What Is This Thing Logistics?

It used to be fairly simple. The Department, or before that, the Admiralty, decided to put the sloop-of-war, frigate, or ship of the line, as the case might be, into commission. They notified the dockyard to start putting her into cruising condition, and they ordered Captain Spritsel T. Bowline to report for duty in connection with fitting out and in command when in commission. They asked him if he had any choice of officers with whom he would like to serve, advanced him a very moderate sum for advertising purposes, and gave him their dubious blessing.

Captain Bowline, having taken a quick look at the forlorn-looking hull around which leisurely shipyard workmen were beginning to congregate, at once broke out his sprucest uniforms, cocked hat and epaulets, shined his sword and became his own recruiting party. He put advertisements in the papers. He put placards on the notice-boards of shipping agencies and boarding houses. He made speeches to staring groups of waterfront loungers. He advised the Judge at the coming Assizes that his ship was in need of men; and in response, His Honor gave petty thieves, drunkards, wife-beaters, disturbers of the peace, and other misdemeanants their choice of the Big House and the rock pile or going to sea.

For the nucleus of his petty officers, the Captain and his newly reported Lieutenants painted glowing word-pictures of Patriotism, Promotion, and Prize-Money for horny- handed fishermen and whalers just back from an unsuccessful cruise. They, at least, could hand, reef, and steer, knew their ropes; and if they turned out to be lippy, could be dealt with,

By the time Captain Bowline had bullied the shipyard into giving him good, knolless spars, new unbleached canvas, and adequate stores of tar, pitch, and turpentine, dried beans, dried peas and rice, rum and salt junk; and had carefully seen to it that the boxes of hardtack bore dates less than live years old, he had a more or less full crew, numerically speaking. Of the three hundred odd, perhaps fifty had been aloft before, perhaps one hundred had never seen blue water. Mostly, they were white faced, shambling and sullen; but that was all right—they needed only a little working over. Just before sailing, Captain Bowline would address them. “Men, you have all heard of Red Mike, the terror of the Western Ocean. Well, remember! I’M BLACK PETE! Go for’ard!”*

At last U.S.S. Biftick cast off her lines and headed out to sea; and once clear of the land, Captain Bowline turned over the deck to the watch officer, went below, and opened his orders from the Congress. He found that he was to cruise the South Pacific; but “in passing the Capes of the Delaware and the Chesapeake, you will employ some of your men in catching fish, which will give a healthful variety to the diet and save your sea provisions.”†

Round shot, powder kegs, slop-chest clothing were below. The surgeon in the lazarette had his stock of salts, croton oil, quinine, and brandy. The ship’s cook had his own little locker full of prunes and perhaps raisins, to fill the pics he made for sale when not engaged in damning the stupidity of the amateur mess cooks, each of whom had twenty men to serve.

And that, brethren, was the sum total of the logistics required for a cruise of three years or more. Put in here and there for wood and water, find some shelf cred cove to careen and scrape the bottom every six months or so, send the purser ashore to haggle for an occasional bunch of bananas or to see if he could find a few more barrels of not-too-ancient salt horse, perhaps. But once at sea, the ship was self-contained, especially so if the boatswain and the carpenter were old hands who knew how to manavel a few extra spars and coils of rope on a moon-light requisition when the Yard gang were not looking. Service Force? What’s that?

So the pattern was set, and the baseline of that pattern was simply this: The captain does everything. All functions are command functions.

In looking through nineteenth century records, autobiographies and reports, the curious reader is certain eventually to wonder when the captain had time to sleep and shave—although surviving portraits prove that most of them never used a razor. The multiplicity of petty details which fell to the skipper possibly was the first cause of the prevalence of beards in the pre-Spanish War Navy.

Raphael Semmes of the Alabama had what can be conservatively described as a busy and worrisome command; but in his memoirs a large part of one chapter is devoted to a semi-humorous account of how much time it required for him personally to go through the monthly clothing requisitions to make sure that his division officers were adequately protecting their men from waste and folly. He regrets the time needed to complete the job, but insists that if he did not “draw his pen through the fourth or fifth pound of tobacco” asked for by some grizzled Master- at-Arms, his crew would likely smoke or chew themselves into inefficiency.

