Great War at Sea #5 - U.S. Navy Plan Black

During the late 1800s, two emerging industrial powers began to build large modern fleets: the United States and Germany. Perhaps inevitably, tensions rose between them. Each entered the imperialist race very late and had to content itself with the leftovers which the British and French had passed by. When the United States seized Spain’s colonial empire in 1898, German jealousy raged hotly. Some German business leaders lusted for the Philippines and Puerto Rico, urging the Kaiser to purchase them from the Spanish before the war ended, or from the Americans afterward.

German and American squadrons did not, as legend has it, almost come to blows in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War — the British spread that story, eager to cultivate American public opinion. We included a scenario for that in our 1898 game anyway. But the German and American admirals on the scene did cultivate an intense dislike for one another, and the feelings spread to the top on both sides.

A century later, it’s difficult to say how seriously each nation’s leaders considered war with the other. On either side of the Atlantic, naval planning staffs wrote elaborate scenarios for a possible German-American naval war. It’s these documents that serve as the basis for our game. So while the game is “hypothetical,” it’s drawn from the actual war plans of both nations and is, in its own way, an even more “accurate” wargame than those based on battles or campaigns that did take place.

Though there’s no evidence that either nation’s intelligence services penetrated the other’s naval staff, the two plans oddly mirror one another. Both discounted intervention by other nations. The German “Operations Plan III” posited a trans-Atlantic strike by the German High Seas Fleet to capture Puerto Rico as a base in the first phase of the war, followed by an invasion of the American mainland if the United States refused to negotiate. This second wave would attack a major U.S. port, probably New York but perhaps Savannah.

The U.S. Navy’s Plan Black accurately anticipated these notions, though the Americans discounted the lengths to which the Germans prepared to go. For example, the German command planned to tow its shorter-ranged ships across the Atlantic, something the Americans never considered.

The game’s map covers the central Caribbean basin, from Miami in the north to Caracas in the south, and Nicaragua in the west to the Virgin Islands in the east. In addition to the German and American fleets, Plan Black the game also includes the Brazilian and Argentine navies, each of them a respectable force, and the tiny gunboat navies of Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia. There’s a small Dutch naval force, and the U.S. Coast Guard puts in an appearance.