John T. Kuehn’s “Agents of Innovation: The General Board and the Design of the Fleet That Defeated the Japanese Navy” is an important work that demolishes the image of the U.S. Navy’s General Board as musty place for elderly admirals to get in a “twilight tour” before mandatory retirement age. Instead, the General Board is revealed as a far-thinking deliberative organization with traits of a think-tank, a general staff, an advisory committee, a collection of subject-matter-experts and an investigative body populated by some of the U.S. Navy’s luminaries.
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Kuehn’s work is well-organized. He introduces the reader to the institution of the General Board, coherently discusses the impact of the Washington Treaty’s provisions on the General Board’s work; and the innovative solutions the General Board found or attempted to deal the strategic problems facing the U.S. Navy.
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The author also discusses the General Board’s efforts on three particularly important issues: keeping the aging battleships up-to-date until new ones could be built; finding ways to bring air power into the fleet despite the shackles of the Washington Treaty’s limitations on the numbers and size of aircraft carriers; and creating a mobile base structure to overcome the lack of fortified bases in the western Pacific Ocean. By the time the U.S. entered the Second World War, nine of the Navy’s ten oldest battleships had received comprehensive upgrades to fire controls, armor and armament which kept them relevant; aviation was so comprehensively established throughout the fleet that when the battle line was crippled at Pearl Harbor the transition to carrier task forces was immediate, seamless and without hesitation; and a plan was already in place to build up the mobile base structure and underway replenishment organization that allowed the U.S. Navy to stride across the central Pacific in seven-league boots. Viewed in conjunction with the Navy’s other two great interwar institutions, the Naval War College and the annual Fleet Problem exercise, it becomes readily apparent that the U.S. Navy’s success in World War II was anything but an accident, an underdog victory, or a come-from-behind affair.
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Kuehn concludes his work by doing something too few historians attempt: he properly contrasts the U.S. Navy’s experience with that of the British Royal Navy, Imperial Japanese Navy, and Nazi German Kriegsmarine. None enjoyed a deliberative body anything like the General Board, and although each developed certain innovations, they were often taken in isolation and not part of any coherent, comprehensive strategy.
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The volume includes five appendices. The first included the complete text of the Washington Treaty (“Five-Power Treaty”) of 1922, and the second the U.S. Naval Policy of 1922. The third appendix discusses proposals for battleship modifications, the fourth concerns “flying-deck cruiser” designs, and the fifth details Mobile Base Project.
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I highly recommend this book. It jettisons the fallacious view of the General Board as a stagnant backwater for fading, change-resistant admirals and replaces it with a look into an organization that was everything the title and subtitle claim. This book should be read with Felker’s “Testing American Sea Power,” O’Hara’s “On Seas Contested,” and “Battle Line” by Hone & Hone.
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