I recently came into possession of a number of back issues of U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings. I had never heard of the publication but you can imagine with what avidity I read it. One thing impressed me more and more until I became obsessed with the necessity to write this piece.
The thing that impressed me so much was frequent iteration of the point that the bearing and conduct of officers and men in the Navy be such as always to leave a good impression upon civilians.
I suppose that is because, in the end, civilians foot the bill for the Navy. A bad impression, then, as a corollary, would imply that vital services might sometime be curtailed by a captious civilian who found himself in high place. To me, this consciousness of responsibility of the Navy to the civilian public reflects the fact that the Navy knows what it means to our national existence. Yet is the civilian public able to match that understanding? I leave the question in its rhetorical state and pass on to my own understanding of the Navy and its function.
Having been born and reared on the west coast, and rarely out of reach of the salt air of the Pacific, I have seen the great, gray shapes of the Fleet anchored offshore and in our ports. I have become accustomed to seeing the men on liberty as they have infiltrated to the coastal towns. And in a mystic way, these casual contacts have symbolized something vast and in touch with the farthermost reaches of the earth.
The Navy has symbolized for me my country’s foreign policy. What that policy is I have never been able to grasp. But whatever it is, the Navy vitalizes it.
I have read somewhere that war is simply an extension of civil politics, and that the admirals and generals step in when peaceful means fail to accomplish a nation’s purposes in dealing with other powers. If that is not the precise quotation it at least expresses my own beliefs. It is upon that assumption a civilian can come to a better understanding of the Navy and its ultimate purposes.
In developing my thesis I must assert that I am not to be counted among those who hold hopes for a permanent, or a lasting, or a durable peace. I am not foresighted enough to see such a change in basic human impulses as will bring that about. It is simply well to work toward that end. But the peace —the de facto peace—that will be written will be one written by the side with the most armaments. The ink will be compounded of blood, bones, and guts. There will remain on the sides of the victor and vanquished alike the bitter memories of the stuff that made the ink. The victor, by the very necessity of his victory, will write the peace. I doubt if the vanquished, by the very nature of his humiliation at arms, will be consulted by his masters. The deal will be a unilateral contract binding, in the end, with armed might.
We shall, of course, strive vigorously to maintain peace. We cannot implement our statesmen with a discarded Navy. We toyed with that notion once. Our great strength lies in the fact that this nation is committed to the policy of no further territorial aggrandizement. No power on earth need fear us on that score. By the same token we have of right well earned the duty to protect what we have without fear of any power on earth. That means the maintenance of what we have produced in these war years: the world’s greatest navy. If that means an armament race, let notice be served that we are prepared to compete.
On that basis, and only upon that basis, can the United States approach the peace tables with stern and unquestioned authority.
We have, today, the capital investment in a Navy that is equal to any demands that peace or war may impose upon it. The maintenance of that investment intact and usable will be cheaper than hasty improvisations to meet crises created by weaknesses. Surely, this is no longer a vast world, but a small one wherein it is possible to bring tremendous mobilizations of power against any part of it in incredibly short periods of time. Power can only be offset with power. If great power should exist in hands not ours, we cannot economically organize a defense once it begins to move against us. The defense must already exist, vital, responsive, and intelligent. The Navy, in all of its present, mammoth might, can be that defense.
That this power shall continue to exist after the war is a matter for civilians to determine. If they determine upon such a course, then our statesmen will have their policies implemented in such a manner their words will be clearly understood. I suspect that Nomura and Kurusu understood the words of Secretary Hull, but they also understood, according to their lights, that Mr. Hull did not have a navy sufficient to back him up. But surely, Mr. Hull’s very words would have had entirely different meanings to those men if the present Navy had been in existence in 1941. Futilely we can ask ourselves if, under those circumstances, Japan would have attacked us.
When one takes into consideration the merchant bottoms necessary to supplement a Navy, would not Germany have recognized the likely solution to the problems of North Atlantic logistics had the 1944 Navy been in existence in 1938? Holding, as we must have held, under those lost circumstances, the balance of world power, would Germany have dared to upset the world peace?
We may speculate on answers to those questions. But regardless of the answers, we know that our enemies will be bent to their knees because the Navy has brought our armed might to actual physical contact with the enemy in this world-wide war. We shall achieve peace through power and force. For ourselves, regardless of idealism, our ultimate security will lie in our own strength. Upon that we may strictly depend. What methods will formally be pursued to maintain world peace in collaboration with other powers is immaterial to the tremendous necessity of holding together our naval strength against the natural deterioration of collective international associations. I say this because the personalities and attitudes of nations are constantly changing and the things for which we aspire today may, twenty years from now, be repugnant to our children who then shall be the rulers. Yet so long as people remain virile they are creating the very things that inspire envy in others; and envy—particularly when it is coupled with the resentments of defeats—might well be rationalized as the prime cause of war. While strategy, joined with moderate strength, may win an engagement or two, it cannot conceivably destroy or conquer the United States if this nation elects to retain and maintain the overwhelming naval strength it now has in service and on the ways.
It seems to me that any post-war plan in conjunction with other world powers that would propose to debilitate the Navy or in any manner impair our sovereignty in its use and deployment would be less of a peace plan than an attempt to reduce this country to an inferior position in world affairs. Indeed, with what we have, the Navy is the best guarantee of a peace that will have some tangibility, if not permanence.
When we speak of force, let us not be dilettantes or aesthetes. Let us be realistic men who have behind us the permanent policy of the world’s greatest Navy. With that, coupled with proper merchant bottoms and the man power inherent in this nation of unlimited resources, our statesmen can be stern and realistic in their demands that world peace be kept. Historically, we have demonstrated our good intentions. This leaves us, then, an opportunity to set forth in good faith our aims at any peace conference. But as the sovereign people who became the arsenal of democracy we have a right to insist that the American Navy shall be an inherent part of our peace commitments and that our engagements shall be within the scope of the Navy to maintain them.
It is thus, then, as a layman I view the Navy as an inherent and permanent part of American foreign policy; a part that can implement any decisions, right or wrong, the American people choose to make.
And that is why, in a mystic way, the great, gray shapes of the Fleet symbolize for me something vast and in touch with the farthermost reaches of the earth. More than that, even, they symbolize America’s destiny. With them, this nation will survive or perish.