The picture of the destroyer Lloyd Thomas (DD-764) evading exploding shells off North Vietnam in the spring of 1972 is worth 10,000 words. Yet, the dove and the hawk would find great difficulty in agreeing what those words should be. Both points of view must now forsake the hyperbole and the passion; for what is needed is a clear statement of what the U. S. Navy’s role will be in the western Pacific in the years ahead.
One of literature’s great similes is Thomas Mann’s comparison of the Buddenbrooks family, at the height of its wealth and power, to a long dead star whose light is still seen from earth to be burning brightly. Literary artifice aside, much the same description might be made of the U. S. Navy at the moment of its triumph in Tokyo Bay in the fall of 19-45. That navy had just given a magnificent display of all the mariner’s fighting arts on, under, and above the sea as it fought back from Pearl Harbor to victory-. True, the victory had been made ambiguous by the use of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the burden of this essay is that it was not these lights, "brighter than a thousand suns,” which dimmed the glory of the American fleet. Rather, it was a misreading of the overwhelmingly complete success of that fleet which led to a failure to recognize that American seapower in the Pacific had limits. A quarter of a century later, the American people and their Navy are facing the political, psychological, and strategic consequences of trying to pass those limits. Much of the future of the people and their Navy in the Pacific now rests in a new perception of those limits. The danger may be both that the Navy does not yet recognize what the limits are, and that the people will not recognize what can and must be done within those limits.
An obscure incident in that fall of 1945 at Chefoo, China (a between-the-wars summer port of the old Asiatic Fleet), showed, symbolically at least, that the Navy’s victory in the Pacific, like the life of a star, had limits. Nevertheless, the light from the Navy’s star was to be seen in the Pacific for another 25 years, and even though at times in those years it seemed to shine as brightly as ever, both the American public and policymaker were to learn that a dead star is an uncertain navigational aid on a long voyage.
The Chefoo incident is quickly told. When Japan surrendered, the Nationalist Chinese government held little of China north of the Yangtze. Although General MacArthur, as Supreme Commander Allied Powers, had designated the Nationalist forces to receive the Japanese surrender, the control of North China and the Japanese there became immediately a race between Chinese Nationalist and Communist armies. American air and sea lifts put almost half a million of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s troops into north and east China in the weeks after the Japanese collapse. At the request of the Chinese Nationalist government, over 50,000 U. S. Marines were also landed in North China to aid in taking the surrender and, as the Nationalist government intended, to inhibit by their presence any Communist attempt to occupy Peking, Tientsin, Tsingtao, or the railroads and coal mines in the area. As part of this, Marine Major General Keller E. Rockey and troops were to move to Chefoo by sea, escorted by Admiral Daniel Barbey in the USS Louisville (CA-28). The Chinese Communists were in possession of the town when the transports arrived. American officers were allowed ashore to inspect American property in Chefoo, and Kungtung Island in Chefoo harbor was used by the Marines for recreation. But, when the Marines asked the Chinese Communists to evacuate the port for an American landing, General Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the Chinese Communist Forces warned that no landing should be attempted without prior agreement of the Communist Eighth Route Army. On the grounds that the Japanese in Chefoo had been disarmed and that order had been restored in the city, the transports stood off and, after a few days, sailed away to land the Marines at Chingwangtao.
The immediate effect of this rebuff was minimal. The Marines did occupy the important areas; the Japanese were disarmed and repatriated; and Peking and the other cities were turned over to the Nationalist government. Longer-range effects may have been more serious because Nationalist re-entry into Manchuria was made more difficult without the port of Chefoo. But the portent of the Chefoo incident should have been obvious. American naval power could reach, but could not encompass, a hostile Asian mainland. The statement of the Secretary of War in November 1945 (when faced with a recommendation to withdraw the Marines that "the 60,000 Marines who are there could Walk from one end of China to the other without serious hindrance" can now be seen to have been either a typically optimistic view of postwar Chinese-American friendship or as the first of a tragically long succession of miscalculations about Asian peasant armies.
