Julian S. Corbett – författare

This book continues the author's study of the development of the fleet and the naval art and the history of naval operations under the Tudors and Stuarts. The author considers the British struggle with the Dutch for maritime supremacy and the rise of British power in the Mediterranean.

Sir Julian Corbett was regarded as one of the greatest naval historians of the early twentieth century. Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905 was never available to the public during his lifetime. As noted in the introduction to Volume I, Corbett dealt not with "minute details and themes,...but a continuous narrative that demonstrated the interrelationship of land and sea events as they impinged on each other in conception, execution and results. Thus political objectives, geographic factors, and the machinery of government all could be seen working together as part of a whole." Corbett's work delineated the differences between maritime and land warfare, while also exploring their interaction.Published in hardcover by the Naval Institute Press in 1994, both volumes are now available in paperback for the first time.

Unlike his contemporary American theorist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Britain's eminent maritime strategist, Sir Julian Corbett, believed that victory in war did not come simply by the exercise of sea power and that, historically, this had never been the case. Corbett's keen analysis of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and his discussion of the pros and cons of limited conflict is still of great value to our understanding of today's limited wars.Based on intelligence reports provided by the Japanese government, this work on the Russo-Japanese naval war was written as an official study in the years just before World War I and classified "confidential" by the Royal Navy. The two-volume study demonstrates the lessons the war held for the future and shows the essential differences between maritime and continental warfare, while also exploring their interaction.

Sir Julian Corbett's Some Principles of Maritime Strategy represents the most refined general statement of the uses of naval power in wartime as the subject was understood at the beginning of the twentieth century. Corbett, inspired by read­ing Clausewitz's On War, applied a general, philosophical approach to the specific issues of naval conflict. Using his extensive knowledge of naval history, Corbett was able to refine some of the ideas developed earlier by Alfred Thayer Mahan and Phillip Colomb. Complementing those earlier writers' illumination of specific points, Corbett wrote what must be considered the first successful attempt at a compre­hensive synthesis of the subject, linking it both to the general theory of warfare and to the specific issues of sea power, strategy, and naval battle. Although he could not foresee the importance of the airplane, the submarine, and outer space to naval warfare, his work is seminal. Part III, in particular, is an early attempt to deal with what we have recently come to call "operational art." While Corbett never uses that term, his subject is the same: that area between strategy and tactics which translates strategic vision into successful activity of forces in space and time, constrained by logistics and the power and ambitions of the enemy.The Classics of Sea Power series makes readily available, in uniform, authoritative editions, the key works of profes­sional naval thought. Illustrating naval development over the centuries, these major original, book-length works relating to theory, strategy, tactics, operations, and important themes in naval warfare have been chosen for their eloquence and time­liness. The series is a companion to histories, anthologies, and other interpretative writings, providing a depth of under­standing that cannot be had from reading secondary sources alone.