 Professor Andrew Lambert, who is Professor of Naval History in the War Studies Department, published extensively. I haven't got time to talk about his rich research background, but I know he's currently completing a biography of Julian Corbett, and he's going to talk to us this morning about the Corbett and the Battle of Sharpen. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this session. What I want to look at today is Julian Corbett, the concept of decisive battle, and the extent to which the Battle of Jutland is a decisive battle, or indeed is not. So this opens up, I think, a very important discussion right at the heart of the development of modern naval strategic theory, which begins in the late 19th century with the American naval officer Captain Alfred Thayer Mahon, and Corbett very much overlaps with Mahon. Mahon publishes in 1890. Corbett is publishing his critical work in the first decade of the 20th century, and it's a division about the importance of battle in the overall development of sea power strategy. Mahon as a naval officer and a student of Yomini, the man who had capitalized on the intellectual legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, and had used the so-called decisive battles of Napoleon to argue that that was how wars were won. And Corbett takes a different view. Mahon is operating in an American navy, which has only just recovered its modern professional ethos after long decades of being ignored, essentially by the American government, and was very much a challenger naval power. Whereas Corbett is writing in Britain, he's writing not just in Britain, but for the Royal Navy. His job when he goes to work is teaching senior officers of the Royal Navy about strategy and sea power going forward. So there's a core argument here. Mahon believes that sea power is secured by great battle fleets, meeting in combat, and the winner of battle requires a decisive control over the sea. That is the sea power he talks about, which it can then use to conduct other kinds of operation. The projection of military power, the imposition of economic blockade, the capture of overseas territories. Corbett believes that these things are all possible, but that from a British perspective it is not necessary to seek out the enemy's fleet and defeat it, because in 1900, and indeed in 1914, Britain is dominant at sea. It has the largest navy. It doesn't need to challenge anybody to secure control of the sea. It has that control. And therefore, rather than rushing around in a somewhat chaotic fashion looking for a battle, it should simply get on with applying sea power to the strategic conduct of the war. He used his historical studies, which date back to the late 1890s through to the First World War, to demonstrate how Britain had fought a series of long-involved wars with relatively limited commitment of military power, but a very extensive commitment to naval power. And the main strategy of those wars was not finding the enemy fleet and defeating it, but defeating the enemy and waiting for the enemy to challenge British sea control. So in his great history of the Seven Years War, which was published in 1907, Corbett argued that the decisive battle of the war, the Battle of Kiberon Bay, was actually the French response to Britain capturing France's entire overseas empire, culminating in the capture of Quebec in the same year, that the French had been left with no means of winning the war other than attempting to invade Britain and land an army on the British coast, and that when they sent their fleet out to attempt this operation, it put itself in a position where the main British fleet could engage and destroy it. And because of the French Revolution and Empire, Corbett says exactly the same thing happens, Britain has command of the sea, it's for the French to challenge that command. And the only significant challenges the French make are the invasion of Egypt, where their entire fleet was wiped out. And in 1805, the events leading to the Battle of Trafalgar, in which again the main French fleet was destroyed. And the genius of Nelson in those two battles is not winning the battle, it's understanding that this was a fleeting opportunity to reduce the enemy's fleet to complete uselessness by destroying a large portion of it and achieving both a material and a moral ascendancy that would shape the rest of the war. It was not necessary to defeat those fleets because the British already had command of the sea before the battle, during the battle and after the battle. The opportunity that Nelson Grasse was so brilliantly is to grind up the enemy's resources and stop them mounting any kind of challenge going forward. This allows the British to disperse their fleets around the world and to be much more proactive in prosecuting the war. Corbett explained all of this I think very neatly in a wonderful quotation from his books on principles of maritime strategy, where he argued that since men live upon the land. That's where sea power has to be measured. Fighting at sea is merely an auxiliary to the ultimate decision on land. And sea power's greatest contribution to victory in long continental wars is economic, the destruction of the enemy's economy, the resources of war. And this can be complemented by amphibious operations. But in the case of Britain, which has a small army, these will tend to be directed only against naval and maritime targets. They will not be conducted as primarily continental military operations. And if you look at the Napoleonic Wars, that's certainly the case. Now, Corbett developed from the arguments of Britain's leading military strategist of the late 19th century, Colonel GF R. Henderson, who observed that the core task of any British army was to ensure the maintenance of British sea power. And you can see that in operations in the Napoleonic Wars and indeed the Crimean War, when the enemy's fleet is the core target, not the enemy's army. That was the orthodoxy in Britain going into the 20th century. But in 1904, we begin a process where the army begins to challenge that orthodoxy and argue that what Britain needs is an army to engage in Europe because the war in Europe will be over quickly. The relative balance of power between France and Germany means there's a possibility France might be overthrown in a single campaign, as it had been in 1870. And just as the government creates a committee of imperial defence to co-ordinate systematised British strategic thinking, the army decides that it doesn't want to do what it's always done, which is to be the amphibious strike force of the navy. So we end up with a navy that needs to think about fighting an enemy navy, but not with an army alongside it. And this leads into I think the great conundrum about the Battle of Jutland. Enters the First World War, August 1914, he is quite literally just finishing a great strategic analysis of the Russo-Japanese war, in which he demonstrates compellingly that the Japanese navy at no