The Sail of the Centuries : TO SHINING SEA A History of the United States Navy, 1775-1990<i> By Stephen Howarth(Random House: $25; 640 pp., illustrated) </i>

Since the birth of this nation more than 200 years ago, the U.S. Navy has been fighting, almost without pause, a bitter two-phased battle--against the enemy at sea and against the government at home. For usually when the bloodshed has ended, the call for “peace dividends” has rung out--and the money earmarked for peaceful purposes has been siphoned first from the Navy budget. Who needed a large, expensive Navy if the danger was past and the boys were coming home?

George Washington, who spawned the Navy, wrote to a friend after becoming President: “As certain as night succeeds the day . . . without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive--and with it, everything honorable and glorious.” But President Thomas Jefferson found less need for such a force. He wrote his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin: “It is of the utmost importance to diminish our expenses. This may be done in the Navy Department.”

These two arguments--for and against a strong Navy--have echoed through the White House and the halls of Congress ever since the country’s pioneer days, usually in predictable cycles. A war would break out, and the naval budget would burgeon, as it did under such leaders as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Then peace and, unless a new palpable threat loomed ahead, the ships would suddenly become a deplorable drain on the Treasury--in the eyes of Presidents who regarded favorably the Jeffersonian view of naval priorities. Among them were Martin Van Buren, Harry Truman (until the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb) and Jimmy Carter. Today, the greatest Navy the world has ever seen is, with the Cold War over, nervously waiting to learn its fate.

This see-saw history is deftly chronicled in Stephen Howarth’s scholarly but very readable “To Shining Sea,” a one-volume account tracing the growth of the Navy from the wind-driven frigates of President Washington to the nuclear-driven ships of President Bush. The chief merit of compressing the highlights of so rich a history into some 600 pages is that it makes for a handy reference work for the layman who prefers not to wade through a series of volumes like that of Samuel Elliot Morison. Such condensation, in any case, sharpens the historical focus, silhouetting the stark trends of history against a backdrop largely unembellished by drama or unessential detail.

Sometimes the effect is startling. It is no secret, of course, that the United States and Britain often have been enemies during the last 200 or so years, starting with the Revolutionary War. But the emphasis on this point imposed by compression nevertheless stirs a feeling of disbelief. Is it possible that as late as the 1920s the United States, seeking naval supremacy, anticipated possible war with the British we now view as virtual blood brothers--while the “aggressive” Japanese urged an end to world naval expansion?

And though Howarth delves more deeply into the background of such naval heroes as John Paul Jones and Ernest J. King, limited space precludes their emergence as full-blooded human beings who can give the Navy a dimension beyond that of a faceless military arm.

Howarth’s obviously profound sympathy for the Navy does not allow for much heavy criticism, but his depiction of its struggle for survival and glory helps to explain why some of America’s bravest warriors have been turned into insecure, almost panicky pleaders who, in their perpetual fear of losing power and prestige, have sometimes resorted to unsavory means to cover up negligence and inefficiency.

Toward the end of World War II, the cruiser Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine and its survivors remained in shark-infested waters for five days before the Navy even realized that it was missing. Naval leaders however, made the innocent skipper, Capt. Charles B. McVay III, a scapegoat and court-martialed him for negligence, simply to take the heat off themselves. They were desperately trying to resist efforts to unify the armed forces, a move that would dilute the independence of the Navy, and the sinking, they felt, would play into the hands of the Army, which favored unification.

And recently when an explosion killed a number of men aboard the battleship Iowa , the Navy blamed one of the victims, claiming, without any supporting evidence, that he deliberately caused the blast on a suicidal impulse. The explosive involved was later found to be defective, clearly the reason for the accident. (Despite all the talk of a “peace dividend” that could cut deeply into the naval budget, the Navy finally withdrew its charges against the dead seaman on Oct. 17 of this year.)

Howarth writes of a “new national assertiveness” in prewar days. “Requiring an outlet,” he says, “the assertive energy made the idea of war nationally acceptable once more--particularly if a war could be found which could be fought in a good cause, which would benefit U.S. interests, and which could be won.” Was he referring to the Persian Gulf War of 1991? No, to the Spanish-American War of 1898. It, too, was a short, decisive struggle and produced a military hero as revered as Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf--Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt. Soon, in the afterglow of victory, “Teddy” became President and, by instilling in the American public fear of a Japanese naval attack on the U.S. West Coast, prodded Congress into financing the construction of the biggest fleet in the country’s history to date.

Now, in the current afterglow, naval optimism has been rekindled because of new fears of the future. Who can say, argue Navy lobbyists, when the next Saddam Hussein might pop out of the Third World woodwork?

But if the admirals are breathing a bit easier now, even though they must, ironically, depend on deadly danger to remain professionally alive, they know that when and if major budget cuts come, they are likely to hear once more the dreaded voice of Jefferson: “This may be done in the Navy Department.”