There were to be no immediate repetitions of the Chefoo encounter. As the People's Liberation Army advanced southward, American naval forces prudently withdrew without incident, although a three-man naval plane crew was captured and then released after some months by the Communists in North China. The British Navy was not as lucky; the cruiser London and the famed frigate Amethyst were holed badly by Communist artillery on the Yangtze in April 1949—no more would Sand Pebbles and Timber Dicks take Western seapower deep into China. Before the fall of Shanghai in May 1949, Admiral Oscar Badger, U.S. Navy, and his fleet closed the shore installation and withdrew. When the Communists reached Canton in October, the USS Dixie, (AD-14) with the refugee American Embassy from China on board, found shelter at Hong Kong. What an Indian historian has called “the Vasco de Gama era"—meaning Western dominance over Asia through seapower—was at an end for China.
But, within the next year, the war in Korea seemed to suggest that American seapower in Asia was not limited. A large United Nations army was supported almost entirely by sea; the Inchon landing was a brilliant afterglow of the amphibious victories of 1942-45; and even the withdrawal from Hungnam could in honesty be called a tactical success.
At the same time, the power of the Seventh Fleet in the western Pacific was so great that the Chinese Communists never dared challenge the Nationalists on Taiwan.
In subsequent years of the 1950s, American seapower seemed to retain its might. When Chinese Communist planes shot down a Cathay Pacific airliner off Hainan in 1954, fighters from the USS Hancock (CV-19) punished the attackers' air force quickly. After the Geneva Agreements of 1954 on Indo-China, the Navy made another successful sealift from the Communist north to protect the south.
And, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the U. S. Navy had the power, the bases, the political allies and the freedom of action which enabled it to move at will in Asian waters, limited only by the normal constraints of international law and prudent policy.
The Vietnam war seemed further proof of naval power. In fact, a friendly Australian analyst has summed it up succinctly: "No American navy, no Vietnam. He did not mean that because there was unchallengable American seapower in the western Pacific, there was therefore an American involvement in Vietnam, although to many critics this has become a corollary interpretation of American involvement. But he meant that, without command of the sea, without major sealift capacity, without the movable air bases of Dixie and Yankee stations, without riverine forces and without a maritime stop-and-search ability, an American army of over 500,000 could not have been deployed in Vietnam, even though that army itself had been moved there by air. But victory—and this essay can accept almost any definition of that elusive lady—was not to be had. The potential political and security costs of seeking her were within neither American reach nor will. And thus, even with unlimited sea and dominant air power, the United States at the end of the 1960s found itself on the rim of the Asian land mass in no better position than were Admiral Barbey and General Rockey in their ships off Chefoo in October 1945.
A Harvard professor has noted that historians of American foreign policy fall into two groups: Those who ask, "What happened?" and those who ask, “What went wrong?" Thus it is also with American seapower in the Pacific after 1945. Even the cursory look at what happened given here suggests immediately the question, "What went wrong?” Because the use of seapower in the Pacific in those years was, with the exception of the Polaris deployment, not in direct defense of the safety of the United States but largely as an adjunct of foreign policy, this question of what went wrong is a real one. More important, though, is the question, "What now?”
Any attempt to answer "What now?” can no longer be made in the purely diplomatic and military terms in which the Free World alliance structure was assembled and built. As the American people come into sight of the departure of the last American infantryman from Vietnam, it is incumbent upon the Navy to weigh again its role in the western Pacific to see if there are not grounds for giving its political masters and diplomatic colleagues an equation, for the exercise of seapower in the years ahead, different than the simplistic one used in the postwar years that had as its major term American omnipotence in Asia.
The temptation to misread the lessons of Vietnam is great. If American seapower’s capabilities in Asia were overestimated after World War II, it must be reckoned that there is risk of underestimating that capability after Vietnam. Moreover, any such misreading now will not be just in its own terms. Indeed, it will be accentuated and amplified by a series of attitudes and assumptions which have lately been deep in the thinking of the American people and in their politics. That series is long and varied, but there are three categories which encompass most of them.
