NAVAL WARFARE

Naval warfare relied largely on two forms of shock action. (1) When opposing ships touched each other, soldiers on one attempted to board the other and fight with spear, sword, and shield. The use of bows, javelins, and slings could precede and supplement this action, but at such close quarters shock action itself predominated. (2) Shock action between the ships themselves constituted the first reliance of the rival forces, and it was this consideration that dominated the design of the ships.

Since a quick victory with negligible losses would reward the sinking of an opposing vessel, the design of warships aimed at facilitating the ramming of the opposing ship below the waterline and opening a large hole to flood the rammed ship.

For this reason warships differed markedly from merchant ships. Instead of stubby, sturdy ships relying on sail, navies had narrow, lightly built ships depending primarily on oars. These had relatively high speed because of their many oarsmen, light weight, and great length in relation to breadth. In contrast to merchant ships, naval ships had a ratio as high as ten to one: other things being equal, a narrower ship moves through the water more readily and can attain a higher speed before it encounters a sharp increase in the resistance offered by the water. This speed made the ram at the bow even more menacing.

By the time of warfare between the Greeks and Persians, warships had reached almost full

development. A representative vessel might have had a length of eighty feet and a breadth of eight to ten feet. By seating oarsmen partially above as well as behind one another, the ship could accommodate twenty-five oars on each side. This many oarsmen gave the ship high speed and its design provided for considerable strength in resisting a blow against the bow; but the light weight precluded any other elements of structural strength. The ships, built with planks on wooden ribs attached to a keel, differed little in design from wooden warships built ever since.

An oar-propelled warship could easily defeat a merchant ship, even though the merchant ship might carry many more soldiers. Able to move largely independent of the wind and having higher speed and the greater manoeuvrability provided by its disciplined oarsmen rowing under command, the warship could overtake and ram the merchant vessel. Piercing the ship under water, the strong ram, attached to a ship designed to withstand the shock, would open a large hole that would promptly sink the merchant ship.

But when warships fought each other, neither had an advantage. Tactics involved ships advancing in line abreast, thus placing opposing ships bow to bow, ram to ram. In spite of the similarity between the phalanx of spearmen and the line of ships, the oars kept the ships apart and allowed some manoeuvring and attempts to reach the opposing ships’ flanks to ram their sides. The skill of individual captains and the quality of the oarsmen had much to do with success in these

endeavours. But when the ships came together, often using hooks to maintain their position, it was soldiers who frequently settled the action between ships.

Sea battles involved elements similar to land battles, including concentration of force, flanking or enveloping attacks, and the employment of a reserve. For example, when the Persians invaded Greece in 480 B.C., they first met the Greek fleet near Cape Artemesium on the coast, close to where the Persian army was advancing southward and seeking to enter Greece through the pass of Thermopylae. The Greeks took up a position in a narrow strait between the mainland and the large island of Euboea, so that their commander could protect the flanks of his fleet against the larger number of Persian ships.

The Persians at first sought to reach the rear of the Greek position by sending some of their ships around the island of Euboea. But when a storm arose and destroyed the fragile Persian warships on their short voyage, the Persians launched a frontal attack and the fleets met bow to bow. Some ships broke through the Greek line and prepared to use their superiority in force to take Greek ships in the rear and to use two Persian vessels against one Greek. But as they passed through the gap in the Greek line, the momentarily victorious Persians received a counterattack from a second line of Greek ships held in reserve. As the Persians came through the first line of Greek ships, the Greek reserve attacked the sides of the hostile ships and sank several. Discouraged by these repulses, by the storm, and by the skill of the smaller Greek fleet, the Persians withdrew.

Later, when the Greek fleet made another stand between the shore and an island, the Persians, having blocked both exits of the strait between the island of Salamis and the shore, attacked the Greek vessels holding the eastern end of the strait. The Persians expected an easy victory because they knew that the Greeks were divided over whether to fight or retreat. A small island in the strait divided the advancing Persian battle array and the narrow channel may even have forced some of their ships to enter the strait in line ahead instead of abreast.

