ABSTRACT
In Newport, Rhode Island, amid the summer palaces of the moneyed elite, stood the Naval War College. A haven for intellectuals, the college was merely tolerated by the majority of officers. The nautical future was conjured up by the repeated playing of a series of naval games invented by a retired lieutenant named William McCartney Little and introduced into the War College curriculum by Alfred Thayer Mahanin 1893. Instead, prudence and the general drift of naval architecture dictated an almost automatic escalation to the level of the largest ship possessed by any one naval power. Regardless of the prophet's admonitions, the rites performed atop the gaming tables of the Naval War College had completed Mahan's resuscitation of the battleship. In 1932 the Navy's General Board reported to the secretary of the Navy that "the consensus of naval opinion in our country is that the battleship is the supreme naval type, and that all others are adjuncts or auxiliaries.
