the concept of ‘decisive battle’ and ‘decisive theatres’ requiring the annihilation of the enemy’s forces in order to secure quick victory in war. The writings of Clausewitz had become extremely fashionable in General Staff circles and appeared to support this continentalist mode of thinking. Both Fisher and Corbett observed that, ironically, most naval officers were ill-equipped to counter this continentalist narrative due to a lack of strategic literacy. Despite operating the most strategic asset available to the British Empire – her navy and the concomitant sea control it delivered – British naval officers were largely unable to articulate how that sea power could, and should, be applied to provide a strategic deterrent or to gain advantage in wartime. Their cause was not aided by the fact that the most influential naval thinker of the late 19th century, Mahan, had largely promoted a navalised version of German continentalist thinking.
Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History had convinced the world that the primary purpose of a navy was to defeat an adversary’s fleet in a decisive, blue-water engagement and thereby gain Command of the Sea; it was a theory of naval attrition written for an American audience who required convincing of the value of expensive blue-water naval assets and the pitch was therefore made in familiar, continentalist language.[1] Britain needed no convincing about the utility of its navy, yet the long peace of the Pax Brittanica combined with the rapid development of naval technology had fostered a generalised uneasiness in British strategic circles that perhaps the strategic logic of Drake and Pitt the Elder had become obsolete. Mahan’s work became such a popular manuscript that it distorted the traditional British manoeuvrist concept of the employment of sea power as a component of a maritime strategy that focused on land and sea elements working in unison through combined operations.
Corbett’s work therefore had two aims. Firstly, he aimed to re-acquaint the Admiralty, the War Office and the British statesmen of the age with the wisdom of previous centuries; that the true value of sea power was not to seek a decisive battle with the enemy’s fleet, but to employ sea power as a strategic deterrent that prevented the need for tactical victories in battle in the first place. Lambert repeatedly highlights how Corbett painstakingly built the evidence to support his theory that continentalist ‘decisive battle’ thinking was antithetical to Britain’s unique circumstance as a global maritime empire, rather than a continental power based on mass conscript armies. In the process, Corbett found himself sparring with the War Office and the anti-Fisher elements of the Admiralty through the leading periodicals and newspapers. He was continually struggling to convince uniformed leaders that a civilian scholar, trained in the law and lately having turned his attention to British strategic history, could offer insights into naval and military policy to shape the thinking and decisions for a future war. The War Office and General Staff were therefore consistently able to influence foreign policy and shape the strategic discourse to a much greater extent than the Admiralty. This gradually evolved to translate the Entente with France into an obligation to provide a large land force on the continent for ill-defined and wrongminded reasons.
Corbett’s second aim, therefore was to enable the naval officer corps to develop the influence they needed to get British strategic thinking ‘back on track’. As previously noted, Corbett and Fisher had noted that the average naval officer was woefully ill-equipped to articulate the strategic concepts of an alternative maritime strategy based on combined operations, manoeuvre, and deterrence. Arguably Corbett’s most famous work, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, published in 1911, was conceived as a method of filling the void in the strategic education of the RN’s officer corps and to challenge the dominant continentalist narrative. It went on to become a strategic primer text used extensively in the Naval War Course to equip naval officers for the types of strategic dialogue and debates that would await them in their future roles in the Admiralty. In an age when British Generals and statesmen had become fascinated by Clausewitz and the strategic logic of the Prusso-German tradition, Corbett stressed that to enable British naval officers to offer a counterpoint, they must be properly educated in the British strategic maritime tradition. This began by ensuring they could speak the same language as their General Staff colleagues, dragging the naval officer’s lexicon out of the technical jargon particular to warships and naval combat, and stressing the need for a more elevated perspective that considered principles of war, theories of warfighting and strategy.
Alas, Corbett’s efforts came too late. By the time the July crisis of 1914 set in motion the conditions that led to the Great War, the Admiralty’s ability to influence the strategic discourse was diminishing largely due to the controlling influence of the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill. Lambert highlights the cognitive dissonance presented by the figure of Churchill. His record as Prime Minister during the Second World War – as a cautious strategist keen to avoid great bloodshed in a titanic struggle against the Wehrmacht on the European continent – belies the continentalist leanings and raw ambition of Churchill as the First Lord of the Admiralty in the opening years of the Great War. Lambert’s vicious criticism of Churchill’s motives, methods and decisions during this period leave no doubt as to his view; that Churchill as First Lord largely misunderstood the strategic underpinnings of British sea power.