Foremost, probably, is preoccupation with the quality of American life. The racial cancer; violence; the legacy of the assassinations; a worrisome economy; the changed mores of youth; drugs; the pollution problem; the decline of the cities—all have led and will continue to lead the American people to look inward and to shrink from both the rhetoric and realities of the military establishment.
The second sector is disillusionment with international responsibility. Even before the collapse of the Vietnam effort, there were questions about the unequal distribution of burdens in the anti-Communist world. Neither NATO nor Japan seemed to be doing their share. The disparities of power between the United States and its interests and those of some of its alliance partners suggested that priorities clearly had been misplaced—CENTO, and SEATO for example, seemed asymmetrical to the American people whenever they thought about them. In the wake of Vietnam they have begun to think about them more often. The case for foreign aid seemed to be based more and more on stale exhortations unaccompanied by identifiable progress after the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan. The ghost of Vietnam will be an almost palpable presence at future Congressional hearings on foreign economic or military' assistance. Finally, there was no peace and there still seems no prospect of peace. The Arab world and Israel, India and Pakistan and the squalid, murderous quarrels of dozens of quondam allies and friends have suggested strongly to the American people that their efforts for international peace have been a costly failure.
In the third sector is to be found a collection of attitudes that can be summed up best in one word—mistrust. It is not just that the American people have been asked to bear the loss of about 50,000 dead in Indochina in pursuit of objectives which seem to be changed with spokesmen or events. Revisionist historians and New Leftists now tell the people that their policies have been consciously aggressive since Hiroshima. And, their political leaders and military spokesmen seem to tell contradictory stories in fertile succession—Tonkin Gulf, My Lai, the Pueblo, the bombing of Vietnam, The C-5A, Laos and Cambodia, the Bay of Pigs, fragging, Diem —the list seems endless. Successive administrations try- to cover these up with sophistry, bigger and better stories or by thinly- disguised attempts to circumvent the First Amendment or the doctrine of separation of powers. Meanwhile watching all this (and often able to supplement it with actual experience) is an educated youth that must in the end make up the nation’s military forces.
Certainly, the combined effect of these discontents will be in itself an almost intolerable burden upon a professional Navy faced with commitments 8,000 miles from the continental United States. If that Navy misunderstands its missions, its capabilities or its potential enemies' capabilities, then disaster, out of proportion to that misunderstanding, will be the fate of its allies and, in the longer run possibly, the fate of the American people.
The major and at all times overriding mission of the U. S. Navy in the western Pacific is to be the first-line deterrent and ultimate defense of the formal alliance partners of the United States who are supportable by seapower. The most important of these alliances is the Japanese one. Of all the 130 nations of the world, only Japan and the German Federal Republic have that economic power whose loss could change the balance of industrial might against the West. There are no greater prizes in international politics today.
In an alliance system, Japan, of course, presents a special case. Its constitutional limitations on war as a means of national policy preclude it from having exportable military power. Thus, it can assume no obligations for action should its alliance partner be threatened outside of Japan. This, and the fact that Japan's expenditure for defense has only recently reached one percent of its GNP, have given rise to the concept that Japan is enjoying a "free ride" in defense. This is an oversimplification about a country with 13 infantry divisions, 1,000 tanks, and a capacity to build F-4 fighters, to say nothing of having a navy of 200 vessels and whose professional talents are formidable.
This oversimplification will become blatant as Japan takes over defense responsibility for the Ryukyus chain and as its defense expenditure reaches, as it will in 1972, $2.6 billion—or more than that of many NATO countries. But, if Japan were to do no more in defense than provide bases and internal order, it would still be to the advantage of the United States to continue to accept its treaty obligations, so great is Japan's potential industrial worth in the balance of power of the 1970s and 1980s. An island nation of 104 million crowded into a land area about the size of California, Japan is obviously susceptible to military and nuclear blackmail; given a national psyche that is sensitive to nuclear matters in any form, and which admits of blackmail in its domestic life to an extent little explored by sociologists or psychologists, the assurance of support from a powerful American fleet has to be a real part of Japanese stability and steadfastness.
