MATERIAL AND PERSONNEL
DURING the debates preceding enactment of the 1928 Naval Appropriation Bill by the Sixty-ninth Congress, Carl Vinson, a Representative from Georgia, intellectually and morally free from partisanship, and deeply stirred by the niggardly tenor of the bill, declared: “It is absolutely essential that our Navy be in condition and prepared at all times. It must ever remain in a state of readiness, for, in the event of a national emergency, it cannot wait to be prepared, it must be prepared at the time to cope with the emergency.”
This statement is gospel, a naval axiom, and as it is a publicly admitted fact that, from the material standpoint, our Navy is not in condition, prepared, and in a state of readiness, one is justified in asking: “Is the efficiency of the personnel, officers and men, in that status insuring the nation, whatever their condition, the utmost fighting value of its commissioned ships?” A logical question, now and ever, for it bears on another axiom: “Ships are tools; men make navies.” From the latter truism, it is sound to conclude that efficient crews may secure results with obsolescent and militarily impaired craft that are beyond the ability of lubberly crews manning ships of formidable type and appointment. Here, doubtless, is an indefensible argument for neglecting the maintenance of a modern, well-equipped, and tactically rounded-out fleet, but it is an irrefutable argument for top-notch efficiency of naval personnel, particularly so in our case, as our naval policy generally has been that of a gain-loving, sentimental, thus shortsighted people, long on funds for memorials and pensions, but short on money for ships and guns.
It is not necessary to turn back the pages of national history—say to the time of Thomas Jefferson, who dismantled all but six frigates of the Navy of his day and sought to defend the nation and its seaborne commerce from the ravages of Barbary pirates and the powerful fleets of England and France by means of those six ships, a number of one-gun river scows, the payment of tributes, and his Non-Intercourse, Embargo, and Non-Importation Acts—to seek proof of the policy cited. Indeed we need go no further back than November 18, 1926, when a sub-committee of the House Appropriations Committee began hearings on the very bill which, on February 24, 1927, was debated by Congressman Vinson.
Representative Burton L. French, of Idaho, Chairman, having called the subcommittee to order, announced:
In going through the reports of the different bureau chiefs to the Secretary of the Navy for the last fiscal year I came across this sentence used by Rear Admiral Bloch, the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance: "The total tonnage being limited and the dates of replacement being established (by the famous 5-5-3 Treaty) it appears that the efficiency of the Navy can only be increased by increasing the efficiency of the personnel, by training and practice; by increasing the reliability and accuracy of our present material, and by developing new and better material." This thought, it seems to me, is one that must be the guiding principle of administrative officers of the Navy Department, as well as the guiding principle, in a very large degree, of this committee and of the Congress.
It will be noted that Rear Admiral Bloch included both personnel and material in his formula for increased naval efficiency; that his report had been printed as a public document, and, for more than a year, had been available to all branches of the Federal Government—it was not a new or suddenly developed idea, in fact, the “principle” advanced was made historic by Hermocrates of Syracuse in 413 b.c. when advocating a policy of aggression against an approaching hostile Athenian naval expedition.
The first witness before the sub-committee, Curtis D. Wilbur, Secretary of the Navy, reported:
The material condition of the Navy is in general good, although it cannot be said to be al-
together satisfactory. The policy of using the major portion of available funds for repairs to vessels of the active fleet, to the exclusion of alterations tending to general military efficiency has been continued. This policy has made it possible to hold in check retrogression but has prevented any substantial improvement. . . . We can give you the details about it, but that would be a long proposition, there is a great deal of it. . . . I might say that there are two items there that will interest you—the improvement of the radio, to keep up with the advance of science; and the other is our fire control.
“Those are being kept up?” he was asked.
“They are being deferred,” he replied, I mean those are two big items where we could, by putting in improvements, advance very materially the efficiency of the ships.”
Testifying further concerning material, Secretary Wilbur said:
The effect that age of vessels has on the cost of maintenance must again be stressed. The repair facilities afloat are utilized to the fullest possible extent, and the increased repair load which must naturally result from year to year as the ships grow older must be met by increased appropriations rather than by an attempt to overload such facilities. This is especially true if the Navy’s enlisted personnel is to suffer any reduction in numbers.
