7 - Teaching by Example: Julian Corbett’s The Campaign of Trafalgar of 1910

Summary

This essay examines the recovery and development of strategic leadership as an educational aid for senior officers and statesmen. Between 1902 and 1914 Julian Stafford Corbett (1854–1922) provided history and strategy lectures for the Royal Navy's senior level war course, an educational programme designed to prepare the navy's leadership for future conflicts through in depth study of strategy, technology, intentional law, historical and contemporary experience, and national policy. Corbett, a lawyer by training, was wealthy and politically engaged. In the less than a decade he developed his limited initial brief, providing historical content, into a programme to capture and define national strategy, and disseminate it as doctrine. He worked closely with service leaders, including First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Fisher (1904–1910) and successive directors of naval intelligence, the navy's chief war planner, and the officer responsible for the war course. Not only did he teach almost all the middle and senior level naval officers who served in the First World War, but his extensive publications ensured national strategic doctrine was widely understood, by service leaders and civilians.

Corbett's work was shaped by service agendas, but the navy left him to deliver the programme. This intellectual partnership between the navy's strategic leadership and a sophisticated Clausewitzian intellectual proved to highly effective. In 1907 Corbett published England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, which demonstrated the impact of limited maritime strategy in a global war with extensive continental military operations. It was a template for a future conflict, written for admirals and statesmen, not academics. The book stressed that British maritime/amphibious strategy had triumphed over French-continental methods, and remained the basis of national strategy in 1907. He highlighted the critical role of civilian strategic leadership, working in partnership with sophisticated service leaders, in this case Pitt the Elder and Admiral Lord Anson. His argument shaped contemporary strategic choice, ensuring Britain did not create a mass conscript army before 1916.

The leadership he studied was national, not individual, rational rather than heroic, and his focus was on the evolution of contemporary strategic doctrine. In his study of the Trafalgar campaign Corbett emphasised strategic continuity, not tactical innovation.