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Personnel planners who, for years, have been able to accept, project, and prepare for shortages of doctors, dentists, aviators, lawyers, submariners, engineers, and the like, do not seem ready to accept the growing shortage of unrestricted surface line officers. A psychologist might categorize this inability to recognize a developing pattern as the "Buffalo Syndrome,” which was first observed in a Kiowa Chief a century ago.
Advised that the buffalo herds were smaller and more restless than in previous years, the old man took several of his braves to a promontory and, looking out over the great herds from which his people had drawn their sustenance for countless centuries, told them, "Boys, there’s always been buffaloes and there’s always gonna’ be buffaloes. Look at ’em out there eatin’ up all that grass. Lord knows, buffaloes are one thing we don’t have to worry about.”
How wrong the old Chief was can be verified by anyone who cares to take a short walk through downtown Oklahoma City any hour of the day or night. Them buffaloes are gone, although there is still some grass around.
Like the buffalo, the unrestricted surface line officer (1100) doesn’t seem to be around in anywhere near as many places, or in anything like the numbers he used to. This fact was driven home to me not too long ago when I was driving home from work. "Gee,” I said to myself, "the art of conversation seems to be dying out. Everything I talk about is either technical, fattening, or illegal.” And then it hit me. I had been talking to no one but fellow aviators, submariners, engineers, and those dentists over at the Washington Navy Yard. No wonder!
I decided to give a call to a couple of 1100s I know and, with them, go up in the Washington Monument just so that we could reassure ourselves that there were still plenty of RNOs—Real Naval Officers—around. I was, however, discouraged to learn that I would have to make the climb myself; it turned out that all the 1100s I called were out at sea.
I wish I could say that, after getting to the top, I looked down, as the Kiowa chief had, and saw the grass crawling with 1100s. But that would be an exaggeration. Actually, I didn’t see any.
I tried to recall the last one I had seen. It had been quite awhile. I had come close to seeing one about two months before when an old Tar Heel buddy of mine dropped me a note that his ship would be in port for 24 hours. We couldn’t get together, though, because he had already received an invitation to dinner from his wife and was unable to accept mine. I would have insisted and—since I am his senior—was about to do so, but for the fact that £e explained that he
had not seen his wife in a year and that they had several important matters to discuss.
Actually, the relationship between surface line officers and their familes would provide a most interesting study for cultural anthropologists. Such a study might answer the question of whether it is because of—or in spite of—the rarity of meetings between husbands and wives that these marriages tend to be very exciting and produce large numbers of children.
Another intriguing aspect of such marriages, of course, is that the father usually enjoys a much higher standard of living than his family and, the longer such marriages last, the wider the living standard gap seems to grow. Teenage children, in particular, after visiting their father on board ship and seeing his cabin, his boats, his orderly, and his wardroom, frequently ask their mothers why it is that daddy is so rich while the rest of the family is so poor. Their question answers itself when dad comes home on leave; for, ashore, he is every bit as poor as the rest of them.
Still, as Chesty Puller was fond of saying, "If the Service wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one.” So, let’s forget for a moment about dependents and talk about dependence. To whom can the rapidly dwindling herds of 1100s look for their salvation? Are they, like our national parks and our naval aviators, deserving of being preserved and protected? Should they, like U. S. aviators, garbage collectors, and nuclear submariners, be paid extra because of the unusual nature of their specialty? To answer these and other questions, let us turn back the clock.
The authorization, by the Continental Congress, for the outfitting of two "swift sailing vessels,” and for the men to man them, had to be expedited in October 1775 since it was well known that the Marine Corps was scheduled to be born on 10 November of that year and, of course, it wouldn’t do not to have a navy for the Leathernecks to be part of. Be that as it may, this was the beginning of the era of "Iron men and wooden ships.” And the unrestricted surface line officer was soon regarded as the most iron-like of them all.
On the shoulders of these men was placed the burden of victory over the British Navy. They didn’t care—perhaps, public relations being what they were in those days, they didn’t even know—that no Royal Navy warship had ever been defeated in combat against a single enemy ship until John Paul Jones turned the trick with the Bon Homme Richard's victory over HMS Seraph. It was during that battle, of course, that Jones voiced his undying reply to the British demand for surrender: "I have not yet begun to fight.”
