’No One Can Afford To Say ’Damn the Torpedoes’: Battle Tactics and U.S. Naval History before World War I

Historians overwhelmingly agree that the U.S. Navy changed dramatically between the early 1880s and World War I, but few have asked how the “New Navy” of this era planned to fight its battles. This article seeks to recover its ideas about battle tactics, using torpedo development as a point of entry. Although officials thought seriously about torpedoes’ tactical implications, technological complexity and habits of institutional communication hindered the navy’s ability to agree on them, and important questions remained unresolved on the eve of World War I in 1914.