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JAPAN SOCIETY LECTURE
Trafalgar, Tsushima and onwards: Japan and the Decisive Naval Battles of the 21st Century 22 February 2006 - RUSI, London Lecture by Geoffrey Till Introduction Two hundred years ago, on October 21st, Lord Nelson won a stunning victory over a superior Franco-Spanish battlefleet off Cape Trafalgar. As Corbett puts it in his seminal The Campaign of Trafalgar,
When to this is added the destruction of four of the survivors by Admiral Sir Richard Strachan on November 4th, it is easy to see why Nelson's second in command, Admiral Collingwood should proudly proclaim the battle of Trafalgar to be "the most decisive and complete victory that ever was gained over a powerful enemy." Trafalgar rapidly became the archetype of decisive naval battles in general. Recent political sensitivities over the 200th commemoration of the battle show that even so long afterwards, these events can easily become iconic: they seem to matter to people and how they feel about the world. Every nation needs its heroes, and many of them need their great naval victories too. The aim of this article, though is to look at the way in which such battles as Trafalgar and Tsushima were looked on the time and how they seem now especially to the Japanese, a hundred or more years afterwards. Before the battle of Tsushima, on 27th May 1905, Admiral Togo clearly had Nelson in mind when he signalled the fleet "The existence of our Imperial country rests on this one action. Every man must do his utmost." In turn, the equally stunning Japanese victory at Tsushima became a symbol for Japanese admirals of the Second World War. Admiral Yamamoto echoed his predecessor's general signal to the fleet as it set out 36 years later for the attack on Pearl Harbor: "The rise or fall of the Empire depends upon this battle." Togo's battle-flag flew again from Admiral Nagumo's flagship carrier Akagi. A few months later still, Admiral Yamamoto's Combined Fleet sailed from Kure on its way to catastrophic defeat at Midway in 1941 on Tsushima or Navy Day, the 27th May. This was no coincidence. Yamamoto had been at Tsushima, being badly wounded in the leg and losing two fingers of his left hand . "When the shells began to fall above me," he said, "I found I was not afraid." Togo's flagship the Mikasa, moored at Yokusuka, has the same place in the mind of the defence- attentive Japanese public as HMS Victory at Portsmouth does for the British. Tsushima had resonance for the Americans at Midway too. Admiral Nimitz [Yamamoto's opposite number] personally talked with Togo shortly after the 1905 battle, insisted on attending the great man's funeral in 1927 and played a leading part in the re-establishment of Togo's shrine in Tokyo after the Second World War. For their part, the US Navy regards Midway as its Trafalgar - an event to commemorate and celebrate in the same way. "Midway," said James R Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defence at a dinner to commemorate the 61st anniversary of the battle, "was the most decisive naval victory since Trafalgar." It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for professional sailors, the pursuit of glorious and decisive battle was what naval warfare and maritime strategy was all about. It seems to dominate the naval faith, and is central to much conceptual strategic speculation about what navies do and indeed what they are for. Why think about battles ? But navies are not independent variables, they also reflect their domestic and international context since this in large measure determines what they do, how they do it - and what they do it with. Accordingly, they provide a prism through which that context may be analysed. They illuminate that context, but they may change it too. They may have a decisive effect on subsequent events, or at least help define them. We are interested in navies and their battles for what they tell us about their times and for their influence on what happened afterwards. But, secondly, we are interested in them because the way nations like Japan see battles tells us something about the way they see the world and may illuminate their policy preferences. The idea of Decisive Battle Battles may be decisive at two levels, the tactical and operational levels of what happens at sea in consequence of some grand encounter, and at the strategic level where the focus is on their impact on the war as a whole. A battle can be decisive both for the immediate damage and loss the victor inflicts on the vanquished tactically, but much more for its operational consequences at sea afterwards. A battle decisively won could effectively confer upon the victor command of the sea, or sea control, the tremendously advantageous ability to use the sea decisively for his own purposes thereby preventing his enemy from doing the same. Because of this, securing smashing victories such as Trafalgar, Tsushima and Midway are at the very heart of maritime strategy. Moreover, they have emotional appeal both to the military and to outsiders because they symbolise the warrior virtues of courage, heroic sacrifice, strength, ability and professional skill. The capacity to prevail in battle, should it ever come to that, is the ultimate performance indicator of the military virtues. But even so, both the main theorists of naval warfare, Mahan and Corbett, entered caveats against the unthinking pursuit of the decisive battle however. Corbett was quite stern :