For some years after the present writer received his first commission, the captain continued to perform that duty. Once a month each man made out a slip requisition on C&SS44. Once a month each division officer grimly waited his turn to spread out on the wardroom table a Divisional C&SS44a and with appropriate comment transcribe some seventy or more small sheets into the big one—and it was big. About the size of the wherry’s main-sail, so that only one officer at a time could work, even on the wardroom table. Then the bale of 44a’s went to the captain, who traced out each line with his finger, noting the name on the left-hand side and being governed accordingly. John Doe, AS, wants six undershirts. Hmmm! At seventeen dollars a month he can’t afford them. He’s just lazy. Just another apprentice who would rather waste his money buying new undershirts than scrub the ones he has. Out!

In the ancient files at the Air Station, Pensacola, was found a requisition for timber and cordage. No head of department signed it, nor was there evidence that any one had a hand in its preparation other than the man who signed it, for the .penmanship is all the same. The signature was “David Glasgow Farragul, Commodore, U. S. Navy.”

Not until 1887, when Assistant Paymaster T. J. Cowie had a long talk with his commanding officer, Captain Stephen B. Luce, did any person other than the Captain order meat for the berth deck messes. In fact, until 1902 there was no general mess and no commissary officer.

The Paymaster, ex-Purser, always had the chore of keeping the pay roll; but until World War I it was the captain’s job to see that lie did it honestly; and once a month, every man-jack in his best uniform marched around the capstan, singing out his name and rate, so that the skipper, pay roll open beside him and the ship’s writer checking it, could make sure that the roll was not padded and that there were no stowaways on board.

Until around 1910 there was no such thing as an Accounting Officer. Each Yard department head kept his own books, the Captain of the Yard coordinated them—but the Commandant had to approve them and was responsible for their correctness.

After dubious experiment on three ships starting in 1906, the general supply system afloat began. Prior to that time, each ship’s department head had had his own storerooms and kept his own books—but the skipper was responsible for each ledger and balance sheet and had to sign it under a written guarantee that he personally had scrutinized it and attested its accuracy. How economically this system worked is shown by what happened when it was made Navy-wide. There had been bitter opposition from department heads who were sure that no one else could know how much of anything should go down in the Allowance List. This criticism was appeased by the method adopted. Each ship, on her next visit to Navy Yard, borrowed the sail loft and landed everything except provisions, medicines, and fuel. Everything. Then each department head, with the skipper’s blessing, picked out what gear he wished to take back to last him six months comfortably. It is a recorded fact that only such ships as had just ended a long and depleting cruise look back on board as much as thirty percent of what they had landed. The rest was turned into store. One small gunboat in my personal observation, found in the process of stripping the storerooms, one hundred and fifty-six new coal shovels of which no one had any record. They were not the engineer’s—he had just required for one hundred to replace his depleted stock. They belonged to the Equipment Officer, having, by best conjecture, been put aboard on first commission to shovel sand for the decks.

Still the notion hung on—stores were the commanding officer's personal responsibility as the legal “bailee of the cargo.” Every gray-haired S.O. still in the Navy can remember at least one cruise where his OSK quarterly balance sheet had to be submitted before mailing for verification of its figures by—shall we say, the captain’s yeoman?

So it went, item after item. It needed Gideon Welles, once a paymaster himself, to take the Navy’s buying out of the hands of irresponsible civilians when he discovered that a small but lucrative business had grown up in brokering Navy contracts to be let by political appointees—the original “Five- Percenters,” except that in those easy days it was oftener flic standard ship-broker’s “One quarter of five percent.” The captain still did the ordering, but paymasters did the buying; and the Act of 1864 forbade their dealing with brokers and established the definition of “regular dealer” which endures to this day. This was a momentous change and is not thoroughly understood even now. The demand, the requirement, still lies and must always lie with the man responsible for the use of the required article. That is and will always be the captain, acting through the agency of his specialized department heads. Hut the buying is a tricky business. To wit:

Take tinned tomatoes, a much-demanded item. Add up the number of cases of tinned tomatoes to be used by the Navy for twelve months. The annual appropriation bill accrues 1 July and runs until 30 June. Contracts under it must be let not later than 1 June if deliveries are to be expected by 1 July.