Less well known is the fact that it was at that precise moment in time that a wounded Marine rifleman,
The llOO Officer: Endangered Species 53
fighting in the foretops, turned to a bleeding companion, and yelled, "What did the old man say?”
Continuing to fire, the other Marine shouted back, "He says we haven’t started to fight yet.”
"Well,” said the wounded Marine, as he rammed home another round, "I guess he’s one of the 10% that never do get the word.”
This apocryphal story, for all its foolishness, somehow seems to ring true with the larger-then-life image the surface line officer was building for himself in those early years.
And, as the years of what the British termed "The American Rebellion” dragged on, the American surface line officer would summon forth all his sailing skills and fighting heart to overcome the superior size of the enemy vessels and fleets. Thus, their skill and valor became the foundations of American seapower.
By the end of the Revolutionary War, the societal and cultural structure of the Navy had taken what seemed to be a permanent form—and the surface line officer occupied the pinnacle in both prestige and pay. Specialist officers ranked just below the dependents and just above the sailmakers.
The line officers were heroes to the public and the pages of contemporary journals were awash with stories, many of them true, about their actions and activities. Every schoolboy could recite details of their victories or quote the mottoes and maxims which either flowed from their idols’ lips or were printed in their name to become the watchwords by which the Fleet lived and sailed.
If, then, there was a "pecking order,” if not a burgeoning naval aristocracy—and there surely was—no one in the officer corps of the Navy took precedence over the surface line officer.
Having won his laurels in the Revolution, and defended them with distinction in the Quasi-War with Erance, against the Barbary pirate states, and in the War of 1812, the surface line officer, like the still-young navy itself, suddenly found himself about to be inundated by the great waves that had been churned up by the Industrial Revolution. Where the British, Barbary, and Erench naval forces had failed to prevail, the U. S. Navy was about to capitulate to the irresistible march of technology.
The first shot fired across the surface line officer’s how was the launching of the world’s first steam Warship, Fulton. Whereas, previously, he had been the unquestioned monarch on the quarterdeck, orchestrating ffie winds, seas, and tides as his natural engine to move the ship where he willed, he now had to abdicate. In the depths of the hull lurked that most astonishing of tech- n>cal miracles—the steam engine.
Yet, crushing as it was to be deposed by this mechanical marvel, more humiliating still was the knowledge that the king must share his powers with a human—if he could be called that—regent: a "Chief Engineer.” The line officer might propose, but the chief engineer would dispose. All that power, all that authority, the captain must delegate to this pallid man who lived deep in the bowels of the ship, a stranger to sun and sky.
No longer could the skipper hoist clouds of clean sail to catch a fair wind. Rather, he must send messages down through a snake-like voice tube (as though making imprecations to hell) requesting varying speeds, before the ship would respond. And, depending upon the mood, skill, and hearing of the chief engineer, the requested power and speed might be forthcoming. If, however, the results were unsatisfactory, the outraged captain’s cursing of the metal monster would have equally as little effect as yelling at the wind.
There was one big difference between man-made and natural power: unlike the wind, the passage of no amount of time alone would make the engine go. Only technicians could do that. So, although surface line officers continued to pace the decks displaying an outward confidence, deep in their broken hearts they knew they must share their power with that "ugly, malevolent thing” below—and no one could ever be sure whether the captain was referring to the engine or the engineer.
To make matters worse, steam engines ran on wood and, later, coal. These are not the cleanest materials in the world and, after every coaling, it would take days to rid the ship of the clinging black grime that stuck like glue to the soles of shoes. On those occasions when the line officer went home, he was likely to be met at the door by his wife shouting, "Take off those filthy black shoes before you come in this house.” The sight of so many pairs of sooty footwear thrown carelessly in halls or on porches across the country served notice to neighbors that "Old Blackshoe’s back in town.” Thus it was that Blackshoe became synonymous with "Surface Line Officer,” while, years later, other neighbors of other naval officers were left to wonder what that brown stuff was they had on their shoes.
Tremendous traumas, then, were experienced by the surface line officer during the shift from sail to steam. Granted, some major fighting ships carried both sail and steam for awhile. But this was a momentary expedient, and the surface line officer never for a moment doubted which way the steam vapor was blowing.