He argued that a bull-headed pursuit of decisive encounters was unwise for two different sets of reasons - the first to do with the practical problems of securing them and the second with their perceived importance, relative to other things that the fleet could be doing instead. Trafalgar could be said to illustrate all these points. First at the operational level it showed that it was almost impossible for both sides to concentrate all, or even most, of their resources in one spot at one time for one grand encounter, even if they wanted to. There will always be ships under construction or repair, in transit from one place to another, or away doing other things in other places. As Brian Tunstall observed,
Even after this great defeat, the French in effect managed to reconstruct their battlefleet. By 1813, Napoleon had another 80 line of battleships in commission, with more building. As a result, the French were able to conduct a dangerous and ferocious war on trade and to compete with the British in a score of minor naval campaigns around the world. In the twelve years before Trafalgar the British lost 87 warships to the French; in the 10 years afterwards they lost another 61. It was otherwise at Tsushima. This was a battle that followed a year of campaigning which had already seen the progressive destruction of Russia's first Pacific Squadron through aggressive Japanese action both ashore and afloat. At Tsushima, Admiral Togo sank eight of the Russian battleships and captured the other four; only one of Russia's eight cruisers made it to Vladivostock; one auxiliary ship escaped, five were sunk and two captured; two Russian destroyers got through to Vladivostock, but three were sunk, one captured and three interned in neutral ports. 4,830 Russians were killed, compared to 117 Japanese and nearly 6000 were taken prisoner. "The overall Russian loss," says one account, " was the heaviest in the history of naval warfare." For his part Teddy Roosevelt thought it more a slaughter than a victory. The Japanese had destroyed such a high proportion of the Russian fleet that there was virtually nothing left over to fight another day, and, in the time available, the Russians could not hope to replace their losses. But this was very unusual. Corbett called it 'perhaps the most decisive and complete naval victory in history...not in our most successful war had we obtained a command of the sea so nearly absolute as that which Japan now enjoys." He wondered whether anyone would ever have such uncontrolled sway again. Tsushima was in effect the end of the naval campaign. After it, the Russian navy had nowhere else to go. This was not the case at Midway despite the catastrophic carrier losses the Japanese navy suffered there. Midway, was just an important part of an eighteen month campaign that ran from Coral Sea in May 1942 to the end of the struggle for Guadalcanal in November 1943. Here the essential metric is not the number of ships sunk or aircraft shot down but the consequential strategic situation ashore. With the Americans starting to crawl up the Solomons after their final victory at Gudalcanal the Japanese began their long and irreversible retreat to Hiroshima. "The real war," said the Japanese Prime Minister General Tojo a little later "is just beginning." Some historians go still further and argue that by this time, Japanese deficiencies in ship and aircraft building, in their very limited capacity to replace lost personnel, and in their fractured command and control arrangements meant that defeat by the United States was inevitable. To quote Winston Churchill on the later stages of the battle of the Atlantic, "All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force." Midway therefore merely reflected the strategic context accelerating a process that was inevitable, and so hardly counts as a war-changing event. The Japanese Navy's perverse pursuit of an intrinsically decisive victory that would magically transform the hard reality that faced them is indeed held to be a major cause of their downfall. Memories of the glories of the battle of Tsushima were significantly responsible for this. They led to a strategy in World War II that focussed almost exclusively on battle at the expense, for example, of the hum-drum business of protecting their sea-lines of communication. It contributed to a level of confidence that they could deal with an enemy apparently much stronger than them, because of superior morale, training and equipment at the start of a conflict. The easy successes of the early months of the Second World War in the Pacific only made the shock of defeat when, inevitably, it came, the worse. But there is still one