It has always been a minor problem for the Armed Services. Away back in the days when target practice was an annual matter of dropping a barrel overboard and firing the guns at it, one at a time, whether or not it was visible, the problem existed. A man spent a four-year hitch learning to be a baker. If he succeeded even passably, he never came back for a reenlistment bonus. He went to the town where he had met That Girl, spent perhaps two hours looking for a job in a civilian bakery, and usually, if there were two or more of them in town, had them bidding against each other for his services. So it was with machinists, electricians, barbers, tailors.
The attrition of officers was not so rapid. In those days, the general public thought an officer’s job consisted only of waving a sword and making sturdy young Americans salute him.
Now and then, there came a war; and industry on the beach came in contact with officers on shore billets. When each war ended, peace saw the Navy lose many officers we could ill spare.
World War II taught industry a good deal about the Armed Services. In spite of the whirlwind demobilization, in spite of the sudden end of industrial expansion, there had been seven busy years of planning and working together. The emergency declared in 1938 began with a good deal of anxiety that the odd happenings of World War I would be repeated, but we had all learned a lot since then. By the middle of 1940, it was a smooth team. In April, 1941, when a young Reservist told his employer—who happened to be the knowledgeable Standard Oil Company— that he was requesting active duty in the Navy, they told him, “You’ll get more experience in two years with them than we could give you in ten. When you come back, your job will be waiting.” It was, but by this time, instead of minor desk in a State office, they gave him a whole State to manage.
So now, the problem is not confined to bakers and barbers. Industry, practically on a war basis from 1938 to 1953, had seen many eye-opening things. They realized that even in times of the strictest peace-time economies, the inspector-in-charge of the Torpedo Station at Newport was running a business with an annual turnover of around $16,000,000; the manager of the Aircraft Factory was turning over more than twenty- five millions a year; while the commander of a Sea Frontier had duties which made a combination of the Cunard and the White Star look trifling.
Came the end of the Korean wrangle; and industry girded its loins for its first chance to make money in peace-time for longer than most of its junior officials had been out of college. Labor again was plentiful; but management was needed badly. And right there, industry began to look around at admirals and generals, colonels and captains who were doing smooth and economical jobs at air-fields, shipyards, supply centers, administration offices. In these days, they were mostly in their forties or low fifties, and most of them were currently making perhaps as much as the skipper of a menhaden trawler. Industry realized what Standard Oil knew in 1941: that the Service had given these men more sound management experience than industry itself could do in a much longer time. They began to make tempting offers.
These offers were graded. A youngster who had put in his statutory time only since graduation needed only an offer of, say, the pay of two ranks higher to tempt him to resign. Of those who went out, I will wager that many now are realizing that the road to promotion is just as hard outside as it is “in the outfit.” The large offers come to those who have had more than just a few years of J.O.D., gun-drills, and record-keeping. They are made to officers who have reached the planning, policy-making level and have made good at it.
So—as an old-timer, I would say to all bewildered, hard-working, homesick ensigns— if you want a job outside at a salary promising comfortable senescence, slay in till you have proved your right to a brass hat. Your “starting” salary then is likely to be as much as, if not more than, you could have worked up to as a civilian; and you will have behind you some twenty years of learning to know your country and the world. You will have friends from coast to coast and memories you by then would not have missed. And so will your wife. Of that, more later.
Of course, if you are the heir of a going business, or have married one, that is different. But if so, what was your state of mind while the tax-payers financed your education?
To be specific: How long, think you, would it take in the usual course of shore-going to become, say, president of the Jewel Tea Company, treasurer of Curtiss-Wright, manager of the U. S. Lines, chief of cost-accounting in Haskin-Sells, vice-president of Chance- Vought, State agent for ,G.E. or Standard, Police Commissioner of Philadelphia, or president of a college? These are only a few of the billets my own shipmates moved into when they were wearing sometimes only three stripes.
And to be personal, my first temptation came from a large university in my second year of service, and it offered double the $128.33 which an ensign with one fogy then commanded. I thought long and hard; and then decided that I still had a lot of the Navy to see. A nationally-known publishing house made inviting inquiries, but by then a “JG,” I was beginning to have rather gripping notions of what is now called inventory control and wanted to work at it. At the end of World War I, a national chain of hotels wanted a commissary officer at a figure no admiral had as yet reached. I couldn’t see it. It would have meant just as much travel— this time in railroad cars, not ships; and my teeth were by that time set deep into my specialty. And finally, as I wound up my World War II duty, I was offered the presidency of a collegiate institution and a secretaryship in a great university. But by that time, I wanted to throw the alarm clock out of the window, find a small house in a quiet spot, and get acquainted with my neighbors.