There is no packing company in the nation which could swing the entire Navy contract without curtailing deliveries to its regular civilian customers. Building goodwill is a long and dogged affair. The public must see your label on grocery shelves. Wholesalers must depend on receiving their orders promptly, for retailers keep nagging at them; and if Sunrise Brand fails them, they will buy Sunset from now on. We can all remember “flash-in-the-pan” brands that from time to time we have liked and asked for, only to find them no longer on the shelves and an annoyed grocer saying, “I can’t get deliveries out of that crowd.” Goodwill building takes time—a great deal of time— and is not to be tampered with.

The packing season for vegetables begins in the South in April. Slowly the season, seldom longer than five or six weeks, drifts north until New England packs in September. By that time the second Far South crop is ready, and the last of the year’s pack is in October, just where the first April pack occurred. There is no packer who could guarantee delivery from his own plant for twelve months in any year. To take a lump Navy contract would need buying from his competitors and reselling to the Navy—not a process conducive of economy to the taxpayer. He could not even devote his entire pack to the contract to minimize his outside buying, for that would mean the disappearance of his brand from the shelves and quick commercial oblivion. And to split the total buying into just the possible excess of each packer in each month takes a fairly thorough study of the canning industry. Someone remarked in a Proceedings article a few months ago that bee-keeping was about the only subject not touched by the present-day curriculum at Annapolis. I hereby add another—fruit and vegetable canning.

Tool steel, electronics, aviation supplies, engine parts, clothing and small stores, lumber, cordage, musical instruments— whatever the Navy may need (and that includes about everything except ostrich feathers) is a special buying study in itself; and unless long-range, up to date commercial statistics are available, together with a commercially-trained man to read and digest them, buying will be haphazard and costly, not only to the Navy but to the civilians whose markets we have upset.

Too often the Navy’s specialists have decided that since only they know about the construction, inspection, and maintenance of any given gadget, no one else is qualified to do anything about it. Too often in the past, untrained buyers, in or out of the Supply Corps, have groused and insisted that “It can’t be done” when the skipper wanted something. This loses sight of the one unassailable fact in any military pursuit: Only command knows what is to be accomplished. Only command can tell what materials will be needed. Only command can say where and how it shall be used. In brief, only command can create demand.

Command, however, has neither the time nor the data in its files intelligently to draw up specifications of anything but performance. The needed gadget must be able to do the job. The development of the gadget is a specialist problem.

All specialists used to be called so. However, there have been other factors which influenced Navy legislation, and at times they have been controlling. Engineers as such vanished from the Navy Register in 1899; but it was but a short time before E.D.O.’s appeared in it—specialists, not eligible to command, but wearing stars on their sleeves just the same. They nominally are members of the commanding Line, but are eligible for engineering duty only. They remain a true Staff, and perform true Staff functions. When the Construction Corps was amalgamated, there was not even a time-lag. Uniforms were changed, but duties were not. In short, command specifies the purpose to be accomplished, E.D.O.’s devise a gadget to meet the need, and turn the resultant specifications over to buying specialists, who have also heard from command how many, where and approximately when.

Now when the skipper gels into “where and when” too quickly, he sometimes becomes a bit unrealistic. He knows the need and he wants to be completely safe right now—certainly not later than next Wednesday. Haste in formulating his demands, and adherence to the last-century rule, “All functions are command functions,” leads at times to strange results. To wit, once when World War I was looming on the horizon and ships afloat pricked up their ears each time the radio began to crackle, there was a flagship of the old ten-inch armored cruiser class. She was at the time sitting on the lid of a somewhat tumultuous Caribbean. The Admiral sent for his engineer and his Staff S.O. His orders were brief—take on board at once enough fuel and provisions to last six months, so that when the call came the ship might at once proceed to battle. After a gulp, one young officer said, “She won’t hold it, Sir.” The other said, “Thirty fresh and forty-five dry is her limit, Sir.” Command frowned. “Get out of here. You heard your orders. Obey them.”

The two youngsters obeyed. For many weeks the quarterdeck could not be used for morning walks, for it was filled with coal. For even longer the bilges could not be inspected nor the magazines opened for the passages were piled high with corned beef and tomatoes.

The moral to this was best expressed by another admiral who brought himself up short in the middle of a speech at a conference with a wry grin. “I keep forgetting that I am not an engineer myself,” he said. He knew what he wanted, but he also knew that he had best leave the details to an officer trained to handle them.

