(6) NAVAL WARFARE

 

War on water!

No – not like when Roman Emperor Caligula literally declared war on the sea (in the form of the god Neptune or Poseidon), but war fought on water, albeit overlapping with war fought on land in amphibious operations and naval landings.

“Naval warfare involves military operations on, under, and over the sea” – “combat in and on the sea, the ocean, or any other battlespace involving a major body of water such as a large lake or wide river”.

As surprisingly capable humans are as swimmers for terrestrial mammals (particularly primates), naval warfare obviously involves the various vessels humans have devised for transport on water. Of course, it doesn’t just involve vessels but vessels of sufficient size, resilience, and above all means for combat with other vessels. Hence naval warfare originated from the Bronze Age onwards, with the first recorded sea battle as the Battle of the Delta between the Egyptians and the Sea Peoples in about 1175 BC, although the very name of the latter suggests some sort of naval warfare before that.

Prehistoric humans probably fought each other from canoes or even rafts but that seems more a form of naval proto-warfare. However, the former persisted in recorded history with the use of war canoes, usually as a form of amphibious warfare – an important subset of naval warfare – although “canoe versus canoe engagements…were also significant”.

Naval warfare rose to a surprising importance and prominence in ancient history that are often overlooked for the more famous warfare on land. That importance seems even more surprising as naval warfare was predominantly fought either by boarding enemy ships or ramming them – methods which seem crude by the standards of modern naval warfare but persisted for a surprisingly long time until (and to some extent even after) the advent of gunpowder allowed for shipborne artillery as the standard means of naval combat.

Homer’s Iliad may have had the siege of Troy as its focus but famously features the so-called Catalogue of Ships, in its second book no less, albeit for the transport of Greek forces to Troy rather than naval combat with Trojan ships.

Thereafter, naval warfare looms large in ancient history – from the Persians and Greeks (particularly the Athenians) through to the Romans, whose Pax Romana was as much a matter of Mare Nostrum as it was of the legions.

Galleys were the primary means of ancient naval warfare and persisted as the dominant vessels for war until the early modern period in that primary arena of naval warfare, the Mediterranean. Galleys were superseded by the vessels of the Age of Sail, which also saw naval warfare expand with maritime transportation from mostly hugging the coasts in seas to the open ocean – although it is striking how often naval battles continued to be fought in coastal waters.

On that point, while we typically think of naval warfare as battles fought on the sea or ocean, there’s also naval warfare fought on lakes and rivers – reflecting that “even in the interior of large landmasses, transportation before the advent of extensive railways was largely dependent on rivers, lakes, canals, and other navigable waterways”. Hence the modern distinction between brown-water navies for riverine or littoral bodies of water and blue-water navies (or green-water navies) for open oceans or seas.

From the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam and Steel – with naval warfare in the latter evolving to steam power for ships and coaling stations for bases or ports. The latter also saw “ironclad” ships – first used in naval combat in the American Civil War – reflecting the improved chemistry and metallurgy which not only provided the means for armor to ships but also the guns and shells “capable of demolishing a wooden ship at a single blow” for which the armor was required.

Interestingly, naval supremacy underlaid modern superpower in a similar manner to the Pax Romana, only more so – with the Pax Britannica of the 19th century (with the Indian Ocean being dubbed a “British lake” in a similar manner to the Mare Nostrum), succeeded by the Pax Americana in the 20th century.

Modern naval warfare has seen a proliferation of forms through technology – notably naval aviation and aircraft carriers or submarine warfare which came to the fore in the Second World War (effectively superseding battleships) but also more recently missiles and aerial or naval drones.