I am glad I did. Probably any one of the five opportunities listed above would have produced more in the way of this world’s goods than did forty-one years, ten months, and sixteen days in the Service; but I know that I would always have had a nagging feeling that I had quit on a job that was not only necessary but interesting and rewarding. Any one of the five would have provided a small segment of the absorbing creative work I had in the Navy; but none of them would have had more than a fraction of it.
In fairness, it must here be noted that two serious deterrents to “shipping over” were prominent after World War II collapsed. One of them was that in the public distrust of the mythical “Military Mind” and in Congress’ desire to do most for the so-called “underdog,” even boys who would ordinarily have been glad to stay with us realized that if they put twenty years under the colors, they could barely double their present salaries. This stumbling-block has been at least partially removed by the recent pay bill enacted by Congress; but its effect is still with us and will probably be with us for a long time.
The other deterrent is the fact that no matter how eager each officer or man may be to make it so, a Navy of half a million is not the close corporation, almost the “family,” that a Navy of 45,000 used to be. Of course, not one of the “Old Navy” sailed with everyone else; but we all knew each other by reputation, by report of people who at different times sailed with both of us, by the semi-affectionate anecdotes that clustered about the names of even the roughest “Sundowner” or the densest “Wooden Dick.” This new partial strangeness is inevitable in any large organization; but it can be ameliorated very much indeed by the least of us, once we realize it and work at it. To be explicit:
Such graduate institutions as the Harvard Business School and Stanford and Amos Tuck and Northwestern teach a great deal of business method and process; but the core and the very basis of their work is what has recently been dubbed with the resounding name of Science of Human Relations. During the war, learned professors were sent here and there studying such problems as labor “turnover” (i.e., lack of what we would call re-enlistment) and absenteeism. And these gentlemen, sometimes to their surprise, discovered what the Armed Services have known for centuries: a man likes his job and does good work in direct proportion to the feeling that he is not a nameless cog in a machine doing the same thing anonymously over and over again; that even the topside of command knows that his name is Bill Jones, that he is good man to have around in a pinch, that he “belongs,” and maybe even that his wife’s name is Emily and his youngster is in the fifth grade. In brief, “The Science of Human Relations” is nothing whatever but what the Services call “Leadership.” And while many books, some sound, some sorry, have been written about leadership, we all know that it boils down to one basic fact: a man may have many others working with him, for him, and under him, but that does not in itself make him a leader. What counts is just this: Is he just giving orders and enforcing them, or is he calling the signals for a team that has learned how to work together and likes it? Men will follow a leader whom they consider ahead of them. They will grouse at a “driver” who is pushing from behind a stone wall of authority.
And remember, if you still are thinking of getting out and making more money, it is proven leaders that industry is crying for. Drivers are a dime a dozen, in the Service or out of it. Learning a new trade, even a new vocabulary, is not difficult for a determined young man with ability. The point is, can you get along smoothly with others? If not, your road ahead in civilian life is even rougher than it would be in the service. The bigger posts are not for you.
There is another problem which is particularly knotty for young people. Civilians as a rule can see nothing but misery in the constant moving about we have to do. I know of more than one officer who left the Navy as the price of marrying the girl of his choice, a girl whose family demanded that he give her a “settled home.” I know a few who were bribed by “in-laws” into civilian life when the grandchildren arrived: “That blessed baby in Guam? Preposterous!” My own prospective mother-in-law asked me pointedly, after hearing my answers to her searching questions, “And what would that make my daughter while you sail around? Neither maid, wife, nor widow!” And I have heard many civilians, both male and female, shudder at the thought of “living in a suitcase.”
Well, I will hereby ask a question, not of the officers and enlisted men who may read this article, but of their wives. Have you had to do without a home? Rather, haven’t you had a series of homes, some perhaps skimpy or crowded, but many of them so delightful that by now you have difficulty remembering which place to be homesick for in blue moments? Instead of living in a suitcase, didn’t your Lares and Penates soon get the habit of fitting cozily and comfortably into each new house as they did in the old one? And would you for any price erase the memory of the friendships you made in Boston and Philadelphia and Pearl Harbor and Norfolk and San Francisco and Clearwater and New Orleans—and for that matter, in Guam or Guantanamo?
