One of the great values of history is the reminder that whatever exists in the present is the result of something that happened in the past. For Julian Burke, a retired rear admiral, the current overseas homeport of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk (CV-63) is a tangible benefit from his efforts of more than 30 years ago. As the nation gears up for possible conflict, he takes quiet satisfaction in knowing that the basing of the veteran carrier in Yokosuka, Japan, puts her much closer to the scene of action—whether it be the Korean Peninsula or the Persian Gulf—than if she and her crew and air wing had to travel from the West Coast of the United States.
Turn back the clock to 1970, when the United States was engaged in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. The warships built during World War II were wearing out, and the crews who operated those ships were hesitant to reenlist. That summer, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt burst onto the scene as a Chief of Naval Operations who was determined to shake things up. Part of his plan was to retire old ships so the money saved could be put into modern ships. Another part was to improve human factors to encourage reenlistments.
Julian Burke was then a relatively junior rear admiral. As he related in his Naval Institute oral history, he had orders to become Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Japan. While the movers were at his home to pack up his household goods for shipment, he was called to the Pentagon for a briefing that came as a complete surprise. He had expected that he would be stepping into a status quo situation. Now he learned that the United States was planning to withdraw its naval forces from Japan. In addition to pulling out ships and planes, the Navy would turn over to Japan a substantial infrastructure, including fleet homeports at Yokosuka and Sasebo, a naval air station at Atsugi, and a large housing complex at Yokohama. The Navy was to work in conjunction with the State Department and to execute the plan over a period of about a year.
In August 1970, the admiral met many Japanese leaders and a group of influential expatriate U.S. businessmen. He soon discovered that the name Burke carried an amazing amount of cachet in his new job. Admiral Arleigh Burke had won the admiration of the Japanese for his exploits as a warrior in World War II and their gratitude for his role in helping establish the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force afterward. The people he met assumed that he was either Arleigh Burke’s son or a much younger brother. For a time, Julian Burke tried to explain that he was not related. But when those explanations failed, he accepted the benefits that came from having a name that opened doors.
After Burke had begun the process of giving back to the Japanese the naval facilities the United States had occupied since World War II, he received orders in January 1971 for a dramatic countermarch. Not only was he supposed to reclaim the assets already returned, he was to ask for still another concession—that the Japanese accept a U.S. aircraft carrier homeported in Yokosuka. This was to be part of Admiral Zumwalt’s overall plan to have two carrier task groups forward deployed—one in the Mediterranean and one in the Far East. Forward deployment would bring two advantages: shorter travel time to potential areas of operation and less time away from families during deployments. The latter was especially aimed at redressing the lagging retention rate.
Admiral Burke had some background in the plans and policy area after a previous tour of duty in the Pentagon. To restore U.S. Navy presence and bring in a carrier, he put together a “kitchen cabinet” of his staff members. The group’s' task had a frequent roadblock to work around in that the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo did not look favorably on the Navy’s intent. Thus he had to develop back-channel communications with the Japanese government.
Gradually, as the result of negotiations, the Navy regained nearly all it had given back under the original plan to withdraw. In August 1972, the U.S. and Japanese governments concluded an agreement whereby a carrier and her escorts would be homeported in Yokosuka. (This was in great contrast to the Mediterranean, where the desire to put a U.S. carrier in Greece fell flat.) In October 1973, the USS Midway (CVA-41) arrived in Yokosuka to begin her new career as a forward-deployed carrier. The ship repair facility in the port served as her home shipyard. Workers there took a special pride in maintaining “their carrier” in top-notch material condition, despite the fact that her name commemorated a notable Japanese defeat in World War II.
In August 1991, the Midway was relieved by the Independence (CV-62) and returned to the United States for the first time in 18 years. In 1998, it became the turn of the Kitty Hawk to move to Yokosuka as homeport because of the imminent decommissioning of the Independence. In January of this year, the Kitty Hawk got under way from Yokosuka to conduct sea trials and training—ready for what may come in the way of operational requirements. That she now calls the Far East her home traces back to the vision of Admiral Zumwalt and the fulfillment of that vision by Rear Admiral Julian Burke and his staff.