The Greeks exploited the ensuing Persian disarray and enveloped the right flank of the Persian fleet. Able to ram the vulnerable sides of the enemy vessels, the Greeks pushed the Persian right wing back upon its centre, causing additional confusion, which the Greeks again exploited, driving back the Persian ships with heavy loss. The Persian fleet, having suffered psychologically and materially in two defeats, withdrew to Asia Minor to protect the army’s communications there, and the Persian King reduced the size of his army in Greece to one small enough to live on the area of Greece it had conquered. Thus the critical success of the Creek fleet halted the Persian advance and deprived the Persian army of the secure water communications necessary to supply its full strength.

The next year, at Plataea, the Creek armies defeated this diminished Persian force.

Sea warfare clearly exhibited many elements in common with combat on land. The vulnerability of the flank, compared with the front, and the consequent importance of a flank attack stand out as does the value of a reserve. With a thin line of ships rather than a deep line of heavy infantrymen,

numerical superiority and concentration of force at one point in a line had greater significance, even when fleets had their flanks protected by land masses.

Ships at sea displayed many of the qualities of mounted warfare on land. Like the cavalry, the ships could go into action rapidly, and their often relatively small numbers, compared to the horsemen of the armies, made it easy for the ships to maintain their array, something more decisive for ships than for cavalry. But in their reliance on a well-aligned formation, the ships had more in common with infantry than with cavalry formations. Yet this similarity with infantry did not dominate warfare between ships, because their few numbers, the greater discipline of the ship captains

compared with individual cavalrymen, and the manoeuvrability conferred by oars sufficiently offset the need to maintain formation to make the tactical attributes of fleets more like that of cavalry than infantry.

In spite of the fleets’ placing little or no reliance on an impetuous charge, warfare at sea shared another trait with mounted shock action on land. Defence had no superiority over attack, even when the ships on both sides had identical features, unless the weather, like the terrain, favoured one adversary over the other. Without any predominance conferred by topography and neither

contestant enjoying an advantage from remaining motionless, neither offence nor defence had any primacy in naval combat. Of course, the outline of the land did give benefits, as the Greeks skilfully exhibited when they protected their flanks in the battle at Artemesium, but it conferred none in frontal attack. Nor could defenders at sea emulate the Romans in entrenching themselves, though beached fleets did fortify their landing areas. So, tactically, the warfare of sailors in ships to a large degree resembled that of soldiers mounted on horses who engaged in shock, rather than missile, combat.

But naval logistics differed markedly from that of land armies in that navies could not live on the country the way armies could. On the sea, however, they had the most efficient means of

communication and so could, and found it necessary to, depend on bases for supply, a method nearly impossible for any armies divorced from water communication. Although merchant ships could take advantage of their efficiency as carriers to supply themselves for long voyages, warships could not do this. Light and narrow of beam, they lacked the carrying capacity of merchant ships and their large complements of oarsmen and soldiers required huge quantities of food and water.

The fragility of warships made them, even more than merchant ships, dependent on the safety of staying close to shore, and their shallow draft and flat bottoms made it easy for warships to beach themselves for the night. Moving along the coastline facilitated foraging for food and water. But, unlike an army on the move, the vessels lacked alternative routes, and even when they found a promising area to forage, the sailors could search in only half the circumference available to an army and lacked pack animals or carts to bring in supplies. In addition, with sailors and so many oarsmen, a fleet had a small military capability in relation to their demand for human food. Only the absence of animals made their subsistence problem simpler than an army’s. For these reasons, navies could not consistently rely on foraging along the shore, and they remained dependent on bases that offered ample water and from which they could draw food supplies.

Fundamentally, naval strategy had a logistic objective. It sought to control the sea to secure its own commerce, to deny the use of the sea to the enemy’s traders, to move and provision its own armies, and to prevent the movement and support of enemy forces. The success of the Greek fleets in interdicting the supply lines of the Persian forces and so diminishing their numbers exemplified the crucial role that the navy’s logistic strategy could play.

But to obtain this dominance of the sea, the hostile fleets had to aim at one another. The victory at Salamis, an application of combat strategy, gave the Greeks the control necessary to employ the navy’s logistic strategy against the communications of the Persian armies. Alexander’s strategy of

using his army to capture the bases of the Persian fleet exhibits the use of a logistic strategy to defeat the enemy fleet.