The concept of a dominant Navy enabling the application of a small, but highly professional, land force appears to have been lost on Churchill. Instead, Churchill oversaw the usurpation of this tradition by wilfully encouraging the use of the British Expeditionary Force to supplement the much larger French army on the continent, and believed that the German High Seas Fleet would seek out a Mahanian ‘decisive battle’ against the Royal Navy of its own accord. In doing so, he sentenced the BEF to play a subsidiary defensive role on the continent and surrendered its real strategic value; the application of offensive land power at a point of British choosing enabled by naval mobility and endurance. His decisions openly ignored the advice of his Admirals including his chief naval advisor, the First Sea Lord. Churchill’s recall of Fisher out of retirement to fulfill the vacant post at the head of the Admiralty in late 1914 is indicative of his belated recognition of the error in his strategic logic.
Fisher and Corbett understood that only a direct threat to Germany’s key vulnerability, the Baltic trade routes, could force the High Seas Fleet to seek an engagement and the most viable manner to achieve this involved combined use of the Navy and the BEF to threaten the closure of the entrances to the Baltic, including the Kiel Canal. Fisher and Churchill would never agree on this course of action, however, leading to Fisher threatening resignation on multiple occasions. Having committed the strategic blunder of prematurely assigning the BEF to the continent, Churchill spent the remainder of his time as First Lord seeking some manner for the RN to decisively alter the course of the war. The Dardanelles campaign, by far the most famous of these initiatives, led to his dismissal and decades of collective Empire introspection.
Corbett had been commissioned soon after war broke out in 1914 to lead the writing of the official history. Leaving the history of the land battles to others, Corbett lead the efforts of capturing the war at sea, but most importantly, preserved for himself the responsibility of capturing the history of British grand strategy in the Great War. Needless to say, many of his contemporaries feared having their errors exposed and analysed, Churchill and Beatty amongst them. A determined campaign to block the publication of the official histories ultimately failed, however when Corbett and Fisher both died before it was completed the door was left open for revisionist versions of events, such as Churchill’s own The World Crisis, to muddy the waters.
A great achievement of Lambert’s The British Way of War, is to highlight not only the great works of Corbett and the influential role he and his published works had in attempting to correct the continentalist drift of British strategy at the turn of the 20th century, but also to provide the context around the logical basis for these works. Each of Corbett’s most famous works had at its heart a resonance in the strategic debate of its age which both informed and provided the motivation for the research. The book is presented in such a way that each chapter is dedicated to one specific work or a specific period that demonstrates the progression in Corbett’s thinking as well as the progression of the political and strategic developments of the day. Corbett’s works are presented in parallel with the unfolding strategic tragedy that would lead to the First World War. The chapters build on and support each other such that each is able to be studied separate from the book as a whole. In this way, the chapters lend themselves to ease of use for students and educators of this era in British strategic thought.
While clearly articulating the strategic purpose underlying each of Corbett’s works, it is far less obvious to the reader what the ultimate purpose of Lambert’s work is. The British Way of War is much more than a simple biography of a man Lambert clearly admires. Corbett wrote about historical events and key figures from Britain’s past, but wrote for a specific audience with a clear purpose to educate the naval officers and statesmen of his times about the unique British Way of War as particular to the conditions of the British Empire. Lambert’s writing follows a parallel structure. He not only conducts a biographical study of Corbett’s life, but examines the historical events and debates that both shaped and gave purpose to his analysis. I suspect that Lambert equally shares Corbett’s sense of purpose; the education of the naval and diplomatic classes of the present day United Kingdom. The events of the past several months, and the desperate scramble of the West to refine some semblance of a strategy in the face of old-world Russian realpolitik suggests that Lambert’s message, like Corbett’s, is badly needed, but his timing, also like Corbett’s, may have come slightly too late to influence the outcome of this particular crisis.
*Darin MacDonald is a Commander in the Royal Australian Navy having previously served in the Royal Canadian Navy. He is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada (B.A. (Hons) Military & Strategic Studies – 2000) and a distinguished graduate of the Australian Command and Staff Course – Joint (2018). He holds a Masters degree from the Australian National University in Defence and Strategic Studies and is currently serving as the Commanding Officer of HMAS Toowoomba, an ANZAC-class frigate.
[1] Benjamin ‘BJ’ Armstrong, “Mahan Versus Corbett in Width, Depth and Context,” Military Strategy Magazine 7, no. 4 (2022).
This review was originally published on MaritimeHistory.com