Did the Secretary demand funds to provide the ships with those items: radio, for communications, and fire control apparatus, without which the Fleet cannot be tactically maneuvered and controlled, and accurate, victory-winning gunfire cannot be secured? Did he demand action preventing reduction in enlisted personnel? Did he inform the sub-committee that the Navy was already so short of men that submarines alone had full complements, that battleships and other craft were five to twenty-five per cent undermanned on a minimum peace-time basis? He did not. He had made the case as strong as he could, for he, like all other naval personnel, regardless of rank or position, cannot make requests or demands for congressional appropriations beyond the recommendations of the Bureau of the Budget. There is an executive order against such action, as there is a naval regulation forbidding the personnel to seek legislation. Secretary Wilbur, to his everlasting credit, violated the spirit of the executive order in so plainly pointing out current deficiencies. To have gone further would have jeopardized his case and harmed the cause for which he testified.
Had the Secretary, by demands and tirades against the policy he faced, sacrificed whatever advantage his observance of the executive order gained, it would have made no difference to the sub-committee, its members well-knowing all the distressing material and reduced-personnel deficiencies of the Navy; in fact, the same sub-committee had gone over the details a year previously and was in a large measure responsible for the very faults the Secretary dwelt upon.
Under the circumstances, and despite the Secretary’s testimony, it was a foregone conclusion that the sub-committee would send a bill to the House deficient in appropriations for material needed to increase the efficiency of the Navy, and that the enlisted personnel would be held at a figure so that the poorly-equipped ships would be undermanned. The bill was so reported, and is now a law of the land.
Howbeit, in conjunction with its passage, no one suggested the repeal of a section of the “Articles for the Government of the Navy,” “passing the buck” from the Congress to the personnel, even to the gates of eternity, namely:
The punishment of death, or such other punishment as a court-martial may adjudge, may be inflicted on any person in the naval service who, being in command of a fleet, squadron, or vessel acting singly, neglects, when an engagement is probable, or when an armed vessel of an enemy or rebel is in sight, to prepare and clear his ship or ships for action; or does not, upon signal for battle, use his utmost exertions to join in battle; or does not afford all practicable relief and assistance to vessels belonging to the United States or their allies when engaged in battle.
This is a Revised Statute of the United States, enacted by the Congress, but nothing therein even hints that the Congress will furnish “any person in the naval service" with a modern ship or ships, armed with modern guns, equipped with the latest models in fire control and radio apparatus, and other efficient material, and a full complement of officers and men to aid such “person” in affording the “relief and assistance” that the regulation quoted so grimly demands.
One does not question the justice or the expediency of the death penalty for downright cowardice, but one must note the injustice of sending brave men to their doom in inferior and short-handed ships. The tragic details of the Chesapeake and Shannon affair off Boston during the War of 1812 furnished an historical case in point. Yet the Sixty-ninth Congress, in passing the 1928 Naval Bill, deliberately ignored, in fact contributed to, the unsatisfactory material conditions under which the Navy must function.
Thus the governmental naval policy of the present day does neglect the material situation. The Administration, the Budget Director, the sub-committee of the House, and the Congress are not accepting as their guiding principle the statement of Rear Admiral Bloch, so glibly quoted by Chairman French, that the efficiency of the Navy embraces both personnel and material, but are laying upon the shoulders of the personnel the entire burden and all of the attendant responsibility, meanwhile emphasizing that responsibility by the legal threat of death should the burden prove too great for flesh and blood to bear.
A NEW ERA IN SEA POWER
Despite the untoward circumstances bearing so heavily upon them, it is a service belief that our naval officers and men, singly and collectively, are more efficient today than ever before, and, I am told, the efficiency is so high that no radical changes in organization can be made that will promise noticeably increased efficiency. Increase must come through individual initiative in line with administrative procedure now in force. These are strong statements. It may be that they can be substantiated by an examination of the collateral facts.
In the first place, due to major wars and capricious national policies, the United States Navy has had its ups and downs. Expansion in war has naturally been followed by peace-time reduction, but the reductions, almost invariably, have been in the nature of general disbandment, sometimes to an extent making it impossible to maintain a single training squadron. These whirligigs of time and circumstance have had a seesaw effect on personnel efficiency, particularly in the case of officers.
Aside from the first decade following the Revolution, and the eight years of Jefferson’s Administration, 1801 to 1809, the lowest period in our naval strength was reached within ten years after the Civil War. From 1875 to 1890 we had no Navy within the meaning of the word. With the latter date, however, began the era of steel, steam, and big guns, its first phase producing the White Squadron of grateful memory—it was this squadron that won the Spanish- American War.
In the period from 1875 down to Dewey’s fleet action at Manila, and the chase and melee action off Santiago, American naval officers, as throughout our previous history, were good ship-keepers, good individual ship commanders, good disciplinarians, and good fighters. But, with the exception of Admirals Dewey, Mahan, Luce, and Watson, a few captains who had served with Farragut, Porter, and Du Pont in fleet actions of the Civil War, and possibly a number of seniors who had attended the Naval War College, the officers of the time knew little about fleet tactics, and less about naval strategy. The professional awakening caused by the rehabilitation of the material was almost entirely spent in controversies over theoretical design covering rams, monitors, dynamite cruisers, torpedoes, et cetera, while traditional pride alone bolstered up seamanship.
