Читать книгу Mr. Roosevelt's Navy - Patrick Abazzia - Страница 14

2. A Destroyer for Sadie Hawkins Day

THE FIRST ATLANTIC FLEET was born in January 1906, evolving out of the old North Atlantic Station, then North Atlantic Fleet. But ironically, as a harbinger of the future, its first important mission was in the Pacific as part of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet.” In World War I, its heavy ships maintained ocean patrols, but it was the humble destroyers and subchasers that saw combat against the U-boats and won the victory at sea.

After the war, despite fears over dispersing the Navy, Secretary Josephus Daniels overruled his assistant, Franklin Roosevelt, and determined to transfer ships to the Pacific to deter Imperial Japan, which during the war had improved her strategic position by capturing Germany’s Pacific islands. Thus, on 30 June 1919, half of the Atlantic forces were detached to make up the new Pacific Fleet; the latter received the more modern vessels. The shift was announced as a means of stirring a healthy spirit of rivalry in the service by creating competing fleets.

Then, in 1922, the Navy was divided into four components: Battle Force, the major task force, which comprised most of the heavy ships and was shaped to fight the main fleet engagement of the future; Scouting Force, which was organized to conduct reconnaissance in strength and thus was strong in cruisers; Control Force, which consisted of the light forces, mainly older cruisers, destroyers, and small craft, needed to defend advanced bases and lines of communication against raiders; Base Force, which conducted training and provided logistical support. The Atlantic Fleet, as such, was abolished by General Order No. 94, of 6 December 1922. Its ships were distributed between Scouting Force and Control Force. One-third of the battleships—about six—were retained with Scouting Force in the Atlantic, so that the East Coast was still well defended against all but the strongest attack.

But the task force organization, so excellent in wartime, showed weaknesses in peacetime. The ships evolved different procedures and doctrines as a result of different missions in different oceans. Since the entire Fleet would have to be concentrated in the event of war, standardized training was vital to cohesion in battle. Thus, in December 1930, type commands were set up within each task force to ensure adequate maintenance and common training. Then, in April 1931, Control Force was abolished in order to free ships for other duties; only Scouting Force remained assigned to the Atlantic.

Early in 1932, as a result of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Scouting Force was sent to the Pacific to join Battle Force for the annual Fleet Problem, after which it did not return to the Atlantic. Although East Coast politicians complained at the fait accompli, the transfer was a warning to Japan. Less than a score of ships, most of them old, remained in the Atlantic. These were known collectively as Training Squadron, for their major duty was to conduct the annual training cruises for midshipmen and reservists. The force consisted of the old battleships Arkansas and Wyoming and the nine four-stack destroyers of Destroyer Squadron 10. In the Canal Zone, the Special Service Squadron, or “Banana Fleet,” mustered an ancient light cruiser or two, several gunboats, and in flush times, a few old four-stackers; its function was to protect Americans during the periodic revolutions of the Caribbean states. Its last significant sortie was made in August 1933, during Fulgencio Batista’s “Sergeant’s Revolt” in Cuba, when the light cruiser Richmond and several four-stackers dashed for Havana, but there proved no need for intervention. In the fall of 1936, Squadron 40-T was established to evacuate and assist American nationals in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and “keep an eye on things” in European waters. Usually consisting of an old light cruiser and a pair of four-stackers, the Squadron, basing for the most part at the French Mediterranean ports, remained on duty until October 1940. Once in the early going, off Bilbao, a Nationalist bomber mistakenly attacked the Kane, dropping six bombs in the water nearby; the destroyer fired two 3-inch antiaircraft rounds at the plane, but missed. Both the Forty Tares and the Banana sailors generally enjoyed cushy duty, but the former, amid the European glitter, were expected to maintain a spit-and-polish image.

In July 1937, Training Squadron became Training Detachment, and the force received reinforcement. The battleships Texas and New York joined the Arkansas and Wyoming, and the number of four-stackers was increased to seventeen: Flagship Decatur and Destroyer Division 28 (the Roper, Dickerson, Leary, Herbert, and Schenck), DesDiv 29 (the Tattnall, Badger, Jacob Jones, Tillman, and J. Fred Talbott), and DesDiv 30 (the Manley, Fairfax, Taylor, Babbitt, Claxton, and Hamilton).¹

From May through September, the ships carried out midshipmen’s practice cruises, ROTC cruises, merchant marine training cruises, and Reserve cruises; from January through March, they conducted the annual Fleet Landing Exercises, known as Flex, in the Caribbean. The rest of the time, the ships carried out individual battle practices, participated in division and squadron tactical exercises, went into the yards for upkeep and refitting, and showed the flag in East Coast and Caribbean ports.

Rear Admiral Alfred W. Johnson commanded Training Detachment. He was a solid, able officer, but somewhat lacking in dynamism. His force’s connection with the Flex problems convinced him of the usefulness of amphibious warfare, and he was one of the few naval officers of the thirties who gave much thought to the complexities of landing assault troops on hostile beaches and supporting them with gunfire and supplies. He worked to expand the scope of the Flex practices and helped to secure patrol planes and submarines for them. The Flex landings off Puerto Rico did much to demonstrate the feasibility of the amphibious theories being developed by the Marines, but lack of suitable assault craft, vital transports, tankers, and auxiliaries, necessary communications equipment, and other important gear meant that the state of the art still lagged well behind the hopes of the Marines.