more operational-level question left to answer, and that is why was the Imperial Japanese Navy so successful in the Russo-Japanese War. It was, indeed, partly a matter of superior equipment. The Japanese battlefleet was a homogenous force of largely British built warships with armour, speed and weaponry that was far superior to the bulk of the Russian fleet. Even the best of the Admiral Rozhdestvensky's battle line - the four Borodino class battleships- sat so low in the water that much of their armour was submerged. It was difficult to fire their 12" guns in any kind of seaway. A hit from one of these guns could do tremendous damage, but it was very unlikely they would hit because their fire-control systems were defective. Even at the extraordinarily close range of this action - 4-5000 yards or less in some cases, the Russians struck home only with two out of a hundred shots. Worse still, a distressingly high proportion of Russian shells turned out to be duds and failed to explode. And even when they did work as intended they had neither the penetrating nor the explosive effect of Japanese shells. The tactical and operational effect of poor equipment was made worse by inadequate training. However gallantly they fought, the crews of the arriving Russian fleet were nothing like as well trained in the many disciplines of naval battle as their Japanese counterparts. The Japanese, including Admiral Togo himself, had benefited from British training and had had a year in which to rehearse and perfect their fighting skills. The Russians, on the other hand had suffered the rigours of the extraordinarily long and arduous voyage from the Baltic to the East China Sea. Many of the best seamen had already been sent out to the First Pacific Squadron: a worrying proportion of the Second Pacific Fleet not only were the B team, but worse still, knew they were. The despairing comments about the morale and proficiency of the fleet as it made its way to the East that spatter the diary of Commander Vladimir Semenoff are eloquent. After its disastrous engagement with a fleet of trawlers from Hull, the Russians found themselves being convoyed by Royal Navy cruisers. 'All their movements were so regular, all manoeuvres were carried out at such speed and with so much precision...as if a well-rehearsed play were being enacted before our eyes.' Admiral Rozhdestvensky admired such professionalism on the one hand and lamented its absence in his own fleet. "That is something like." He is reported to have said "Those are seamen. Oh, if only we..." Especially when it heard of the fall of Port Arthur, this was a fleet that knew it was probably going to its doom, but carried on anyway. " I think, wrote Semenoff, "I can confidently assert that in the fleet there was hardly anyone [except perhaps, quite inexperienced youths] who counted upon success in an open, decisive battle." Most other observers thought the same. Thus Lord Vansittart, reflecting on the drawling enquiry into the Hull affair, '...while the Russian rattletraps puffed to Tsushima and the bottom of the sea, as everyone had expected from the first day of the maddest voyage ever ordained by the lunatics who so often get to the bridge on ships of state.' Like Captain Nikolai Klado, Semenoff thought the real explanation for this naval catastrophe needed to sought in the poor quality of the Navy's leadership. Much of this, in turn, was directly due to the deficiencies of the Tsarist regime itself in which the navy merely reflected its context. In effect, Tsushima, rather like Midway, could be seen as a symptom of Japan's defeat at a higher level rather than a cause of it. This gets us onto the more important strategic level at which battle should be understood. The strategic importance of battle rests on the broad consequences of a victory at sea upon the outcome of a war. This claim is based less on what happens at sea, than on its consequences for the prosecution of the war on land. Corbett was sceptical about the impact of Trafalgar from this point of view. 'By universal assent,' he wrote ... Trafalgar is ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, and yet of all the great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result. It had brought to a triumphant conclusion one of the most masterly and complex sea campaigns in history, but in so far as it was an integral part of the combined campaign its results are scarcely to be discerned. It gave to England finally the dominion of the seas, but it left Napoleon dictator of the Continent. By the time Trafalgar was fought, the argument goes, Napoleon had already had already effectively abandoned his apparent project to invade England and started moving his armies into a major campaign that led to victories at Ulm and Austerlitz, the unravelling of the coalition that Britain had tried so hard to create and to William Pitt dying thinking himself to have been defeated. The counter-argument is that while a French victory might well have led to a revival of Napoleon's on-and-off plans for invasion, a French defeat required Napoleon to impose the 'Continental System' which in turn led a war against the whole of Europe which even he could not, in the final analysis, win. The naval campaign of the Russo-Japanese war has, likewise, to be seen against the broader context of the land war in Manchuria. Here too, although the costs were much more evenly spread between the two adversaries, the Russians had suffered a demoralising series of reverses. Against this background the battle of Tsushima, finally hammered home the fact that the Russians had lost the war at sea as well as on land, and when the Americans offered the prospect of a mediated end to the war, they took it. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese war contributed to the revolt of 1905, significantly exemplified by the mutiny in the battleship Potemkin, and both led to a programme of constitutional, systemic and military reform which might have finally transformed Russia into a great power in every sense of the word, had the process not been halted by the onset of the First World War. The immediate strategic result for Japan was a free hand in Korea, the expulsion of the Russians from Manchuria, the occupation of the southern half of Sakhalin but much more important, for Japan, the re-focussing of Russia's strategic priorities back on Europe where many of its leaders always thought it should have been in the first place. The Japanese were well aware of the tremendous costs of the war, especially on land, and on the damage it had done to Japan's finances and economy. This explains why Japan was also willing to participate in the American mediation and the huge disappointment, and the anger, felt in Tokyo by their failure to get the reparations from Russia, which would have alleviated the costs of a war forced on them, they though, by their defeated adversary. In this can perhaps be discerned a growing sense that Japan could not rely for their just deserts on the international community; these would have to be secured by independent action. The long-term consequences of victory are equally debateable. Japan had, in the eyes of the world, most unexpectedly defeated one of the apparently great European powers. Its victory made it a key player in the security architecture of East Asia, and in some quarters at least, whetted the appetite for more. Japanese leaders in the Showa era of the 1920s and 1930s were encouraged to build on this success but, seduced by the lure of a divine 'national destiny' settled on policies that were much less justified, clear, constrained and, because they involved going against all the major powers rather than with some and against others, were hardly feasible. Victory in 1905 can be seen, in short, as leading to defeat 40 years later. A final key indicator of the importance of such encounters is the question, though, of what would have happened had the fortunes of war gone the other way and the victor had actually lost. If Admiral Togo had lost the battle of Tsushima, Japan's army could have been deprived of supplies in the developing stalemate in Manchuria and forced to retreat with incalculable but significant results for the ending of the conflict. Losing Midway, again, might have reversed America's strategic priorities from Europe to the Pacific, a dramatic shift of focus which would have had enormous consequences for the rest of the war, and arguably, the postwar world. From this perspective at least, surely, Trafalgar, Tsushima and Midway all deserve their reputation as decisive battles - especially when viewed from the perspective of profoundly maritime powers like Britain, the United States and Japan. Contemporary Perceptions So much for the distant past, but what is made of such victories now ? Such expectations about the operational and strategic importance of the battle for sea control were alive and well in the later 20th Century. The pursuit of naval battle was an element in the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, the Falklands campaign of 1982 and the Gulf war of 1991. It also dominated the construction, preparations and exercises of the navies of both the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies in the Cold War. For many of the world's navies, the concept of battle and the sea control it confers still remains very much in fashion, perhaps especially amongst the burgeoning navies of the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean navies take each other as notional adversaries, and indeed the navies of the two Koreas have recently clashed, if in minor ways, with worrying frequency. The Indian and Pakistani navies have fought significant naval campaigns against each other and planners on both sides in such relationships feel they have to take each other's sea control capabilities very seriously indeed. This has major implications for the US Navy which is faced on one hand with serious budgetary restrictions and on the other with a dilemma of choosing to focus either on responding to the clear growth in the blue-water capabilities of the leading Asian powers or the manifold requirements of