The last gallant squadrons of Spain’s age- old sea power were to be the anvils upon which we were to hammer out the genesis of our own. We did not know this when war was declared in April, 1898, but John D. Long, Secretary of the Navy, needing a general staff, called together the advisory Naval War Board of 1898, and to that Board came Admiral Mahan, perhaps the most profound student and master of the strategy and logistics of sea power of all time. By July 4 the deed was done, and the United States had started upon the development of a coordinated sea power which, in a quarter of a century, became the practical equal of that of the British Commonwealth of Nations upon which a great people had lavished their energy, wealth, and colonizing genius through three hundred years of heroic effort.
If the victories at Manila and Santiago began a new era for the American people, they certainly did for the American naval officer. The impetus of the war’s demands on personnel and material furnished the actuating impulse of the post-war development in craft and crews, as, for the first time in our history, expansion and not demoralizing disbandment became the Government’s naval policy following a war.
From the declaration of war in 1898 down to the hour that the Washington Arms Limitation Conference began its sessions, November 12, 1921, our Navy did not cease to grow in strength, to keep abreast or ahead of the general adaption of scientific developments to maritime use, to increase in efficiency ships and men in the drive for battle effectiveness by a three-plane Navy employing surface, sub-surface, and aircraft, and their technical adjuncts, and to play its great part in the rise of the United States to the position of the world’s principal industrial and commercial power. These tasks were not accomplished without mistakes, professional heart-burnings, and difficulties both economical and political, but they were accomplished.
Inventive genius, scientific discoveries, metallurgical triumphs, and industrial daring, joint enterprises of naval officers and civilians, contributed to the forward push in naval progress and also materially aided in the spread of American influence in the markets of the world. But the chief factor in the rapid development of this country to an enviable place in maritime affairs was the acquisition of those insular possessions which became American territory in 1898. Porto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam and Samoa forced the issue, but in 1898 the nation was ripe for the momentous change in its domestic and international policies necessary to insure maritime greatness. We took the step, which, twenty years later, compelled us to exert the balance of power in the World War to maintain free world communications, in other words, “the freedom of the seas.”
President Coolidge has said: "Great light is always shed on the question of what ought to be done by finding out what has been done.” It follows that if we find out what has been done we may also find out who did it and why. Hence if we conjure up a thumb-nail definition of sea power, note the means used by this country to develop it, and squeeze the political embalming fluid from one or two so-called dead issues, we can evaluate the Navy’s part in the national effort and acquaint ourselves with the progress of the professional efficiency of its officers.
From the printed speeches of congressmen, Federal officials, and articles by journalists generally, I gather that to many people in America the thought of sea power embraces one idea: armed force, represented by a navy. But to naval officers sea power means much more; and, as we shall see, their professional efficiency must go far beyond the mere military phase of sea power and into the realm of diplomacy and statesmanship, with a degree of social, industrial and economic understanding coincident thereto seldom required even in the distribution of the highest ambassadorial honors.
The Elements of Sea Power
Stripped of clarifying details, we may define sea power in five words; Production Shipping, Markets, Colonies, Navy. The principal conditions affecting the sea power of a given nation have been boiled down by Mahan as follows: I: Geographical Position. II: Physical Conformation, including, as connected therewith, natural production and climate. Ill: Extent of Territory IV: Number of Population. V: Character of the People. VI: Character of the Government, including therein the national institutions.
These six fundamental conditions of sea power were favorably developed in the United States when the Spanish-American War began. Geographically we were not forced to defend ourselves by land, nor obliged to seek strategical operating bases by land; thus our defense and our offensive attacks were united upon the sea. Our chief geographical weakness was in the tremendously extended water route separating our eastern and western coasts.
We were already an industrial nation, producing raw material and manufactured commodities in excess of the national needs, although our industrialism required products from other lands to complete the cycle of economic manufacturing and to satisfy the luxury-loving demands of a maturing civilization. We both bought and sold abroad. We had huge terminal facilities in the seaports along our eastern coast line, and at strategic railheads on our west coast, connected by water and rail transportation systems with interior urban centers and raw material and industrial regions; we were equipped to expedite large volumes of traffic.
