Remarkable that i could certainly, i think, speak for both of us. We felt privileged to be able to tell those stories. So i would have one thing and i know we probably have to get out of here soon, but the sand tom mentioned in the men we write about and its all men because of the wars the grit in my almost two decades downrange in hellholes around the world, i see the same and the same grit in the men and now women who are fighting for us today and have fought for us since 2001. And we should all be very proud of that. So i guess that ends it. So thank you very much. Welcome to International Security studies at Yale UniversitysJackson Institute for Global Affairs. Im ted whittenstein and i want to extend the special welcome to some of our zoom participants as well as cspan folks tuning in. Its wonderful to magnify the reach of everything exciting. Were doing here on the yale campus which of course includes professor kennedys wonderful new book victory at sea naval power and the transformation of the global order in world war two. Well introduce professor kennedy in just a moment along with our moderator professor westad. So as a reminder, you can silence your devices in the room if youre on zoom you can submit your q a using the q a feature. You have your volume and video muted, but were recording this session and well extend and circulate a copy for the benefit of everyone. So were delighted to kick it off. Im gonna hand it over. To professor arne westott, hes yales elehoo professor of Global Affairs and history. Hes the director of International Security studies and hes a very close colleague of ours and as well as pauls whos been a colleague and mentor to so many over the years at jackson and at yale. So thank you and over to you arnie. Thank you very much ted. Its wonderful to be sharing this session with my colleague and friend professor paul kennedy. Now of course here at yale pull doesnt need any introduction. He has been the mentor to many of us who are here to generations of undergraduate students and and graduate students. He built up an environment for International History and global history at yale. That is unrivaled. I think not used in this country, but but internationally he has gone out of his way to be to be kind and to help people who have been visiting here including me before i arrived at, you know, as as faculty and its i think this ability that professor kennedy has to reach out to people that is really helped us here at yale build the kind of environment that we now have for the kind of research that he will talk more about in presenting his book, but of course, its not just that at deal that professor hindi as well known to a whole series of books. This is his 20th written or edited volume. He has really helped to shape the field of International History. At no point more. I think it would be right to say then with his 1988 the ryerson full of the great powers, which is probably the most influential book on international and global history published for the last two generations. Had a tremendous impact for how other historians think and write about this field and many of the ideas that professor kennedy developed in that book and in the publications that came after that book, are now put into the volume that he is going to present on today victory at sea naval power and the transformation of the global order in world war two. So youre going to hear more about the book from the author himself in a moment, but let beers say that this is a book where the title for once. Promises less than what is actually in the book. Usually with those historians. Its the other way around because this is not just the book about victory at sea during the Second World War. It is a book about how forces change in great at great moments of historical change and historical transformation. What are the determining factors . For this kind of change. Thats what professor kennedy i think has been broken part with throughout his career. Thats what he wrote about in the ryerson full of the great powers, and thats what he brings together in this book for the crucial changes. Place in power constellations during the Second World War that really delivers the world that we live in today. So its a great pleasure for me to introduce professor kennedy. Please join me in welcoming him up to a stage that he knows very very well. But where we will be very interested in listening to what he has this. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming out on a on a wet monday afternoon for this and for for looking in i want to say thank you immediately to to any westjet. A direct of International Security studies here to ted whittenstein and to others who helped so nicely behind the scenes to get me sliced together and to give me support in in the years in which i was doing this particular book the story of which i will try to unfold in a moment, but welcome to you all and thank you for coming. Let me begin with a story of what turned out to be a sort of rescue mission, which i didnt plan on doing but when i had stepped away from my last book and got a bit of a breather. I began to think of moving on to two different projects. This is about now seven years or so ago one was how would one take the rise and fall of a great powers to which professor west at eluded and try to bring it up to date in an extensive, you know, appendix given the fact that the world had changed so much especially in asia since 198889. How did one do that . So its beginning to collect materials and data for that project. I also had in my mind quite different project which has been in out of my mind for many many years more which is to try to do an intellectual study of the great english imperialist writer a rudyard kipling. How was it my it was behind my query. How was it that kipling switched from being the django assertive confident writer in many dimensions of the 1880s and 1890s to be