Gunboat! Small Ships at War

Gunboat Diplomacy is a political scientist's catch-phrase and includes all the present day exercises in naval sabre-rattling, embracing carrier task forces and even stealthy subs. Perret entertainingly shows the original use of diminutive warships ( the US Navy now labels them "small combatants") in protecting merchants and envoys during the period of the Pax Britannica. Today, some of these actions appear like bullying -- teaching the uppity fuzzy-wuzzies a lesson. But Victorian Englishmen saw themselves as being on a civilizing mission, trying to bring order to what they saw as the chaos ruled by warlords and avaricious princes. Not so incidentally, the order enforced by the mini-warships protected British mercantile interests. The tales of the lone gunboat patrolling some foreign shore or river bank to quell disturbances are excitingly told as are some of the episodes where the gunboats participated in a full-scale war -- such as Mesopotamia in WWI -- and a quasi-war such as the Opium Wars of the mid 19th century. I am not so sure that the Mississippi gunboats of the American Civil War really belong in the book. They were pretty much akin to the regular warships of the Union and Confederate forces, the only difference being that they had a sufficiently shallow draft to navigate shoaled and badly charted rivers. In his brief discussion of the use of "gunboats" in Vietnam, Perret should have mentioned the "Asheville" class of coastal patrol boat, as this was a revival of the original gunboat concept...more so than the little PBR boats patrolling the Mekong Delta. All in all, a lively and informative review of the lower end of the naval force scale.

This is an excellent book from start to finish, most of the action is based with the Royal Navy mainly because Britain was defending an empire and was at the time the dominant power. The US receives less mention because during the era of gunboat diplomacy the US was busy managing it's own affairs and it's foreign policy was isolationist until after the Spanish-American war. Chapters include stories on different stages of the gunboat development from an action perspective such as the Crimean War, Sudan War 1870s-80s and WWI. Also there are interesting chapters on Mississippi gunboats, operations against piracy, police actions against natives in the Pacific and gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean with tin pot dictators/warlords and one or two interesting chapters about operations in China, including 'where blood was thicker than water' when it came to saving lives of the Western people in China against bandits where an American gunboat helped a British gunboat. The only down point where I agree with past reviewers is the very small chapter on riverine warfare in Vietnam, which in my opinion should have been left out because it was not in the realm of gunboat diplomacy or any bearing on development of the gunboats of the time. A chapter on the subject is best left to a book on Naval counter insurgency.

This book is not about grand strategies, the technical evolution of gunboats as naval weapons or academic theories about so-called gunboat diplomacy. It is a well written collection of thirteen interesting narratives about the use of gunboats - typically small vessels with relatively heavy armament - in major and minor conflicts from the 1850s through the 1940s. All the stories involve the British Royal Navy, with two exceptions: gunboats on the Mississippi River during the American Civil War and a pathetically inadequate "chapter" - less than two pages - about a single aspect of the USN's riverine actions in Vietnam. Some of the incidents were highly improbable: transporting gunboats hundreds of miles through the jungle to neutralize WWI German forces on an African lake and shootouts between an RN frigate and Red Chinese artillery batteries hundreds of miles up the Yangtze River in 1947. In this day of central "command and control" by people far from the scene of action and the absurdity of getting a military lawyer's permission to strike targets the depiction of actions in which local commanders take full initiative as to whether or not and how to undertake action against an adversary (and not be second guessed afterward) almost seems like fiction. The fact that most of the wars or campaigns won't be familiar to many Americans adds to the exotic images that the author portrays; one gunboat captain "goes native" and wears a skirt. The summary of the ill conceived 1914-1917 British campaign to capture Baghdad - even through their initial mission to simply protect their Persian Gulf oil supplies from the Turks had already been quickly accomplished - reads like a cautionary tale for American and British experience since 2003. The "hooligan element" loots and terrorizes Basra after the Brits liberate it from the Turks and far more troops are needed than initially anticipated. Sound familiar? In this action several gunboats - some of which will play an encore role against Germans in the 1942-43 North African and Sicily campaigns - steam up the Tigris River providing heavy firepower to soften up the Turks and add punch to the British Army troops' efforts in a manner similar the way aircraft and armor are used today. Finally there are the "characters", mostly junior officers who distinguish themselves in colorful ways. Almost unbelievably one RN officer who commanded a gunboat in combat against Sudanese forces on the upper Nile in 1896 goes on to launch "black ops" torpedo boat raids in the Baltic Sea to support White Russians against Red Russians in 1919 and is finally seen being captured by the Germans while serving as naval liaison to an army unit in North Africa in 1942. What a pleasure to read about situations where the characters are allowed to be heroes instead of portrayed as victims. The 224-page paperback includes some reasonably helpful maps, 15 pages of black and white photographs, a one-page bibliography and a most useful sev

This is an excellent account of the under appreciated application of the gunboat as an instrument of foreign policy as well as a big punch in a small package. The feats of the officers and ratings assigned to these diminutive dreadnoughts are astounding. Usually outnumbered and operating far from home these naval personel showed a sense of initiative rarley seen since. Thumbs up.