While possessed of ample territory for further increase, we had even then a numerous population, industrious, prosperous, imbued with a pioneering spirit, and, standing behind it, egging it on, a financial organization at once powerful and adventurous. Our Government had protected our producers, manufacturers, and wage-earners by a high tariff, and facilitated our selling and buying abroad by concluding numerous favored-nation commercial treaties. We were, then, quite completely organized to meet the requirements of the first element of sea power; production.
With respect to the second element, shipping, we were disgracefully weak. Those great developments, alloy-steel, and shipyards for fabricating it, brought to the forefront of American industries by the building of the White Squadron, had been almost wholly employed in turning out the Squadron itself. Hence, we find, while in the early eighties we were carrying nineteen per cent of our overseas traffic of one billion, five hundred million dollars in American ships, in 1900, when the war disturbance of our commerce had abated, and our foreign trade approximated two billion, two hundred and fifty million dollars, our merchant fleet was still inadequate to carry more than twenty-one per cent of that trade.
However, we were well on the road to the realization of the third element of sea power, markets, but excepting Alaska, April, 1898, found us without colonies, the fourth element, the main object of which is to permit the maintenance of well-located, suitably equipped, and properly defended bases for the repair, fueling, shelter, and sanctuary of shipping engaged in vital trade in peace and war, and to serve as operating bases for the fleets of the Navy, element five of sea power. The victorious conclusion of the war partly remedied our colonial needs, but, while we had sufficient strength to cope with the Spanish Navy, we did not have enough naval craft of the proper characteristics to insure free movement of our existing seaborne trade in the event of war with either of several rival maritime powers.
Such were the conditions in 1898. At these crises in the maturing growth of nations, Mahan’s sixth condition, “Character of the Government,” becomes fatefully decisive. Governmental policies can make or break the exterior elements of sea power. Still, in the case of a representative government, such as our own, public opinion may force a fostering policy toward the consolidation and development of sea power if —Mahan’s fifth condition, “Character of the People,” here applies—economic or militaristic aggressiveness is a national characteristic. Happily, perhaps to our credit and certainly for the peace of the world at large, we are not a militaristic people.
FORWARD AND BACK
Although peace-loving, we are economically aggressive. Accordingly, the Spanish ships had scarcely struck their colors before we began our march to commercial leadership. We engaged in no orgy of imperialism, we started no treasury-embarrassing policy, but we pursued a continual naval building program calculated to offset the lack of naval bases not supplied by the territorial gains resulting from the War.
Of first importance, economically and strategically, was the building of the Panama Canal. By this means we united our east and west coasts by a fairly direct water route; shortened the sea lane from industrial eastern America to the potential markets of Asia; freed our shipping from the menacing guns and supporting squadrons of numerous bottle-necks of ocean trade; and, while shifting our acute naval problems from the Atlantic to the Pacific, also shifted our inter-coastal water-borne freight from foreign to domestic vessels under protective coastwise traffic laws.
We also began a fortified naval base at Hawaii, and instituted the policy of maintaining bases at Guam, Samoa, and the Philippines to protect our Eastern interests, and provided other bases among our Caribbean outposts for the protection of the Canal Zone and the Atlantic seaboard. Under Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, these policies were variously advanced. Our overseas trade grew by tremendous strides; we kept reasonable pace with our naval construction, but neglected our merchant marine and worked but intermittently in completing the naval bases at Hawaii and in the East.
We took some backward steps, and were pursuing a number of ill-fated detours from the straight and narrow path to maritime success when the economic, political, and social complications of the World War brought us back to the task and, with tragic abruptness and a challenging pressure not to be denied, literally forced us to make ourselves great upon the seas. Our part in that frightful upheaval need not be detailed here. Suffice to say that we emerged from it with an augmented Navy and the world’s second largest fleet of merchant ships. Our defensive and offensive operations, as in 1898, again being united upon the sea, our troops again fighting beyond our shores, our industries shot skyward in magnitude and value, and the United States became the banker, broker, and meal-ticket holder for a war- starved world.
As in 1899, so in 1919; for the second time in our history we adopted a policy of naval expansion following a war. We went further, for when the War Administration turned over the reins of Government to one of “Normalcy,” March 4, 1921, the Congress had digested the admonitory lessons driven home by the war and passed the National Defense Act of 1920, revised and strengthened the Naval Building Program of 1916, and pushed through the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. Through the medium of these acts we had in hand or underway, for the first time since the adoption of the Federal Constitution, a period of 132 years, all of the elements of a tremendous and seemingly permanent sea power. In 1920 our foreign trade reached the prodigious sum of $10,000,000,000, fifty-one per cent of which was carried in American ships, while our Navy, built, building and authorized, was on a scale equaling the navies of Great Britain and Japan combined.
