This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
November 1921 Proceedings—Not to be outdone by Oscar Wilde, who said, “/ always quote myself; it adds spice to the conversation," Bradley Fiske this month quotes himself quoting Mahan. He is distressed that so many postwar strategists consider Guam to be more important strategically than the Philippines. To make his point that the reverse is true, he cites his book, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, written five years earlier. The chapter, “Naval Bases” includes: “Mahan states that the three main requirements of a naval base are position, resources, and strength: and of these he considers that position is the most important; largely because resources and strength can be artificially supplied, while position is the gift of nature and cannot be moved or changed.”
Fiske does not claim that, because the Philippines are 500 times the size of Guam, they could be made 500 times richer in resources such as sheltered harbors, wharves and docks, or 500 times stronger to prevent their capture. But he plants that idea. Guam’s importance, he says, will continue to be its contiguity to the routes between the West Coast of the United States and the Philippines. The trade routes that pass the Philippines lie between all the great countries of Europe and all the great countries of Asia.
November 1941 Proceedings—A buccaneer is not, as some comics claim, a high price for corn, but neither is it a synonym for a pirate. In “The Buccaneers,” Lieutenant Commander Charles Moran takes us back to Hispaniola where these marauders, probably English or French shipwrecked crews or deserters, first appeared in the mid-17th century. Their methods always smacked of piracy and eventually degenerated into piracy. But pirates were never honored, as the buccaneers were—with the title of allies against Spain—by England and France.
The only rules these rapscallions observed were their own. They were vowed to celibacy but not to chastity. “No prey, no pay!” was their motto. Plunder was divided by prearranged rates, however, and a tariff was adopted for injuries received in combat—perhaps the first mandatory accident insurance. They demonstrated a grotesque form of piety by occasionally endowing one church with the loot of another, while using nuns and priests as human shields in battle.
Theirs was a long (1655-1697) and sickening tale of sadistic cruelty that no amount of skill, courage, or endurance can redeem. Spain would have paid a bounty of much more than a buck an ear if they could have been sure the ear belonged to one of these hell-hounds.
November 1961 Proceedings—To understand what Rear Admiral John D. Hayes is talking about in “Sea Power and the Civil War,” one has to visualize Charleston, South Carolina, as its citizens do: “where the Cooper and the Ashley Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean.” When Hayes is talking about the Civil War, he’s talking r-i-v-e-r-s and he’s saying that riverine warfare—not U.S. Grant—is mostly what beat Robert E. Lee.
The way Hayes sees it, as Mahan before him saw it, Lee’s tactical opponent was the Army of the Potomac, but his strategic rival was the Union Navy. He sums up: “He who would use navigable waters for military purposes must first be able to deny these waters to the enemy. But Lee knew that sea power is only effective as far as it can reach from navigable waters. So he maneuvered his Army of Northern Virginia beyond the range of Union gunboats.” Well, for a while, anyway.
To his misfortune, Lee couldn't alter geography. He couldn’t deny the Union the use of the Chesapeake Bay and its four rivers—the Potomac,
York, James, and Rappahannock—or, farther west, the Mississippi, Cumberland, Tennessee, or Ohio Rivers. And, because Lee couldn’t control Port Royal, South Carolina, Sherman could cakewalk to the sea and force the abandonment of Savannah and Charleston, “where the Cooper and the Ashley come together ...”
Clay Barrow
This video offers a fascinating record of the sea services’ historic achievements, from the early stages of Operation Desert Shield through Desert Storm and beyond.
The program presents a collection of personal interviews with on-the-scene commanders, including those who led the Middle East Task Force, the Red Sea Maritime Interdiction Force, the 1st Marine Division, Task Force Taro, and many others. Their eyewitness accounts of what their commands did and how they did it are reinforced by expert commentary and analysis by Norman Friedman, author of the recently published Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait. (See our ad on page 16 for details.)
New Books
Two famous naval aviators, Admirals John H. Towers and Marc A. Mitscher, are the subjects of two Naval Institute Press biographies published this month. Admiral John H. Towers: The Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy by Clark G- Reynolds is the first book ever written about the man who provided the crucial planning for the carrier air war that defeated the Japanese fleet in World War II-
A history professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Reynolds draws extensively on the admiral’s private papers to present a revealing picture of this architect of naval air power.
The Magnificent Mitscher by Theodore Taylor is being brought back into print— after 30 years—on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Pacific War. A pioneer aviator, Mitscher earned his Navy wings in 1916 and in World War II became the commander of Task Force 58, spearheading the Allies’ attack across the Pacific- With a new introduction by Jeffrey Barlow, this edition puts the story in modern context.
Past Presidents: ADM D. D. Porter: RADM J. L. Worden- RADM C. R. P. Rodgers: COMO F. A. Parker; RADM J. gers; RADM T. A. Jenkins; RADM E. Simpson; RADM S- P Luce; RADM W T Sampson; RADM H. C. Taylor; RADM C- Goodrich; RADM R Wainwright; RADM B. A. Fiske; VADJJ W L. Rodgers; ADM H B Wilson; ADM H. P. Jones; RAD”! E. W. Eberle; ADM S. S Robison; RADM M L. Bristol; ADJJ W H Standley; ADM D. F. Sellers; ADM W. D. Leahy; AD^ H R. Stark; FADM C. W. Nimitz; FADM E. J. King; ADM L- t Denfeld; ADM R B. Carney. ADM W M Fechteler; ADM A A Burke; ADM J Wright; ADM G W. Anderson, Jr.; ADM D_h McDonald; ADM T H Moorer; ADM E. R Zumwalt, Jr.; AD J L Holloway III; ADM T B. Hayward; ADM J. D. Watkins; ADiv C. A. H. Trost.
Proceedings / November
1991