As I Recall: Operating with the Little Beaver Squadron

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happens for two or three times—and then after a while, they don’t get used to it, but they get so that they can think well.

Now, the basis of this long harangue is that the battle is won primarily by people and how well they function. If people can anticipate exactly what’s going to hap­pen, and put it in a computer and program it exactly right and say, “This is what the enemy is going to do” and the enemy does it—which they never did for me— you’ll come out fine. The computers are much more accurate than man’s judg­ment. The programs are worked out in detail, and if they’re checked and double checked, they ought to be very good pro­grams, and better than any man can do on his feet. But that works only when you’ve been able to foretell exactly what the hell is going to happen—not exactly, but gen­erally.

Navy people on active duty now are more skillful, have better technical edu­cation, are much more technically orien­ted than we were 50 years ago, and spend much more time in training. After a man chooses his specialty, he must concen­trate on it. There is no time left for other activities; this requires great devotion to duty, which all of you have. High-tech equipment requires tremendous attention of many expert technicians and that means there must be large numbers of qualified technical experts, or the equip­ment will not perform properly. Fortu­nately, the Navy has dedicated and quali­fied personnel.

After the war—and I’m going to tell another sea story now—I became very good friends with a man whom I had fought against in three good battles, Admiral Kusaka. He was the commander of the Japanese forces at Rabaul on New Britain. Every time I went to Japan I called on Admiral Kusaka. He couldn’t speak English, but I think he could read English and understand it, although Cap­tain Tamagawa (one of the best aides I have ever had) was always there to inter­pret. I went to call on him several times. We would go out to his place for lunch, and right after we finished eating, he would break out the charts, the photo­graphs, and all the data of his battle re­ports. He had studied those battles ex­tremely well, and he knew exactly what I had done. He knew more about the ma­neuvers that I made than I did. I couldn’t remember them, but he had worked on it.

One time he said, “Admiral, why is it that you never followed your own doc­trine?” And I said, “I knew you had our prewar doctrine of destroyer attacks, and I knew you had studied them.”

Admiral Kusaka then replied, “But the doctrine was extremely good. We used it, too. Why didn’t you follow it?” So I simply said, “What were the results, Admiral?” That made him pause, be­cause he knew the results were that he had been caught by surprise each time, for he thought differently than we did. He interpreted doctrine as meaning orders that had to be followed without any devi­ation. So, in a sense, he had prepro­grammed us—except that we did not do it that way.

But then he said, “One time we were bombarded at Rabaul”—you had to go down through St. George Channel to do this, and it was a silly thing to do. You should never tangle with shore batteries when you don’t have maneuvering room. That’s a good rule, passed down a couple hundred years ago; it’s still sound. So he asked, “Why did you come down there and bombard the installations in Rabaul? You knew your little five-inch guns wouldn’t do any harm. We were under­ground.” I explained that we had been caught in one more battle than we had anticipated. We were delayed and there was no way to get the hell out of there except to go through St. George Channel. So I thought we would just shoot anyway and do some good, maybe.

What we had intended to do was to go up to the harbor north of Rabaul—■ Simpson Harbor—where many Japanese merchant ships and men-of-war were anchored. We were going to make a high-speed sweep in Simpson Harbor. A high-speed sweep, with guns blazing and torpedoes all set for short, shallow runs would probably have surprised the Japa­nese, and we could have sunk every ship in the harbor in a few minutes. Admiral Kusaka said, “You’re a lucky man. The week before that, I had mined Simpson Harbor, and we had no ships in there.” That wise, fine, Japanese naval officer

As I Recall . . .

Operating with

the Little Beavf

Shortly after 1 was commissioned in 1942, I was assigned to the USS Con­verse (DD-509), a Fletcher-class de­stroyer. My first job was first lieuten­ant in the gunnery department, and I also stood bridge watches.

After training hard for combat duty, the ship arrived in the South Pacific in May 1943. I loved that experience— maneuvering ships and changing forma­tions. We used to have destroyer screens around the large combatants, and the Converse would change from one spot to another, whenever the for­mation reversed course; to me that was an ideal situation. I had a good picture of relative movement with my math background and my ability to work

maneuvering boards. It was a lot of fun.

In the South Pacific, shortly after we got there, then-Captain Arleigh Burke was on the scene. We had heard a lot about him—that he was aggressive, “gung ho,” extroverted, reactive, and anxious to do something. We had taken a licking in the South Pacific in the first days. He was forming a squadron of new 2,100-ton destroyers, Destroyer Squadron (DesRon) 23.