To those who had known the Navy for many years, it seemed that the General Board, created by departmental order in 1900, had reached its majority and realized its goal coincidentally; that the amazing industry of Admiral Mahan and his uncanny ability to analyze historical theory, principle, and fact in terms of latter-day practice, priceless gifts to his country, were at last recognized; and that, without resorting to the repugnant militarism of universal service a la Europe, the United States had determined to place herself beyond reasonable attack by establishing adequate military and naval defense forces, rescue her ocean commerce from foreign shipping, and insure her future prosperity against distant depredations by erecting impregnable naval bases at strategic points beyond the seas.
Alas! for practical statesmanship when partisan politicians, represented by “legal” and “best” minds, go slumming for votes and prestige. Attempting to dull the keen edge of European disappointment at our failure to accept membership in the League of Nations, agreeing to Lord Balfour’s estimate of our naval requirements, and desiring to throw a sop to the pacifistic fringe of the national electorate, the new administration hustled through the Washington Arms Conference. As a result we are back to the relative position in sea power that we occupied in 1900. To be sure, we are stronger now than we were then, but other powers, particularly Great Britain and Japan, have not, by any manner of means, stood still.
The Conference status quo treaty forbidding us to fortify bases in our Far- Eastern colonies has shorn them of their chief advantages as an element of our sea power; indeed, they have become a source of weakness, if not veritable isles of danger. By bending backward in our zeal to idealize the terms of the 5-5-3 Treaty, our Navy has slipped to second place in capital ships, and to third place in auxiliaries, and those units, through the pursuit of "economy,” have been allowed to deteriorate until, as Secretary Wilbur’s testimony shows, we are relying upon the personnel to hold the bag.
To complete the vicious circle, as a free gift to our trade rivals, making our tribute payments to Barbary pirates in Jefferson’s time seem like so much peanut change, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 has been so far nullified that seventy-six per cent of our $10,000,000,000 annual ocean trade is now carried by foreign shipping. We have become colossal with respect to production and markets, but again weak in shipping, colonies, and navy.
When I look at the present magnitude of the United States, and vision the enormous expansion in population, industry, and political influence which even the next twenty- five years will bring to our flag; when I note the spread of our ideals of political thought in all quarters of the world, and number the forlorn, disconsolate, and semi-submerged governments of small nations looking to us for their guidance and security in a world of chaotic change; it is far and away beyond my comprehension how those who are responsible for the decreasing strength of our sea power can find any satisfaction in pursuing such a tragic policy, or find any comfort in the frankly brutal statement of "Admiral B.,” recently made at Geneva, in which the mysterious British “Admiral” calls down upon our heads our own folly in these sentiments:
It is difficult to understand upon what grounds the United States can claim naval equality with Great Britain when the latter power has such an enormous world trade to protect, and also carries a large proportion of the ocean trade of the former.
EFFICIENCY OF PERSONNEL
A review of congressional legislation from 1898 to the present time, covering the development and recent retrogression of our sea power, as outlined herein, including an inspection of the printed hearings supporting such legislation, provides positive proof that our beneficial colonial and maritime policies have been, in large measure, the work of naval officers. Whenever legislation has been adverse to the growth of our sea power, or supporting legislation has been refused, there is abundant documentary evidence that naval officers have warned or advised against abandoning or retarding the development of our logical interests upon the seas.
While the Naval War College was founded in 1888, it was not enthusiastically supported until after the victories of 1898. It had, however, been the means of indoctrinating the Navy with a broad view of the whole subject of American sea power, and when, in 1900, the General Board came into being as an independent consultative advisory council, that body, supplied with information collected from domestic and international sources by the office of Naval Intelligence, and empowered to call expert witnesses from any source, furnished the Department, the President, and the Congress with a continually expanding and up- to-the-minute policy for creating a fleet and coordinating it with the other elements of sea power then and since available.
The President of the General Board from its creation until a few weeks before we entered the World War, in fact, until the day of his death, January 7, 1917, was George Dewey, Admiral of the Navy. His place in history already won, this great naval statesman gained for the Board the immediate acceptance of its mission by the service, and gave it prestige with the country at large. And through the ensuing years the board has been a balance-wheel, a stabilizer, and a guiding and directing agency; first for the administrative heads of the Navy in the Department’s relations to other branches, departments, and agencies of the Federal Government, to civil industries, and in its contacts abroad, and, secondly, for the restless energy and enthusiasm of the personnel of a Navy overwhelmingly mechanical, and who, in a hectic scientific age, must needs be led into channels preserving a continuing and rational progress toward an ideally balanced fleet, properly designed, built, equipped, manned, and properly employed.