There are other maritime alliance partners for whom the successful operation of the U. S. Navy in the western, Pacific represents survival insurance—Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the Republic of China. To these must be added the Republic of Korea, a mainland power but a peninsular one, whose long coastline and narrow width ensure that it can be supported by seapower.
To would-be, globe-bestriding naval strategists, this absolute priority to nations which at this moment face little direct external threat may seem restrictive. These officers might wonder what the admirals of the Royal Navy felt in their "storm-beaten ships upon which the Grand Army never looked." Both Jellicoe and Beatty have left us memoirs of the frustration and boredom they felt in barren years at Scapa Flow in a similar mission over a century later. The real function of the Navy in the western Pacific must be much the same. It is one equally as noble as halting Napoleon or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany at the water’s edge. It is also a mission that the American Congress and the American people will back.
The heart of a fleet that fills this mission must continue to be the fast carrier force able to base itself in the western Pacific, able to stay long periods at sea and able to protect itself at a distance against hostile submarines, aircraft, and missile-bearing surface vessels. Such a fleet will obviously pose all the problems in design, weaponry, and technology that can challenge the 20th century naval officer. It will also pose those human problems of petty officer retention, officer esprit de corps, and leadership which have become so vulnerable in the aftermath of a disastrous over-commitment of power and prestige in Asia. And, hopefully, such a fleet will restore to the Navy its heritage of blue water which so many of its officers have only half-reluctantly renounced in recent years.
Nothing will derogate more from that fleet and its mission than a confusion of objectives. Nothing will lose more quickly the support of the American people than the suspicion that the Navy is committed in the western Pacific to objectives other than the support of maritime alliances to which the United States is pledged.
Most obvious among these confusing objectives is the one at which this essay is aimed—trying to project American naval power onto the mainland of Asia. The dangers of such projection are present today and will not diminish in the next few years.
First, there will be the temptation to intervene again with carrier task forces in Vietnam. It is not difficult to envisage a "surgical strike” being ordered to punish a North Vietnamese aggressive act; it is equally easy to envisage an honest justification for such a strike. But to use the Seventh Fleet carrier force in the future as a scalpel risks too much. To begin with, in the post-Vietnam era which we are now facing, such use risks the bases in the western Pacific which are politically tenable only so long as our allies do not see these bases being used for adventures on the mainland of Asia not related directly to the mutual defense. Use of the Fleet again in Vietnam risks also the support of Congress and the public. If the Navy is seen as thrusting onto the mainland again it will not find a sympathetic ear for policies or appropriations when it seeks backing for its role in the alliance system.
Next, the Navy must seek from the State Department and from the Army and Air Force a clear understanding of the American commitment to Thailand under SEATO. Of all the American alliance partners in East Asia, only Thailand is truly a continental power. As such it cannot be supported by the projection of American seapower against a land attack even if it were possible to contemplate the use of nuclear weapons. Yet, it is clear that certain U. S. pledges to Thailand have gone beyond what SEATO would require. This is not to say that Thailand should be abandoned if threatened; it is only to say that it would be folly to engage American seapower in support of Thailand in an effort comparable to that made in Vietnam, and it would be well to have that understood in advance.
The Navy’s major mission will suffer should it become involved in ethnic, tribal, and national divisions within the countries on China’s southern border. The pattern of instability in Asia for the next few years may well be based on ethnic and tribal divisions. The ethnic minorities, whose lands form a patchwork quilt for thousands of miles on both sides of China’s borders, are a significant political factor. For years we have seen how these groups can be employed: the Khambas raid Tibet in behalf of unknown employers; the Chinese give guns to the Kachins in Burma; the Americans use the Meo in Laos; the Chinese use the Shan in Thailand. It is a variety of Kipling’s great game that appeals to our CIA as much as to Peking—tragic in its consequences for the people used, futile in any realistic assessment of world power, but cheap to play. It is not for the Navy.