In the Flex 4 exercises of 1938, lack of transports resulted in the assault troops being crowded into the battleships, cramping the infantrymen and hampering the ships in their delivery of effective gunfire support. The shortage of cargo ships hampered the landing of artillery and other heavy equipment. Ship-to-shore communications were inadequate to permit necessary control and coordination of the battle. The lack of landing craft meant that the assault troops had to use ships’ boats, which were fragile, exposed, difficult to handle in the surf, and too small to accommodate sufficient men to allow a rapid buildup of firepower and momentum on the beaches; because less than two battalions could be landed simultaneously, assaults were not formidable, and invariably the piecemeal commitment of troops caused dispersion and confusion ashore. Although 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 of simultaneous Japanese and Axis aggression in both oceans, and the nation’s basic war plan, Plan Orange, was modified and then replaced by five contingency plans, Rainbows I-V. Since American strategic interests in Europe—primarily, control over the Atlantic approaches to the Americas—seemed adequately safeguarded by the Royal Navy and the French Army, much of the Rainbow planning was focused on the Pacific and on problems of hemispheric defense. Although Rainbow V did provide for a strategic defensive in the Pacific and an offensive in the Atlantic in concert with the Allies, service planners devoted much of their time and attention to the details of Rainbow II, which seemed most relevant to existing world conditions. Rainbow II provided for the projection of American forces into the western Pacific, with but “limited participation of U.S. forces in Continental Europe and the Atlantic”; Britain and France would handle most of the European-Atlantic operations.¹¹

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1938, in order to test the implications of the new Atlantic ingredient in American strategy, President Roosevelt had decided that the U.S. Fleet should visit the East Coast the following winter and that the annual Fleet Problem, which had invariably taken place in the Pacific, should be conducted in the Caribbean early in 1939. The Fleet’s presence in the Atlantic could be ascribed to ceremonies related to the opening of the New York World’s Fair. For once, a Flower Show proved useful.¹²

That fall, 1938, in anticipation of the Munich Agreement, which Roosevelt thought shameful,^c the President directed Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Naval Operations, to speed up the reconditioning of the World War I destroyers reposing in “red lead” rows at Philadelphia and San Diego. After inquiring into the status of new construction on the East Coast, the President then ordered the formation of a temporary squadron of new cruisers in the Atlantic. He made it clear that these ships were to function independently of Training Detachment; they were to constitute a separate task force reserved for operational use. The task force was to be given an identity of its own: the Atlantic Squadron.¹³

The Atlantic Squadron was born on 6 September 1938. It was allotted fourteen new ships, and its mission was to serve as a task force strong enough to “discover and to turn back a sudden raid into the Caribbean” pending reinforcements from the Pacific. Three of its cruisers were to be held in readiness to show the flag in Latin America. The Squadron consisted of Cruiser Division 9 (the light cruisers Boise, Honolulu, and Phoenix), Cruiser Division 8 (the quick-firing, 10,000-ton light cruisers Philadelphia, Savannah, Brooklyn, and Nashville, which were favorites of the President), and the destroyers Sampson, Somers, Warrington, Ralph Talbot, Mugford, Helm, and Shaw.¹⁴ Since 1932 all new construction ships had been sent to the Pacific as a matter of routine, so Rear Admiral Sherwoode A. Taffinder, Director of the Ship Movements Division, wrote one of the cruiser commanders to explain his surprising assignment and perhaps to assure him that a command in the Atlantic was not evidence of official disfavor: “. . . the function of the Atlantic Squadron . . . is evidently a gesture aimed at political conditions abroad. The President personally directed the formation of the Squadron.”¹⁵

But Rear Admiral Johnson was vexed to discover the sudden appearance of an independent task force in his domain, especially as command of the Squadron, now the key post in the Atlantic, had been given to an officer junior to him, Rear Admiral Ford A. Todd, of CruDiv 8. Admiral Leahy coolly, if untruthfully, had to explain that the oversight was due to the speedy nature of the President’s decision. Roosevelt then agreed to honor the mandate of seniority, and on 10 October, the old battleships and destroyers of Training Detachment became part of the Atlantic Squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Alfred W. Johnson. While Johnson lacked the youth and fire that the President relished, he knew his ships and was not indifferent to progressive techniques of naval warfare.¹⁶ He would do.

Fleet Problem XX was slated for the Caribbean, and the Squadron was to participate. The ugly ducklings of Training Detachment had become part of a fighting command at last. It was a good feeling.

^a New Bedford’s seafarers turned out 5,000 strong one day to see the Leary; in comparison, New York City had produced a maximum crowd of 3,000 to see the Texas a few weeks before.

^b Congressman Donald O’Toole thought the Brooklyn Navy Yard should get more repair work because New York City contributed “more financially to the support of the Navy in the way of taxation” than other coastal regions.

^c At the time of Munich, FDR was prepared to impound German ships in U.S. ports for Allied use.