stage in this war sought a decisive battle with the Russians. The Japanese navy was used to move the Japanese army from Japanese islands to Korea and Manchuria. It then maintained those supply lines against any attempt of the Russians to attack them. It did not seek out the enemy fleet for battle. The Russian First Pacific Squadron was destroyed by the Japanese army, which surrounded its base at Port Arthur and bombarded it from the land. And when the Second Pacific Squadron arrived all the way from the Baltic, the Japanese navy waited in a strong defensive position in the straits of Tsushima between Japan and Korea and literally forced the Russians to attack them. The Russian attack failed and most of the fleet was destroyed. These battles were decisive, but they were not battles that were sought. And Corbett stresses the point. It's not the business of the dominant fleet to seek out the enemy's fleet. The enemy ultimately will have to come to you and it is much better to let them do so. Sadly, this analysis wasn't widely promulgated before the First World War because it was literally in the press when the war broke out. What Corbett was arguing, and here he's worked with Admiral Sir John Fisher, who was First Sea Lord before the First World War and in 1914-15, is that in order to bring the German fleet to battle and to reinforce Britain's command of the sea, it would be necessary to put pressure on Germany in a place where it would be compelled to use its fleet. And that was not by attacking Germany's colonies in the Pacific or indeed by steaming around in the North Sea looking for a battle. That was not going to happen. Corbett stresses in August 1914, the only thing the Germans will use their main fleet for is the defence of the Baltic coast to prevent the Royal Navy entering and commanding the Baltic and breaking the German economy by cutting it off from its neutral supply, as particularly Sweden, and operating there in concert with its Russian allies to break the German economy by cutting its access to iron, copper and other vital strategic war materials. So while many thought that it was possible to seek out the enemy and defeat them, Corbett stressed that this was not possible. So in concert with Fisher, he develops a strategy to send a fleet towards the Baltic narrows into the Danish channels and to draw the German fleet out into battle. This would take a little time to mobilise. The problem here is that the soldiers had convinced the politicians that the war would be over by Christmas and it was necessary that Britain made a serious military effort on the continent in the interval. This meant that the strike force that was necessary to operate in the Baltic was committed to fighting in France and Belgium and was simply drawn into a continental war, leaving the Navy without the necessary divisions to secure territory, assure the Baltic region. The problem becomes significantly worse as the country mobilises more and more military power and ends up fighting two completely separate wars. This means the offensive element of naval power projection is gravely weakened and public pressure, the denusion that the war would be over by Christmas, either 1914, 1915 or perhaps 1916 and here we think about the point the Bill raised at the beginning. How long is the pandemic going to last? We'll pass president suggests about three years. And British wars tended to last many years. And that I think is a key problem. The politicians did not expect the war to last that long. They thought it would all be over and that they had to rush. That was not actually the case. So Corbett is putting forward a strategy that looks at winning the war through economic pressure and through the threat to Germany's vital interests, not a kinetic threat, not a direct threat. And so when we get to the battle of Jutland, the great controversial centerpiece of the naval history of the First World War, we're looking at something which is not by any stretch of the imagination intended to be a decisive battle. The German high seas fleet has just set off from Willemshaven into the North Sea to conduct a raid against British shipping on the Norway to Great Britain route. It hopes that this will draw out part of the British fleet, and that some kind of action will take place in which small parts of the British fleet can be destroyed that the balance at sea can be upset. The intelligence of this sort he comes through the British commander in chief, Admiral Sir John Jellico is about to launch his most ambitious strategic move of the war. He is going to send elements of the grand fleet around the Jutland Peninsula into the catagat and heading down towards the approaches to Copenhagen. This is precisely what Admiral Fisher, Julian Corbett, had been arguing that it was only by threatening to enter the Baltic that the British could get a battle with the Germans in which the Germans would not do what they did at Jutland. The two fleets meet in late afternoon on the 21st of May off the coast of Jutland. The Germans have no reason to stand and fight against a larger or more powerful fleet. Once they realize the situation they're in, they retreat. And when they get back into a bad situation they retreat again because they're not going to use their fleet to fight a battle with no strategic value in the middle of the North Sea. Had that battle been fought in the approaches to Copenhagen it is unlikely the Germans would have retreated and much more likely that the battle would have had some significant effect. So what we need to look at with Jutland is this is not going to be a decisive battle. From the beginning it is not in a place that is strategically critical to Germany. Once the Germans realize that they're fighting not part of the grand fleet but all of it and that they're outnumbered, they retreat. This is perfectly logical. And Corbett's task in the last years of his life was to explain all of this to a country that thought the Battle of Jutland should have been the Battle of Trafalgar. Rather missing the point that the enemy at Trafalgar were brave but not very capable whereas the enemy at Jutland were brave and highly professional and the British could take no liberties with the high seas fleet. It's a very efficient fighting organization. So the irony of Jutland ultimately is that if the Germans hadn't sailed on the 31st of May, the British might well on the 1st of June have sailed on a sortie into the Categette towards Copenhagen and this might indeed have brought on a properly decisive battle. So what is a decisive battle at sea? Well it's one that finishes off a campaign, not one that starts it. The odd decisive battle at sea is one when the enemy takes the ultimate risk with their fleet in a disadvantageous situation and is put in a position where they are able to be destroyed. So the ultimate examples of this would be the Nile and Kiberong where the French overextended the use of sea power and were ultimately defeated. Thank you very much.