the one who was fearful about the future of a British Empire and it began to be seen in his his many writings political writings, but also even in some of the the writings for children, so interested in that so thats what i was planning to do, but i was also enjoying the fact that i had been introduced by john hadend over the Naval War College to the paintings of a remarkable marine artist called ian marshall. Marshall was a im going to show him in a minute, but marsha was a an architecture and painter. He was preparing. His fourth or fifth book by encouragement of the uss Intrepid Museum in new york when the threeyear refurbishment would be done. Thered be a special gallery of his marine paintings, and he was really enjoying doing that as well as painting once a year and another picture which would be of the warship coming in and out of the river time side in the north of england where my father and my two uncles were Ship Builders boilermakers for about 50 55 years and had many sort of memories of my father describing worships coming into the china going out and he ended a painting for me once a year. That was my birthday present to myself. Um, so i was familiar with what he was doing and just really liked all of his paintings of smaller and large ships and i was so pleased that he would have this exhibition in manhattan and then caramba the news came through that that theres a new director a new president of the board of a museum in new york a very very rich gentleman with a lady with a wife would new what things needed to be done and what didnt and she decided that this this gallery for ian marshalls and other paintings would be set aside for guess what ladies and gentlemen a childrens playroom. Children would come on board a museum and hell be play around with you know, model ships and stuff and that would be it so ian was really really badly hurt by that i had myself got to encouraging him in the Previous Year and offered to write the forward to his collection of paintings when when it came closer to fruition, so i began to write that forward and encourage ian because hed written a nice book on on ahmed warships before 19th century warships because hed written a book on flying boats and another one on passages to india to try to put together his paintings of maybe more than carriers, maybe different sorts of warships and tried to produce a nice coffee table book. On warships of the Second World War and do a bit of a narrative to suggest that this he started off doing but as ian was former or happy just doing the paintings when the narrative of a thing so at a certain stage, i believe it was when i was getting a couple of hips replaced and i was to be sitting at home on the sofa recovering from that i agreed to do a basic text of of this of this book and we would try to approach a publisher who would integrate the paintings into the flow of it takes rather than as the biggies in new york like simon and schuston others. Wanted to do just collect them together put them together at page 246 or whatever. So yeah University Press turned out to be an incredible choice for us. We high quality of what theyve done now just really staggers and impresses me if you see the book itself there oblige ian by bringing some of the paintings right to the edge of the of the page rather than margin say he did a very wonderful job on this, but that was now i was this spring it was not like that. Seven years ago. So as i was beginning i was putting kipling to one side putting a rise and fall over great powers to one side beginning to draft a chapter or two and courage by a couple of friends in england who thought this would be good provided. I described the difference between a frigate and a destroyer and other things like that in a chapter called warships and navies of 1939. I got to work on this and then alas in was about 82 years old had a massive heart attack and died in his kitchen just before christmas of 2016 a long time ago so after going backwards and forwards and thinking what would happen . I decided that i would take it and if you like run with it, but i also try to insert in the story in this book some other ideas of mine, which has been referred to by professor wester trying to look at how this story of a changing naval power. Thats the if you like the title and the subtitle here how the story of a shifting naval power reflected some bigger change or some sort of really large epic transformation of the great powers in the 19th into the 20th century, especially so that meant that i needed to go back into an awful lot of investigative writing researchers some drafts trying it out on one or two audiences. I did a talk here i think about four years ago to the history faculty on what i was up to and slowly and slowly push this one forward. Then along came covid just two years of slowing down further. It was no use trying to rush this when yale University Pressed rightly wanted to get copies of this at the front of of you know, barnes and noble bookstores and that was impossible so we held on and that gave me the chance to go back to the manuscript and go through its sentence by sentence and try to trim it down. Its a very large narrative in any case and to try to get official sufficient and wonderful number of statistical. Tables and data and the maps by mapmaker down in maryland mr. Wilson all put into this complicated book. I was trying to do if you like. What historians might call a broad delian approach to the naval history of the Second World War brodell and his magnificent books on the mediterranean in the age of philip ii said there was an underlying or basic level of causation geography the climate and everything else. There was a middle level of technical technical and technological trading change which affected things. And theres a top level the history of events lee strava anymore, which was that of you know battle of lepanto or the spanish armada. Could