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Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex: Torpedo Development, Property Rights, and Naval Warfare in the United States and Great Britain before World War I Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Katherine Cranston Epstein, M.Phil. Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Geoffrey Parker, Advisor John Guilmartin Jennifer Siegel Copyright by Katherine Cranston Epstein 2011 Abstract The warfare state is much older than the welfare state. For centuries, the relationship between militaries and the private manufacturing sector has been the most important point of interaction between the state and society. The naval-manufacturing relationship has even deeper historical roots: since warfare at sea has traditionally required much more sophisticated technology than warfare on land, nations have had to invest more money in navies in peacetime. In the late nineteenth century, two developments transformed the naval- manufacturing relationship. First, the intense naval competition preceding World War I increased the pace of technological change and the need for peacetime investment in naval technology. Second, the Second Industrial Revolution transformed the manufacturing sector into the industrial sector, and it accordingly altered the nature of military and naval technology. Torpedoes were in the vanguard of both developments. They played a significant role in the arms race before World War I because they threatened to revolutionize naval tactics and strategy. Navies realized that the tactical system built around capital ships primarily armed with big guns might give way to one built around smaller vessels primarily armed with torpedoes. At the strategic level, the ability of smaller vessels carrying torpedoes to sink larger ones made battle and blockade very risky. Given the potential of torpedoes to alter the metrics and application of naval ii power, navies worked feverishly to develop them before World War I. The sophistication of torpedo technology, however, complicated the task of turning potential into reality. Powered by fossil fuels and made with hundreds of small, steel, inter-changeable parts, torpedoes symbolized the Second Industrial Revolution at sea. Sending a torpedo prototype into mass production without adequately testing it beforehand would produce nightmares of assembly and operation. A robust research and development (R&D) infrastructure was therefore vital. Torpedo development in the United States and Great Britain showed the two sides of the R&D coin. Despite the common depiction of a declining Britain and a rising United States in this period, Britain actually had a decided edge over the United States in naval-industrial R&D resources. This edge enabled it to perfect existing torpedo technology and test new technology, while the United States had to take technological gambles. It was R&D resources, not Yankee can-do spirit or John Bull conservatism, that accounted for the nature of technological change. Although the two nations met with differing degrees of success, the effort to create an adequate R&D infrastructure profoundly changed the relationship between state and society in both the United States and Britain. Lacking the resources to develop adequate technology alone, the public and private sectors were forced to work together— but their collaboration raised fundamental and complex questions about the nature of property in relation to invention, and it imperiled the liberal political philosophy on which both nations were putatively founded. Between their interaction with industrialization and the new relationship between the government and the private sector, torpedoes may be said to have helped put the iii “industrial” and the “complex” in the military-industrial complex. Their story therefore belongs in larger narratives about the nature of technological change, industrialization, modern warfare, and national development. iv Dedication Dedicated to Mom, Dad, and Claire v Acknowledgments It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the assistance I received in researching and writing this dissertation. My first thanks are due to those who helped me at the archives I visited. In England, the staff at The National Archives in Kew retrieved countless documents for me. I am also grateful to the archivists and librarians at the Hampshire Record Office, in Winchester; the Hartley Library of the University of Southampton, in Southampton; the Churchill Archives Center, Churchill College and the Vickers Archive, University Library, at the University of Cambridge, in Cambridge; the Tyne and Wear Archives, in Newcastle; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, in London; and the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich. At the naval base in Portsmouth, Jenny Wraight, the head librarian of the Admiralty Library, was gracious and helpful during my visits to the Naval Historical Branch. Iain Mackenzie answered my inane questions and ferried books back-and-forth between the Naval Historical Branch and the Royal Naval Museum, where the staff was also very friendly. I visited several other archives in the Portsmouth area. George Malcomson hosted me on a brief visit to the HMS Dolphin Royal Navy Submarine Museum. Lieutenant Commander Bill Legg let me poke around the HMS Collingwood Communications and vi Radar Museum and even gave me a tour of the base. Lieutenant Commander Brian Witts kindly did the same for me at HMS Excellent . At the Brass Foundry in Woolwich, Jeremy Michell, Andrew Choong, and Graham Thompson created a convivial working environment. In the United States, the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC took my questions about obscure record groups in good humor and brought me many cart-loads of documents. The staff at the Navy Department Library, also in Washington, made it a congenial place to work on my short visits there. At the Naval War College, where I viewed documents from the Naval Historical Collection, Dr. Evelyn Cherpak went to some trouble to procure the records of the Naval Torpedo Station for me, and then generously tolerated the boxes ringing the edges of her archives. Her company made my time in Newport much more pleasant. In addition, I am grateful to Dr. John Hattendorf for giving me a tour of the Naval War College Museum, including its torpedo exhibit. I would also like to thank Neil and the late Philippa Coughlan for their hospitality while I did research at the Naval War College. At the Yale University Law Library, John Nann gave me a vital lead on tracking down the records of several court cases. Generous financial support enabled me to research and write my dissertation. A Dean’s Distinguished University Fellowship from the Ohio State University permitted me to focus on research without teaching responsibilities. An ABC-Clio Research Grant from the Society for Military History, a Caird Short-Term Research Fellowship from the National Maritime Museum, a Tomlin Fund grant from the Society for Nautical Research, vii and a Student Grant from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies funded my research trips. A Rear Admiral John D. Hayes Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the U.S. Naval Historical Center and a Pre-doctoral Fellowship in Security Studies from International Security Studies at Yale University gave me another year to write without teaching responsibilities. I am grateful to all of these institutions for their assistance. I have been very fortunate in my education. Some people have their first great teacher in college; I had mine in kindergarten. I would particularly like to thank Betsy Emery, Bryan Jones, Leonard King, and Cynthia Peterson. Liz Hall was a long-time coach and mentor. I still treasure the eight years of Latin that I took with a trio of extraordinary teachers—Sean Mulholland, John Pepino, and Christine Vellenga—who gave me some my happiest moments in middle school and high school. Puckie Thomas taught me how to write and continues to inspire me with her devotion to the life of the mind. In college, Dr. Jay Winter let me into his junior seminar on World War I as a sophomore in return for my volunteering to do the first presentation. I liked the class so much that I changed my major to history. Although shopping period is the bane of most Yalies’ existence, it gave me a chance to check out Charlie Hill’s course on International Ideas and Institutions on a whim, which set me on a course to taking Studies in Grand Strategy with him, Dr. John Gaddis, and Dr. Paul Kennedy. Grand Strategy was intellectually exhilarating, and I believe it was Charlie who suggested that I think about going to grad school to study military history further. I am glad he did. I am grateful to Dr. Alex Roland, of Duke University, for suggesting that I look into torpedoes. In the midst of flailing around for a dissertation topic, I met Dr. Roland at viii the 2007 West Point Summer Seminar and wrote to him asking if he had any suggestions on topics. He graciously replied with several ideas, one of which was torpedo development, saying that he had seen little on the subject. Thus a dissertation was born. When I was just beginning to think about my topic, I paid a visit to Dr. Jon Sumida at the University of Maryland. Not knowing what to expect from a Clausewitz scholar who studied the Royal Navy as a hobby (I thought), I found Jon full of enthusiasm and support for the idea. He was the person who really got me excited about my topic, and he often restored my spirits when they flagged. Jon smoothed the way for me at archives and was exceedingly generous in sharing documents (including a complete set of the Annual Reports of HMS Vernon , the Royal Navy’s torpedo school, and several “Paper[s] prepared by the Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes for the Information of his Successor”) and advice—without pressuring me to agree with his interpretations of the sources.

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