Great White Fleet - Background and Purpose

Background and Purpose

In the twilight of United States President Theodore Roosevelt's administration, Roosevelt dispatched sixteen U.S. Navy battleships of the Atlantic Fleet on a worldwide voyage of circumnavigation from 16 December 1907 to 22 February 1909. The hulls were painted white, the Navy's peacetime color scheme, decorated with gilded scrollwork with a red, white, and blue banner on their bows. These ships would later come to be known as the Great White Fleet.

The purpose of the fleet deployment was multifaceted. Ostensibly, it served as a showpiece of American goodwill as the fleet visited numerous countries and harbors. In this, the voyage was not unprecedented. Naval courtesy calls, many times in conjunction with the birthdays of various monarchs and other foreign celebrations, had become common in the 19th century. They became increasingly important with the rise of nationalism. In 1891, a large French fleet visited Kronstadt, Russia in conjunction with negotiations between the two nations. Although France and Russia has been hostile to each other for at least three decades, the significance of the call was not lost on Russia and Tsar Nicholas II signed a treaty of alliance with France in 1894. As navies grew larger, naval pageants grew longer, more elaborate and more frequent. The United States began participating in these events in 1902 when Roosevelt invited Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to send a squadron for a courtesy call to New York City. Invitations for US Navy ships to participate in fleet celebrations in England, France and Germany followed.

However, the voyage of the Great White Fleet demonstrated both at home and on the world stage that the US had become a major seapower in the years after its triumph in the Spanish-American War, with possessions that included Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. It was not the first flexing of US naval muscle on the international stage since that war. During the Algeciras Conference in 1906, convened to settle a diplomatic crisis between France and Germany over the fate of Morocco, Roosevelt ordered eight battleships to maintain a presence in the Mediterranean Sea. What the Great White Fleet showed was that, without having to fire a shot, the US Navy could take control of the seas with an overwhelming display of naval might and demonstrated the practical import of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's theories on the use of sea power to project global power. Specifically, as Japan had arisen as a major seapower with the 1905 annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, the deployment of the Great White Fleet sent a message to Tokyo that the American fleet could be deployed anywhere, even from its Atlantic ports, and would be able to defend American interests in the Philippines and the Pacific. This gesture capitalized on a war scare that had resulted from anti-Japanese riots in San Francisco. Roosevelt saw the deployment of the fleet as one that would take the American public's mind off an economic depression that had begun in 1907, encourage patriotism and give the impression that he would teach Japan "a lesson in polite behavior," as historian Robert A. Hart phrased it. Roosevelt did so on the assurance from financial experts that Japan had been drained from the Russo-Japanese War and would not be ready for another conflict for at least a decade. After the fleet had crossed the Pacific, Japanese statesmen realized that the balance of power in the East had changed since the Root–Takahira Agreement that defined relevant spheres of interest of the United States and Japan.

The voyage also provided an opportunity to improve the sea- and battle-worthiness of the fleet. While earlier capital ship classes such as the Kearsarge, Illinois and Maine were designed promarily for coastal defense, later classes such as the Virginia and Connecticut incorporated lessons learned from the Spanish-American War and were conceived as ships with "the highest practicable speed and the greatest radius of action," in the words of the appropriation bills approved by the United States Congress for their construction. They were intended as modern warships capable of long-range operations. Nevertheless, the experience gained in the recent war with Spain had been limited.