expeditionary operations and global maritime security. Even if naval planners are not serious about the apocalyptic possibilities of a full scale naval war, battle-worthiness is still a relevant and legitimate aspiration since the confidence that comes from expertise in the disciplines of battle bolsters a navy's ability to do everything else. For this reason, many navies are likely to continue to base their preparations on their assessment of the capabilities of other navies. Peer competition, particularly on the open ocean, will remain the guiding principle of naval procurement and operational preparation. Accordingly the major focus will be on the maintenance of independent and national warfare capabilities in both defence and attack, particularly at sea. "Sea Control" says the new Indian Maritime Doctrine "is the central concept around which the Indian navy is structured." This kind of naval thinking is important, also, for the light its sheds on the assumptions behind security thinking and policy in particular countries. It assumes, firstly, that national independence of action must be sustained and secondly that this rests in large measure on the capacity to secure or maintain sea control in the traditional way. Accordingly, significant resources are devoted to the business of conventional sea control on the high seas. But on the other hand, in many parts of the world, this kind of traditional thinking about battle, sea control and peer competition plays much less part in naval policy and preparations than it used to. Many of the world's transforming navies no longer use each other as a significant planning device or a benchmark for the capabilities they should develop. The United States Navy, for the time being at any rate has no serious adversary on the high seas. It can take its sea control almost for granted and can move away from the peer competition model that so dominated naval development in the 20th Century. The same goes for the navies of Europe. Many of the world's smaller navies never were seriously in the sea control game anyway, having largely coastguard functions, or being essentially for display. For them, Trafalgar and Tsushima are of little more than antiquarian interest. Instead, many modern sailors feel they have other pressing and important tasks which demand a range of skills, habits of mind and weaponry utterly different from those deployed in battles of this sort. Three categories of such tasks less obvious than simply defeating someone else's fleet are easy to see these days. These may be the decisive battles of the 21st Century. ExpeditionaryOperations With the end of the Cold War and the peer competition thinking that went with it, navies have shifted their focus from power at sea, to power from the sea. Accordingly, the focus of the navies of United States, Europe and increasingly the Asia-Pacific is on the conduct of expeditionary operations, in distant places, often but not always in support of a UN sanctioned peace support operation. Expeditionary operations call for power projection capabilities [aircraft carriers, marines, sea-launched land-attack missiles etc] and a very special kind of sea control, aimed mainly at providing force protection in narrow and local waters against everything from accidents, mines, and fast patrol boats to 'swarming' terrorists on jet skis. The fate of the USS Cole in 2001 and the French tanker Limburg in 2002 demonstrate the seriousness of the threat. Naval Diplomacy and Coalition-building 'The Allied Powers,' Nelson remarked despairingly in 1795, 'seem jealous of each other, and none but England is hearty in the cause.' This was a major focus of his concerns. These days, too, coalition building is a significant major naval activity and is often a prerequisite for later combined action in support of common action against common threats. It is an important part of a comprehensive and integrated strategy in which military activity is interwoven with all other aspects of foreign and economic policy in order to achieve the desired effects. Accordingly, in the Adriatic and the Gulf operations of the 1990s, keeping such maritime coalitions intact was, and remains, a major preoccupation. It is facilitated by previous coalition-building activity including naval visits, cross-training, combined exercises and shared procurement. Good Order At Sea Activity of this sort shades into the wider maritime security concerns involved in the maintenance of Good Order at Sea. This is threatened by terrorism, maritime crime [piracy, drugs and people smuggling] resource degradation from over-exploitation and/or pollution, accidents, the quarrels of competing users and inadvertent involvement in the quarrels of others, such as the 1980s tanker war or jurisdictional disputes of the sort worryingly common in the South and East China seas. To illustrate these points, the US, British, Australian, Singaporean and other navies in the Gulf have intercepted hundreds of small craft attempting to smuggle oil, guarded oil rigs and merchant shipping from terrorist attack and have trained