The Power of Sea Power

The soft, blue cover is slowing but unmistakably separating from its pages, a testimony to the hands of my predecessors which have carelessly or delicately leafed through it to soak knowledge from this book.

NAVSC102: mandatory reading: SEA POWER.

 Yes, I know school books are boring, but what caught my attention about this book is that it discusses and analyzes the roles of the world’s Navies throughout major conflicts in history (American Revolution, Civil War, WWI and WWII, for example).

Growing up, I learned about the Civil War and the American Revolution through books like Silver for General Washington, Stonewall, etc. Those wars were heroic stories to me, full of colonial images influenced by occasional visits to Williamsburg, where my family and I pet sheep, gawked at cannons, and conversed with actors dressed as the civilians of that particular time. In any exhibit we visited, we were transported back to that age by uniforms of the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s. We made wax candles, wrinkled our noses at the smell of animal feces from the reinvented farms, and stared out along the coastline of Fort McHenry. We pressed our noses up against the glass box in which sat a pompous model of a German U-Boat. I recall almost losing my lunch after a visit to a WWII submarine; the enclosed space was too much for me.

These memories, these impressions of these wars that these experiences left on me, were by no means unpleasant. History was something I marveled at, I revered. I didn’t understand history in context of that time period. 

The content of Sea Power is nothing pretty or entertaining. The authors discuss the tactics of varying sea captains as they strategically plan battles and try to pummel enemy fleets into submission. The cool, mature, levelheadedness with which the authors treat this subject which had formerly seemed like a fairy tale to me shocked me to my core. This really happened. This is what was really going on. Just as the war in Iraq has our attention with its controversies and tragedies, so did these wars on the nation at that time. Just because they are crystallized in our past doesn’t mean I can treat them like a good adventure tale. These sailors were terrified as they fired their cannons, cannons I found adventurous. They were weapons, not artifacts. Men as young as me fought and died, merely nameless particles that compose the battles we like to summarize and interpret for our own benefit. My childhood creation, history as my pet, has faded in light of the clear view in which my maturing eyes can now see.

Sea Power, edited by E. B. Potter. I would check this book out if I were you. There was a lot more going on during the American Revolution then Mel Gibson portrayed. (I did love the Patriot).

A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end.  You live several lives while reading it.  ~William Styron