Equally enticing in theory is seapower’s capacity in East Asia, as Francis Bacon put it, "to take as much and as little of the war as he will.” Forays into hostile Chinese, Vietnamese or Korean waters whether for intelligence operations or for coat-tailing are luxuries the Navy can no longer risk without at the same time risking either its foreign bases or its domestic support. The Maddox (DD-731) and the Pueblo (AGER-2) are remembered in Washington and Tokyo, as well as in mainland Communist capitals.
One further temptation is the war game syndrome that suggests that carrier movements are real power counters. President J. F. Kennedy’s carrier force against Laos and Professor Walt Rostow’s against North Korea were never seen as any great threat by the Pathet Lao or Pyongyang, and such use of the Fleet in the western Pacific can only hurt the Fleet’s main mission, intelligence operations or for coat-tailing are luxuries
If the risks of involvement on the Asian mainland are clear, it then seems odd to suggest that there are risks in open seas—the Indian Ocean. But there are, and they are risks that also can derogate from the Navy’s ability to carry out its prime mission in the Pacific.
The growth of Soviet seapower and its successful extension to the Indian Ocean have led American naval spokesmen into two fallacies which, if allowed to develop lives of their own, could again unbalance American seapower in Asia.
The first of these fallacies is that the withdrawal of British power from the Indian Ocean has left a dangerous vacuum which cannot be left to the Soviets to fill. This view fails to see that the Indian Ocean is not a power locus such as the Atlantic but is basically a transit area. True, 46% of Australian exports and 56% of her imports normally cross that ocean, and Japanese dependence on Middle East oil coming across the Indian Ocean is well known. But in peace it is highly unlikely that the Soviet Navy, for all its bad sea manners, would risk interference with the shipping of America's allies. In time of war, control of the Indian Ocean becomes, as it was for the Royal Navy, a matter of controlling the Atlantic and Pacific outlets of a would-be predator. The Soviet Navy's Baltic, Northern, and Pacific fleets, in time of war or tension, would be unlikely to consider commerce raiding in the Indian Ocean a target worth a sortie from Soviet waters.
More germane is the political argument that a Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean is an asset to the U.S.S.R. This is true, but is such an asset necessarily a comparable American loss? Only the zero-sum game mentality of Cold War warriors would find it is. The United States can gain little from a naval intervention capability in the Indian Ocean; the conditions that led to the Royal Navy's peacekeeping operation in East Africa in 1964 are unlikely to be duplicated. Political influence in the Indian Ocean area is not coin to be won with a navy—the main powers, India and Pakistan, are resolutely land powers despite India's one aging carrier.
The suggestion that the eastern exit from the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Malacca, is vital to Free World shipping overlooks the Suez experiences of 1956 and 1967 that re-routing modern merchant shipping to avoid blockages or political trouble is not a formidable task. It overlooks also the fact that modern jumbo tankers are already too big for the Strait.
The second fallacy that operates in the case of Soviet Indian Ocean power is the belief that navies exist only to fight navies. It is reminiscent of such faded slogans as, "We want eight, and we won't wait." Navies exist to exercise seapower; if that means fighting another fleet, then that is what must be done. But it is well to remember that Napoleon won his greatest land victories after Trafalgar and that Germany's most dangerous land offensive came almost two years after Jutland. Matching the Soviet navy ship for ship, type for type, in the Indian Ocean seems at best to be rooted in a parochial view of seapower and at worst in a belief that Congressional appropriations for the Navy increase directly, if not geometrically, to Soviet tonnage.
To divert any sizeable strength of the Seventh Fleet to the Indian Ocean would again risk the Navy’s main mission in the Pacific because in the mood of the 1970s the American people, their Congress and their allies would equate the exercise with the "global adventurism” reminiscent of the hyperbole of the Sixties.