But much naval warfare took place without a decisive command of the sea on either side. Weaker fleets avoided battle by remaining secure in their base ports. The persisting strategy of a blockade of the inferior fleet in its port would accomplish the same objective as a victory, but this task proved especially difficult for the warships of ancient times. Unable to keep at sea for long, ships could not blockade consistently. Even foraging on a hostile shore had its dangers because armies found beached ships a vulnerable and important objective. The success of the supply ships of Alexander the Great in transporting provisions along the coast of Asia Minor amply demonstrates the difficulty of warships in interdicting hostile commerce, particularly along friendly shores. But even Alexander used this commerce only as a supplement. The liability of Pompey’s fleet, even with an island to provide much of its needed water, to prevent the passage of Caesar’s army across the Adriatic illustrates the hindrances to a blockade with oar-driven ships. But blockade, in which a stronger fleet used the threat of combat action to obtain the same results given by a victory in battle, nevertheless remained an essential part of the strategy of aiming at the enemy fleet. A blockade also functioned as a means of interdicting commerce as well as troop movements or the activity of an enemy fleet. But, unlike the siege on land, the intermittent blockade had difficulty forestalling the hostile force, and the blockaders had all of the land besiegers’ supply problems.

In the absence of blockade, hostile navies convoyed troop transports and even merchant vessels. In the absence of convoys, raiding ships, individually or in small flotillas, preyed on ships carrying men or commodities. Thus the strategy of raids, important in land warfare, had a role on the sea. In raids against supply, merchant, or troop ships, the raiders, rather than relying on the combat action of battle or its threat through a blockade, applied directly the navy’s logistic strategy of attacking the enemy’s supplies.

The Persian command of the sea in the Marathon campaign showed that the navy could deliver to the army something more than the most efficient means for moving and supplying troops. By transporting and escorting the invading army, the navy’s collaboration enabled the Persian commander to pursue a combat strategy. The Persian fleet protected the ship-borne soldiers from Greek warships during the voyage to Marathon while making it too dangerous for Greek land forces to venture a crossing of the Aegean Sea to attack Persian territory. Further, the Persian army could land at any of many different places in Greece, a capability enhanced by the ability of ancient mariners to beach their ships and not have to rely solely on ports.

Thus, for the Persians the sea constituted both a moat to protect their own country and a highway over which to advance to attack the Greeks. This situation conferred on the Persians, to an unparalleled degree, the power to initiate action. The initiative gave them an opportunity for strategic surprise, without which the Persians would have found themselves at a distinct tactical disadvantage had they disembarked on a defended beach. So the command of the sea assured the invaders the ability that surprise implies - to concentrate against weakness.

In any case, the stronger Persian army could have taken the offensive, and this would have given it the choice of objectives and routes of advance. But command of the sea magnified the Persian advantage: because the commander had to make no strategic dispersal of his troops since he had no apprehension that the Greeks would attack his territory.

The Persians used their initiative, which, like surprise, is not a theme of this work, to distract the Greeks. Aiming at Athens, where he expected to find political support, the Persian commander did not land on the west coast of the peninsula, near Athens; rather he landed twenty-six miles away at Marathon on the peninsula’s east shore. This distraction drew the Athenian army to Marathon at the same time that the Persians re-embarked half of their army and sailed around the peninsula,

intending to land near Athens and capture the city while the Athenian hoplites fought the enemy at the original landing place.

After their victory over the Persians at Marathon, the Greeks sent a messenger on the now-famous run to Athens with the news while the army marched back, arriving before the Persian army had disembarked from their ships to assail Athens. Thwarted by the successful Athenian use of its interior line of operations between the two hostile armies, the Persian fleet and army withdrew.

Nevertheless, a delayed Greek attack at Marathon might have caused the victorious army to return only to find the Persians occupying Athens. The command of the sea had given the Persian general the opportunity to distract his opponent and create a weakness at Athens that he very nearly had the opportunity to exploit.

The navy’s contribution to the army’s operations as well as its warfare at sea displayed many parallels with that on land. It had its great effect on land warfare by its influence on strategy

through logistics, the sea providing the most efficient and often the only reasonable communication between two points on land. The effect of the Greek command of the sea in weakening the Persian army prior to the Battle of Plataea offers an illustration of the navy’s most typical strategic

significance for land warfare, just as the Marathon campaign demonstrated the strategic benefits sea power could give an invading army. Back