To those laymen who might think that these matters overlap or conflict with the established duties and functions of the various bureaus of the Department, it need only be pointed out that the bureaus view their work as a whole with reference to their duty as a part of the Navy Department with subordination to the national policies as a background, whereas the General Board views the questions before it, taking the Navy as a whole to be harmonized with other efforts of the government in behalf of the nation, with a background of the world controlled by interests other than those of the United States and sometimes hostile thereto.
Singularly free from political influence, unafraid to declare its honest judgment on any relevant subject, its decisions founded on the broadest principles of sea power and the duties and responsibilities of the Navy thereunto, its membership recruited from among officers experienced in high command afloat, adjudged to be men of profound reasoning power, and of high professional attainment, its ex-officio members those who occupy strategic posts counted of highest importance in the naval establishment, the General Board constitutes the fountain-head and backbone of naval statesmanship as far as this nation is concerned, doubt it not.
In view of this knowledge I emphatically insist that the most profound and farsighted statesmanship and diplomatic sagacity to be found in any institution within the purview of the Federal Government is lodged in the senior ranks of the naval profession. The fact that this source of information upon international questions is so consistently ignored by our treaty-making authorities is so much loss to the general welfare. Despite the fact that those bitter, derisive, and galling phrases so peculiarly outstanding in the American development of the English language have been prodigally bestowed upon naval officers of prominence, such as, “swivel-chair admirals,’’ "gold-laced flunkies,” “fogies,” “bureaucrats,” “imperialists,” and "militarists,” I venture the opinion that future historians will marvel to find that naval officers are the most earnest and logical advocates of peace that our civilization, avowedly peaceful, has ever produced. One example of recent memory may be cited: Had our government carried out the recommendations of the General Board, say from 1909 to 1914, inclusive, and built the naval craft in toto that those recommendations involved, even with our green ambassadors at the courts of Europe—at the time under discussion our ambassadors enjoyed an average experience at those courts of less than one year—our State Department in all probability could have forestalled the World War. With our Navy at that strength advised by the General Board, our influence for peace would have been decisive, just as our contribution to the allied cause, after we had become tangled in the web of war, was decisive for victory.
Although it had increased mightily the knowledge and efficiency of numbers of individual officers, it was not until 1912 and 1913 that the Naval War College was fully appreciated by the Navy as a whole. During those years its graduates, scattered throughout the Bureaus of the Department and detailed to command and staff duties with the fleet, became the leaven which raised the standards of professional knowledge and aspiration above the mere ship- keeper, navigator, and disciplinarian stage. By instituting junior as well as senior classes at the College, the whole fabric of the Navy soon became permeated with the influence of a ripened naval scholarship. This was a telling influence when we entered the World War, as War College graduates went to the planning sections and boards of the Department, to responsible administrative and command berths in the fleet, and to similar positions with the shore-base and floating organizations in the War Zone.
Since the war these same officers have reached command and flag rank and are now the dominating influence behind the drive for efficiency actuating the whole Service. Their numbers are being constantly augmented by new graduates from the college, while that institution has become the foremost of its character in the world; it has promoted a new departure in the naval profession, the progressive education of officers for the exceedingly responsible and exacting duties of “high command.’’
The Bureau system is an old and tried administrative feature of the Navy Department. The Bureaus, from time to time, have been changed and their number increased to keep pace with the growth of the Navy and with the progress of science and industry affecting the character and operation of the Fleet. That the system is an efficient one is best illustrated by the ease with which the Bureaus expanded to meet the unprecedented demands of the World War. The material, personnel, technical, and fiscal bureaus coped with these tremendous tasks without breakdown or reorganization; they simply expanded, did their work, and settled back to normal enrollment after the emergency came to an end. I maintain that there cannot be any serious question concerning the efficiency of the bureaus today, for they are now headed by executives who handled the war problems and manned by those younger officers who still find themselves tingling with the professional urge of the war effort.
If the officers detailed to the Navy Department are efficient, the same can be said of those aboard ships and at shore stations. All are members of one body, trained at the same institutions, and striving for the same high goal. In this connection, I have recently read sharp criticisms of the Naval Academy, the source of line officer recruitment for the service, in which the administration, curriculum, instructing staff, and the midshipmen have been roundly scored. The burden of this assault seems to be that the Academy is an unsatisfactory institution for imparting to its students “a groundwork of educational fundamentals upon which experience afloat may build the finished naval officer,” which is officially stated to be part of the Academy’s mission.
