An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless law of mutual support. Accordingly, both he and all his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgment upon the spur of the moment and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into action with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeuvres. . . . Thus they can never make up their minds to seize any favourable opportunity that may present itself. They are fettered by the strict rule to keep station, which is enforced upon them in both navies, and the usual result is that in one place ten of their ships may be firing on four, while in another four of their comrades may be receiving the fire of ten of the enemy. Worst of all, they are denied the confidence inspired by mutual support, which is as surely maintained by the English as it is neglected by us, who will not learn from them.
Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana, a Spaniard writing of the Battle of St Vincent where a relatively obscure Commodore Horatio Nelson first rocketed to celebrity thrill-seeker status. Disobeying orders, he headed his 74 gun third rate straight into six of the heaviest Spanish ships three of which were 112-gun three-deckers and a fourth the 130-gun flagship. With his ship’s wheel shot away, he led his troops to board an enemy ship and then with cries of “Westminster Abbey or Glorious Victory” ordered them to board another ship. Everyone ended up very impressed. The rest is history.
I was under the impression that TQM was effected in those days by liberal application of rum, sodomy and the lash …
Not at all.
There were posters all round the Victory and all the other ships.
“No-one clocks on to do a good day’s work”
“There’s no ‘i’ in ‘team'”
“Get it right first time”
That kind of thing.
Extraordinarily, they also found this image on the inside of one of Nelson’s badge after the tragic victory at Trafalgar
Horatio’s internal TQM dialogue: “I wonder what the difference is between “do” and “act”? How can I know? Is it just management gobbledegook to create a spurious virtuous circle? Christ, I’d better duck before I get shot! …. oops! Too late … Kiss me Hardie.”
of course they operated under canon law~
Hey Nick,
Whilst in hospital I heard you interviewed on ABC radio talking about PPPs.
you were very good of course. You really should put it up here
Thanks – it is up here.
There was also multi-tasking
Nicholson, Adam, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty and the Battle of Trafalgar, p. 248. (a bad book that’s fun to read).
I once read a history of the 1812 war (by, I thought, Patrick O’Brian but I can’t find it on Wikipedia) which explained that the English were used to taking on anyone, even when outgunned. It was the done thing: you sighted the enemy and you closed and engaged. They were invincible.
They thought. They came to grief with the Americans and it might have been for reasons given in your post. As usual for a bureaucracy, it took some catasprophic defeats for the message to hit home.
The book I read – as referenced above that provoked the post – argues that the British tactics at Trafalgar were somewhat foolhardy – certainly riskier than they needed to be. Another book The Institutional Revolution, is written by an economist arguing that all the peculiarities of their incentive system were optimised to a world where it was extremely hard to surveil people and so you made do with crude rules and very powerful incentives for disobeying them. The book exhibits the strengths of an economic perspective and all the weaknesses of a contemporary economic training. That is it’s argument is quite convincing and the way it’s put over is amazingly crude as if it’s essentially impossible to meld discussions about incentives in a thoughtful cultural context so that you get the feeling you’re observing human beings situated within a culture and within an institutional setting.
In any event, it makes the case that the British rules of naval engagement, which involved the Brits taking the windward side of an engagement forced them into the aggressive stance that Nelson was famous for. The French were to the lee side and so could run away like the surrender monkeys the Americans discovered when they changed the name of their national dish from French fries to Freedom fries. You can’t run away if the wind is blowing you towards your enemy. Also the Brits hanged the odd captain for cowardice – like one poor benighted Admiral John Byng in the Mediterranean – even where their failure to engage might have made good tactical sense. As Wikipedia explains:
British navy leaders were, accordingly obsessed with being seen to be aggressive enough. Nelson was the apotheosis of this – a pretty unhinged loon in battle. As he said, one imagines with relief on his deathbed, “Thank God I have done my duty”. They were his last words. Before this he said to those trying to smooth his dying agonies “fan, fan … rub, rub … drink, drink”, from which the well known TQM routine “Think, Plan, Do, Review” may have arisen. But this is far from certain.
A bit late to this one, but I found this bit rather curious:
There’s nothing particularly “British” about seizing the weather-gauge. In the age of sail, being on the windward side of an engagement was in all but extraordinary circumstances the best tactical position as you could give or evade battle. The (imperfect) analogy with land battles is seizing higher ground.
That said, being on the windward side of an engagement doesn’t “force” one into an aggressive stance. You obviously CAN run away from the enemy if the enemy is before you and the wind is at your back by running before the wind, e.g. to port or starboard, away from the enemy, and taking advantage of the fact that the enemy can only approach you by sailing against the wind, necessarily more slowly and with the risk of exposing himself to a broadside of cannonfire.
More broadly, and more to the point of the post, the so-called “British” tactics that you refer to – i.e. sailing at the enemy line, into gunfire – were not universally applied. Nelson is known for them, because he won several celebrated battles by breaking the enemies’ line of battle this way, but by no means did all RN fleet actions proceed on the same basis. Different situations called for different tactics.
Nelson was willing and able to point his ships into an enemy line, because he knew that the enemy’s lower standard of gunnery would result in less accuracy and volume of fire (thus less damage on approaching the enemy line) and that once brought into action his crew would outfight the enemy in gunfire and boarding action. Why? Because by the late 18th century the Royal Navy had been at almost constant war for nearly a century and was the largest, most experienced and professional navy in the world. Years of blockading enemy fleets in port meant that opposing naval crews lacked training, experience and morale whereas the RN had highly experienced and motivated crews led by professional officers. These facts meant that British fleets were able to delegate authority down to individual captains and to allow flexible tactics in a way that their opponents could not. RN captains would expect to defeat any enemy ship of similar, or even slightly superior, rating. Better training provided the freedom for aggression and innovation. This didn’t work so well for them against American frigates because: 1) the Americans had equivalently trained and experienced crews (many of the members were ex-RN); and 2) the US frigates were typically bigger and better-armed than the RN equivalents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812#Single-ship_actions
Thanks Fyodor,
I was quoting The Institutional Revolution – not making the claims myself.
The Soviet Army had a similar command structure to the French and Spanish:
The Soldier’s Lot, Viktor Suvorov
James one of the soviet army’s bigger problems in WW2 was that Stalin in the 30s had purged (often shot) most of its higher level officers and largely replaced them with political commissars. And therefore their ability to organise-coordinate complex large scale multiple unit maneuvers was pretty limited.
Not entirely true. Commissars did not lead units, but effectively supervised the officers who did. The officer corps was heavily purged in the 1930s and then again in 1941, but there were still many talented generals able to employ the Deep Battle approach to operational art developed by the Red Army in the 1930s, e.g. Zhukov in 1939:
Battles of Khalkhin Gol
Yes
Zhukov did more than survive in ‘Siberia’ and of course went on to pull off the pincer move on Stalingrad.