An Admiral Who Was Right: The Capable Biography of Admiral Sims

ADMIRAL SIMS AND THE MODERN AMERICAN NAVY. By Elting C. Morison. Houghton Mifflin Company. $5.00

EXACTLY twenty years ago William Sowden Sims, U.S.N. (retired), after studying the results of the air attack on the obsolete warships, declared " the battleship is dead.” He and Brigadier General William Mitchell, that other stormy petrel of the armed services, were in complete agreement about air power in the future.

Sims was ahead of his time. He was always ahead of his time. Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye when he was signaled by Sir Hyde Parker to retreat. Nelson defied his admiral when ordered to defer to a half-pay officer who had been made a commissioner through favor. Admiral Sims was much more belligerent. He had no blind eye for anything or anybody. He carried the war for a modern navy into the enemy’s camp in Washington. He was the enfant terrible of the service from the beginning of the century until 1936, when he died. He was the terror of the bureaucrats and the naval officers who knew the gentle art of getting promotion by political finagling and social maneuvering. More than almost any other man, he revitalized, modernized, and humanized the United States Navy.

Born in Canada, where his father was building a railroad, Sims was anything but a prodigy when he entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He had the greatest trouble passing the entrance examinations, and the Congressman who had nominated him almost regretted having done so. He was in the middle of his class on graduation, and his class was a mediocre one. In those days a midshipman, because so many were nominated, was often nine years reaching the rank of ensign. The Navy was moribund, and had a personnel of only seventy-five hundred. Many of these enlisted men were foreigners and unsound in character. There were more officers than there were billets. Each bureau in Washington worked independently. Guns, armor, navigation, ships, and stores were produced without the slightest consultation with the officers who were to sail in the fleet. There was a War College, founded by Mahan, but it was regarded as an extravagance. Few of the wooden ships were fit for service duty.

This was in 1881. Sims went to sea in the Tennessee, a wooden, full-rigged ship of five thousand tons.

Sims and Sir Percy Scott, R.N., were brothers-inarms against the powers of darkness and sluggishness in high places. Sims told Scott how Theodore Roosevelt had been a tower of strength to him and his fellow reformers, and Scott mourned because there was not a member of Parliament who “knew one end of a gun from the other.”

Sims’s relations with Lord Fisher, the dynamic deviser of the Dreadnought, were equally unconventional. By building this first all-big-gun ship in absolute secrecy, Fisher had given the Royal Navy a four-year jump on the other navies. When Sims asked to see the ship, Fisher told him it was “impossible.” But Sims was also told to go to the dockyard and put on mufti, and somehow he was able to go all over her and send a report to Washington about her.

Probably the report was pigeonholed — reports usually were. When Sims received a confidential memorandum about the new German gyroscopic compass from a friend attending Kiel Regatta, he wrote a report. It was pigeonholed until the American submarine commanders cried out for new compasses.

Sims inundated the Navy at Washington with reports. Had it not been for Theodore Roosevelt’s friendship he would have been got rid of somehow. Roosevelt deflected the forked lightning that played around the head of Sims. Sims never gave up. The story of the era of Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, as detailed in Mr. Morison’s book, is incredible. The book, in fact, is really a history of how the American Navy escaped being destroyed by the political bureaucrats and the die-hard conservatives.

Sims could always see what was coming, and he had the courage to fight Congressional ignorance when it got in his way. When Daniels declared in 1917 that the Navy " was prepared from stem to stern,” Sims showed that, apart from a few capital ships, it was not prepared at all. When the mayor of Boston, years later, called him a Benedict Arnold, Sims merely laughed.

Mr. Morison has done a fine job in this splendid book.

WILLIAM McFEE