Yet, this was really only the beginning of his troubles. Still to come was the first screw-driven warship, the Princeton, in 1843, the development of the naval rifle, and the ironclad ship. The first battle between
ironclads in March 1862 was the beginning of a whole new era in naval warfare. This battle, which pitted the USS Monitor against the CSS Virginia, signaled for all time the end of the age of wood and sail and the beginning of the age of iron and steam. And, as usual, caught right in the middle was the surface line officer. No longer was he merely at the tender mercies of an engineer, but whichever way he turned in his ship, he was confronted by equipment the mastery of which required technical skills he didn’t have. Try as he might, he was unable to absorb technical knowledge as quickly as he needed it and all around him were bright, ambitious young men who knew more about parts and pieces of his ship than he did—a situation that would have been unheard of only a few short years before.
But the surface line officer was not about to surrender his ship without a fight. His counterattack was to fight fire with fire or, more accurately, paper with paper. All of the knowledge of the intricate workings of these new mechanisms were contained in technical manuals, weren’t they? Very well, he, too, would read every manual, every technical paper, every manufacturer’s brochure he could get his hands on. And he could get his hands on plenty. Ships settled lower and lower in the water as the line officers’ stacks of manuals grew higher and higher.
At last, the inevitable happened. At first it appeared that, with almost no forewarning, a pile of paper simply collapsed and, with a last, soft cry, a senior line officer was smothered to death under an avalanche of directives, manuals, and technical papers. Yet, to his brother officers, this seemed to be too pat an explanation. Was it, they whispered in the wardroom, merely another ghastly accident—such as had occurred to the Tuscarora when the sea horses ate out her straw bottom, sinking her with barely a bubble to mark her watery grave—or could this be something more, such as a unique form of suicide? The paper caper is probably one of the riddles of the sea that will never be unraveled. But it may account in some small way for the constant complaint by 1100s that they are being "snowed under.”
Still more tribulations were to come; for, despite the inroads being made by the new technologies, the surface line officer still theoretically commanded the vehicles that controlled the seas—and, for all practical purposes, the skies above them. But, in April 1900, the Navy accepted the Holland (SS-i) and the submariner was born. This new breed of officer, who would eventually be separated from his straight—in every sense of the word—line brother by special insignia and pay, claimed all the water beneath the surface of the sea as his own domain.
This dramatic development w^s followed within a
few years by an equally startling event, when, in 1911, Eugene Ely landed an airplane on a temporary wooden flight deck that had been placed on the cruiser Pennsylvania. As we all know, it then became only a matter of time until the air above the seas belonged to another specialist group—the naval aviators.
With the dimensions of his world growing ever smaller and as each passing year found him more and more a stranger to the new and mysterious gear being placed on his ship, the surface line officer sailed forth on a new tack. Taking the only practical course open to him, he used his hard-won knowledge of command at sea and molded the new weapons systems into the powerful Fleets that fell under his direction. He learned to use the specialists as he once had used the winds and tides. How well he succeeded can be seen by recalling, for example, the cruise of the "Great White Fleet”—a powerful force of 16 battleships that sailed around the world in 1907 as a display of American naval strength.
Then, almost as if to prove the validity of Murphy’s all-too-true corollary—"If you think things are getting better, you have obviously overlooked something”—the Navy’s first aircraft carrier, the Langley was commissioned in March 1922. This radically new design in ship construction was to become the forerunner of the vessels that would form the fast carrier attack forces of World War II, and replace the battleship fleets.
By now it was apparent that the trend of naval warfare was moving more and more in the direction of the technical and specialist weapon systems. And, submarines and aviation were luring more and more officers away from the surface line community.
By the early 1950s, the Fleet axiom that, "there are four great dangers to a naval officer’s career: "drinking, gambling, women, and depending upon technical experts” had ceased to be valid. Increasing numbers of surface line officers were studying to become specialists and subspecialists in areas ranging from law to international relations. And those young officers who were giving thought to the planning of their own career were discovering to their astonishment that a career of nothing but sea duty could be as deadly for promotion as nothing but shore duty. It was also noted that postgraduate school was becoming a sought-after assignment. It was just about this point in time that there occurred a noticeable decline in the numbers of pure surface line officers in the Navy.
