At 1100, the opposing battle fleets made visual contact at a range of twenty miles. At 1121, at a range of 30,000 yards, the White battleships commenced firing, aided by spotting aircraft; five minutes later, the Black battleships began to return the fire. In the meantime, many lesser duels flared. Overhead, 70 Black patrol bombers and 12 torpedo planes, escorted by 36 Marine fighters, swept in on the White ships; nine White fighters attacked the rear squadron of seaplanes, but their interception was too late and too weak. The patrol bombers struck from high altitude with 152 1,000-pound bombs; the slow, stubby torpedo planes slashed in in a low-level attack off the bow of the White van, but they were badly shot up by antiaircraft fire from three White heavy cruisers. Meanwhile, three other White heavy cruisers and a formation of destroyers attacked the light cruisers and destroyers at the rear of the Black column, causing considerable damage. Then six Black heavy cruisers seized the moment and attacked the three remaining heavy cruisers at the head of the White formation, sinking them all.
With the opening provided by the victory of the heavy cruisers, a Black destroyer squadron launched a torpedo attack against the White battle fleet from off the starboard beam. Admiral Kalbfus ordered his White battleships to make a right-about maneuver to avoid the torpedo attack; his lead battleship, the Tennessee, was hit by fire from the Black battleships and suddenly slowed to 8 knots. The five trailing White battleships then also reduced speed, so that it took them too long to complete the reversal of course and redeploy; for several minutes in the long turn, the three lead battleships masked the fire of the rear three. During this crucial interval, the White battleships suffered costly damage.
The exercise ended at 1236. The Black fleet could claim a victory. Its cruisers had kept heavy pressure on the White light forces, preventing them from attacking the Black battleships, while its own destroyers attacked the White battleships. Black losses were one battleship, four heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and six destroyers. White losses were one battleship, three heavy cruisers, five light cruisers, and eleven destroyers. The White battleships were more heavily damaged than the Black.1
At the conclusion of the Fleet Problem, the Atlantic Squadron’s old battleships of Battle Division 5 and destroyers of Destroyer Squadron 10 were called upon to participate in Fleet Landing Exercise 5, to test the amphibious capability of Admiral Johnson’s command.
The warships fired gunfire support practices off eastern Vieques. The naval fire blasted deep craters on the island, and the din and rumble of the earth seemed demoralizing, but a very disappointing amount of substantive damage was done to the mock-up target defenses. Reconnaissance flights were flown over the island, and a Marine Reconnaissance and Intelligence team went ashore to reconnoiter, a luxury not usually available in combat operations because of the limited time ships might spend in waters patrolled by enemy planes and fear of compromising tactical surprise.
The landing exercises took place on 10 and 11 March. The assault troops, 1st Battalion, Fifth Marines, were as usual carried in the cramped old battleships Wyoming, Texas, and New York due to lack of transports. The Marines’ supplies and heavy equipment were carried in the venerable cargo ship Capella; to a force long bereft of auxiliaries, the vessel, recently refitted after nineteen years out of commission, seemed the “most useful vessel in the expedition.” The main assault landings were carried out despite rising seas and shoals off the beaches. Defending planes simulated strafing attacks on the naked boats, inflicting “appalling” losses. The Marines then quickly established a beachhead, as the troops of the defending battalion, thinly stretched over an impossible 25-mile frontage, pulled back in order to concentrate their dispersed forces.2
Thus ended Fleet Problem XX and Flex 5. The mock warfare campaign illuminated significant trends in naval strategy and tactics, although some lessons remained shadowy.
Generally, the Problem exemplified the psychological advantages of the offensive in warfare. White ships and planes for the most part fought daringly, cleverly, and vigorously; Black ships and planes, leashed in a necessary but seemingly sterile defensive role, were less alert, more careless and lethargic.
Concretely, the Problem illustrated that it would be difficult to fight a major naval foe in the Atlantic while much of the Fleet had to be based in the Pacific. The lack of adequate bases in the Caribbean was particularly ominous. Admiral Andrews commented:
. . . secure and well equipped bases at Port of Spain and beyond will be essential if our fleet be called upon to uphold the Monroe Doctrine by operations against an aggressive enemy in central or south Atlantic.
To project the fleet into such an area against a strong foe without the facilities for maintaining it there or without a secure line of communications would be contrary to any sound concept of strategy and so hazardous to our own control of vital sea areas that it is unlikely ever to be attempted unless suitable bases are provided.3
Sailors in the Pennsylvania line the rail to honor President Roosevelt after Fleet Problem XX
He warned,
A fleet on which the country may depend for its existence should never be placed in the position of operating in the face of an aggressive enemy without first having established a base in its lee. . . . In view of the present world conditions, the importance of the West Indian area to our national defense, and the maintenance of our national policies, and the lack of bases therein, it is high time that corrective measures be taken.4
Andrews believed that a base on the Gulf of Paria was indispensable, and the fliers thought Samana Bay could be made into an excellent base for patrol planes. The latter also felt that both San Juan and Trinidad had excellent potential as patrol-plane bases, although they believed Culebra’s Great Harbor was misnamed; it was too small to be a PBY base. Andrews’ recommendations included building up the inadequate existing American bases in the Caribbean and leasing bases in the area from foreign governments. His report was seen by the President, for whom the absence of bases in the Caribbean was a pressing matter.5
Significantly, while both Admiral Andrews and Admiral Kalbfus were orthodox, veteran officers, both had made air power the determinant of his strategy. Neither force had attempted to close for the decisive surface action that each desired until the enemy’s air forces had been decimated. The battleships had not fired a single round from their main batteries in all the six days of the Problem.
However, had the battle lasted another day, the planes would no longer have been able to function decisively. The remaining forty PBYs were down to their last bombs, and the Ranger had but 57 planes of all types left; the White carriers had only 86 planes still operational. The mutual air attacks scheduled for the 26th would have exhausted the offensive potential of the aircraft, and it would have been left to the battleships to determine the victor. The peacetime practices and exercises generally suggested the same trend: the efforts of the air forces ended in mutual extinction through attrition. Yet, as long as the planes remained formidable, no surface engagement was feasible. The trend was toward longer and longer postponement of the fleet action as aircraft performance improved until, finally, in World War II, the decisive surface action could not take place at all.
Technically, both sides handled their naval air power well, and the carrier commanders appeared to be thoroughly familiar with correct doctrines and tactics of carrier warfare: both fleets made the carrier, not the vaunted battleship, the target of their air strikes; and both tended to deploy the carrier as the core of an independent task force, for greater mobility and concealment, rather than to keep the flattop leashed to the battle line (although this deprived the carrier of the concentrated AA protection of a more central position). And Admiral King’s strike against concentrations of Black shore-based aviation was a sure harbinger of the fast carrier strikes of the Pacific War.
It should have been clear from the Problem that carriers needed more fighter planes aboard to protect them from enemy bombers and torpedo planes, but this lesson had to be learned again at high tuition early in the Pacific War. The Problem indicated that high-level, horizontal bombing was an ineffective technique against firing ships maneuvering