up the Iraqi River patrol and Iraqi Coastal Defence Force [a prototype Iraqi navy]. These activities merge imperceptibly into the wider Operation Enduring Freedom mission. Under this arrangement, set up in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a large number of the world's navies are involved in cooperative campaign against international terrorism through the monitoring and interception of all suspicious shipping, trying to stamp out the drugs, arms and people smuggling activity used to finance it and. through the Proliferation Security Initiative , seek to control the passage of material that could contribute to acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by disreputable regimes and organisations. Finally the great majority of the world's navies help protect the world trading system, and everything it sustains from terrorist attack by monitoring the implementation of the Container, Shipping and Port Facility Security codes. And, of course where the system is threatened by instabilities ashore, navies aim to project power from the sea as they did over Kosovo, Iraq, Sierra Leone, East Timor and Afghanistan. One common aspect of all these newer, and less familiar naval tasks is that they are are predicated on cooperation with other navies, because it is almost a truism that none of them, not even the United States, can perform such tasks on their own for a whole variety of political, financial and operational reasons. They call for cooperative action, and it is indeed hard to dispute that in many ways these are the decisive battles of the 21st Century, and that preparing for them explains the wholesale transformations that are affecting so many of today's navies. In this kind of approach, navies are reflecting a new set of assumptions about the world and the security priorities of many of its principal countries. They proceed in large measure from the fact of globalisation, a phenomenon affecting every aspect of life and which rests essentially on a world sea-based trading system, the chief components of which are the container and the merchant ship. If people travel by air, and capital is transferred electronically the physical exchange of the goods that makes both these possible is conveyed by sea. The vast majority by volume and weight of the raw materials and finished goods that exemplify international trade are transported by ship. The more a country trades, the more its security and its prosperity depend on this sea-based trading system. But the just-enough, just-in-time philosophy that underpins so much of the merchant shipping industry increases the vulnerability of this system to disruptive threats that range from international crime, through instability and conflict in littoral areas to hostile attack. Because these are common threats to common interests they encourage common action against the perceived sources of the problem, afloat and ashore. Accordingly, the emphasis here is on a collective rather than a singular, national independent battle-centred approach to security at sea. It implies instead a kind of globalisation of naval power itself. Striking a Balance Between the Two These paradigms are not of course clear-cut and most navies will exhibit evidence of both approaches, just as the nations they serve will engage in a mix of unilateral and multilateral behaviours. The end of the Cold war seems to have encouraged a shift from the first to the second, especially at sea. With their growing concerns about international instability and global terrorism, the navies of Europe, for example, are quite clearly changing their emphasis towards developing their capacity for multilateral expeditionary operations, though this does not mean that they have stopped being interested in sea control ! The navies of India, Japan, China and the United States, all exhibit elements of both approaches but there are tensions between the two, and even for them, resource constraints require choices to be made. The Indian Navy, for example, espouses maritime multilateralism, confidence building from the sea and is eager to engage in cooperative activity with other navies of note on the one hand but on the other maintains the centrality of sea control in its naval doctrine and is seen by some of its neighbours as asserting itself significantly more than it used to. The US Navy is likewise clearly expanding its expeditionary capabilities while putting considerable emphasis on naval coalition-building. But, at the same time, it is pursuing a course of technological excellence that poses real challenges for its allies . There are deep concerns in Washington about the future challenge posed by the Chinese Navy and the US Navy is seen to display a continuing propensity for independent action perhaps natural to a superpower. So Where Does this leave Japan? Japan too appears to be striking a balance between these two approaches to the maritime aspects of security. Japan's National Defence Program Outline [NDPO] of December 2004 and its Defence White Paper of August 2005 identify two major strategic requirements