Too Far on a Whim

"In 1938, the US Navy chose to proceed with the installation of a revolutionary high-temperature, high-pressure steam propulsion system in all of its major warships. This adoption of what had become known as "high steam" was a seminal moment in the career of de facto engineer-in-chief Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy's Bureau of Engineering at the time. Postwar scholarship-on the rare occasions that this topic is discussed at all-has lauded this decision, universally asserting that vast improvements in the cruising radius and mechanical durability of Navy warships were critical to the US effort against Japan during World War II. This view of high steam relies almost entirely on the account of Admiral Bowen. His 1954 book Ships, Machinery, and Mossbacks: The Autobiography of a Naval Engineer remains to this day the only easily accessible entryway into the highly complex subject of mid-century military steam propulsion. However, as an officer who found himself marginalized in the aftermath of high steam's contentious adoption, Bowen had a clear motive to paint himself as the martyr for a pure cause. A complete reliance on his partisan account of high steam technology thus poses significant problems for modern scholarship, and especially for the promises and pitfalls of naval engineering now and in the century to come. Too Far on a Whim argues that while high-steam developments did improve the endurance of Navy warships, faulty operational assumptions by Bowen and his bureau meant that the system often failed to achieve more than two-thirds the endurance expected once war broke out. This shortfall rendered the carefully compiled data upon which all warship movements were planned utterly useless. To make matters worse, the improvements that were achieved were accompanied by substantial production and training problems that dangerously snowballed after 1940. High-steam propulsion is therefore not only a critically overlooked factor in American naval history, but also an example of technological progressivism gone awry. Throughout the 1930s, there was little consideration given to either the situational nature of the advantages the new system offered or its far-reaching administrative consequences. This was in large part due to the increasing complexity of these technological systems, which by the early 20th century had moved beyond the comprehension of non-specialists. The result was that experts like Admiral Bowen, who were relied upon to help leaders make important design and policy decisions, found themselves wielding tremendous power and influence that far exceeded their official limits. This story of the American high-steam system is thus a powerful cautionary tale for us today"--