Another friction-maker between command and specialist lies in the laws which govern the Navy. “Law” is a fighting word to some senior commanders. “I am the Regulations!” snapped one once as he threw overboard the book in which his executive had tried to point out something. There has never been a session of Congress with fewer than fifteen or twenty former Army officers in it. The Army works on land. When the Army wants something, even an ex-D.A. from the cattle country can as a rule understand it. Consider the simplicity of new legislation for the Army. When the Army was granted allowance for moving families and furniture— years before the Navy got it—the Act read simply that “There is hereby appropriated so much for the transportation of dependents and household goods subject to regulations promulgated by the Secretary of War.” And look what happened to us!

The reason is not obscure. Stockton, Hobson, Hart—in 150 years can anyone remember any other ex-Navy Regulars in Congress? And there are so many queer things requested by the Navy for unfathomable purposes, and they cost so much! And wasn’t it the great Dr. Johnson who said, “I can conceive of no man going to sea who has wit enough to get himself lodged in jail”? Even, as we have recently seen, to the Army, the mission and functions of a Navy are a closed book and the contentions of Navy officers vague vaporings. Consequently, the Navy is hedged about with legal safeguards against stupidity and worse. Our appropriation bills are usually far from being the granting of a given sum to accomplish an approved task. They lay down in rigid terms how much may be spent for shingles and how much for bituminous coal. They point out just who may be allowed to enter a bid and what to do with any rash contractor who overestimates his ability. They go into minute detail, and that detail is not in Navy language. Usually, it is not even in business language, but in the peculiar lingo of legislation developed through the centuries.

This is the prime reason for the statement made above—that Law is a lighting word to a large percentage of responsible command. On the other hand, to the specialist it is his very livelihood. One lapse from the provisions of, say, Treasury Department Circular 52 may cost him more than a General Court could give him as a fine—and such checkages cannot be worked out piecemeal. They must be paid right now.

It is obvious to all seasoned officers that not all specialists deserve the name. When a partly educated or lazily ignorant specialist gets unusual orders and cannot find a paragraph in the Regs, specifically allowing it, his first impulse is to claim “No can do!” in anguished accents, and another sore spot is developed in command-administration relations. Such sore spots multiply, and they grow out of two things which have in the past been all too prevalent. The first, and minor one, is the disappearing sort of commander who remarks—and this is an actual quotation—“Scientific Management of a Yard is to do everything yourself.” The other, and major one, is the half-trained and unimaginative specialist who hears something he did not expect and says that it cannot be done, thereby marking himself as an overpaid yeoman.

It is a recognized fact that there is hardly a single transaction possible to the Navy but will, unless cannily consummated, violate some law, order, regulation or commercial usage. It is a fact slowly coming into plain sight that there is practically nothing needed by command that cannot be done promptly by someone who knows the laws, the usages, the current statistical circumstances, the human factors and the approximate time. There are gates in every wall, but they sometimes take finding. I cite one clear example, happily solved in the face of ominous difficulties. It was solved because one local officer knew the oil business, another knew railroading, and a third had a generation of dealing with shipping and labor behind him.

Pre-World War II oldtimers who were watching the teletype in the spring of 1941 will remember a sweeping and momentous movement of the Fleet in the Atlantic which grew, shortly after, into the occupation of Iceland. In District Headquarters in New Orleans, lips were tight shut over lunch- and conference-tables. Everybody was saying nothing for fear of saying something that he should not.

About five o’clock of a Thursday afternoon the Commandant’s phone rang, and after a few startled moments of listening, the D.S.O. was summoned on the run. A tanker had called from Quarantine far down the river. She was proceeding to baton Rouge for a holdful of fuel oil. She would be back in New Orleans Saturday morning and she wanted four hundred barrels of force-feed oil and five hundred barrels of aviation lube. She had to sail by noon Saturday. That last was superfluous information—all hands were bursting with keeping the secret. All hands knew she could not make her rendezvous if she was late getting through the Passes. Closing time was forgotten.

A telephone inventory disclosed the fact that stocks of the two oils needed in the entire Eighth District, not only of the contractor but of all oil companies, totalled less than two hundred fifty barrels.

The contractor’s refinery is in Port Arthur, over two hundred miles away.

Due to local political troubles, the river at New Orleans was nowhere deeper than 28 feet, alongside the wharf of the United Fruit Company, where a ship was already berthed. With a holdful of oil, the tanker drew thirty.