you try and do broad dell in the mid 20th century . I was going to have a crack at this. So thats the backdrop to this complicated book. Let me see now if this control works better than it did 15 minutes ago, and we see what i mean . There is ian wonderful gentle scotsman coming from alolans of of scotland. There is a number of his lovely paintings of different warships that see japanese merchant ship a higher limping with its oil into malta at the end of the pedestal operation 1942 and so on it was so wonderful to work with him and years that i was able to do so i would i had to start going back to the basic works basic official history on the Second World War. See the one on the left is the fourvolume massive cabin roskill british official history. The one on the right is the 15 volume of the United States navy history of operations in the Second World War years ago, you know, ladies and gentlemen, i thought that these were just simplistic narratives who could read or pass on or see them second hand in book stores. I got to admire the authorship in both of these and the sustained amount of of detail which they supplied and brought them out really as early as in 1950s. I duff my hat these official naval histories. He has broadale and a mediterranean world. I wont do anything further. Ive described what i thought i was doing with this mastermind who evolved his notion of three levels of causation and change while in a german prisoner war camp outside lubeck between 1944 and 1945. What a story. There is a sort of staggered three levels of a broadelion approach. I will not try to detail them now. Im not in a you know, Political Science lecture class, but this is what i really thought i was doing. Here is the battle of the biggest battle of the war. The one that gave churchill such an enormous amount of concern. He said if we lose this we lose everything if we lose this we cannot get the american troops or all supplies or tanks or anything across the atlantic to turn Great Britain into a gigantic Takeoff Point for the eventual invasion of france in 1944 and what it hard tough battle. That was i i really do like that novel by nicholas monstera the cruel sea, he was a destroyer captain by the way as well as a novelist and i really do like the black and white movie version starring jack hogans in the cruel sea, but it wasnt indeed a very cruel sea and from end of 1939 into 40 and 41 losses in the atlantic of merchants. Especially all tankers went up and up and up. To the distress of chamberlain later on fdr and to the british admiral what were you going to do about this . This is the theoretical backdrop to what i was trying to do. Im sorry, ladies and gentleman if you think im zigzagging in my and a narrative as i try to describe the three or four purposes put within you know, the covers of this book. This is this is a Political Science ir book on the theories of long cycles and World Politics going back to the to reporting ease in spanish time coming forward trying to link them up to contradiff curves. I wouldnt bother you with all of this this however, theres a key work for me in the theory of all of his sea power in World Politics. So i was trying to do something about that and you see that when you get if you cant get through the narrative chapters to the very important chapter 8 where i stop there thats modellskis long cycles who ill come back and give a sixhour lecture on all of us if you want. Ladies and gentlemen. This is a destroyer First World War destroyer modified. Im going to talk about in a few minutes time one of the heroines if you like of my story if you refer to ships in the female gender. This is the Aircraft Carrier essex stacked with not already done now. If they did the essex class carrier, which is going to be important part of my narrative stacked with all of these all of these new aircraft designed at the beginning of the Second World War tested and then ready to go to the pacific to turn the tide in the pacific in the year of 1943. This is another aspect of the book ladies and gentlemen, naval historians will disagree with me and saying that it was the battle of midway june 1942 was the loss of the four japanese fleet carriers, which turned a tide. I dont think it was for reason. Ill try to to explain to you. By a beginning of 1943 in fact in the battle of the pacific almost all of those Aircraft Carriers, which had been in the us fleet at the beginning of the war had been destroyed not just a sunk at bale of a coral sea one at midway the wasp on escort duty pretty well everything except the very old uss saratoga converted battle cruiser was there under halseys command in the southwest pacific by in the First Six Months of 1943. There was nothing else nothing else such that the admiral king who really did not like to beg anything from a royal navy reached and sent a message across asking if the admiralty could send one of their brand new victorious class carriers to to reinforce halsey and and turn it into an american vessel for that critical, you know gap time in the pacific until a new ones were ready. The the hms victorious actually disappears from history professor westad. This is a this is a afterdinner question for you for about three or four months because the us navy using secrecy decides to give it an american name. So while it goes through the panama canal and gets all sorts of new american attack fighters hellcats avengers and everything else. It becomes the uss robin i kid you not for a while of victorious disappears a robin is there and they Work Together sharing operations in the southwest pacific until this magic time when transformation occurs. Id like to get you know there but when the uss essex arrives with its panoply of aircraft having come through the panama canal it arrives on the first day of june 1943 with our guest anonymous looking out of his headquarters into pearl harbor itself as it advances to to the