John M. Lillard - Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II

In October of 1960, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz delivered a speech to the staff and students of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, on how the wargames conducted at the War College during the 1920s and 1930s contributed to American tactical and strategic successes during the last two years of World War II in the Pacific theater. In his speech Nimitz, recalled by former director of naval history Earnest MacNeill Eller as the principal architect of the American victory in the Pacific, asserted that the war with Japan had been re-enacted in the game rooms [at the Naval War College] by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surpriseabsolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics towards the end of the war.raises intriguing questions about the specific ways in which the games prepared and, in some respects, failed to prepare future naval leaders and their navy for war.

When Nimitz attended the War College from 1922 to 1923, the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan still dominated U.S. Navy doctrine. Since 1890 Mahan emphasized that a great navy is one designed to fight an enemy in fleet engagements in order to win command of the sea, not one designed for commerce raiding or guerre de course. This philosophy shaped U.S. Navy strategy and force structure well into the twentieth century. However, Nimitz and his classmates had never had the opportunity to put Mahans theories to the test in actual combat. The last major American naval actions occurred against understrength Spanish fleets in 1898. American naval involvement in the First World War was limited to convoy support and antisubmarine patrols, and the minor naval operations of the interwar period, between 1919 and 1941, did not provide any occasions to prove or disprove Mahanian doctrines. But while their experience and education were grounded in the doctrines of the previous century, the student-officers of the interwar period like Nimitz, Ernest King, and Raymond Spruance led a very different navy to war in the 1940s. Their new navy possessed a long-range punch that centered on fast aircraft carrier task forces rather than battleship battle lines. This navy interdicted distant enemy lines of communication with high-endurance submarines. It repeatedly landed fully equipped ground units over enemy-held beaches, stayed at sea for long periods without returning to port, and carried its logistics support train forward with the battle fleet instead of sending combatant ships to homeports for refitting and repairs. It employed a wide range of new ship types and improved weapons, communications, and especially sensors such as radar and sonar. None of these capabilities were present in the U.S. Navy when the First World War ended, and none of the navys leaders had much in the way of operational experience with them before Pearl Harbor. However, the navy introduced and experimented with all of them to varying extents during the interwar years.

These new developments were not just in doctrine and technology

This catalog of progress raises a basic question: How did a navy whose last experience in major combat occurred in the previous century transform itself so profoundly? Nimitzs speech suggested that he credited the Naval War Colleges wargames with a major role in that transformation. Naval scholars generally agree that the Naval War College wargames were one of a number of techniques such as fleet exercises, formal war planning, and senior officer group deliberations that the navy used during the interwar period to manage its preparation for war. Comprehensive studies of the fleet exercises, formal war planning, and senior deliberations have informed the understanding of the navys transition, but there is no analogous study of War College gaming during the period.