This phenomenon, of course, was not unique to the U. S. Navy. Other navies throughout the world were experiencing similar problems. The British sought a straightforward solution by establishing a "Wet” and a "Dry” Navy, which was not—as first suspected— composed on the one hand of drunks and, on the other,
The llOO Officer: Endangered Species 55
of teetotalers. What it was composed of was two groups, one which never ever went to sea and another which hardly ever came ashore.
Other countries tried other solutions, one of which is the still ongoing Canadian experiment wherein everyone in the Armed Services wears the same uniform. Happily, the uniform uniform idea has not caught on nationally, or Canadian football would be a much more confusing game than it already is.
Does the answer for the American Navy lie with the British or the Canadian extremes? Or is it possible that, as usual, we may have to explore an area somewhere between if the U. S. Navy’s surface line officer community is to be held together.
Is it, as was the case with the specialists, a crash program of myriad special benefits that is needed to attract and retain adequate numbers of unrestricted line officers? All sorts of arguments can be heard on the subject, but there does seem to be agreement on one point; one of the major incentives for the 1100 is destroyer duty. In the opinion of many, destroyer duty is the one thing that is holding these officers.
When one examines all the confusion and changes that were the outgrowth of technical innovations and new ship construction, it seems nothing short of miraculous that the Navy should have developed and built destroyers, the perfect ship to attract and retain surface line officers. Big, but not too big; fast; sleek; complex, but capable of being mastered; and with fire power enough for all contingencies, these "greyhounds” of the ocean constitute for surface line officers an attraction that can only be compared to the lure of a sports car for a 16-year-old.
The non-1100s of the Navy can only envy them; to watch a destroyer steam under full power is to behold a thing of beauty and power, and to command one must be a masculine joy unequaled in this world. Even their song—". . . Roll and toss, and pound and pitch, and creak and groan, you son-of-a-gun”—seems to come from other, happier days. Clad in the adopted leather flying jacket of the aviator, the destroyer officer is as close as a man can be to the feel of an old sailing shijs of the line; and this factor provides all the com
pensation needed to hold the heart and loyalty of a surface line officer.
If this is so, it can easily be seen how slender is the thread by which hangs the future existence of this group. Allowing all your fragile eggs to rest in one type of iron basket is not prudent in any sense of the word. For, suppose the Navy suddenly felt it had found a replacement for the destroyer, as it did the battleship. What would be the reaction of the surface line officer? Or, more likely, imagine the results of the destroyer sailors banding together and forming their own specialty group, as did the submariners. There is already a Destroyer School in Newport. What other outward signs are required beyond a distinctive chest insignia and a special pay category to make them a full-fledged specialty corps? If either thing should happen, which way would the unrestricted surface line officer turn?
Asking questions about this valuable group of officers is, of course, a lot easier than answering the same hard questions. Perhaps, despite all that has been said herein, lightly or otherwise, "sea pay” or some other form of special recognition might very well be a great inducement. Unless some notice of the problem is taken soon, we will surely experience the same puzzled wonderment expressed long ago by the Kiowa chief. Where had the buffalo gone? "Hell,” he is reported to have said, "I don’t know what happened to ’em. One minute they were all over everywhere—and the next minute they were gone.”
Commissioned in 1946 from the NROTC Unit at the University of North Carolina, Rear Admiral Toole served in the USS Paul G. Raker (DE-642) and George Clymer (APA-27) before being assigned to the Naval Communication Station, Washington, D.C., in 1948. Designated a naval aviator in 1951, he flew with Patrol Squadron Ten until 1954, when he was assigned to the Office of the CNO as liaison officer with Headquarters, Directorate of Intelligence, U. S. Air Force. In 1957, he became Aide and Flag Lieutenant, Staff, ComMidEastFor. After flying two storm seasons with the Navy’s "Hurricane Hunters,” he became an assistant to the Director, Aviation Captains’ Detail in the Bureau of Personnel. He then served in and eventually commanded Patrol Squadron Seven. In February 1968, he became Naval Aide and Executive Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Manpower and Reserve Affairs). He is now Commander, Amphibious Group One.
Just Keep It Quiet
A naval officer fell overboard and was rescued by a deckhand. The officer asked the sailor how he could reward him.
"The best way, sir,” replied the bluejacket, "is to say nothing about it. If the other fellows knew I’d pulled you out, they’d throw me in.”
—Contributed by John Behnke