No, life for a husband and wife in the Navy is just the same as life outside, except for its variety. It is happy and comfortable in exact ratio to the effort two people make to see that it is.
The last bugaboo is as easily laid: “However, with all that moving about, can you give children a chance at an education?” On that point, I can be specific. Any child who chooses his parents with reasonable care will get an education! More than that, he or she will grow up in an atmosphere where the discipline and feeling of responsibility necessary to any human community is painlessly absorbed through their pores as soon as they start to talk and walk about. Discipline, after all, is nothing but the codified good manners necessary when people live as close together as they must at sea. Even the much-maligned “salute” is merely a service extension of the custom, unhappily of the past but current in my boyhood, of a younger man touching his hat to an elder he happened to meet, and of the elder returning the courtesy. I have never heard of a Navy or Army “Junior” who was entangled in the teen-age gangs now occupying much space in the public prints.
Schools? Young parents, that is strictly up to you. Almost anywhere in this great land there are acceptable schools; but if not, and while travelling, or before the age for formal school, there are still two parents for each youngster. I was never overworked before reaching public school; but six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, I had my hour or perhaps, if it was raining, an hour and a half of reading and spelling and arithmetic. My parents saw to it that I got no more than that. If I got fascinated by the yarn I was reading and dawdled over it, the order would come sternly, “Take your nose out of that book and get out of doors! No, not another minute!” The result?
I was nine years old when my father was retired, and the family came home from Yokohama and settled in Indianapolis. Across the broad Pacific, and in the then long Pullman ride from San Francisco to Indiana, agog with the adventure of public school ahead of me, I read. Grammar, Arithmetic, Geography, Penmanship. I determined that no civilian kid was going to show me up as an ignoramus! I was interviewed by school principals. Then I was given oral and written exams. And at nine years and two months of age, I entered the Fifth Grade and had little difficulty. In fact, it was that period of my life which taught me a lot about this new Science of Human Relations, for I was a head shorter and twenty pounds lighter than most of my classmates. But if I missed anything, I am sure I do not remember it. And I am certain it never gave me anything like the now much-palavered-about “Inferiority Complex.”
Chance at an education? You had one, didn’t you, young parents? Well then, if schools are unavailable, pass what you have on to Junior. Knowing him or her, you can do it better for a while than strangers, no matter how psychological and pedagogic, can possibly do! And you will also be letting him grow up in a community where responsibility and swift obedience and adherence to a code are normal, universal, and expected of everybody, small or great. He will get a perspective of living in this big world no “settled home” can give him in twice the time. Think it over!
There is here no attempt to argue that life in the Service is easy or always comfortable. We all know it isn’t. There is, however, the result of years of living among, working with, and observing people of all kinds in many places; of hearing them talk and watching them work and play and make a living. That result is this firm conviction: There is no trade or profession which does not entail hardship and worry and at times discomfort in the early stages of getting established and recognized in it. There is no economic bracket which is free from worry, pressure, and uncertainty. And there is no calling of which I have knowledge where the satisfying results of good work, whether or not immediately rewarded, are so apparent to the man who did it as they are right here in the Navy. A first cruise has the uncertainty of what it is all about, the monotony of apparently meaningless detail, the worry of adjustment to a different way of living. So does the first decade in any trade or profession or business. But ask any old-timer who has achieved standing in his lifework about those first few years. Nine times out of ten, the civilian will give a mock shudder and reply, “Let’s forget it!” Nine times out of ten a colonel or a captain will grin and say “Whee, I was a green kid! But I wouldn’t have missed it!”
Above were mentioned a few of the many officers who have left the service for high and lucrative positions in civil life. I have encountered many of them since. They are prosperous and content; but practically every one I have met is at times just plain homesick for the old life, even more homesick than the normal officer gets after he hits the Retired List.
Right here some one will probably remark, “Oh, yes, but he’s talking about the Old Navy. It wasn’t like today’s outfit.” So it wasn’t. Nor was the Navy I entered in 1905 anything but a distant relation of the Navy my father entered in 1867. As the old saying goes, “The Navy ain’t what it used to be, and it never was!" But it remains the Navy, everchanging, ever new, ever more efficient in its job, and always a rewarding and interesting career. So, young men and young wives, think it over seriously before you decide to leave us.
Think long and hard!