There were eight ships in the squad­ron. Captain Burke’s flagship was the Charles Ausburne (DD-570), and we had the Thatcher (DD-514), the Dyson (DD-572), the Spence (DD-512), and the Stanly (DD-478), although the

Stanly was not with us too often. There were also the Claxton (DD-571), the Foote (DD-511), and, of course, the Converse. The Converse spent much of the time as flagship of the second divi­sion in the squadron, DesDiv 46.

The commander of the second divi­sion was Commander Bernard L. Aus­tin, known as “Count.” Actually, Cap­tain Burke called him “Long Count,” because when Austin would get on the TBS—as we called the voice radio in those days—he’d talk for what seemed forever. Sometimes we had communi­cations drills in which we’d count through numbers to test the circuits. Typically, a short count would suffice, but whenever Commander Austin got was so right.

The point I’m making is that unex­pected things happen; you can make beautiful plans, and they don’t quite turn out. The weather fouls up or something happens. The enemy is doing his best to make your plans worthless, and the enemy is usually pretty good. The other guys don’t think the way we do—they never do. So they’re going to try—as we ^are going to try—to do unexpected things. I’ve never been in a battle yet that ^went the way we expected it to go or where everything worked. The one that ^Was closest to that was the first battle in the Philippine Sea, but even then, there Were unexpected things that happened.

This is a roundabout way to explain why I don’t like to comment on the value °f ships in combat before they are tested ln c°mbat. But I’d like to say one thing about destroyers, though, as well as other combatant types. She’s got to be able to bght any time, any place, and against any enemy. I don’t know anything about the oviet Navy, but I think it would be very dangerous to underestimate what the Soviets can do with the equipment that hey have. We may have superior equip­ment, but something will pop up in case

go to war that’s going to surprise the bell out of us, for our enemies will start a War only when they believe they can win

h s remarkable what people can do in hrnes of great emergency, and be suc­cessful in it. Many battles—naval battles particularly—have been won because one side or one man has been persistent. When reason indicates that a man doesn’t have much of a chance of winning, he fights on and wins.

This is true in every war. Persistence, coupled with some good judgment, is a very great quality, but I think that every military force in the world certainly knows, because history has proven it over so many times, that training is basic— your people have to be extremely well trained. They can’t do any better in battle than they can do in peacetime. You can’t expect performance in battles that’s supe­rior to that in an exercise. Sometimes, in rare instances, there may be better per­formance in battle, but you can’t expect it. Usually, no operation in battle is as good as it is in an exercise. So don’t un­derestimate your enemy.

The difference between what a de­stroyer skipper had to face in World War II and what he has to face now is the length of time he has to think. In my day, you had a minute maybe to think about what you were going to do. You don’t have that minute now—you’ve got five seconds, which means things have to be automatic. When we youngsters were officers of the deck, one of the training officers would say, “What do you do if a man falls overboard, port side?” And if you couldn’t roll that off, and if you didn’t know the wind and sea conditions, you were in trouble, because it was a de­cision that had to be made in seconds— and it had to be correct. This is what the destroyer skipper must do now; he’s got to make a decision in seconds. Whether he lets his missiles go against that missile he thinks is coming in, or he attacks a submarine that he is pretty sure is enemy, but not absolutely sure, are decisions he must make in seconds while in his mind he wonders if his sensors and other iden­tification gear are functioning properly. Well, he’s got to attack, or he’s in real danger.

Now if he gets too nervous, he’s going to do a lot of damage to his own forces. This is a danger; some of that will be done. But if he waits too long, he’s use­less, which is worse than being dead. He hasn’t done anything—he hasn’t accom­plished his mission, or any part of it.

Time is a very valuable—but most fleeting—asset, and I think this is one of the elements that naval officers don’t appreciate nearly as much as they did when I was a youngster. It was drilled into us that time was important. You can’t put things off until tomorrow; you can’t expect to learn things some time in the future. If you don’t know it now, you better by a damn sight take steps to know it. Destroyer skippers have always been faced with the fact that there is never enough time. If he can’t make decisions; he’s had it. He’s got to depend on his people to do things automatically. And if his crew members are not trained, it’s too late. He will wish they had been trained, but that’s probably the last thing he’ll do.

fluadron

By Vice Admiral Raymond E. Peet, U. S.

Navy (Retired)