The tanker was due to arrive around six or seven a.m., and to leave on time; loading should start at once.

Owing to “depression” rulings still in force, the ship’s crew could not be employed in the loading. It had to be done by contract.

Any time before eight a.m. under Union rules is overtime.

At the time, no Naval activity could pay overtime without written authority from the Assistant Secretary—telephone authority would not do. Moreover, the subject was too hush-hush to discuss over an open wire.

Well, the oil specialist went into a three- way huddle with the contractor’s local agent, the home office in New York and the refinery in Port Arthur, having received the contractor’s assurance that the telephone bills would be his and not the Navy’s. The refinery went to work on the oil at eight o’clock Thursday night.

The railroad man did not bother with subordinates, either. He buttonholed the highest Southern Pacific official he could find and outlined the problem, being careful not to state why it was pressing but making it plain that it was. The railroad gallantly played ball. A ten-car train was spotted at the refinery at 5 a.m. Friday, and the nine hundred oil drums began to fill it. Friday evening, the crack Sunset Limited waited over an hour on a siding at Lake Charles to let that oil train, its drums still hot and reeking, highball past on its way to New Orleans.

The man who knew something of shipping had little opposition from the United Fruit Company. They were in the business of going to sea in the submarine-haunted Caribbean themselves, and they leaped to attention at the word “emergency.” The ship on berth was hastily moved across the river to an Algiers wharf, and a twenty-foot camel put down to breast the tanker off.

That done, remained the Longshoremen’s Union. It took time to find the responsible officials, and it took careful stating of the many factors involved, including the lengths to which the oil company, the fruit company, and the railroad were cooperating. But once the situation was clear, the Union men agreed heartily. Certainly they would load the ship, and they would be there by six a.m. and they would for this once, since the country was in a jam, forget about overtime. They would send enough men to finish loading in three hours at most.

At six-fifteen on Saturday morning a ten- car oil train trundled down the United Fruit wharf where three hundred longshoremen were waiting. At six-twenty, the tanker threw them her lines and tied up. Winches were squealing within five minutes. The tanker sailed at 1000. The D.S.O. wrote a letter at the Commandant’s direction outlining successful completion of the District’s mission, but saying in official terms, “For Heaven's sake, next time give us a little more leeway! Otherwise, the price of everything in New Orleans will go skyrocketing!”

Done in the normal, routine, “regulation” manner, every phase of that vital operation would have been illegal. Tackled by specialists who knew, not only the Navy’s need but also the problems of the civilian concerns involved and the language in which each stated and solved those problems, and most important of all, who knew how much they were asking, the tanker made her rendezvous without violation of a single ruling or order.

Two things stand out clear from this admittedly extreme, but typical example, which can be verified from the records.

Command ordered, and only command could have known enough to order, what was needed, and when it was needed, and where it would be used.

A Staff trained in dealing with Industry and Labor, and only such a Staff, could answer the vital questions: where do we get it, how do we get it, and how can we make it legally, politically, and organizationally safe to get it?

The captain can no longer do it all. Not all functions are today command functions; and indeed, except by default, they never were.

What we need and where it is to be used can be stated only by trained Command.

How to get it and how to move it cannot. That needs a body of trained specialists who are also Naval Officers familiar with the problems which command must solve, as well as being versed in their specialties. It is a great help to be able to recruit and put into uniform transportation experts, industrial experts, legal experts, etc., when war breaks out. They know their specialties; but until they have been in a time long enough to be almost disastrous, they seldom realize that command has problems too, and they are only incidentally transportation, industrial and legal problems. They are predominantly military. The specialist learns eventually that he is no longer an independent head of a competitive agency.

Command means just what it seems to. It decides what to do, what to do it with, and where to do it.

Administration seldom originates anything but perhaps a new and shorter or sounder way of getting things done and to leave a plain record for Congress to read. Its job is not to plan operations, but to see that the planning Command gets what it needs without having to waste time finding out how to procure, package, and move it.

One dictionary defines logistics as “that branch of military science which includes all details of supply and transport up to but not including actual battle.”

That is a team job. All hands must know what the skipper wants, and as far as is consistent with security, why he wants it. But “all details” is a mighty big phrase. No skipper can do everything nowadays, not even C.N.O., when it comes to details.

But what, where, when—only the skipper can say that.