Paraphrasing the “graduating” sermon preached by Captain Sydney K. Evans, (Ch.C.), U.S.N., to the Class of 1927, and with which I am in hearty agreement, it is undoubtedly true that there are weak spots of varying gravity throughout the Acadamy, administrative, pedagogic, and academic, and a number of discrepancies in technical laboratory equipment, all of which should, and of course will, be corrected. Doubtless the same degree of proficiency in such subjects as navigation, seamanship, mathematics, ordnance, engineering, aeronautics, English and modern languages, attained by the recently graduated class, could have been attained at other institutions. It is possible that at institutions other than the Academy these graduates might have attained even higher proficiency in the subjects mentioned, but if proficiency in these subjects alone is the goal of four years’ effort at Annapolis, then, in the writer’s opinion, their study ought to be pursued elsewhere and the Academy abolished.
Said the Chaplain: “The real Naval Academy is invisible—a thing of the spirit with its ideals and traditions of truth, honor, duty, loyalty, courage, initiative, chivalry, and self-sacrifice.” The people of this country should thank their lucky stars that this is true. It is not a sentimental “blurb” by an emotional “sky pilot,” for the indoctrination of these spiritual attributes constitutes the most practical phase of the midshipman’s whole course at the Academy. Without such attributes, deeply implanted in mind and soul, the naval officer, to whom leadership must be the pearl of great price, is of little use to the service, even although his brain be jammed to the bursting point with technical data and lore.
This year’s Board of Visitors, reporting to President Coolidge, closed their report with this paragraph:
It should be borne in mind that a naval officer's education does not end with graduation from the Naval Academy but continues throughout his entire naval career, and that for every advance in rank he is required to pass a searching examination.
How true this is! And not only are Academy graduates qualified to take their places in the fleet and begin, with few theoretical academic handicaps, their practical education as naval officers, but once started on their careers they may specialize in the scientific and technical branches of the service in aid of which postgraduate courses at the Academy, and at civilian colleges and universities are available, while the higher branches of administrative, tactical, and strategical knowledge, as we have noted, are cared for by the junior and senior courses at the War College.
From personal knowledge of other navies, and of the educational systems which they maintain, I am positive that no other Navy gives greater attention to the provision of adequate and advanced facilities for the professional training of its officers than our own. This means not only well-staffed schools, in and out of the service, but highly- specialized practical work in the fleet, which, after all, is the greatest of schools. Under the conditions discussed, there should be no room for doubt that our naval officers, as a whole, are highly efficient. Hence, no doubt should exist concerning the efficiency of the officers in the fleet, from its Commander-in-Chief down, for the ships are officered, in most instances, in the key positions, by those who designed them, equipped them, placed them in commission, and put them through their paces during the World War.
CONCLUSION
Happily for the Navy and the maritime interests of the country, the romance of the sea has not ceased to stir the imagination of the American boy. Nor has the replacement of ships with billowy sails by the gaunt and speedy steel craft of the modern, electrified, and power-driven Navy dulled his enthusiasm for a taste of life on the ocean wave. The alien sailor has been forced ashore and we now have an all-American Navy, ships, guns, and gunners.
The mechanically-minded youth of the land find a pleasurable outlet for their investigative eagerness on our warships, for the surface and sub-surface craft are so like floating machine-shops, power plants, and sea-going scientific laboratories, and our naval airships and seaplanes are so completely mechanical, that these youths are self-confidently and happily at home in the fleet.
Because of this super-mechanical character of naval craft, and the necessity of skill and experience as concomitants of safety and efficiency, in their management and operation, careful selection—moral, mental, physical, scholastic, and vocational—in recruiting the enlisted force has become a fixed policy, while training has reached a stage which makes the Navy an aggrandized trade and technical school.
Something favorable can certainly be acknowledged for a system that can recruit and train twenty-four per cent of its entire enrollment yearly. This is a heavy tax on the service, and hits efficiency a body blow, but it is the biggest fly in the ointment and may be quickly swatted out of existence by a law increasing the terms of enlistment, particularly the first term. Yet, despite the handicaps of short-term enlistment, it is noted that, for the fiscal year 1926, desertions dropped to 692, whereas, in 1924, they were 3,161, and that for 1926 seventy-six per cent of the expiring enlistments were either extended or the men affected reenlisted. This record, in itself, is a mark of high efficiency.
But every enlisted man must be educated, trained, and indoctrinated with the spirit and traditions of the Navy; such procedure is not reserved for officers only. And when we remember that to meet the requirements aboard ship there have been established 137 different ratings among the enlisted personnel, each rating representing a distinct class of different kinds and degrees of training, it is not surprising that twenty-six trade schools with courses varying in length from four to thirty-eight weeks have been established, that these schools, with 260 petty officers as instructors, give seventy-four courses, and that these courses, with text books, are also available to all enlisted men.
