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nsiderable cruising in the sditerranean, visiting various its, and carrving out target
Vice Admiral Bernhard H. Bieri, U. S. Navy (Retired) was Commander Naval Forces Mediterranean from June 1946 to 7 February 1948. The following is an edited and abridged excerpt from the transcript of an oral history interview of the Vice Admiral conducted for the Naval Institute by John T. Mason, Jr., during 1969-70.
In March of 1946 I received orders to proceed to the Mediterranean and report to Admiral H. Kent Hewitt for duty in command of the U. S. Naval Forces in the Mediterranean as a relief for Rear Admiral Jules James. Admiral James’s force in the Mediterranean consisted of one cruiser, one destroyer, and a lot of skeleton naval bases that .were left over from the war.
Admiral Hewitt had no definite orders for me, except that I was to return to Naples and relieve James and carry out my basic orders.
Admiral James had no orders to give me, or to turn over to me. I had no statement of policy from anyone in the government as to what our relations with the different nations were supposed to be, or what the government wanted us to develop. I had no instructions about what operations I should carry out, which ports I should visit, or anything of that sort.
It later developed that I made out schedules about what I was going to do and what I expected to do, and submitted them to Commander Naval Forces, Europe, and to the Chief of Naval Operations. They were generally approved, with the exception of certain ports which we were forbidden to visit. Principally, we were not permitted to visit any ports in Spain, Egypt, or Palestine—-which at that time was still a mandate of the British.
I chose to go to quite a number of places. I decided that the only thing to do was to cooperate with the senior State Department official or ambassador, or consul or consul general, or whatever he was; and do whatever in his judgment was supposed to be done in the area.
We got along very well with this approach.
I wrote to Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman, Deputy Chief 0 Naval Operations for Operations shortly after I got there and to him that I had no orders or statement of policy. He wrote back and told me that the Navy Department and State Depart-^ ment were in the process of e veloping and getting these thing out. I never got them.
In the meantime, we began receive ships to increase the s'z of the Mediterranean force. We^ received two cruisers under Ke Admiral Edwin Burrough and several destroyers. Later on, >n the next six months or so, we received another cruiser and tw aircraft carriers and some additional destroyers. This continue to be the size of the force unh about the later part of 1947, when it was increased by three transports. . .
It became known as the Six) Fleet following my departure m February 1948. During the time that I remained there we did
Proceedings / August
A few days after the task force had been called off, on 10 March, Forrestal was talking with an old friend who shared his misgivings concerning the Soviet Union. This friend was the Right Honorable Winston Spencer Churchill.7 In his diary, Forrestal reported that Churchill had said that he was:
“. . . very glad of our sending the Missouri to the Mediterranean but was very much disappointed when I told him that the plans to have this ship accompanied by a task force of substantial proportions had been abandoned.
“He said that a gesture of power not fully implemented was almost less effective than no gesture at all. He said that to make the gesture effective the entire task force should sail into the Sea of Marmara. . . . Refer
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ring to the Russians, he said they had no understanding of such words as ‘honesty,’ ‘honor,’ ‘trust, a ‘truth’—in fact, that they regarded these as negate virtues. They will, he said, try every door in the house’ enter all rooms which are not locked, and when tn come to one that is barred, if they are unsuccessfu 1 breaking through it, they will withdraw and invite y° to dine genially that same evening.”8
Forrestal shared Churchill’s disappointment over the U. S. Government’s decision to refrain from sending task force of substantial proportions at that time “bar” the door to the Mediterranean, in the British w leader’s graphic phrase. But in the weeks and mon immediately following, Forrestal exercised his consu
19*’
shir>1Ve^ 3 new ass*8nment of ba ,S’ anC^ sent lbe ones we hat f°r sji? Atlantic Fleet—shi]
tanh!6. V'sited Athens’ Ismir, Is‘ Fren k and Bcirut; also the BonC ports ot Algiers and north and also Tunisia in the occa -C°aSt °f Africa- °n sever QuaS10ns’ we visited French S6'8 31 Vii'efranche, Mar- Gen S’ 3nd. tbe itaiian ports of ear .0a; tbe*r naval station at ;ard>n.a, Gulf of Taranto, and v'fsta. We also made frequei s to Malta. All the ships stopped in and out at Gibraltar.
Although I had no particular instructions about [the purpose] of any of these visits, my idea was that showing the fleet or whatever ships we had there would strengthen the hand and the prestige of the diplomatic representatives. We would also establish friendlier relations with foreign naval personnel. In all these places visited where there was a head of the government, we made calls on these officials. We were very careful to indoctrinate our personnel as to the conditions that existed in these various ports and the conduct that was expected of them. We had no difficulty on that score.
The only time that we had any call for what you might call naval support or naval assistance was early in my tenure. We had, of course, still a large Army contingent in Italy and on the Yugoslavian border. In fact, we had a division there. Our troops were facing a considerable group of Yugoslavs. The British had a near division of troops at Trieste. There was a disturbance there of some sort. I decided that I’d better see if there was anything that I could do. So I took my flagship, the USS Fargo (CL-106), and the other cruiser which I had, and a couple of destroyers and we went to Trieste and made contact with the Army.
On the way, I had a message from the Chief of Naval Operations saying he thought it would be a good idea if I went to Trieste. I was able to send an immediate reply, informing him that I was already on my way.
We also, at one time, were sent to southern Greece. The communists were getting pretty active there, and they thought that the presence of the ships might lend a little support to the Greeks. The Greeks, at that time, would very much have liked our country to land a division of American troops there to help them solve their problems; but they had plenty of personnel. Mr. Truman wound up by sending over a military mission headed by General [James] Van Fleet, who did an excellent job in organizing the Greeks and getting them into the fields to do something about keeping the communists from getting down into Greece. They eventually cleared the place up.
I was relieved in February 1948 by Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman.
For a catalog containing summaries of approximately 150 oral histories in the Institute's collection, send $3 to Director of Oral History, U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland 21402.
forceS ' at PoBt*cal infighting to eventually get his task he Sj mto tbe Mediterranean.9 To achieve this objective, is wa^ ’y' P.roceeded on the standard Navy assumption that evenS Unt^'.n^ab'e to have a battleship in waters that were ins s P°tentially dangerous without her customary escort- oreen of destroyers and other vessels.
1946^1° dleMissouri left New York Harbor on 23 March f°rei' °Und ^or Istanbul, the decisive step in the postwar been^n .policy °f the United States had taken place. It had sunn lnitlated by Forrestal and Nimitz, and had the full Pport of President Truman.
aniba« M'Ssouri arrived in Istanbul on 5 April 1946. The ernonSSa °r S body was taken ashore with appropriate cer- les. the captain of the Missouri and his officers paid
their official respects to various dignitaries of the Turkish Government, and the bluejackets and Marines from the Missouri went ashore to see and be seen.
Just seven month before, on 2 September 1945, the Missouri, lying at anchor in Tokyo Bay, had served as the site of the Japanese surrender. Now this graphic symbol of U. S. military might had crossed both the Pacific and the Atlantic and was riding at anchor in the harbor of Istanbul— a clear manifestation, both to our friends and to those who might be our foes, that U. S. military power, having recently contributed to the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan, would be used by our government as a constructive force for peace in the world. The United States was once again following the historic Anglo-American policy of “showing the flag” in troubled or potentially troubled
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°Ce*dings / August 1987