This paper has argued for restraint toward the mainland of Asia and toward the chimera of Indian Ocean power. Now, it argues for restraint in a third field much less susceptible of analysis or calculation—restraint of rhetoric. Senior naval officers prior to World War II were indeed a silent service; when they had complaints, as truly they had, they settled them within the framework of the Service. But many postwar officers went to the other extreme, perhaps out of a felt necessity to combat the tendentious claims of the Air Force or out of a conviction that "the coonskin on the wall" approach was the only way to deal with a Soviet or Chinese threat. In the post-Vietnam era in the Pacific, there are three fields in which restraint of rhetoric could usefully contribute to the maintenance of the Navy's primary mission.
In looking at the nature of the threat to American interests in the Pacific, one might well start with Adlai Stevenson's observation that the threat of Communist China is not so fanciful that it should not serve as a valid assumption of policy. There are many gradations of increasing perception of that threat which are then possible. But no purpose is served by naval press statements and briefings that begin with charts of lurid red arrows radiating from Peking toward a dozen different targets and go on then to suggest Chinese aggression is imminent. It may well be that as the present administration moves to attempt to reconcile some of the American differences with Peking there will be restraint imposed from above on the Navy's rhetoric. Far better would be the realization by naval planners and spokesmen that the American people and Congress are aware both of what the Chinese Communist have said and threatened and that prudent precautions are necessary. There are some elements of the American academic world who deny any Chinese threat at all, but these people are beyond the reach of temperate or intemperate language.
Meanwhile, the problem of foreign audiences, allied, neutral or hostile, has often been overlooked in the overkill of the Navy's rhetoric.
Rhetoric toward the Congress must also be restrained. This will come hard to naval officers who have taken part in bitter fights for appropriations in the post-Hiroshima world. The claims of the Air Force, as well as its tactics in the press and the hearing room, could have permanently crippled the Navy in the immediate postwar years had they not been rebutted. But the record of air power in Korea and Vietnam has not been such as to augur well for the success of such tactics in the post-Vietnam Congresses that will have to weigh domestic claims against any claims of defense or foreign policy. A Navy that can point to Pacific maritime alliances, a politically secure base structure and a clearly defined mission of defense would do well to credit the Congress with the ability to see the need to support that Navy.
Senior naval officials must now also forego exaggerated rhetoric in support of the dubious claim that had it not been for civilian restraints both the Korean and Vietnam wars could have been "won.” What is not in dispute is that both Republican and Democratic administrations in both wars decided that the risks of seeking "victory,” even if it were to be had, were greater than any conceivable strategic or political gain from victory. There has never been any suggestion that these administrations did not have the backing of a majority of the American people in the course they followed to limit the wars. Twentieth century history has shown two clear instances—the German army and World War I, then the French army and Algeria—of the dangers of the "stab-in-the-back” legend. In the instance of the western Pacific, even the suggestion that military power should have the right of untrammeled exercise may be enough now to caution the American people against giving sustenance to that military power.
Is this too austere a vision of the Navy’s role? It is too austere only by the standards of 1945-70. The American people will not support those standards again. They will support a Navy in the western Pacific whose aim is freedom of the seas in times of peace, command of the seas in time of war, and the successful defense of their country’s maritime allies. More than this is beyond both the American people’s will and the U. S. Navy’s reach in the Pacific.
Ed. Note: This article represents the opinion of the writer and is not intended to indicate the views of the Department of State.
Mr. Holloway was a Naval Reserve officer in World War II, taking part in the Normandy and Okinawa operations. He entered the Foreign Service in 1947. Besides serving in the Department of State, he has been assigned to Rangoon, Shanghai, Bremen, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Stockholm. Academic assignments have been to the University of Michigan, Japanese language school at Tokyo and Harvard University. Since September 1970 he has been Consul General at Osaka-Kobe.