Mr. Roosevelt's Navy. Patrick Abazzia

in shore bombardment practices against bunkers and other beach-defense targets, the Training Detachment battleships and destroyers scored a hit factor of 31 percent, some observers felt that conventional naval gunfire produced imposing explosions and deep craters but did little real damage to soundly built installations. Nevertheless, little was done to provide the necessary ships, equipment, and research to master amphibious techniques, as only the Marines and the Training Detachment were seriously interested in the problem.² This inertia later cost the lives of riflemen on bloody beaches, and was perhaps the darkest sin of the peacetime Navy.

      The training cruises succeeded in giving useful, if cursory, shipboard experience to greenhorns, but more important, they helped to instill in the youngsters who joined the Fleet in more parlous times a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of responsibility assumed and mastered. The sailors of the forties proved well satisfied with the reservists who fought in the Atlantic, and it would be kind to think that the humble steaming of the old battleships and destroyers of Training Detachment in peaceful days had a little to do with it.³

      Then there were the port visits, called Flower Shows ever since a Florida senator requested that a “battleship or other suitable vessel” visit his state in connection with a flower show. New Orleans needed a destroyer to make its Mardi Gras complete; Brunswick, Georgia, could count on a destroyer for local ceremonies. One California congressman futilely but insistently demanded that the annual Fleet Problem be cancelled so that large ships could be provided for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes the nature of the event did not warrant the attendance of a warship; for instance, the four-stacker Bernadou was sent in July 1940 to the Cambridge (Maryland) Regatta, but it turned out that only nine members of a private yacht club visited the ship, to the chagrin of the skipper. In July 1939, the old Leary was sent on a highly successful visit to seafaring New Bedford because the local Democratic organization needed a popular diversion to blunt the impact of the mayor having been indicted for corruption in the grand manner. The bigger cities got the battleships.^a

      The port visits made planning of operating schedules difficult, and for the sailors they entailed a spit-and-polish performance, but usually also a compensating liberty. The crews enjoyed the functions in proportion to the number and interest of the visitors to their ship. Few men were so lost to tradition as not to accept as obvious the superiority of their ship over all others of similar type.⁴

      For old and undermanned vessels, the Detachment’s operating schedule was murderous; the midshipmen’s cruise alone entailed a voyage of ten thousand miles. The busy schedule did not leave time for adequate upkeep. The deck- and side-plating of the destroyers became badly rusted, and their old power plants required more and more attention. As Admiral Johnson suggested, “. . . the material condition of these old ships brings up the problem of balancing their usefulness as against the usefulness of the new ships which might be bought with the money now expended on vessels that are obsolescent.” The destroyers lacked torpedoes and antiaircraft machine guns, and Johnson warned that they were “practically defenseless” against air attack. The old battleships lacked modern guns and antiaircraft weapons.⁵ In February 1939, the Arkansas’ skipper was surprised to find his ship scheduled for a practice with .50-caliber AA machine guns during the midshipmen’s cruise; he wrote the Navy Department that if he was to comply “it is felt that .50 caliber anti-aircraft machine guns should be installed.”⁶

      Serving prosaically in an ocean devoid of a tradition of romance and without a formidable potential enemy, Training Detachment was regarded as a noncombatant command, “out of Fleet,” and outside the mainstream of promotion. The Bureau of Navigation considered it a seagoing replacement center to be bled for special drafts of manpower, and considered its personnel assigned on a temporary basis while awaiting reassignment to other commands; in 1938, the personnel turnover in the Detachment was 700 percent! The turnover made complicated tactical training impossible, for as the crews became sufficiently well trained to carry out tactical exercises with other ships they were decimated by transfers, and the training process had to start all over again at a simpler level.⁷ It seems likely that Johnson was given more than his share of hard cases and mediocre people; good officers developed a tendency to deem Atlantic commands second-rate or even injurious to their careers, and they longed for the major fleet units and “sunny, starched-white pageantry” of the Pacific. Some felt that the Atlantic received the capable administrators, the competent plodders, while the most dynamic officers were assigned to the Pacific.⁸

      Because of the turnover, material defects, and its rigorous operating schedule, which deprived it of important tactical exercises, the Detachment was not ready to carry out major offensive combat operations. Nevertheless, perhaps because it acquired the stubborn, you-be-damned pride of the subtly despised, it performed its mechanical tasks well. Its gunnery compared favorably with that of better-endowed ships, and engineering performance, despite the limitations of the equipment, was “satisfactory.” In the face of reduced personnel levels, its damage-control practices remained “very satisfactory” and communications were “excellent.” Indeed, after Flex 4, the ships of Destroyer Squadron 10 were rated excellent in maneuvering and gunnery, and one inspecting officer reported, “I consider these vessels to be in a high state of readiness for battle.” The ships and men were hardened to steaming great distances without the support of fleet auxiliaries. There were few morale problems, and discipline was “uniformly good.” The venereal disease rate was high, about 120 cases per 1,000 men, roughly double the Pacific norm, due to frequent visits to West Indian ports. On balance, and allowing for the difficult conditions in which they served, Admiral Johnson was pleased with his men, observing, “The morale and efficiency of the bluejackets. . . is of the highest quality and is satisfactory in every way.”⁹

      In the thirties, Congress carefully watched over the Navy, making certain that new installations were located in appropriate districts and repair work was evenly shared by Depression-ridden cities.^b The East Coast wanted the extra income that a large fleet could provide, and in 1937 the Adequate Coast Defense Association was founded in Norfolk under the motto, “A Battle Fleet for the Atlantic Coast.” It was argued that it would take three weeks for the Fleet to reach the East Coast from the Pacific in a sudden emergency, more than forty days if the Panama Canal could not be used. The movement gained converts because of the Navy’s obvious weakness in the Atlantic as international affairs in Europe grew more ominous. That winter H.R. 8819 was introduced in Congress; it directed the President to establish a “permanent” fleet that should “in all peacetime be maintained on the Atlantic Coast.” The bill also prescribed a minimum strength for the fleet in each category of ships and aircraft.¹⁰ Clearly unconstitutional because it infringed the President’s prerogative as Commander-in-Chief to dispose the nation’s armed forces, H.R. 8819 did not pass; but it placed Franklin Roosevelt in the happy position of being prodded and pressed to do what he had planned to do anyway.

      American naval planning in the thirties was not unduly complex. As a result of a decade and a half of isolationist and pacifist sentiment, the planners shunned alliances and expeditionary forces as unthinkable, lending an artificial quality to their efforts. They were chiefly concerned with the danger of a Pacific War with Japan, a formidable naval power, and neglected Europe and the Atlantic. America’s basic war plan envisaged a conflict in one ocean against a single power, an uncomplicated contingency requiring a simple response, a long naval thrust across the Pacific to secure bases from which to defeat the Japanese main fleet in a decisive engagement in the central Pacific. However, by the late thirties, these inchoate arrangements were soon rendered obsolete by a forced march of untoward events; the increasing aggressiveness of Germany raised the spectre of a war in Europe, which in turn would pose grave problems of hemispheric defense. In Latin America, endemic poverty and an unstable political tradition offered favorable conditions for a German-nurtured military putsch, and the events of the Spanish Civil War seemed to underscore Hitler’s willingness to forcibly export Fascism. The United States required a more flexible strategy, one that provided for the possibility of a complex, two-ocean war against a coalition of hostile powers; and in the winter of 1937-1938, the Army-Navy Joint Board began to plan for “readiness for action in both oceans.”

      American strategic planning in the next two years took increasing account of the possibility