for the country's armed forces. The first is 'to prevent and repel any threat against Japan.' Since Japan comprises some 400 inhabited islands, has the world's 6th largest EEZ and is dependent on sea lines of communication by which come 95 per cent of its raw materials and nearly all its trade, a recognised need for significant forces to defend its maritime space and interests would seem unsurprising. And, indeed, incidents as varied as local piracy, intrusions into Japanese waters by North Korean spy-ships, Chinese hydrographic vessels, aircraft and a Han class submarine appear to be attracting an increasingly robust response. This reinforces a trend towards the development of an even more capable Coastguard force and an increasing emphasis on building naval forces stronger in the disciplines of sea control, particularly in the areas of anti-submarine and anti missile defence, which take Chinese capabilities as a benchmark of what is required. The interest in the new large helicopter carrying destroyer, the 13,500 ton 16DDH and the prospect of its becoming a kind of tactical aircraft carrier seems to support the existence of such a trend. The possibility that this ship might be named Akagi, the flagship of the Pearl Harbour attack force aroused considerable controversy. But whatever the name finally chosen, it has been interesting to note the slow parallel shift in attitude in recent years towards the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force. The current programme to restore Admiral Togo's flagship, the Mikasa at Yokusuka and the recent spate of films on various aspects of the Pacific war at sea, most obviously Haruki Kadkawa's blockbuster 'Yamato: The last battle' suggest that a slow 'rehabilitation' of the Imperial Japanese Navy is taking place and that this is connected with a growing public acceptance of an expanding naval role for Japan. As Haruki Kadokawa himself is quoted as saying "I want people to start thinking again about how to live with self-awareness and pride as Japanese." Unsurprisingly, this has reinforced perceptions in some quarters that Japan is indeed re-embarking on a more assertive course which could de-stabilise the security of Asia. Japan's attempts to reinterpret Article 9 of the constitution have therefore become controversial. But against this, commentators have made two contrary points. Firstly, that pride in the traditions and achievements of the Imperial Japanese Navy might be thought entirely natural and indeed in many respects thoroughly understandable. The Navy fought with great gallantry and, after all, had been one of the forces of caution and restraint before both the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War. Admiral Togo was, and is, widely admired as a civilised and honourable warrior and even the Russians accepted that the Japanese treated their defeated adversaries with Nelsonic compassion after the fighting was over. This was, unfortunately, less true of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War, though naval forces were much less tarred by wartime excess than was the Army. The fact that after the war, relations between senior Japanese and American sailors were surprisingly good may be cited as evidence of this. Secondly, the other, markedly novel, focus of the NDPO is, in any case, notably collectivist in approach:
The threats of international terrorism, and piracy has resulted in a considerable expansion in the range of naval and other military activity in recent years. These have included interest in maintaining and contributing to anti-piracy patrols off South-east Asia, continuing logistical support for coalition forces engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom in the Indian Ocean, the Tsunami relief operation, the shipping of humanitarian aid to the Turkish earthquake and so on. Here expanding naval activity is seen as a natural Japanese contribution to the international community's response to threats to the international system. In parallel, such activity is also seen as a means of engaging with other maritime powers, [particularly the United States, China and India]. This range of naval activities calls for the ability to operate at a distance for long periods of time, and for a focus on the interface between land and sea rather than on conventional conceptions of battle and sea control. Because the needs of the first and second approaches are not identical, choices may need to be made. Anti-submarine and anti-missile capabilities for example are expensive; investing heavily in these demanding capabilities may well reduce the number of vessels available for collective operations in the Indian Ocean. Where Japan chooses to strike the balance between the these two maritime approaches, and its developing response to its own maritime past will surely be one of the most important aspects of the decades to come. How Japan sees and responds to Tsushima and its naval past, in other words, will tell us a great deal about how it sees the future. Geoffrey Till |
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