The work of education for enlisted men is complete and includes both theoretical and practical instruction, covering every subject in detail for each of the 137 ratings, and other courses for the general academic education of the individual men, purely cultural, embracing such subjects as algebra, trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, and languages, and all this instruction is carried out under the supervision of the officers, even to the correction of papers and the tutoring of special students. During 1926, it is reported, 57,632 courses were issued to a total enlisted force of 62,261. Add to this academic work the inculcation of self-reliance, the spirit of fair-play, and self-control under stress and hazard, the products of discipline and tradition in an institution with a gallant and unsullied record of 145 years of service to the nation, and you have the ingredients of a successful recipe for efficiency, and the conditions that develop manhood. Here is no scheme for taking boys and young men from homes of culture and making idlers and ne’er-do-wells wholesale; here is no debauchery of manhood; here is no economic thievery, no sweeping robbery of industrial ranks by taking needed workers for an idler’s life on men-o’-war in times of peace. On the contrary, except for properly proportioned hours of rest, recreation, and wholesome physical relaxation, the enlisted men of the Navy are actively employing their minds and bodies in the most extensive, most diversified, and most exacting technical school in the whole wide world.
While it is a fact that a large number of the technical requirements of the Navy are concerned with the identical equipment and apparatus which the service itself developed and then passed on to the country’s industries ; its greatest contribution to the nation’s welfare in peace-time is this constant flow of vocationally trained and disciplined young men, from 15,000 to 25,000 each year, who leave the Navy and enter industrial establishments, business enterprises, and the technical professions ashore. This service to the country, if the Navy performed no other, makes the financial outlay upon its maintenance appear less like a burden and more like usury and putting money on a dead sure thing than may be observed in any other Federal activity.
Is it not apparent, then, that this extraordinary system of education, the careful selection of the recruits themselves, together with the weeding-out process on the basis of intelligence, application, and physical condition, which is constantly going on, practically guarantees the efficiency of the enlisted personnel, man by man? And where, as we have seen, the zeal and enthusiasm of the men is matched by that of the officers who instinct and care for them, and who work with them, the whole service exhibits a type of teamwork efficiency that merits the whole-hearted praise and constant support of the country at large.
It is my belief that I have given herein such a body of proof that there should be no doubts concerning the truth of the statement that the efficiency of the personnel, officers and men, is on a high plane, and that they are getting the utmost service possible from the ships they man. Personally, I believe that the efficiency of the personnel was never so high as at this particular time. The results of gunnery exercises and engineering competitions, of fleet maneuvers and aircraft operations, of the tremendous amount of self-sustaining repair and upkeep work carried out afloat, and of the expeditions now in the Caribbean and China, if given in detail, would merely pile up evidence sustaining the contention.
In my estimation, the knowledge of this high status of personnel efficiency in the Navy Department, and on general service ashore and afloat, is undoubtedly a determining factor in the policy of the Congress, and the Government generally, to neglect the material situation and crowd upon the personnel the task of protecting the country and its widespread and incalculably vital interests with obsolescent and improperly equipped ships. Such treatment of devoted public servants is un-American, unfair, and, if continued, may be disastrous to the best interests of the country.
But what shall be said of those governmental officials, all along the line, who ignore and pigeon-hole the advice of our naval statesmen, as was done by those in control of the issues of the Washington Arms Limitation Conference; who seem to believe that the naval needs of the country do not extend beyond their own transient terms in federal office; who will not understand that naval strategy is not confined to the operation of a fleet or fleets in wartime sea campaigns, but that it “has indeed for its end to found, support, and increase, as well in peace as in war, the sea power of a country”; and whose political programs do not recognize that prosperity fostered by our mighty foreign trade is ephemeral unless that trade is carried on by our own shipping and the sea lanes and distant termini, as well as the home ports, of that trade are protected by a Navy “in condition and prepared at all times?”
Those too blind, too partisan, or too weak to grasp and utilize these great and fundamental truths, and shape their policies accordingly, cannot be trusted to equalize the burden of Fleet efficiency by providing “new and better material," the need of which was so plainly stated by Rear Admiral Bloch and made so clear to the House sub-committee by Secretary Wilbur.
Once truthfully informed of the conditions, and thus without excuse for indifference, public opinion, expressed by means of the ballot if denied access to the press, I am led to believe, must assume the responsibility of insisting upon a governmental policy of providing our efficient naval personnel with material, ships, guns, and apparatus, in all respects worthy of their skill, devotion, and loyalty. If public opinion fails in this matter, the policy will not be realized; for partisanship knows naught of justice, of true economy, or yet of our naval needs.
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